Cathy Young argues today that the reason Sarah Palin makes feminists so upset is that she’s all successful and stuff, and we’re just jealous bitches. Yeah, that’s the ticket. It has nothing to do with seeing a woman who takes advantage of all the hard work of feminists before her and proceeds to take a piss all over it, refusing to extend the same generosity to other women that was extended to her. I got the link from Scott, and I have to agree with him and with Ann and Miriam that it’s despicable how right wingers are trying to use Sarah Palin’s nomination to drain the word “feminism” of all meaning. As I said earlier, if you fail to understand the desperate hostility to feminism that’s critical to the culture wars, you fail to understand the culture wars. The word “feminism” itself is this fetishized evil for culture warriors. They either try to shame women out of using it, or they try to use it when it’s not applicable (such as laughably describing someone who opposes any support for women’s equality like Sarah Palin a “feminist”), but they are stuck on hating the word itself and wanting to stomp it out of existence.
You just know this is the silly season when people suddenly act like they don’t have the minimum number of brain cells to fire off to understand the concept of female misogyny. (The proper number is 3.) But female misogynists are common critters. They buy into the patriarchal arguments about women’s inferiority and, as such, focus their energies on making sure they’re the best of the second sex instead of fighting for equality, which they don’t think is possible. I wouldn’t even necessarily say that all of them have internalized misogyny—-women like Ann Coulter, for instance, clearly think they’ve sassed their way into being honorary men. Many of them eagerly take to new levels the controlling and punishing of female sexuality, again, to distance themselves from the bad girls and thereby gain what little esteem is possible for a woman to gain. It took Ann Althouse’s peculiar mix of needing praise from right wing men and her loathing of other women to come up with the idea that Jessica Valenti shouldn’t have left her house with her breasts on. They are true believers in the idea that one can be very sexy but also desexualized, which is why Palin is being treated like this giant sex object, because she’s got a practiced ability at being fuckable without showing that she might be the sort who wants to fuck.