The XX Factor: What women really think.

Palin Does SNL

I feel like a scourge for saying so, but I'm queasy about Sarah Palin's appearance on Saturday Night Live this weekend. Tina Fey continued her genius star turn as the governor, and the moment in which she and Palin passed each other, in their identical red suits and stacked hair-dos, was spine-tingling--the perfect update of those fabulous double-takes on The Love Boat when two washed-up former stars from the same dead TV show met up at the buffet table. And yet, for me none of this quite made up for Alec Baldwin in the first skit and then for the out-of-control unfunny disaster of the second. I cringed for Palin while Baldwin talked trash about her without looking her in the eye. It got worse when he ended with "you...are WAY HOTTER in real life," looking her up and down with an hourglass beaming out of his eyeballs. So a woman running for vice-president has to come in for face-to-face ogling by a bore of an actor on national TV? And then for gamely clapping along while Amy Poehler plays her, sort of, by charging around on stage, rapping (if it can be called that) in overdrive to unfunny lyrics, flanked by a guy dressed like a Todd Palin prop and two other guys doing who knows what? And that was before the moose even showed up.

No, I don't think this is the charming and harmless Palin equivalent of Obama Girl. Much as I wish otherwise, it still means something different for a male politician to be treated as a sex object than for a female one to be. Plus Obama is in no danger of being reduced to his sex appeal, whereas Palin may well be when the election is over. I don't mean to excuse her; as Dahlia has reminded us, she's a grown-up candidate who makes her own choices. She didn't have to sit still for all this. I also get why commentators called the whole thing a "win-win." Yep, she proved she's hip enough to do late-night, and that she's down with the Palin dudes who wear "Proud to be voting for a hot chick" buttons. Terrific.