Tony Abbott doesn't always see or hear what women see or hear, writes Annabel Crabb. Will female voters be able to live with that?

There are two ways to look at Tony Abbott's growing collection of accidental foot-in-mouth moments.

One is to view them as non-accidental, which is to assume that when the Opposition Leader referred to the Government "dying of shame" in Parliament, he intended to provoke Julia Gillard into an epochal, white-hot assault on his gender attitudes.

And that yesterday, when he referred to the Government's lack of "experience" in the matter of raising children, he meant the comment to be a reflection on the Prime Minister's childlessness.

And that when he insisted on the need for the PM to "make an honest woman of herself, politically speaking", it was a deliberate reminder of her historically unorthodox personal circumstances.

And that when he suggested in 2010 that "When it comes from Julia, 'No' doesn't mean 'No'," his choice of that charged term was completely intentional, and part of a nasty, subterranean agenda.

As I said, that's one way of looking at it.

The other way is to accept Mr Abbott's own word that each of these references was inadvertent.

And here's the problem: The second explanation is only marginally less worrying than the first. Is it reassuring to have a federal leader who only realises he's said something offensive well after the words are airborne?

"It is better to seek forgiveness than to ask permission," declared Mr Abbott rather splendidly in 2010, when he announced the Opposition's super-generous paid parental leave scheme, having omitted to consult his shadow cabinet first, on the entirely sensible grounds that they would never have let him do it.

Speaking first and seeking forgiveness later is fine, but you can't get away with it forever.

Coalition figures are now convinced the Government is on a politically correct warpath, attacking the Opposition Leader on the slightest infraction in an attempt to portray him as sexist. And they're right. But there's another word for what the Government is doing, and that word is "politics".

The campaign to paint Mr Abbott as sexist is not much different from the Coalition's own crusade to paint the Prime Minister as a serial liar. The only reason the "sexist" campaign feels so unjust to the Coalition is that - frankly - it's never been considered much of a liability, in Australian politics, to be a little bit sexist. It's like the goalposts have shifted, and no-one likes that feeling.

The truth is that Tony Abbott is a blokey bloke, and in some circumstances he doesn't hear or see the things women hear and see. He might not spend much time sitting about wondering whether women like the whole iron-man routine, for instance. He doesn't necessarily get why addressing remarks about the carbon tax to "the housewives of Australia as they do their ironing" is annoying.

Or why a lordly remark about "experience" in child-rearing might raise eyebrows, particularly coming from a bloke who - like most other parliamentary fathers - was able to leave the vast majority of child-rearing work to his spouse while spending the best years of his life fully committed to politics, an option that just about no woman has in that field.

To disparage a Government that - for all its faults - does for the first time in Australian history actually feature a Cabinet with several working mothers of young children, and suggest that it lacks experience in these matters ... Well. It's a big call, in any event.

A few weeks ago, the Opposition Leader gave an interview to Triple M's Grill Team - a line-up boasting the former footballer Matty Johns, and promoted widely as "Sydney's Manliest Men".

Mr Abbott took two of his daughters along with him, and the first few moments of the show were spent in friendly joshing with the presenters about how good-looking the girls are.

As a listener, my hackles rose immediately. I have enough trouble with the fact that a chap who is most famous for gang banging a 19-year-old girl even has a radio show, let alone being promoted as one of "Sydney's Manliest Men", let alone having the opportunity to drool over Mr Abbott's daughters.

My own strong instinct, as a chick, would be to hustle those girls straight out of that studio and never go back.

But then, that's just me. I didn't view the episode as evidence that Mr Abbott is sexist, or that he doesn't love his daughters, or anything like that. It was just interesting - that something so screamingly apparent to me didn't seem like a big deal to him.

But that's the thing about electing representatives, isn't it? As voters, we get to know them, and work out whether they think like us, or alternatively, whether we can live with it when they don't.

To have a male political leader who doesn't "get" women is - ahem - not unprecedented in Australian history. The decision as to whether Mr Abbott's failings are terminal will be made by women as they exercise the right they have enjoyed for 110 years now - to cast a vote in a federal election.

Annabel Crabb is the ABC's chief online political writer. View her full profile here.