Michaelia Cash's comments targeting young women in Opposition leader Bill Shorten's employ has been roundly condemned by women across the political spectrum.
In Wednesday's Senate estimates, the Employment Minister unleashed this threat:
“If you want to start discussing staff matters, be very, very careful,” she warned, “because I’m happy to sit here and name every young woman in Mr Shorten’s office over which rumours in this place abound. If you want to go down that path today, I will do it.”
Minister Cash's comments have struck a chord with women familiar with those dark silencers of innuendo, gossip and threat that hover like a Sword of Damocles.
We all know what it feels like to have your professionalism impugned and the double scrutiny women in politics and the public sphere face when it comes to their personal life, dress and lifestyle.
Women of colour in conservative communities know this feeling very well. It's used as a way to control women by linking 'morality' to character. Stay within the lines or you will be destroyed.
It's often other women and Aunties who will be the most aggressive agents of the smearing and enforcing, themselves steeled through a patriarchal system that has burnt and shaped them.
You don't have to be on any particular side of the fence to find the way women are treated in the political gladiatorial arena a distasteful trend in our 24-hour news cycle.
From a interview with New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, the screaming headlines of Barnaby Joyce's 'Pregnant Mistress' to the relentless jibes about former PM Julia Gillard's personal life - it feels like nothing has changed in Australia, where the cost of being a woman in public remains alarmingly high.
This salacious interest in linking women's personal lives with their ability to do their job undercuts their achievements in male dominated institutions.
The fact that condemnations of Cash's comments have been fierce and unequivocal has been refreshing. What hasn't happened is an acknowledgment of the way in which the Minister represents a kind of female archetype women of colour are used to dealing with.
In Cash we see the kind of women who are so embedded in power they lack empathy for those with less power. Namely, the younger women, women of colour, workers and staffers - women in precarious positions with less capital to negotiate their interaction in male-dominated spaces.
Earlier this week, Monica Lewinsky, now 44, wrote in of the emotional toll of being the internet's first 'cybervictim' in the wake of her affair with former US President Bill Clinton as a 22-year-old White House intern (Clinton was 49).
She reflects on the problematic politics and power differential embedded in the relationship, which - like many others - she only became fully cognisant of as an older woman. She now is able to see the affair as a 'gross abuse of power' on Clinton's part.
At the time, Lewinsky didn't have many defenders among the feminist elite - powerful white women who thought maintaining a leftist presidency was more important than standing up for young women in the workforce.
The saving grace in this scenario with Michaelia Cash has been the direct plain spoken-ness of unruffled Labor Senator Penny Wong.
Wong walked into the Senate committee and shut it down, forcing Cash into a hasty retreat and to later her comments.
"And the minister representing the Minister for Women comes in here making what can only be described as outrageous slurs about the character of female staff working for the Leader of the Opposition.
"It can't be allowed to stand. I think it's disgraceful and sexist, impugning the character of various staff. I would ask the minister to withdraw."
Wong is someone who has learned to deflect the dents of personal attack with a cool professionalism, steeled no doubt through a lifetime of navigating her own position as a distinct anomaly within the Australian political sphere.
Her fierce and clear rebuttal to Cash is a lesson on how to be a force without losing your compass - never forgetting to stand up for others, as you yourself rise.
