The Sydney Morning Herald’s Miranda Devine rips so-called feminists a new one over their hatred of Sarah Palin.
Judging by the opinion polls this week, the Alaskan Governor, Sarah Palin, probably will not get to be the US vice-president. But in her brief starring role on the global stage she has been a powerful psychic enema, flushing out the poison at the heart of establishment feminism for all to see.
No more sheathed claws or pretence about “tolerance” and “diversity”. From Madonna to Sandra Bernhard, Pamela Anderson, Naomi Wolf, Lindsay Lohan and Kathy Lette, a certain type of influential progressive woman has been driven to insane rage by Palin’s very existence.
Bernhard, a comedian in America, reportedly said Palin would be “gang-raped by my big black brothers” if she entered Manhattan, a comment she later denied making. In a deranged concert performance posted on YouTube, Bernhard calls Palin a “turncoat bitch [and] Uncle Woman … who jumps out of the shed and points her fingers at other women … You whore in your cheap f–king … cheap-ass plastic glasses and your hair all up. [You’ll get] a bikini-waxed fresh Jewish t–t in your face”.
Lette, the Australian expatriate author, described her as “very, very dangerous. There’s something wrong with her … She’s a post-feminist – she’s kept her Wonderbra and burnt her brain.”
The violent sexual language used against Palin would be intolerable, possibly criminal, from a man. Yet these women think nothing of describing the 44-year-old mother of five as a MILP: “A Mother I’d Like To Punch”.
From the moment Palin emerged, the effect on some women has been like this, from an editor of online feminist magazine Jezebel: “My head almost exploded from the incandescent anger boiling in my skull. Many friends … said things like … ‘This feminist wants to murk that idiotic c–t.’ ”
Not that Palin is a favourite of males of the left-leaning entertainment establishment, with Matt Damon last week damning her as a “scary thing”.
But the intemperate reaction by women to Palin flags something beside ideological differences – a weird, visceral rage, with its roots in some entrenched psychic pain. There is an echo of bitchy high-school jealousy of the popular queen bee from the snarling, self-mutilating nerd and goths who vainly lusted after the cute boys she snared.
The consolation for the losers is that homecoming queens are meant to get married, get pregnant, get fat and lose their looks so the self-made strugglers such as Bernhard and Madonna can patronise them at school reunions. Palin, by having it all, has cheated. Not only was she Miss Wasilla 1984, but she married her childhood sweetheart, Todd Palin, kept her figure, had five attractive, seemingly well-adjusted children and was successful in her career.
If she made any sacrifices or compromises they were not apparent. And she had won the marriage jackpot: a hunky house-husband who is able to take a back seat without losing his cojones. She juggled home and family, even breast-feeding in the office, without any angst, middle-class welfare, or even bags under her eyes. How did that work?
Instead of lauding the aspirational quality of Palin’s achievements, establishment feminists despised her for showing up their inadequacies.
There is much more than high school angst to Palin hatred. Her ideology is 180 degrees wrong – evangelical Christian, hunting, oil-drilling and, most important of all, anti-abortion.
There is even a bumper sticker, “Abort Sarah Palin”, and no diatribe against her fails to mention abortion.
Abortion is the emotional peg on which Palin-haters hang their hatreds and justify their intemperance. The touchstone issue which makes both sides hyperventilate has become such a bedrock article of faith for establishment feminists that they question it as little as their born-again Christian nemeses question the existence of God.
Even in light of medical advances in foetal surgery, premature baby medical care and prenatal imaging, it is unthinkable that progressive women would rethink abortion, even late-term abortion.
For them “choice” is not about choice at all, which is why Palin is such a threat.
