[lbo-talk] Thoughts on Palin and Sexism

shag shag at cleandraws.com
Sun Sep 7 09:35:38 PDT 2008


At 08:49 PM 9/6/2008, Chuck Grimes wrote:
>Chill, Shag. Think about it. What's going on here?

thanks pops. I'll take your corrections about how to be your kinda woman under advisement.


>What I think is going on is pretty simple. Jessica (author of the blog
>quote above) had the same reaction I had, but for slightly different
>reasons.

ya think?


> I suspect that Jessica X reacted to the undercurrent of inner
>trechery against women's rights by a woman who holds public
>office and has power to do something about her opinions.

oh please. did you even read what she wrote?

as an aside: consider, first of all, that you are a democrat and i'm not. you're on the anybody but a repulican bandwagon and i'm not. there's your difference.

but back to some details. first of all, she writes as if the violent rage were a near universal experience. apparently, she got IMs from her friends which expressed violent rage. i love that as a source of evidence. it's like saying, "well, no one's saying anything to support my onlist, but i can tell you Chuck Grimes, everyone offlist tells me that you're a sexist asshole."

what a stupid ass way to make a point.

it gets better. next, she suggests that the same 'tone' was evident on a blog, in the comments section. She drags out a supposedly representative quote, "I want to punch her in the face and ruin her shit. Fuck her for ruining this historic moment. THANKS SARAH, THE HOTTEST VP."

Now, go look at the live blog comments to which she refers, and for good measure, examine comments on her other posts to which she links in that piece.

Notice anything? One comment, the one quoted, expresses this rage that is supposedly ubiquitous. Not one single other comment comes even close. Jessica is afflicted with SBD: Stoopit Blogger's Disease.


>I can see that and feel it to some extent, but I didn't get a rage
>flash over it. I got my rage flash a few days before at the Ohio
>speech. By the time St Paul rolled around I was mostly over it. You
>can call Jessica X's post sexist hate speech if you want, but that
>doesn't really capture its meaning, motivation, or underlying
>politics.

actually, I didn't call it that. She's an elitist asshole, yes. She stands for one kind of feminism, one which thinks She's Every Woman, one that is racist, ethnocentric, imperialist, and immune to the idea that the feminist movement that represents women like her, represents the tiniest slimmest minority of women on this planet.


>Palin and the Right openly promise to destroy and dismantle as much
>humane and tolerate domestic policy and law as they can. The only real
>check on their potential power to do so, is a rightwing supreme
>court, and the proven spineless Democrats.

The comments section actually contains coherent critiques of Palin's policies, positions, and acts while in office. Jessica ignored those and, instead, sonny and cher'd her phantasmagoria all over the place. apparently, there was a satellite image of it ooozing up and spilling all over in a 20 mile radius out of williamsburg. a big giant slimey mass.

Jessica's phantasmagoric slime was a general claim about what feminists think about someone like Palin.

Namely, that she annoys us because she is the cheerleader/prom queen/beauty queen in school who had lots of dates and then settled down, shortly after graduation, to pump out a 'brood' (as Jenny described it, rather offensively, on this list not too long ago). Jessican writes:

<quote> No, I think the correct high school stereotype is of the homecoming queen. For many of us looking back at high school, we can now feel a smug superiority towards the homecoming queen. Sure, she was pretty and popular in high school, catering to the whims of boys and cheering on their hockey games, but what happened to her after high school? Often, she popped out some kids and ended up toiling in some not particularly impressive job. We can look back and say, we might have been ambitious nerds in high school, but it ultimately paid off. What's infuriating, and perhaps rage-inducing, about Palin, is that she has always embodied that perfectly pleasing female archetype, playing by the boys' game with her big guns and moose-murdering, and that she keeps being rewarded for it. Our schadenfreude for the homecoming queen's mediocrity has turned into white hot anger at her continued dominance.

</quote>

So Jessica is bummed because _her_ way of playing the boys' game (being an ambitious nerd) has not been rewarded (she is writing on an ostensibly sex positive feminist site [which is a joke] called Jezebel for christ sake, where the use of tits and ass is pretty blatant, so this crap about the offensiveness of batting eyelashes is wearing a little thin).

*sob* Poor Jessica. Poor mainstream Jezebel feminism -- most of what's spewed at that site is what Jenny, here, described as me-too piece of the pie feminism aka corporate feminism.

Below, in the rest of your screed, you comment about how shitty it is that "we" cheese eating surrender monkeys are attacked for our love of chard-o-fuckin-ay.

*sob* we are so oppressed by that stereotype. my god. when will it ever end. let our people go! the abuse. the exploitation. the horror.

as god is my witness, as god is my witness they're not going to lick me with all their mocking and ridicule of my precious lifestyle. i'm going to live through this and when it's all over, i'll never be made fun of again! no, nor any of my folk. if i have to lie, steal, cheat or kill. as god is my witness, I'll never be called a chardonnay swilling cheese eating surrender monkey again.

http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)



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