Could somebody please, please explain this whole “pretty” thing to me? Maybe I’m weird, but I’m not getting the “VPILF” phenomenon. To me she looks like Monica Lewinski’s older sister.

So women who don’t like Palin are just being cattly, and not disagreeing with her wingnut agenda or lack of qualifications? Way to go Time.

Women are weapons-grade haters

Thank goodness Palin doesn’t know about the Bush Doctrine!

Incidentally I once had a splinter go through my shoe and impale my foot as a child.  I actually thought it was kind of cool.  Wait, not kind of.  Deeply, richly, sustainingly, dichotomously cool.

(Theoretically, there could be a death-splinter that travels up their arm, travels through their bloodstream and gets fatally lodged in their heart that they’d be opposed to more than any car theft, but I’m going to assume that most people aren’t walking around worried about tiny shards of the apocalypse infiltrating their bodies.)

Don’t mention this to Mrs. Quaker please. She does tend to worry about worst-case scenarios.

“every attribute becomes an affront: the hair, the voice, the husband, the moose-shooting, the glasses, the big family, the making rape victims pay for their own rape test kits.”

Oh you complete bitches. How shallow of you not to like her hair or her assault on the basic dignity of victims of violent crimes. I’m ashamed of you.

What dreck. According to the article, men handle things more cleanly, with physical violence, after which all is cool. Tell that to Bill Clinton. Or anyone who’s ever been on the receiving end of Karl Rove’s tender mercies.

This dipshit can’t seem to wrap her brain around the idea that there is a difference between a qualified person who happens to have a specific appearance or set of mannerisms and someone who is presented as qualified solely BECAUSE of those characteristics. Of course, all women are completely interchangeable except for appearance, so if you don’t like her, it has to be for that.

Time should be utterly ashamed.

It’s good to know that all the strong opinions I have aren’t legitimate, they’re just vagina-inspired.

Palin’s mannerisms, appearance, and voice do bug me, but it’s really more a reaction related to how much I hate her policies and beliefs.  If a stand-up, pro-woman candidate had all those annoying attributes, I’d just sigh, roll my eyes, and still vote for her.

Well, I have to say that Palin’s use of her pregnant daughter and shotgun partner fiance as campaign props, her requiring all employees to resign and reapply when she became mayor, and her choice of churches and implied worldview (Assemblies of God, and former AOG more radical splinter church - think Jesus Camp, Left Behind taken seriously and with an attention to warfare), all increase my visceral dislike of her policies. She strikes me as being a nasty version of the Dominionist Christian primary candidate Huckabee.

She’s just nasty period.  And not in the woman to woman bs implied by the article, but in a George W. Bush “Bring It On - but have somebody else do the actual fighting after the loud mouthed weakling idiot sissy throws the taunt.

And I like Hillary and Sebelius and Granholm - so yeah, go figure. 

And then we can talk about the disdain of the intellectual for the poseur, too please?

That Time article was vile. Every once in a while, in a moment of weakness, I consider subscribing to Time or Newsweek. Thank you for reminding me why I shouldn’t.

“Women are weapons-grade haters. Hillary Clinton knows it. Palin knows it too. When women get their hate on, they don’t just dislike, or find disfavor with, or sort of not really appreciate. They loathe — deeply, richly, sustainingly”

Riiight, and men don’t hate anyone, ever.  There isn’t a word that had to be invented just for them, wait I’m struggling for it, oh gosh, my ladybrain, she lost it!  And there was that was that other one, something to do with races, yeah that’s only women too. Totally.  Gosh, Cher Horowitz is on my Blackberry! Like omg…gotta go.

Could somebody please, please explain this whole “pretty” thing to me? Maybe I’m weird, but I’m not getting the “VPILF” phenomenon. To me she looks like Monica Lewinski’s older sister.

Eye of the beholder, mythago.  Personally I wouldn’t mind spending some time with her if she wasn’t A) a total bitch and B) a nutty-ass Republican member of the religious right.

(By now I’m sick of her, though, so even if she transformed into my ideological twin and were really nice I’d probably just want to be friends.)

I’ll confess to having had strong negative feelings growing up about a certain kind of woman, the “uncle tom” (aunt jemimah?) kind of woman.  As an in-between first- and second- generation feminist coming up in a predominantly male (at least then) profession (law), I had certain standards of conduct to which I thought women should adhere.  I felt they (we) should not use sexuality to try to advance in school or on the job.  I did not feel we had to become men, but we had to put away the tools we used in the dating world and compete based on our professional abilities.  When I saw women flirt with professors or potential employers, it made me crazy.  Because as long as there were women willing to resort to that we would never be accepted as true equals.

Sarah Palin is worse that even the most eggregious examples I ever encountered, because she is using her feminity to mask a complete lack of professional abilities.  It would have made me apoplectic when I was in law school.  Twenty years later it makes me very sad.

Just read the first part of the article and skimmed the second part.

Thing is, it’s one article.  If I were to judge the whole magazine on a single columnist’s work, I’d have stopped reading it the first time I saw a piece by William Kristol or Ramesh Ponnuru (sp?).  I’d say the reasonable response is to be angry at Belinda Luscombe rather than the publication itself.  Just MHO.

This was in TIME???

Golly, yes.  And men always dislike male candidates for <a >mature, logical reasons</a>.

This article made me throw up in my mouth.  I just canceled my subscription to TIME and wrote to tell them why.

Golly, yes.  And men always dislike male candidates for [URL=http://pandagon.net/index.php/site/comments/fl_middle_school_teacher_uses_nigger_to_describe_barack_obama]mature, logical reasons[/URL].

This article made me throw up in my mouth.  I just canceled my subscription to TIME and wrote to tell them why.

Yikes. Did anyone sign their name to that piece of writing? Kind of horrifying.

“Every once in a while, in a moment of weakness, I consider subscribing to Time or Newsweek. “

Don’t go with newsweek.  I’m about to cancel my own subscription.  They just ran an op-ed saying Sarah Palin should be put on the Supreme Court.  And there was that “grant immunity to people who commit torture” piece.

“Could somebody please, please explain this whole “pretty” thing to me? “

She’s charming, no doubt about it.  But, as Al Franken might say, so was Goebbels.

Yikes. Did anyone sign their name to that piece of writing? Kind of horrifying.

“Belinda Luscombe.”

Could somebody please, please explain this whole “pretty” thing to me?

I feel weirdly conflicted about it, because I look a lot like her.  Apparently if I got up on a national stage and said a lot of things Republican men want to hear, suddenly I’d be beautiful!

Could somebody please, please explain this whole “pretty” thing to me? Maybe I’m weird, but I’m not getting the “VPILF” phenomenon. To me she looks like Monica Lewinski’s older sister.

Chacon a son goat - Each to their own perversion.

I’m a male and almost her age, I work with women who look like her all the time, I think she’s pretty cute.

Then she goes and opens her mouth and spoils it.  As you grow out of your twenties, you learn that it really isn’t worth going to bed with anyone you wouldn’t want to talk to afterwards.

“You’re just jealous”. It’s the perfect anti-woman argument, feminists have heard it forever. There is no rebuttal to it, no matter how measured, reasonable or true.

Fuck it, the world hates us, we get it. But gosh darn we can still vote (for now). You betcha!

So, all women have to love Palin or they aren’t women?

Interesting… And they want more than the Stepford Republican women reading their magazine?

Amazing…

So why don’t women hate Hillary Clinton?  She’s attractive, successful, and confident.  But although there are certainly women who dislike Clinton (koff Maureen Dowd koff koff), you don’t see her inspiring fountains of seething, white-hot female rage the way Palin does.

Could it be because Clinton is an intelligent, capable leader and doesn’t have a record of supporting a whole slew of anti-woman policies?  Nah, women aren’t capable of thinking that rationally.  It must be Palin’s hairdo.

I read that article the other day and I threw up in my mouth. I couldn’t believe that got past the publishing desk. But then I have no faith in MSM anymore.

I’m a woman. I’m blind. I don’t really have an idea of what Sarah Palin looks like. Some say she is attractive, others say she is Peg Bundy with a glam squad, or as above, Monica Lewinsky’s sister. She doesn’t sound attractive to me, she sounds fake, ill-informed, and insincere.

The fact that a woman who considers herself a journalist could write such drivel is utterly disturbing. Women don’t like Palin because she is pretty? Oh, ok. I didn’t think it had anything to do with the fact that she thinks the government should own my uterus, that she believes in withholding health and reproductive information to young girls, and she wants to drill for profit on a National Wildlife Refuge. Yes, I must hate her because she is pretty.

And this whole women hate in some kind of immature vengeful and petty fashion while men just get violent and get over it? What the jumped up ever loving hell? The fact that our prisons are filled with men involved in gang violence with many degrees of separation and history of years long vengeance must have went over her head. That is just about as ill-informed as Sarah Palin, which makes me not have any respect for this Time Journalist, and guess what? I don’t even have a clue what she looks like.

So Luscombe’s logic is: “I’m a petty, shallow twit who hates other women; I’m female; therefore all females are petty, shallow twits who hate other women.”

I’m glad that being absolutely outraged that she wanted rape victims to pay for their own rape kits is on the same level as hating her for her hair. WTF. Honestly, the first second I heard about her, it was “did you hear, McCain’s VP is the mother of a down’s syndrome baby” and that was kind of interesting, could be neat, then I read about her policies and was completely disgusted. And the “Well some women hated Hillary for being confident!” whining was just irritating, as yeah, being in conservative upstate NY, I hear a LOT of people bitching about Hillary. Some of it is vaguely legitimate complaints about her policies, otherwise it is just “she’s a stupid bitchy bitch!” from men and women.

Apparently, all propaganda campaigns in the history of ever have been run by women, doncha know, I mean only women hate on certain groups! Not men.

mythago:

So Luscombe’s logic is: “I’m a petty, shallow twit who hates other women; I’m female; therefore all females are petty, shallow twits who hate other women.”

Got it in one. The three things at the core of all right-wing beliefs are projection, resentment and narcissism. Wingers deal with the cognitive dissonance by projecting their resentment onto the people they resent, then directing it back at themselves.

Lexie:

What the jumped up ever loving hell?

Ha! New favorite expression.

She strikes me as being a nasty version of the Dominionist Christian primary candidate Huckabee.

Yeah. Huckabee - before he started selling out - said some things that are heresy to Republicans, like that Mexicans are people too and so it’s not OK to harvest their organs without asking. Also, he kind of looked cuddly.

So, all women have to love Palin or they aren’t women?

Okay, I’m sorry, I read the article and that’s not the message I saw.  I saw a lot of stuff about women which I considered gross generalizations, but nothing saying that “women ought to love Palin and if they don’t then they’re just being jealous and bitchy.”  Maybe you noticed something I didn’t.

I just went back and noticed one thing I missed (which serves me right for only skimming the second part of the article.)  Luscombe says at one point “The hatred women have for Sarah Palin, and others had for Hillary before her, is not necessarily about politics.”

Now, this isn’t the same as saying “the hatred women have for Sarah Palin is not about politics”, but the implication that women are going to avoid voting for her because of the reasons listed by Luscombe is kind of offensive.  To hazard a guess I’d say that, yes, it’s mostly about politics.

It’s also about the fact that she’s incompetent.  Women voting against her because she’s incompetent, some people might argue, is an example of Luscombe’s reason #3: She could embarrass us.  But I’d say it’s less about that and more about the fact that people don’t want an incompetent in the White House.  They want somebody who has some idea where her or his ass is in relation to her or his elbow.

Women voting against her because she’s incompetent, some people might argue, is an example of Luscombe’s reason #3: She could embarrass us.

Hey, I voted against Bush twice because I thought he could embarrass us (and I was right).  It’s not like only women can be bad, egotistical politicians who embarrass us in front of the whole world.  Remember how Dick Cheney decided to wear a frickin’ sports parka and hiking boots to a Holocaust memorial in Poland and looked like a sulky 15-year-old?  That was pretty humiliating.  Palin at least could probably manage to dress appropriately for a memorial service.