Feminism's Greatest Leap Forward

[Dr. Shane]

Palin: Feminism's greatest leap forward since Madonna

After that extravaganza, marking the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s epochal civil rights speech on the Washington Mall, I felt calmly confident that the Obama campaign was going to roll like a gorgeous juggernaut right over the puny, fossilized McCain. The next morning, it was as if the election were already over. No need to fret about American politics anymore this year. I had already turned with relief to other matters.

Pow! Wham! The Republicans unleashed a doozy -- one of the most stunning surprises that I have ever witnessed in my adult life. By lunchtime, Obama's triumph of the night before had been wiped right off the national radar screen. In a bold move I would never have thought him capable of, McCain introduced Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as his pick for vice president. I had heard vaguely about Palin but had never heard her speak. I nearly fell out of my chair. It was like watching a boxing match or a quarter of hard-hitting football -- or one of the great light-saber duels in "Star Wars." (Here are the two Jedi, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Qui-Gon Jinn, going at it with Darth Maul in "The Phantom Menace.") This woman turned out to be a tough, scrappy fighter with a mischievous sense of humor.

Conservative though she may be, I felt that Palin represented an explosion of a brand new style of muscular American feminism. At her startling debut on that day, she was combining male and female qualities in ways that I have never seen before. And she was somehow able to seem simultaneously reassuringly traditional and gung-ho futurist. In terms of redefining the persona for female authority and leadership, Palin has made the biggest step forward in feminism since Madonna channeled the dominatrix persona of high-glam Marlene Dietrich and rammed pro-sex, pro-beauty feminism down the throats of the prissy, victim-mongering, philistine feminist establishment...

Feinstein, with her deep knowledge of military matters, has true gravitas and knows how to shrewdly thrust and parry with pesky TV interviewers. But her style is reserved, discreet, mandarin. Sarah Palin is like Annie Oakley, a brash ambassador from America's pioneer past. She immediately reminded me of the frontier women of the Western states, which first granted women the right to vote after the Civil War -- long before the federal amendment guaranteeing universal woman suffrage was passed in 1919. Frontier women faced the same harsh challenges and had to tackle the same chores as men did -- which is why men could regard them as equals, unlike the genteel, corseted ladies of the Eastern seaboard, which fought granting women the vote right to the bitter end.

Over the Labor Day weekend, with most of the big enchiladas of the major media on vacation, the vacuum was filled with a hallucinatory hurricane in the leftist blogosphere, which unleashed a grotesquely lurid series of allegations, fantasies, half-truths and outright lies about Palin. What a tacky low in American politics -- which has already caused a backlash that could damage Obama's campaign. When liberals come off as childish, raving loonies, the right wing gains. I am still waiting for substantive evidence that Sarah Palin is a dangerous extremist. I am perfectly willing to be convinced, but right now, she seems to be merely an optimistic pragmatist like Ronald Reagan, someone who pays lip service to religious piety without being in the least wedded to it. I don't see her arrival as portending the end of civil liberties or life as we know it.

Perhaps Palin seemed perfectly normal to me because she resembles so many women I grew up around in the snow belt of upstate New York. For example, there were the robust and hearty farm women of Oxford, a charming village where my father taught high school when I was a child. We first lived in an apartment on the top floor of a farmhouse on a working dairy farm. Our landlady, who was as physically imposing as her husband, was another version of the Italian immigrant women of my grandmother's generation -- agrarian powerhouses who could do anything and whose trumpetlike voices could pierce stone walls.

Here's one episode. My father and his visiting brother, a dapper barber by trade, were standing outside having a smoke when a great noise came from the nearby barn. A calf had escaped. Our landlady yelled, "Stop her!" as the calf came careening at full speed toward my father and uncle, who both instinctively stepped back as the calf galloped through the mud between them. Irate, our landlady trudged past them to the upper pasture, cornered the calf, and carried that massive animal back to the barn in her arms. As she walked by my father and uncle, she exclaimed in amused disgust, "Men!"

Now that's the Sarah Palin brand of can-do, no-excuses, moose-hunting feminism -- a world away from the whining, sniping, wearily ironic mode of the establishment feminism represented by Gloria Steinem, a Hillary Clinton supporter whose shameless Democratic partisanship over the past four decades has severely limited American feminism and not allowed it to become the big tent it can and should be. Sarah Palin, if her reputation survives the punishing next two months, may be breaking down those barriers. Feminism, which should be about equal rights and equal opportunity, should not be a closed club requiring an ideological litmus test for membership.

[text from link]

[carolaa]

Over the Labor Day weekend, with most of the big enchiladas of the major media on vacation, the vacuum was filled with a hallucinatory hurricane in the leftist blogosphere, which unleashed a grotesquely lurid series of allegations, fantasies, half-truths and outright lies about Palin. What a tacky low in American politics -- which has already caused a backlash that could damage Obama's campaign.

I'm curious how that is different from all the smears going around about Obama over the last several months.

[Woody]

What smears would that be? I've heard some truths ... but didn't hear anything that I would consider a smear. What are you referring to? Perhaps I missed something.

What I consider a smear ... is calling someone a 'pig'.

[carolaa]

What smears would that be? I've heard some truths ... but didn't hear anything that I would consider a smear. What are you referring to? Perhaps I missed something.

What I consider smears are lying, manipulating the truth, fearmongering. They were so numerous about Obama that I have a hard time believing that you missed them. One example is the email pointing out "Obama's Own Words" with quotes from his book. You can look it up on snopes to see all the misinformation and out-of-context quotes it contained. Then, of course, all the outright lies going around about him being a Muslim, that he attended a Muslim school, that his birth certificate was fake, that he was sworn into the Senate using the Quran, and on and on. Not even to mention the nasty pettiness of whether or not he wore a flag pin on his lapel.

Are you seriously saying you never heard anything like that?

[Woody]

I am just not aware of McCain doing any of what you have described.

You can't stop the entire world from doing things you may not like. But you can do something about your own words. And I am talking about Obama's words.

Like I said ... I consider calling someone a 'pig' a smear. All the things that you listed did not come from the candidate and might be true to one person's opinion and not to another. Or they may just be exploration of the facts.

But I don't consider his patriotism to be 'petty'. His wife has indicated that she had previously not been so proud of American until her husband ran for president. So, this candidate's use or not use of pins and 'hand over heart' ... does become an issue because of this.

And now .... calling Sarah a 'pig' .... well .... I do have to question him.

[olger]

I don't see sarah as a feminist in the normative usage of the word. She's not angry at men..

[Dr. Shane]

I'm curious how that is different from all the smears going around about Obama over the last several months.

Not a lot of difference there. I don't want to get too offtrack other to say two wrongs don't make a right but two Wrights did make an airplane.

Putting Obama aside, this Palin nomination is a huge advance for women and if she is elected it would be great for the women's rights movement in the US.

[carolaa]

I consider calling someone a 'pig' a smear.

His wife has indicated that she had previously not been so proud of American until her husband ran for president.

Now, see I didn't take the pig comment to be referring directly to Palin. It sounded more like he was talking about an idea, that you can try to make it look different, but it's really more of the same. I didn't hear him say Sarah Palin is a pig. No way. I believe that would be way out of character for him to do so.

As far as Michelle Obama's words, she has explained what she meant, that she was proud of how people were getting involved in the process. Anyway, there has not been much to be proud of America for these last 8 years, at least. It doesn't make a person unpatriotic to see that.

[Dr. Shane]

Obama would have to be stupid to use the lipstick and pig phrase if he wasn't referring to Palin after she made the pitbull and lipstick comment aout herself. I don't believe Obama is that stupid. I think he was just trying to get some more press coverage. It worked. The press is going crazy of it.

Michelle Obama is not running for President. I accept her explanation although don't think it that important. If Obama had made the same comment I would be more concerned.

[carolaa]

Obama would have to be stupid to use the lipstick and pig phrase if he wasn't referring to Palin after she made the pitbull and lipstick comment aout herself.

He was referring to Palin's use of the word, not to Palin herself. He was very obviously referring to an idea that they were trying to put lipstick on to make it look different, not to a person.

Those who think using the phrase is unpresidential should at least hold McCain to the same standard when he used it on Hillary.

[Dr. Shane]

I have no problem with the phrase, it was its use right after Palin used a similar phrase to refer to herself. Palin is getting all the press coverage. Obama needed to do something extreme to grab the headlines. He could have said, "a rose by any other name is still a rose" but if he had said that we wouldn't be talking about it. So he used the lipstick and pig adage knowing the press would run wild with it and that would give him opportunity to harp on that fact that McCain is Bush in disguise (which is what he wants to talk about). He has to get that message out and convince the American people that McCain is not a reformer, McCain is not his own man and that McCain is just a Bush puppet. His strategy was risky but seems to have worked.