October 6, 2008

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.