If some men object to the
>inflation of both her politics and looks, is it necessarily sexism?
Yoshie, you're forgetting how oppression works. And yes, it is sexism. They aren't objecting to her politics. They are objecting to her looks as a stand in for objecting to her politics.
There's not much more to say in this space, we all know we don't agree with her. So, let's just attack her looks or question other men's commitment to their politics, because they find her attractive. If she were on the left, not one single man here would say a thing about it and they might get over the bony knees.
The sexism comes in because it's seen as perfectly a-ok to talk this way. IT's normal. That's hegemony at work. And no chuck0, in the context of your other complaints about how ugly left women are, how they don't measure up to _your_ standards, I'm not buying it: this isn't just about the fact that she's a public person and, therefore, an object of ridicule on every dimension you can think of.
If this were a man, _no one_ would be yakking about it -- because the majority here are hetmen.
I've been in plenty of forums dominated by women. Women do not criticize the way men, public or not, look. If they do anything, they _compliment_ men. And, they typically only do it in the context of, "You're taken (married/committed), but if you weren't...." And, it's often done in the form of fantasy of what the person looks like, given their cyberspace demeanor.
I never seen women in cyberspace diss a man, suggest that he must be unfuckable as they've done to you.
Obviously, people are going to think this or that. What matters is how they act on it. In this space, what Jenny observes is that, those who've discussed such things, they haven't had the normative impulse to keep their yaps shut. It hasn't occurred to them that we are here!
They might as well be in the boys' locker room for all we matter. And it's assumed, naturally, that even if we are reading along, we don't see it any diffeently than they do.
As DD observed, they don't even have the normative impulse to second-guess themselves. That matters. What we think we can say without criticism? That's a way to look at how oppression works. It's not unlike Bill Bennett saying what he said about race, crime, and abortion. In his isolated bubble, it all made perfect sense. Who would object?
Oh, there are blacks in the audience who might? wow! Hadn't even thought of them. And wow! There are whites who disagree, too? Fuckmedead.
so, I think, indeed, that a bubble is getting burst for lefty/liberal men. They want beautiful ideas attached to beautiful women. They don't have to have them attached to men in the same way. When ugly ideas are attached to beautiful women, the fantasy is punctuated.
But, let's not forget here was beatiful usually means to most hetMen: She likes sex. That is the story that we're constantly told by our cultural mythology. Not surprisingly, we believe it on some level. There are times we don't, but most of us assume that, when we see a hot woman, she's hot in bed, too.
You can say this is normal and natural, an expression of hetMale desire. Fine. The point is, when you get a thought boner, you don't have to whip it out and parade it around for everyone to see, reminding women just where they stand with you.
And let me make clear for the boneheads: this doesn't mean that it is a bad thing to find people attractive and talk about it. it isn't a bad thing to compliment people on their looks. if you think that, you're not getting it. you're not paying attention to the subtleties of what has played out here: a very specific commenting on someone's lack of attractiveness _because_ of her politics, demeanor.
Her bony knees wouldn't have been brought up had she been a lefty.
"Scream-of-consciousness prose stylings, peppered with sociological observations, political ruminations, and in-yore-face colloquial assaults."
-- Dennis Perrin, redstateson.blogspot.com
Bitch | Lab http://blog.pulpculture.org