skippy the bush kangaroo

Tuesday, June 30, 2009

she deserves to be hated for herself, not because she's a woman

there's a piece in vanity fair about sarah palin, and it's pretty ruthless in its evisceration of her public personae.

now, anyone who reads this humble space knows that we are no fans of the alaskan gov. but we tend to agree w/melissa over @ shakesville (itself no right-leaning organ) who wonders if vf couldn't have written an attack profile on the gov w/o all the condescending bullcrap about her sex:

they are the usual problems with pieces about palin—oblique or overt classism ("the surprise pregnancies, the two-bit blood feuds, the tawdry in-laws and common-law kin caught selling drugs or poaching game [make] billy carter, donald nixon, and roger clinton seem like avatars of circumspection")—and the usual problems with pieces about women—a feisty woman is little more than an animal in need of domestication ("campaign aides cast about for someone who could serve as a calming presence: palin's horse whisperer") or in need of meds for a case of the crazy ("polar disorder," "there were ominous signs—indications of an erratic nature," "more than once in my travels in alaska, people … told me, independently of one another, that they had consulted the definition of 'narcissistic personality disorder' in the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders").

that said, even the (relatively few) passages examining palin's being "at once the sexiest and the riskiest brand in the republican party," even if still insufferably sigh-eliciting ("fertile female," really?), are better than the usual fare, giving time to the reality that palin's appearance is a double-edged weapon:

another aspect of the palin phenomenon bears examination, even if the mere act of raising it invites intimations of sexism: she is by far the best-looking woman ever to rise to such heights in national politics, the first indisputably fertile female to dare to dance with the big dogs. this pheromonal reality has been a blessing and a curse. it has captivated people who would never have given someone with palin's record a second glance if palin had looked like susan boyle. and it has made others reluctant to give her a second chance because she looks like a beauty queen.
but here's the thing (there's always a "thing" about these things, heh): despite the article's being one of the fairer and comprehensive pieces i've seen written about palin—or any female public figure, for that matter (more faint praise)—it's nonetheless given the b-movie monster headline: "it came from wasilla"…

there are, it happens, lots and lots of very good points about palin made in the piece.

and all of them risk being lost beneath the crushing weight of the lazy implication that she is a monster.

worse yet, dismissing her as a monster, as a wild animal, as crazy, is tacit encouragement to pay her no real attention at all. she's not even serious enough to warrant your time.
tho we often think shakesville is too politically correct for its own good (a commentor is reprimanded for using the word "lame," which, we guess, might upset some physcially-handicapped people?), we agree w/melissa about this one.

do we really have to consider palin's fertility when thinking about her career? is that really a salient point? maybe it is for some gopers w/nasty fantasies about their candidates, but, really, aren't we past the time when mothers had to stay at home? as we mentioned on the moderate voice thread about this same subject, how often do male politician's ability to father their own children get ink in the national press?

we're all for a hard look @ what makes sarah tick, and why it's bad for politics. but can we do w/o the strange permutation of the whore/madonna complex, which seems to be "crazy movie monster bitch/baby factory" syndrome?
posted by skippy at 5:29 PM |

4 Comments:

She is a MONSTER, that's why it says "it came from wasilla." I'm a female her age, and the religulous crap is her biggest problem...that and the lying when her lips move.
commented by Anonymous Anonymous, 7:26 PM PDT  
Defining her as an "IT" was a mistake in my view. Had they instead used "she", then it might have sounded like a western title. Had they even used "The It-Woman From Wasilla" it may have worked for then it might be argued that they were likening her sex-appeal to many in the GOP to the famous It-Girls of the past and decided to not refer to her as a "girl" but instead a woman.

As to the silly bit about about being a "fertile female", I have to wonder if any other kind really run in the higher levels of office. Single men are allowed, but are there any single women or women who have no children? Seems to me that public opinion would consider it a negative virtue ... but then I don't really pay much mind to people's personal lives unless they are a part of mine.
commented by Anonymous sean, 8:40 AM PDT  
I agree with the main points you both make. I read the VF piece last night, and thought it was quite good overall, even if much of it has been reported before. I was dismayed to see 3-4 paragraphs with pretty sexist statements ("fertile female," etc.) because they were unnecessary. In some cases, I think Purdum was chasing a quotable phrase (e.g. "neither Anna Nicole Smith nor Margaret Chase Smith" ) but it's really bad framework, whereas sometimes I thought he was trying to get at a legitimate point, but his approach was clumsy at best. It's legit to critique Palin on how she presents herself and how her backers see her – a "traditional" woman respectful of male authority, which is how the RNC sold her – and she was and is a sex symbol for the male conservative base ("starbursts"). But female critics have generally written much sharper pieces on those lines, unsurprisingly. The key objections to Palin have always been that she's a liar, proudly ignorant, incompetent and unqualified for high office, and plays to the most bigoted and spiteful elements of the base. Her main selling point, like McCain, has always been her persona (the trend for most national conservatives), and like McCain, it's largely phony. That's definitely fair game – hell, important – to critique, but some of the attending crap is unnecessary.

On the article's title – "It Came From Wasilla" – editors often choose titles, not the author, although with magazines they generally have more input. Did Purdum submit that himself? One can argue it's dehumanizing, but it's not inherently sexist – although one can further argue that sexism is generally dehumanizing, so it's part of a continuum. As for Palin being narcissistic and erratic – well, she was and is, and the same charges have been leveled, also accurately, at her running mate, John McCain. (Remember the McCain campaign charges, happily repeated by the Politico and others, that the Obama campaign calling McCain "erratic" was code for "senile"?) It's fair to say that in this piece, those characterizations play into a sexist "irrational female" stereotype, which is Melissa's main point. (I just don't have a problem with those specific words.)

As for the classism thing – I remember several threads on this back during the campaign. Implying that Palin was/is ignorant because she's from small-town Alaska and we-all-know-what-those-people-are-like definitely qualifies, and there has been some of that. But like Bush, even when she's clearly been in over her head, Palin has never felt the need to grow into that or study the necessary material. As James Fallows said, she just wasn't "conversant." Nor does she even want to be. I'm sympathetic about taunting anyone as a hick – but (while they're not mutually exclusive) I'm much more concerned about anti-intellectualism, and a modern political landscape that really doesn't give a damn about competence, nor the consequences of policy. Bush's arrogance about simply not doing the necessary work and turning to his "gut" to accommodate his incuriosity and insecurities (while bullying others, naturally) was one of the most contemptible aspects of his character. Palin is very much the same. All that said, I think there's a very fair critique to be made that being unqualified raised red flags with some of the media for Palin and Harriet Miers where it clearly didn't with Bush and other male twits of the year. (Hell, look at some of the attacks on Sonia Sotomayor.) Shorter comment: criticize Sarah Palin for the many bad choices she's made, not for things out of her control.
commented by Blogger Batocchio, 1:56 PM PDT  
Also:

Purdham never gets around to examining in any detail why the Conservative Base loves her so. That's a strange omission, particularly since the whole piece begins with Palin's speech earlier this year at an Indiana Right-to-Life event--significantly, her first public appearance outside Alaska in 2009...
commented by Blogger Batocchio, 9:36 PM PDT  

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