[via David Thompson]I nearly fell out of my chair. It was like watching a boxing match: this woman turned out to be a tough, scrappy fighter with a mischievous sense of humour.
[...]
Conservative though she may be, I felt that Palin represented an explosion of a brand-new style of muscular American feminism. At her startling debut at the Republican convention, she was combining male and female qualities in ways that I have never seen before. And she was somehow able to seem simultaneously reassuringly traditional and gung-ho futurist.
[...]
In the US, the ultimate glass ceiling has been fiendishly complicated for women. Our president must also serve as commander-in-chief of the armed forces, so a woman candidate for president must show a potential capacity for military affairs and decision-making.As a dissident feminist, I have been arguing for 20 years that young American women aspiring to political power should be studying military history rather than women’s studies with their rote agenda of never-ending grievances.
The gun-toting Palin is a brash ambassador from America’s pioneer past. She immediately reminded me of the frontier women of the western states, which first granted women the right to vote after the civil war — long before the federal amendment guaranteeing universal suffrage was passed in 1919. Frontier women faced the same harsh challenges and had to tackle the same chores as men, which is why men could regard them as equals — unlike the genteel, corseted ladies of the eastern seaboard.
[...]
... that’s the Palin brand of can-do, no-excuses, moose-hunting feminism — a world away from the whining, sniping, wearily ironic mode of establishment feminism represented by Gloria Steinem, a Hillary Clinton supporter.
[..]
Frontier women were far bolder and hardier than today’s pampered, petulant bourgeois feminists, always looking to blame their complaints about life on someone else.
"One should doubtless keep an open mind...though open at both ends, like the food pipe, and have a capacity for excretion as well as intake." -- Northrop Frye, 'The Great Code'
Sunday, September 21, 2008
Sarah Palin’s brand of feminism
"Dissident feminist" Camille Paglia is enthusiastic:
J.R., you have just inccurred the wrath of Judy Rebik, Olivia Chow, Heather Mallick, Maude Barlow, Louise Arbour, and Hillary Clinton. Don't you know that women are supposed to toss off the chains of male enslavement, cast aside their vacuous adherance to the male dominated social system, shun the bonds of the valueless patriarchal order imposed on them and adopt the chains of the left-wing ideals of the socialist feminine order, assume the bonds of radical political activism, and embrace the imposed catesism of the new-age emancipated woman.
ReplyDeleteWoe betide any female who dares to step beyond the dictates of the feminist intelligencia and seek her own means of expression for she shall be cast aside as anathema to the cause.
Sarah Palin is a Real Woman. She is independent, smart, tough and can handle day to day living whatever is thrown at her. I don't think the so called feminists can claim the same. Give the Judy Rebiks the Malliks the whatever pretend feminist women a shot at living in the dark, Alaska, living without, hunting for food whether it be Starbucks or moose out in the wilderness, well I know which woman would survive. Sarah Palin would. The Feminists would whine and give up now wouldn't they.
ReplyDeleteIf Camille Paglia considers the meth capital of Alaska the Frontier, then...well, she's on meth. And if you've ever heard the hyperactive lunatic talk, you have to conclude she's on something.
ReplyDeleteWhat. A. Dolt.
Powell, Rick, I agree. The feminist "movement" has long been dominated by the po-mo left/lib whiners and radical activists of Rebik's ilk. Paglia's description of Palin's feminism is what I've always thought feminism should and could be.
ReplyDeleteAnon, "meth capital of Alaska"? What's that got to do with anything? Even the frontiers of of the 1800's had their substance abuse problems. Back then it was booze, laudanum and tabaccy. Methinks You're. The. Dolt.