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Until now the McCain/Palin team has let the media spin about her appeal to women, and how he chose her to steal some of the Hillary thunder. But in these last desperate days of the campaign, they have decided to leave nothing to inference. For those too dense to pick up the hints, Palin has decided to actually plagiarize Hillary. "Are you willing to break the highest, hardest glass ceiling in America," she told a crowd yesterday in Henderson, Nevada, according to the Washington Post. She then went on to accuse the Obama campaign of paying women on its staff 83 cents for every dollar that men get. Now that is some serious chutzpah. I mean, is there no female archetype this woman is unwilling to inhabit: ballbuster, moose hunter, mom, good Christian, sexpot and now rope sandal feminist.
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Susannah, what a great connection. The First Feminists have been such sourpusses during this election that I'd forgotten about their sexed-up side: Gloria Steinem, zipless Erica Jong, Germaine Greer busting out of her tight grey suits, flanked by two women making out behind her. On the conservative side, the anti-feminists have been flirting with sexiness for a while, basically since Laura Ingraham posed for the New York Times Magazine in her leopard-print miniskirt. But it's always been a little timid, as if they were just a younger version of the good, Republican wife. Maybe Sarah Palin is the first one to own the sex appeal and use it as her weapon. Everytime you read about the crowds of men around her, they seem much less predator than prey, just awed, awed by her, here in the New York Times and in the Jane Mayer piece.
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Susannah, thanks for the great posts and welcome! Please forgive me if I suggest this Flight of the Conchords song as background music for this post, just because reading your post about the Sarah Palin blow-up doll made me think of their genius lyric: “She's so hot, she's making me sexist.”
Susannah’s post taken together with Bonnie’s raise the depressing specter of an America that's run largely by dirty old men or, perhaps, by men who simply cannot untangle their sexual feelings about women from their political ones. Yuck. I don’t know about the rest of you, but if the lesson of the two posts together is that men are from Porky’s and our only choice is whether or not to exploit that, I think there’s still time to get me to a nunnery by sundown.
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So a little over a month ago in this space, a few of us wished Rachel Maddow luck with her new MSNBC nightly talk show. And boy, has she had luck, or made her own. Today’s NYT reports that in the 25 days her show has been on the air, it’s doubled viewership in that 9 p.m. time slot. She’s keeping 90 percent of Keith Olbermann’s audience from the previous slot—and he has the second-biggest audience in cable news.
Speaking for myself, I can say that in the few weeks it’s been on the air, Maddow’s show has quietly become a staple of my unwholesomely large media diet. I put my kid to bed, make dinner, and watch Rachel Maddow (or at least have her on in the background while surfing the Web for more political news. Like an addict knowing I’ll be forced into rehab come Nov. 4, I’ve just given in at this point.) Her show still has some kinks to work out. It’s too indebted to airheaded cable-news conventions like the spin-doctor interview (who cares what paid campaign flacks have to say on either side?) and the dreaded celebrity-gossip “expert” (both Olbermann and Matthews regularly host these types, and both visibly recoil from them. Just kill the segment!). But as Maddow settles in, she’s quickly evolving into the liveliest voice of the left-leaning media, as well as the only major cable-news host who doesn't seem constantly on the brink of an apoplectic fit.
I think I’m not alone in Maddow love. Profiles of her are appearing everywhere, like this interview with GQ, in which she cheerfully identifies herself as “a big lesbian who looks like a man,” and this "Domains" piece from the last NYT Sunday magazine. I usually hate “Domains”—a weekly feature about the living space of a famous person that seems designed to incite lifestyle envy among readers—but I genuinely wanted to pull a chair up to Maddow’s kitchen table in Northampton, Mass., right next to the reflector-holding garden squirrel, and have old-school mixed drinks with her and her girlfriend. And mind you, I’m straight (though seeing RM in her cute civilian duds on The Tonight Show, I sort of wonder why …).
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A new message to Sarah Palin popped up on YouTube this weekend. The video features young girls begging that she not "undo everything they (the girls' feminist mothers and grandmothers) fought for." What stood out to me was the statistic that "women in Alaska get raped over twice as much as women in the rest of the country." It's true.
Alaska has struggled with a high rape rate for years, especially among its rural population. According to an FBI report in 2007, the rate was 77.4 per 100,000 people, which is 2.58 times higher than the national rate of 30 per 100,000.
The video also claims Palin has done nothing to reduce the high rate of rape and doesn't care about violence against girls and women. It's worth noting that the problem existed long before she made the jump from hockey mom to political figure. But is there anything to the criticism?
Last year, Amnesty International blamed the federal government, along with state government, for the high sexual assault rates among Alaska Native women. At the state level, the report cites the difficulty state troopers, a group of 240 commissioned troopers, have patrolling the large state. Responding to a call can take hours, or even days, the report found. In 2005, troopers received a call from a village 150 miles away in which a man had beat his wife with a shotgun and barricaded himself in the house with four children. Troopers arrived more than four hours later and after the man had raped a 13-year-old Alaska Native girl.
Palin controls the state troopers' budget. There's no guarantee that merely giving them more money would improve the situation—though it might. Or maybe the solution is more complicated, but one the governor's office should look for.
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Anne, thanks for sending me to Jane Mayer's New Yorker essay "The Insiders." My lasting image from the piece is one of Gov. Palin hijacking two boatloads of conservative pundits and charming them with her wiles. This is the quick study Sarah Barracuda whom Alaskans know and love.
In June 2007, a shipful of opinion makers on a Weekly Standard cruise docked for a day in Juneau. In office only six months, Palin invited William Kristol, Fred Barnes, and Michael Gerson along with their families to a "high spirited" lunch at the governor's mansion. Mayer reports, "everyone was charmed when the Governor's small daughter Piper popped in." After lunch, Palin took her guests for a quick hop (by air) to visit a genuine Alaska gold mine. Ore was not the only thing twinkling. Gerson's impression of the hostess was "a mix between Annie Oakley and Joan of Arc." A "dazzled" Barnes told Mayer he found his new acquaintance "exceptionally pretty" and returned home to write her first national profile "The Most Popular Governor." Later, a besotted Kristol, who spoke of her on-air as "my heartthrob," ardently positioned her for the VP pick.
Weeks after the successful party, the new-as-snow governor intercepted another luxury fundraising tour, sponsored by the National Review. Palin threw a "special reception" at the mansion for the cruise's powerful "guest speakers" (check out this year's lineup here). The perhaps slightly bored pundits (magazine publisher Jack Fowler recalls, "There's only so much you can do in Juneau") happily attended the party and were equally impressed with their host. Fowler: "This lady is something special. She connects. She's genuine. She doesn't look like what you'd expect." Another NR editor later described the governor as "a former beauty-pageant contestant, and a real honey, too." One guest, historian Victor Davis Hansen, told Mayer he "was delighted that Palin described herself as a fan of history, and as a reader of National Review's Web site, for which he writes regularly." The novice governor and notorious horn dog Dick Morris also made a "meaningful connection." The strategist, who once advised a previous ambitious governor, told Palin to hang onto her "outsider cred."
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Today, I received my Sarah Palin inflatable love doll in the mail. I'd heard about the "This Is Not Sarah Palin Inflatable Love Doll" a few weeks ago, and when Topco Sales marketing director Desiree Duffie offered to send me one, who was I to say no? This morning, I missed the FedEx delivery; thankfully, he left the box behind a potted plant. In my apartment, I removed the product from the packaging. From the cover, a busty brunette with an updo, wearing glasses and a blue business suit with the front falling open, stared back at me. "Cross party lines with your own inflatable running mate!" the copy read. On the back, a list of key points informed: "She makes sexism sexy." When I removed the deflated doll, I found the inflatable Palin doesn't look much like the real one. And it takes forever to inflate. But one question remained: Why is America so sexually obsessed with Sarah Palin?
From male fanatics to Alec Baldwin's come-on, an adult video spoof to Palin-inspired erotica, the ways in which the public sexualizes the Republican vice presidential candidate are never-ending. Some blame her for sexualizing herself -- her look is nothing if not sexy librarian goes to Washington -- while others blame misogyny; Feministing is conducting a "Palin Sexism Watch" and has declared the Palin love doll: "So disgusting." But is it? These days, this blog and its sister sites in the blogosphere are as obsessed with Palin as a man would have to be to order an inflatable version of her. Because of the complicated message the so-called VIPILF sends out, politics and sex -- and sexual politics -- are at the fore like never before, and for the first time in a long time, the debate isn't about male sexuality (Spitzer, Clinton, Vitter), it's about female sexuality.
You know who Sarah Palin reminds me of? Gloria Steinem, back in the day, when she was a polarizing figure who captivated the public. Steinem's rhetoric was hardcore feminist, but she was a sexual lightning rod in much the same way Palin is. Watching Palin Slick Willie her way through her appearance on "Saturday Night Live" last weekend, I couldn't help but recall Steinem's "I Was a Playboy Bunny" gonzo journalism story, in which the feminist leader-to-be went undercover as a Playboy bunny at the New York Playboy Club. Without a doubt, the agendas of Steinem and Palin couldn't be more different, but there's something about the way they walk the line when it comes to female sexuality that seems deeply similar to me. They're both as aware of their sexuality as they are dead-set on focusing on politics over sex, but how can we be surprised when Americans respond in kind and sexualize the images of those women whose sexual complexities sit center stage in American politics?
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Ann, thank you for bringing up my Atlantic story on transgender children. When I was reporting, I felt the opposite: Culture weighed very heavily on the boys and not so much on the girls. A girl could go a long time in gym shorts and cropped hair before anyone thought she was anything but a tomboy. But a boy in a ponytail and a skirt? Totally unacceptable. The girls I talked to generally never showed up at a psychologist's office until about age 8 or 9, which is when their love of toy guns and spy gear suddenly seemed conspicuous and when puberty was looming. Boys showed up at age 4, with parents already worried that their sons played with Barbies or dressed up in tutus.
In this little slice of the world, feminists of the Hillary generation can look back and see what they have to be grateful for. In the simplistic, Free To Be You and Me view of gender relations, girls have come a long way. They can be doctors or bus drivers and they no longer do housework alone. But the boys seem stuck in a narrow retro space. William and his doll still raise a big red flag.
That said, maybe there is a stronger biological imperative for boys, as you say, because boys pay such a high price for wearing that skirt that something unstoppable must be driving them to put it on.
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In the new Atlantic, Hanna has a fascinating, and unsettling, piece on transgender children, in which she examines how the issue is being reconceived by experts and parents. Following her through the maze of biology vs. culture, I found myself wondering what light, if any, history might shed on the debate. Girls spending at least part of their childhoods imagining, or wishing, they were boys seems a familiar—and culturally very explicable—drama. Greater freedom, more leeway for ambition and assertiveness, a sense of separateness from omnipresent mom: Certainly back in the day—and now, too—it's easy to see why energetic girls have seen advantages in being a boy—until the hormones kick in and other urges complicate the picture. I'm intrigued to know whether there is any data to suggest a more recent rise in boys wishing they were girls. If so, could that suggest anything about wider cultural, as well as family, influences—or does it perhaps point to possible gender differences in the transgender phenomenon? Could it be, say, that culture plays more of a role in "gender dysphoria," as it's called, among girls, and biology among boys?