Politics by sexploitation for Sarah Palin’s critics

BRIGITTE Bardot this week was just the latest to lift Sarah Palin’s skirts and sneer.

It wasn’t enough for the French film legend to write to the Republican vice-presidential nominee, saying she was wrong on guns and global warming. She had to add: “You are a disgrace to women.”

Of course, it’s fine to object to Palin’s politics, but Bardot’s insult shows she is now confronting something far uglier: a charge that her politics makes her an un-woman.

Or, as Age columnist Catherine Deveny raged, that it makes her the “closest thing Republican strategists could find to a man with a vagina”.

Uglier still is that even prominent commentators think the way to bring Palin back to her political senses is to strip her. Even to figuratively rape her.

The hatred Palin now attracts from “progressives” is as barbaric as that. “Sexist” is too mild a word for it.

Some examples . . .

Here’s writer and director Michael Seitzman, writing on the prominent Left-wing Huffington Post: “Basically, I want to have sex with her on my Barack Obama sheets while my wife reads aloud from the Constitution.”

Here’s “comedian” Sarah Bernhard, as reported by NewsBusters: Palin would be “gang-raped by my black brothers” if she came to New York.

Here’s comedian Russell Brand, in mid anti-Palin rant while hosting the MTV Music Video Awards: “She’s a VILF! A Vice-President I’d like to . . . fumble, fondle, I dunno.”

Here’s Deveny again: “The (anti-Palin sites) that amused me included: Excuse Me, But Has Anyone Else Noticed That Sarah Palin Is Insane? (and) I Would Have Sex With, But Not Vote For, Sarah Palin . . .”

Even Susie Bright, the lesbian activist, fantasised in detail on her website about having sex with Palin, and further down the food chain it is the same guffawing story.

Hustler rushed to film a porn flick showing a “Paylin” having sex with Russian soldiers; Leftist blogs circulated a doctored photo with Palin’s head on a bikini babe’s body; and the Chicago Times published a puff piece on a Democrat-voting artist who’d painted Palin in the nude, using his daughter as a model, and hung the picture up in his wife’s bar.

Ha! That’s how to cut a woman politician down to size. Strip her.

Yes, these are extreme examples. Yet even leading commentators seem obsessed with depicting Palin as sexually sinister or trashy, whoring herself into power and needing to be almost literally defrocked.

Heather Mallick, of the Canadian Broadcasting Commission, accused her of just going after the “white trash vote” with a “toned-down version of the porn-actress look”.

Salon.com’s Gary Kamiya sneered: “The more Palin drilled the Democrats, the more hotly the (Republican) base yearned to drill her.” Author Cintra Wilson called her a “f…able” blow-up doll, giving Republicans a “hardcore pornographic centrefold spread”.

And radio host Randi Rhodes, of America’s Nova M, portrayed her as a slave to an illicit sexuality: “She’s friends with all the teenage boys. You have to say no when your kids say, ‘Can we sleep over at the Palins’?”

So keen is this urge to demean Palin as a sexual threat that the National Enquirer, a big-selling scandal sheet, falsely claimed she’d slept with her husband’s business partner.

Naturally, there’s also been the usual putdowns from the Encyclopedia of Sexist Slurs, which I’d thought had been long taken from civilised shelves.

Palin is just “a stewardess” and “snarling bitch”, snarled TV star Bill Maher. “Like one of those women . . . who takes off her glasses, shakes out her hair, and then all of a sudden, she’s in high heels and a bikini,” said ABC host Jimmy Kimmel.

From where comes this misogynist rage, flaming from prominent “progressives”, including women, who’d normally claim to be warriors against sexism so shameless?

Part of it comes, of course, from the conviction of many in the Left that Palin is so stupid that only her looks and sexual power explain her success.

After all, isn’t this the bimbo who said that creationism should be taught in schools? That rape victims should be charged for their evidence tests? That going to war in Iraq was doing God’s work? That children shouldn’t get sex education? That man had nothing to do with global warming?

Isn’t this the crazy God-bothering Governor who cut funds for unmarried mothers and disabled children? Who got a library to ban books?

The answer to all the above is no, actually. Many journalists simply decided Palin was dumb before they listened to a word she said, and can’t be told differently now, even though she’s for now the woman most likely to one day be voted US president.

And that suggests this hate is more tribal, like the fury people get when a foreigner comes into their club, talking loudly and rearranging furniture.

But Palin not fitting into the media class doesn’t explain why she must be humiliated sexually. And that, I think, comes because she scrambles sexual stereotypes.

Here’s a woman living the feminist dream, but without the feminist ideology. She’s a political star who’s an individualist not a collectivist; a doer, not a protester. That’s not how a female politician is meant to be.

Worse, the women’s collectives find she won’t just blame their failures on mean men, like a sister should.

And men find she doesn’t need their patronage. Instead of demanding quotas and favours from the good ol’ boys who ran Alaska, for instance, she got them jailed and sacked.

She’s beyond that old sexual politics. But now her critics reach out for her skirt, determined to teach her she isn’t at all. See! they scream. She’s really just a woman. Look and laugh.

Join Andrew on blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt

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