sarah eve kelly

You’d have to be a Buchananite to want Sarah Palin elected. She’s a frightening woman. But since her nomination I have wanted nothing more than to take the vote back from the sufragettes and gag the media in a leaky basement.

Listen to this (from Salon.com):

She should … be a galvanizing point for women everywhere. Not to support her candidacy but to rebel against the Republican Party and take back the respect and equality so hard-earned by the women’s liberation movement in the 1970s.

We’ve been shanghaied. This is sick. We need to slap the face of our bad frat-boy date and walk home from this drive-in movie. Sarah Palin may put out to be popular, but the rest of America’s women don’t need to do the same.

If not, what the hell? John McCain should go the whole Hugh Hefner route and have eight V.P.s that all look exactly like Sarah Palin.

It’s McCain’s world, girls: You’d just live in it.

My question is this: doesn’t the leftist punditocracy have enough to go on with this woman? Her airing out of religion? Her promise to take the right to abortion away from rape victims? Her murder of small (and large) animals for fun and profit? Her views are despicable and should continue to be opened up to outrage, fear and ridicule. There is no fucking need to bring in the beauty queen antics. This is not a feminist argument. To argue that it is is, actually, anti-feminist. It suggests that American women are no more than a hive mind, free to vote on the issues if their choice is between two men, but setting aside these issues when a woman is involved if this woman is - as it has been essentially said - too pretty to be trusted.

That’s what they keep going back to, isn’t it? The beauty queen photos; is her son really her son; her daughter the whore. The suggestion that she cannot hold high office because she has too many children and a special-needs baby. The suggestion that she will, in fact, resign if McCain is elected to make way for the “real” Vice-President.

I usually have trouble with Gloria Steinem: I generally think that I’m in the wrong generation to appreciate her, and that her views haven’t evolved a jot since she stepped out of the Playboy mansion 40 years ago. This is likely unfair and ignorant; I await the outraged phone call from my mother. I read her editorial on Palin and didn’t spend as much time cringing as I thought I would, but still:

This isn’t the first time a boss has picked an unqualified woman just because she agrees with him and opposes everything most other women want and need. Feminism has never been about getting a job for one woman. It’s about making life more fair for women everywhere. It’s not about a piece of the existing pie; there are too many of us for that. It’s about baking a new pie.

First off, McCain and Palin do not agree on a lot of things. Palin probably scares the shit out of McCain, even considering his recent - and predictable - pandering to the extreme of his own party. But the main point, again, is the feminism argument. I am a feminist; I have been one since I realised that there was a need to be one. But I am for myself - if I’m not, who is? The fact that a woman cannot run for high office without making her entire agenda about women’s issues (in order to court the leftist vote) tells me that I need to keep on being a goddamned feminist. And in case you think I’m using the term “leftist” in a derogatory way, I would consider myself far more left than right in American politics, and I’m still disgusted.

When Palin was first announced, I discussed it with a friend of mine, a Canadian journalist. His reaction to the media outcry was this: “These are the people who’ve been patting themselves on the back for a year over Hillary. Now we know how deep their respect for women really runs. It’s an inch deep. Everybody’s known all along if they have any sense that the first woman president would be some high-achieving Republican.” I add: also a woman with the skin of a pangolin who doesn’t make an issue of her gender. Hillary Clinton had her own problems with the press - it’s arguable that they made it equally difficult for her, what with the spat over the Vogue cover and the ridiculous photos of her.

Anna Wintour said: “The notion that a contemporary woman must look mannish in order to be taken seriously as a seeker of power is, frankly, dismaying.” The truth of these words is being lived by Sarah Palin.

My mother raised an autistic child almost single-handedly. I should note, also, that my mother has saved the world several times. When my brother and I were small, she was going to nursing school during the day, paying the bills by waitressing, and being such a good mother that I had no idea until I was much, much older that those years were difficult for her. An autistic child doesn’t grow up like the rest of us do. My brother is at the centre of our family: he is everyone’s cause, everyone’s responsibility, everyone’s great love. He has made all of us something more than we would have been. And still my mom goes on saving the world. She reforms hospitals; she reforms synagogues; she even has a t-shirt that says “Always Being Right Is An Awesome Responsibility”. She has wrought change and raised a disabled child: they can be done at the same time.

God help us if Sarah Palin is elected. Not because of her looks, her children, or her glasses (thank you, Roger Ebert - yeesh), but because she doesn’t believe in what I believe in and she doesn’t care about what I care about. Just like Pat Buchanan.

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