Verging on Mansplanation
Bells said:
Dworkin had a highly functioning brain, while Palin had the intelligence of a snotty tissue.
Remember that for conservatives, the only brain function about a woman that counts is the one that prevents whatever they do to her from being necrophilia.
Sorry, I was looking for a couple of old posts of mine, and came across both in one. (
Yes, really↗.)
Bill Maher described the phenomenon, in October 2010, as "the lovely milfs of the new right"°.
And, you know, one of the reasons I'm dubious about a latter-day assertion that Rousseau was actually progressive―technically, yes, he was, insofar as he preferred grooming females to simply outright forcing them―we should also consider that the woman he chose to marry was not only illiterate, but
so uneducated it is said she did not know the months of the year.
Perhaps Maher's hit against these women sounds unfair; on this occasion he struck true. To the one, I would point out that the question of how sexually appealing a candidate is generally avoids explicit discussion in the mainline public discourse unless the candidate happens to be a woman. That is to say, sure, I remember hearing women comment on how appealing former Sen. John Edwards (D-NC) was at the time, but it didn't have the same weight. Such as the editor of
National Review ranting about Palin's sex appeal being the key to her debate victory against Joe Biden. Indeed, as cartoonist David Horsey noted of Palin-porn, people weren't tacking Joe Biden's head onto a lovely, naked female body. Or a handsome, studly, naked male body. To the other, if you're Hillary Clinton, well, I heard the strangest discussion about how she snarked a reporter last week for asking a general, stupid question about the email scandal, and you know what, that's the deal-breaker. And here's the thing about that: Pretty much anybody I know will call Donald Trump unpresidential, but it's rather quite striking to me at the incredibly more sensitive standard of presidential conduct Hillary Clinton is expected to fulfill, and, furthermore, it turns out snarking the forty-sixth reiteration of an already answered question is all it takes for people to start calling a female candidate a bitch. Well, actually, it takes less than that, but in this case I'm thinking of an alleged feminist hippie of my parents' generation, a woman who actually works in the schools and ends up reminding children daily to not say such things to each other because it's a grave insult, and this is all it takes for her to whip it out?
To the other, look at Iowa, where given a choice between competence and a Republican, voters chose Sen. Joni Ernst (R), and before we rush to give men a hand for not freaking out in their hypersensitive way about a woman threatening to castrate that many men as part of her Congressional agenda, we should also remember the lovely milfs of the new right. That is to say, there's a reason men in Iowa don't mind that kind of talk; they still think this woman will give them everything they want.
Speaking of giving men what they want, we might also pause to consider Reps. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN04) and Virginia Foxx (R-NC05), both of whom, for the record, appear to take reasonable care of their appearance. This, however, doesn't mean they're not both ugly as sin, because in this case the criteria is conduct. Ladies Blackburn and Foxx participate in a Republican ritual I grotesquely denounce as "lipsticking", which is approximately akin to putting shinola on a pig. Mixed metaphor. That sort of thing.
Ms. Blackburn is the one Republicans send out to the cable news shows to argue about wage equality; women, according to the Distinguished Lady from Tennesee Four, would be
insulted by equal pay for equal work. Ms. Foxx is the one Republicans sent out to an anti-abortion rally to lend credence―by dint of a woman's voice―to the proposition that what women needed to do was pause to thank all the men for turning out. As Horsey reminded,
"Call it sexist, call it the work of males who can’t break free of their adolescent fantasies about pretty females, call it predictable, but don’t call it immaterial to the democratic process. As Madison Avenue proved long ago, sex sells."
Here's an interesting bit I don't know what to do with; sexism is as sexism does, but the thing is that while many men seem to act as if a woman they wouldn't want to fuck is therefore a woman they wouldn't want to listen to, we should also remember that many of those men would, if given an opportunity, take the ride. And in that context, I would raise the point that it's not actually about who a guy fucks, but who he is seen to be fucking. That is, a lot of those guys who pick on women's bodies would still get on, because in the end that one comedian really did have a point when he explained, "Two tits, a hole, and a heartbeat". And it's funny to me
at first glance―but, of course, somewhat tragic and stupid when we stop to think about it―that there are plenty of women a guy might get on, but he wouldn't want to admit to his friends that he did. I might recount any number of standards on this point, from Aleister Crowley seeking large and unattractive women because he believed them to be more desperate and therefore accommodating lovers, to Queen ("Fat Bottomed Girls"), Cheech and Chong ("Big Bottom"), AC/DC ("Whole Lotta Rosie"), an old but extant standard about child-bearing hips, a longstanding stereotype about Hispanic (usually explicitly "Mexican") men wanting large white women, and even some persistent chatter about driving to the hilt and other such euphemisms for vigorous, enthusiastic, oh, hell, potentially injurious penetration and copulation―you know, like that one skinny girl, it looks like you'd tear her in half, or something like that.
To that end, it's puzzling; in that superficial masculinity, what I recall is shrugging off criticism of who I was sleeping with and making the point that, hey, at least I was getting laid. The smarter ones only needed one or two such occasions in order to figure it out, and every damn one of them knew they would, too. Not that this is heroic, or anything, but it always struck me as strange, given the importance my masculine cohort put on getting laid, that we should maintain this pretense, functionally speaking, amounting to being too good to get on any woman that would realistically have one of us. Then again, I'm gay and have been the whole time, whether I wanted to admit it or not, so maybe I'm looking at this differently compared to my heterosexual brothers.
But this really is one of the curious things about how our political discourse intersects with the proverbial war of the sexes. To the one I don't think I've penetrated the issue any deeper than a basic, two-bit comedy routine on amateur night at the club, but neither have I even put
that kind of effort into the present iteration. That is to say, I thought a lot of this was apparent in our culture, but it's also something we don't discuss, and how is all this too hard to account for in assessing whether Andrea Dworkin is sexually appealing enough to actually show basic human respect?
And what the fuck is up with that last question? How do we even arrive at such crossroads? Welcome to my America; how we've managed to survive this long, I couldn't tell you.
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Notes:
° See #2665505/4↗ (20 Dec. 2010) for Horsey, Lowry, and Maher citations.
. That's why it's usually left-wing feminists who tout themselves as victims, and rarely look after their physical appearance.
