Palin and Dworkin
McCain has picked Sarah Palin as his running mate. I haven’t decided if I think this move is brilliant or profoundly stupid. I’m leaning toward profoundly stupid, because she has no national experience, plus the fact that she’s a woman - even if a pro-life, anti-gay marriage, traditional, non-threatening woman - will probably make some fundies heads explode, and may make some of those middle of the road defect to the Obama camp.
Clinton lost the primary. So, the first woman on a major party ticket in the general election since Geraldine Ferraro is anti-choice, anti-woman, and very conservative. Already the misogyny has started, with comments about her looks, her intelligence, rumors about the parentage of her youngest child. Some feminists are calling out the misogyny, even as they disagree with her politics. While I hope that continues, I think it’s possible to avoid misogyny but still look at the gender issues, the ways in which a woman who toes the line like Palin will get places that women who actually care about other women cannot.
Someone posted this excerpt from Andrea Dworkin’s ‘Right-wing Women,’ it illuminates why someone like Palin, a token, is electable - not like Clinton, who did not dissociate herself from other women, but tried to work for them.
The token woman carries the stigma of inferiority with her, however much she tries to disassociate herself from the other women of her sex class. In trying to stay singular, not one of them, she grants the inferiority of her sex class, an inferiority for which she is always compensating and from which she is never free. If the inferiority were not reckoned universally true, she of all women would not have to defend herself against the stigma of it; nor would her own complicity in the antifeminism of the institution (through disassociation with lesser women) be a perpetual condition of her quasi acceptance.