[Eyeroll] Another Conservative Male Discovers Misogyny [/Eyeroll]

(This Is Why I Tend to Be Dubious About "Kill Him" Reports)

Mark Whittington of Associated Content says,

Commentator Tammy Bruce, who is both a feminist and a conservative, suggests that this kind of thing reveals an undercurrent of misogyny that has existed in the Obama Campaign since the primary fight with Hillary Clinton. Bruce said, "It transcends gender and race. It transcends class. The truth of the matter is, is that one of the most popular t-shirts when Barack Obama was running in the primary season was a t-shirt that said 'bros before hos.'"

O'rly, Tammy.

Never heard of it 'till now. Do tell us all about it.

I say something similar about the "kill him" remark; there are two being reported, now.

It's certainly not that I put it past any of these angry/bitter Palinites that show up in droves to see their magical messiah. But like the "bros before ho's" claim, I want corroboration and proof, because unlike speech on a t-shirt, people who are calling for Obama's death need to be put away, AWAY from normal people, ASAP. By end of business, today.

Hell, these rightwingers drooling for Palin love torture so much, send them to Gitmo where they'll have a grand old time without all that pish-posh of enduring something as tedious and silly as having their rights read to them.

Calling for people's death -- especially that of a presidential candidate -- is not protected speech, anyway, so I don't know who these conservatives think they are kidding, trying to change the topic to bro/ho t-shirts, allegedly all over Obama rallies. Why aren't they all up in arms over the t-shirts at pullinforpalin.com? Oh right, conservative white males with that legendary entrepreneurial spirit run that one, and there's no Black English anywhere on it, so that gets a pass from the Tammy Bruces and Mark Whittingtons.

We can't afford to f' around with ANY of this stuff -- not bros before hos, not illegal, criminal calls for people's DEATH, come on, now. The climate is already a tinderbox, as it is.

The President's Body

The subheader of this post should be "Looking At Sarah and Her Paranoid Style", but this layout doesn't do subheads, so..




Nobody ever thinks about things like "The President's Breasts" or "the President's body". That is, not until Sarah Palin.

As I stated earlier in "Feminism, Fraud and the Fisherman's Wife", when it comes to the "Sarah Palin" phenomenon, the style IS the substance. This week's events aboard the Lynchmob Express set that in stone, both in rhetoric and appearance. Back on September 7, Booth Moore in an LA Times article said (or hoped),

because she's a relative unknown, style is a lot of what we know about Palin right now. No doubt, in coming days her positions on the issues will eclipse our fascination with the brand of eyeglasses she wears. If they didn't, that would be the worst double standard of all.

Far from it, the double standard has gotten worse, with this blog contributing, sad to say. But if it's anything the past month has taught us, it's that whether they like her or or hate her, people love to be looking at some Sarah.

Looking at her style

Looking at her flag pin

Looking at her body language

Looking at her hairstyle changes

Looking at her wink

Looking at her jewelry

Looking at whether or not she's wearing her wedding ring

Looking at her lipliner

Looking at her legs

Looking at people looking at her legs

Looking at people looking at her rear end

Looking at people looking at her chest

Looking at her glasses

Looking at her mascara

Looking at her face, her neck

Looking at her body

Traditional feminists like the people at Sarah Palin Sexism Watch (no link, as I will no doubt end up on their list sometime soon) are quick to point up all this looking i.e. "objectification" as a by product of sexism and misogyny.

One would note, here, that I've deliberately left off the all-hetero-male subculture that's emerged around "looking" at absurdly bad, naked, obvious photoshops. Again, I don't have a problem with porn intellectually, but most days, the airbrushed, overproduced fantasies that make up the bulk of straight male porn just looks ridiculous to me.

In contrast to the "objectification" argument, I say, we like looking at crazy-ass Sarah Palin because she so clearly enjoys being an over-the-top exhibitionist. But the "Sarah Palin" image is changing, and with it, the entire phenomenon.

Robin Givahn is going to have to revise her ideas on SP's "unassertive fashion statement", though it's not even three weeks old, if only because her "style" has been a work in progress for the past month (at least).

Palin's style serves as evidence that a woman can step onto the national political stage without having to manipulate her wardrobe into some torturous costume calibrated to make her look authoritative but not threatening, feminine but not sexy, serious but not dour. Palin proves that a woman can wear red patent-leather shoes and still take questions on foreign policy and the economy.

The test, of course, is whether this particular gal knows the answers.

The other reason being, Sarah Palin just flat-out did not know what to wear, anywhere, before this campaign. That much is clear from her pre-campaign photos, oy. Suffice it to say, she does now.

The style shifted drastically this week, thus did the image. It's going to do so again, too, just watch. It's not a coincidence that it's doing so, post-cloister September, post-VP debate; after which she wasted no time coming out swinging against Obama on issues of judgment and character. Somebody ought to notify the sullen Karl Rove that his ruthless, violence-inducing tactics have already gone before him this week, and he's not telling the Palin/McCain ticket anything they haven't already learned from him.

Not only is The Hair making a dramatic change from what quickly became an anti-fashion icon to a generic Republican white woman who-doesn't-go-gray-but-goes-blonde, the clothes, particularly her tops, are getting trimmer and tighter.

The goal is for the milkshake to bring all the boys to the yard.

Her handlers started what seems to be a very cynical experiment with her New York City trip, which introduced us to what I label The Gray Jacket, reprised at Wisconsin's town hall meeting klan rally this week. Paired with black slacks, it's a form-fitting Nehru collared thing with large black buttons and a cloth buckle belt. The piece flatters her curves all too well.

Sorry, but no 40+ year old professional woman with that kind of body could get away with that outfit at work, without being asked to go home and change.

I would say, expect more of this to come as the election season lumbers to a close with the Palin/McCain campaign lagging. But without the signature Kennedy-era beehive, the representation of all that exotic, idiosyncratic Wasilla beauty and all that connotes, something's missing, and let's hope it's enough to affect what happens on November 4th.

Since the week ended on an extremely sour note for the campaign -- with numbers-down John McCain not only getting booed at his own lynchmob but the campaign openly denouncing the use of Willie Horton's Barack Obama's middle name -- those on the right so loudly crying "sexism!!" are going to end up using Sarah's body as a blindingly obvious votebanking tool, given it's about the only thing they have left.

Milkshakes bring all the boys to the yard, so we've been told.

She doesn't seem to give a damn, so the better part of me feels she gets what she deserves. They're pulling the same old gag that the medicine show does when the soft sell doesn't work: cut to the hard sell. It's already been reflected in Palin's manner, look for the same to be reflected in the style. She permits it to happen, and said yes to these humanity-crushing, individuality-repressing makeovers. Thus, I don't see the point in defending her as so many of these online "feminists" have taken to doing, in the name of the very sisterhood Sarah P. both shuns and appropriates to her own ends, whenever convenient.

Then again, she seems to be running her own campaign right now anyway, so wtf-ever Miss Top-of-the-Ticket. McCain's people even used identical apology language as Palin's people, after their little Mike Scott incident earlier in the week: “We do not condone this inappropriate rhetoric which distracts from the real questions of judgment, character, and experience that voters will base their decisions on this November.”

Who are the people they pay to come up with this b.s?




EDIT: Picture added.

Newsweek Cover Dustup

Look at these two rightwing idiots at Fox Snooze, wailing about the upcoming Newsweek cover of SP.



I paged through the issue while at the bank a couple days ago and like a silly fangirl, dutifully ran out to see if it was on the shelves, yet. It wasn't, so we'll just have to wait.

The cover photo looks great, and if the two conservative dunces in the video had the brains god gave a turnip, they'd realize that it's actually a testament to how photogenic Sarah Palin is.

Of course, Andrea Tantaros plays the conservative gender card like clockwork, whining, "any woman who sees this cover would be shocked and horrified..."

Now watch this weeks' issue of Newsweek fly off the shelves.

Idiots.

The President's Breasts

There are some days when Sarah Palin looks just...weird. The hair is all wrong, some of her outfits from her pre-VP candidate/hidin'-the-baby-bump days are totally atrocious, and she seems to have an ongoing issue with posture.

Then there are the days when her body is just plain smokin'. Some days, she's got it goin' on.

She seems to know this. I think it pisses a lot of people off, because we just have not been confronted with the topic of The President's Breasts in this way before, not in this country. I'm noticing a lot of anger about it, even within myself. Thus the name of the site, right?

I know, I know, she's a horrid person, with vicious politics, and nothing redeeming in her vacuous, ideology-driven "worldview", is likely a supremacist of several various types, has these funny-looking aspects to her beauty; yeah, I already know the laundry list of everything we hate about Sarah Palin. But when those things become simple disclaimers which are really a mechanism for denial, then it's time to take a look at difficult facts that are cause for the panic.

Because yes, there is a certain kind of panic that Sarah Palin -- or at least the "Sarah Palin" image -- arouses. That is likely because part of that image is "getting away with it".

Is there a such thing as a subjective fact? Dunno. But I would prefer to say something like, "some of her pictures are cute, others...not so much, AND she's also a raving loon." I don't think the two have to cancel each other out. I prefer both/and to either/or.

Those of us who are social products of both the Civil Rights Movement and second-and-a-half-wave, post-Ferarro politics, I think, were handed something of a bill of goods when it came to defining and identifying "sexist" behavior; one which doesn't really allow for, or completely marginalizes, a developed sense of visual pleasure. I'm talking about with regards to other women. Women's visual pleasure of other women, even for the outest and proudest, still remains a guilty one, for many of us who enjoy women.

Strange, how other countries -- several of them Muslim and conservative Catholic -- have had female heads of state, many of them conventionally, youthfully "beautiful", like Benazir Bhutto.

Is Sarah Palin a sexist? For wearing those tight suits and coquettish ruby red pumps? For toying with the cameras in a debate for second highest spot in the world's most powerful country? Is she playing to all those straight guys who want to you-know-what, or is she just workin' it, in general? Is she a sexist because the audacity and absurdity of it all is what in fact lets her get away with it?

Could a liberal/left mother of 5 who likes guns game stew play the game this way without being called a slut, a bad mother, or something worse?

Whether one falls into the image, like I and a lot of other people have, or one doesn't like "that type", or whatever, we're being played. The game is obviously for the polls, and that kind of polling will never work with me personally, because I don't vote based on skin color or body parts or base my preference for a candidate based on my libido. But that's just me. Some of these other people, though...uggh. God.

What about Obama girl? Is she sexist for running around in tight tops and singing about her crush on Obama? She really begged the question: what kind of person doesn't have a crush on Obama? The answers to that, I think, are not pretty, though he certainly is.

We observe the same kind of panic regarding Obama's good looks, especially in white conservative males. Frankly, I'm not really interested in exploring that here, because AFAIC, that is a pathology that dates back to Othello and beyond.

More on this at another time. These are just preliminary musings.

I know I keep saying that, but stay tuned. It's all true.

A Crush? On HER? How ridiculous.

Let's just consider this blog to be one big Freudian slip.

To be frank, I'm too old to be having schoolgirl crushes on celebrities. I'm not telling how old I am, but suffice it to say, this is not the way a woman my age should be responding to people in the news (according to whose standard, I'm not quite sure yet. I may never figure it out; I'm fine with that.)

Denial -- yes, I'm talking about Freud's Verneinung -- is an equally unsuitable state of mind, though we do know that denial, like it's cousin repression, is necessary for us to act like civilized, albeit neurotic, people.

This puts the "out queer"/whatever-we're-calling-ourselves-this-month in an undesirable ethical position: how to be "'true' to the self", as required by our out-ness, when the self requires denial of certain truths to thrive?

It's troubling to admit to positive feelings for a character who induces -- indeed, generates -- such enormous negativity, and whose own ethical conduct is being publicly challenged as I write and you read.

It's also very liberating. Well, hopefully it is. Especially in light of the idea that we don't necessarily operate on a strict 1/0, on/off Boolean binary of attraction and repulsion. We can like how she looks (well, on her best days) and despise how she behaves.

The two can co-exist at the same time.

I Can't Stand Her, But Dang, She's Cute

I hate her. I think she's cute. I hate her BECAUSE I think she's cute.

Crap. I have a crush on Sarah Palin, and I really wish I didn't have to admit this. Damn her.

Politically, she's a ruthless monster, being alternately pimped and cloistered by the GOP. Personally, her family life is a very public mess, and her something-to-prove ambition seems to drive her to do or say something outrageous, just about every deh. Despite all the cuteness, she's just nauseating to watch.

But the world just can't stop watching; sadly, or comically, neither can I.

This blog explores the bizarre situation I (and I think a lot of other people on the left who may not want to admit it) find myself in this election season: how to reconcile that age-old sense of attraction and repulsion, both happening simultaneously. I'll be exploring such lofty, liberal-elitist concepts as ambivalence, star power, "it", "the gaze", and women's visual pleasure.

I'll be diving feet first into the political horror that is the Sarah Palin pick.

And of course, I'll be posting plenty of supercute pictures of The Sarah, and probably Barack Obama, too.

One thing I can say for certain: it's a good time to be a person who enjoys both men and women. We've got Obama and Michelle on one ticket and SP and her shameless, daily photo ops on the other.

It's going to be a very interesting 30 days.