It’s a long trip, perhaps.
Here’s an interesting piece from Salon, not for its politics, but for its insightful consideration of the way the gender dominates how Americans talk about Sarah Palin. It begs, from both sides of the aisle, careful consideration about how we are manipulated by language and narrative in an election season:
“The Atlantic’s Coates takes a far smarter, but ultimately still too gentle, approach to Palin in his blog. He writes, compassionately, “There are a lot of us lefties who are guffawing right now and are happy to see Palin seemingly stumbling drunkenly from occasional interview to occasional interview.” Coates asserts that McCain “[tossed] her to the wolves” and notes that while she surely had some agency in this whole mess, “where I am from the elders protect you, and pull you back when you’ve gone too far, when your head has gotten too big.”
Where I come from, a woman — and especially a woman governor with executive experience — doesn’t have to rely on any elder or any man to protect her and pull her ass out of the fire. She can make a decision all on her own….
….It was so predictable that we would get to a pity-poor-helpless-Sarah phase. The press was already warming up for it on the day McCain announced her as his running mate, when NBC reporter Andrea Mitchell speculated that McCain’s choice was designed to declaw scrappy Joe Biden, whose aggressive style would come off as bullying next to the sweet hockey mom from Alaska. Now, of course, we know about the hockey moms and the pit bulls; the more-powerful-than-expected Palin juggernaut forestalled the pity/victim/mean boy/poor Sarah phase.
So here it is, finally. And as unpleasant as it may be to watch the humiliation of a woman who waltzed into a spotlight too strong to withstand, I flat out refuse to be manipulated into another stage of gendered regress — back to the pre-Pelosi, pre-Hillary days when girls couldn’t stand the heat and so were shooed back to the kitchen.”
