Plenty of genuine sexism & misogyny in politics. Don't need prominent women debasing the term to cover their own poor performance. Jeez.

The good thing is now post-Me Too movement, we are not putting up with it. Some of the men have not moved forward. They still think it is acceptable to be sexist and misogynistic.
When I was a whip, an MP was talking about me having a real whip in the tea room in parliament. It happened more than once. It became very uncomfortable and embarrassing for me.
Parliament was designed for men only and there is still that prevailing attitude that this is a man’s place and the women are just window dressing and there is that entitlement to belittle women.

Seriously? Our two most senior female politicians are judged for their legs not what they said #appallingsexism

[Referring to women MPs] We're now up to 35 per cent and a lot of men find this objectionable and want to unleash misogyny. [...]
The irony is that the more women you get, the more it triggers some men who whilst they can blot out of their ears a couple of women, somehow it feels like an assault on them to actually have to listen to a number of women in authority talking confidently, and they then do a backlash.

There was one incident when I wore plain fishnets to parliament. I received so many overly sexual, misogynistic comments that I took the tights off and threw them in the bin and never wore fishnets again.
I spoke to a more senior female MP. She told me to ignore it saying, ‘it’s all banter’. She told equivalent stories women MPs have been through. There were lots of stories of MPs looking up their skirt. The parliamentary environment needs to change.

There are many problems we are facing as female MPs of a certain age. We seem to be regarded as an aberration.

You get low-level sexism all the time. I've defended other women in the chamber. I know women who work for me, certainly Black women, have found Westminster to be oppressive.
Lots of men shush me because I'm quite rowdy. I get lots of comments like "calm down, the honourable lady acts with her heart". In the post-Me Too world, you get joking comments like "am I allowed to ask you to pass the milk?" or "I don't know if I'm allowed to say this to me, but you look lovely". ...
Quite a lot of Tory men treat me like I'm some sort of exotic bird. People act like I'm either a pain or something to be marvelled at. You can see sometimes in meetings, women are asked to do things like get the tea. The expectation of them being stupid and annoying is quite common – that is very irritating. There is a power imbalance, there is an element of impunity.

As a woman who has worked in male-dominated industries my entire life so far, I am sadly no stranger to casual sexism. Like many women in these situations, I found myself making choices about the way that I act, dress, or carry myself to avoid having sexist interpretations read into my interactions – interactions such as, for instance, deliberately speaking closely with an elder who is very hard of hearing. It is a burden that women should not have to bear while they are simply trying to live their lives and do their jobs. The video of BC Liberal Leader Andrew Wilkinson watching on as a multi-term BC Liberal North Shore MLA sexualized my interactions with another multi-term BC Liberal North Shore MLA is a deeply uncomfortable characterization of my efforts to extend kindness across partisan lines. However, this is not about me. Young women deserve a province that encourages them to take on leadership roles without fear of sexism. If we want more young women and people of colour to enter politics, we must commit to creating environments that respect them. The comments and reactions in that video do the exact opposite.

These incidents are only trivial if you compare them to, say, the fact that women MPs are frequently mistaken for researchers, or that there are currently more British male MPs than there have been female ones in the entire history of parliament.
And if the men who govern us aren't capable of seeing women as anything other than totty, sluts or dears then what hope do we have of them taking the issues that affect us seriously?

There was something unsettling about the serried ranks of New Labour women elected on 1 May last year . All those structured smiles and cheerful jackets gathered round our leader made me feel like a bad-tempered Daily Mail reader or one of those glorious man-hating feminists of myth who live in Hackney and refuse to shave their legs. What I hadn’t realised was that this unmonstrous regiment of women came much closer to representing the end of something – feminism as a natural ally of radical politics – than to representing a key moment in the long march through the institutions. Nor had I imagined that so many of them would become part of that blancmange known as one-nation politics.
There are many reasons why they have proved such a disappointment. Personal ambition is one. Most new MPs live in fear of marginalisation, of being banished to the Siberia of consistently applied principle, of having to face up to the fact that they will never be a bag-carrier for an Under-Secretary of State. Sisterly solidarity, too, plays a part. Top Labour women are ferociously loyal to each other, but their loyalty has so far furthered no cause greater than the right of cabinet ministers to send their children to selective schools or to have their minds changed over tobacco sponsorship of Formula One.

[On dealing with sexism from male MPs] One of our colleagues from the northern group had complained about Mo [Mowlam]'s swearing, and he was in the tea room when we got there. So she said: "Oh, it's all right, I won't swear today. But you need to understand the real problems I'm having with my period." I've never seen anybody run faster out of the tea rooms.

There's no question women politicians get a level of abuse online which men don't get. New media and the anonymity has unleashed a really quite violent misogyny which I didn't see when I started in politics, although consistently women always get more severe abuse in the media than men.

Although not all male members engaged in overt sexist behavior, the actions of those who did were generally overlooked or ignored. The womens caucus members demanded that such conduct stop and that men face organizational consequences for it. Another main concern was the absence of women in leadership.

Being shouted down in the chamber by Labour men who clearly don't want women to speak up for our rights to single-sex spaces. How very progressive.