> Carrol writes:
> >This thread is getting pretty revolting.
>
> Ah yes, when it's a political enemy, the pretense is dropped and we
> get to see how men dissect us. In case we needed a primer on male
> privilege, which we don't. Next up, Steve Earle's Oh Condi Condi.
>
> Fortunately for you all, there are men like Dwayne who give us some
> hope, otherwise we'd be inclined to consider males a lost cause,
> to be phased out permanently when we get around to it. So send him
> and Carrol some thankyou notes offlist for redeeming your sorry asses.
>
> Jenny Brown
Let me be a contrarian here. I think men are being unfair and sexist when they substitute mockery of the looks of women like, say, Madeleine Albright and Janet Reno for criticism of their politics -- since they have never traded on their looks. It is also unfair and sexist that men on the Right have made Jane Fonda an object of their obsessive hatred, mainly because she was (and still is) such a beautiful woman, and right-wing men can't forgive her for punctuating their fantasy, even though what she said and did as an anti-war activist was far from the most outrageous and accounts of her activism show her to be a modest person who was trying to be just one of the activists as opposed to wielding her glamor to grab power in the anti-war movement.
In the case of Ann Coulter, however, there is no denying that her looks is part of her political package created by herself and others on the Right, i.e., her selling point is that "a woman who looks like _that_ is saying things like _these_." I supposed that all beauties are conventional, but her alleged "beauty" comes close to the empress's clothes: the Right tries to not only browbeat us into accepting her politics as worth considering but compel us into admiring her looks as "gorgeous." If some men object to the inflation of both her politics and looks, is it necessarily sexism?
Besides, by now, men's looks probably counts as much as women's looks in American politics. I took one look at Jonathan Tasini's photo, and I had a sinking feeling. (No offense intended to Tasini and his politics, and I really do wish him well in his challenge to Hillary Clinton.)
Yoshie Furuhashi <http://montages.blogspot.com> <http://monthlyreview.org> <http://mrzine.org>