Sarah Palin and the Wrong Way to Battle Sexism

Now that the "pit bull in lipstick" who got her start in the PTA has had her honor defended on the national stage, it's only fitting that we're all waiting for Obama's "female surrogates" to fight back. In case we were a bit anesthetized, with all that rocking and "change" chanting, we now have a reason to wake up: hot girl-on-girl action, Election 2008.

In the two weeks since Sarah Palin was introduced to America, first as the second-ever female candidate for vice president, and soon after as the baby-making, gun-toting, wolf-killing beauty queen of the Christian Right, the question of sexism -- or, more precisely, the media's use of sexist frames to introduce and belittle female candidates -- has returned with a vengeance.

The first burst of coverage concentrated nearly exclusively on Palin's family and appearance. In Lifetime-style soft focus, we learned that she's married to her high school sweetheart, her fifth child has Down's syndrome, and her eldest son is bound for Iraq. Then US, People and the Enquirer sharpened the view. Could the McCain camp truly have known that Palin's unmarried 17-year-old daughter, Bristol, was five months pregnant? Was Trig really Bristol's first baby? And what about those persistent rumors that Palin had an affair?

The National Review Online countered these salacious details by asserting that Palin's family represented "vitality and life -- the men are virile, the women are fecund." Robert Novak called her "attractive"; Rush Limbaugh crowed that the Right had the "babe"; bloggers named her McCain's "Trophy Vice"; and Maureen Dowd engaged in a fantasy about Palin in go-go boots. State-specific political buttons, produced by day four, proclaimed "Coldest State, Hottest Governor," and "Hoosiers for the Hot Chick." The New York Times added some gravity to the gossip mill when it reported that the vetting process for Palin had been cursory at best. Unnamed sources said that McCain had wanted the pro-choice Joe Lieberman to be his candidate, but he had caved under James Dobson's pressure. Palin was a craven choice; a pair of breasts; an ingenue; a joke.

What has passed for "issue specific" coverage of Palin has focused on her purported moral hypocrisy: She can't be pro-life if she shoots at wolves and moose; she can't be pro-abstinence if her daughter isn't a virgin; she can't be a serious candidate if she won a beauty contest; she can't be for family values if she refuses to stay at home. The Times' "Mommy Wars: Campaign Edition" queried mothers about Palin's prospective work-family balance and found that most were uneasy about Palin's taking on such a difficult job: "A mother of an infant with Down syndrome taking up full-time campaigning? Not my value set" was a typical response. (Not to be outdone, the Washington Post titled its story on the same theme "Gov. Mom.") Is it any surprise that Rick Davis, campaign manager for McCain, spoke of needing to revise the speech that had been written for the prospective vice presidential candidate because it was "very masculine"?

Meanwhile, the majority of Americans, myself included, remain clueless about the true intellectual and political positions of the person before us. How "nice" for her to get this kind of a free pass; to only have to parry comments about her body and her kids. If you're a female politician, the political is the personal. Your body is the source of your ideas, and the issues you support are "women's issues." And if you cross into male territory -- guns, money, security -- your best response, as Palin seems, intuitively, to get, is camp.

It's obvious that the caricature of Palin to which we're being exposed is the inverse of the caricature of Hillary Clinton. Even if you'd missed the first half of the campaign, all you'd have to do is flip the script. If Palin is "better suited to be a calendar model for a local auto body shop than a holder of the second-highest office in the land," then Clinton is a dumpy, frigid, post-menopausal, castrating bluestocking who only got women's votes because she was a victim of her husband's indiscriminate -- but hell, with that kind of wife? -- sexual transgressions. At least the Right gets the "sexy librarian"; those of us on the other side are stuck with the saccharine Sisterhood of the Traveling Pantsuits.