The XX Factor: What women really think.

It’s a Baby Woman

Gloria Steinem to Get Tramp Stamp?

This from an interview by Joni Evans on wowowow.com with Gloria Steinem, 75:

wOw: In your wonderful book, Outrageous Acts, you advocate that we should do something outrageous every day. Your quote: "Once I began to listen to my own authentic voice—or at least to realize I had one—I discovered a new answer to my earlier rhetorical question: How much more rebellious could I get? The answer was: a lot." Are you still doing outrageous acts? What did you do on your birthday?

Steinem: ... I’m thinking of having a tattoo for my birthday. I like the art nouveau-looking ones that I see on women’s backs just below their jeans—it’s rebelliously known as a tramp stamp—but if it hurts, I won’t do it. My real birthday present to myself is going back to Zambia to live with elephants for a few days.

I can't decide if I'm more surprised that Steinem is considering getting a tramp stamp or that she doesn't know that tattoos hurt.

Cable's Loveliest Lesbians Say Goodbye

Palin's Inflation Problem

Susannah, thanks for the great posts and welcome! Please forgive me if I suggest this Flight of the Conchords song as background music for this post, just because reading your post about the Sarah Palin blow-up doll made me think of their genius lyric: “She's so hot, she's making me sexist.”

Susannah’s post taken together with Bonnie’s raise the depressing specter of an America that's run largely by dirty old men or, perhaps, by men who simply cannot untangle their sexual feelings about women from their political ones. Yuck. I don’t know about the rest of you, but if the lesson of the two posts together is that men are from Porky’s and our only choice is whether or not to exploit that, I think there’s still time to get me to a nunnery by sundown.

My Own Private Sarah Palin Love Doll

Today, I received my Sarah Palin inflatable love doll in the mail. I'd heard about the "This Is Not Sarah Palin Inflatable Love Doll" a few weeks ago, and when Topco Sales marketing director Desiree Duffie offered to send me one, who was I to say no? This morning, I missed the FedEx delivery; thankfully, he left the box behind a potted plant. In my apartment, I removed the product from the packaging. From the cover, a busty brunette with an updo, wearing glasses and a blue business suit with the front falling open, stared back at me. "Cross party lines with your own inflatable running mate!" the copy read. On the back, a list of key points informed: "She makes sexism sexy." When I removed the deflated doll, I found the inflatable Palin doesn't look much like the real one. And it takes forever to inflate. But one question remained: Why is America so sexually obsessed with Sarah Palin?

From male fanatics to Alec Baldwin's come-on, an adult video spoof to Palin-inspired erotica, the ways in which the public sexualizes the Republican vice presidential candidate are never-ending. Some blame her for sexualizing herself -- her look is nothing if not sexy librarian goes to Washington -- while others blame misogyny; Feministing is conducting a "Palin Sexism Watch" and has declared the Palin love doll: "So disgusting." But is it? These days, this blog and its sister sites in the blogosphere are as obsessed with Palin as a man would have to be to order an inflatable version of her. Because of the complicated message the so-called VIPILF sends out, politics and sex -- and sexual politics -- are at the fore like never before, and for the first time in a long time, the debate isn't about male sexuality (Spitzer, Clinton, Vitter), it's about female sexuality. 

You know who Sarah Palin reminds me of? Gloria Steinem, back in the day, when she was a polarizing figure who captivated the public. Steinem's rhetoric was hardcore feminist, but she was a sexual lightning rod in much the same way Palin is. Watching Palin Slick Willie her way through her appearance on "Saturday Night Live" last weekend, I couldn't help but recall Steinem's "I Was a Playboy Bunny" gonzo journalism story, in which the feminist leader-to-be went undercover as a Playboy bunny at the New York Playboy Club. Without a doubt, the agendas of Steinem and Palin couldn't be more different, but there's something about the way they walk the line when it comes to female sexuality that seems deeply similar to me. They're both as aware of their sexuality as they are dead-set on focusing on politics over sex, but how can we be surprised when Americans respond in kind and sexualize the images of those women whose sexual complexities sit center stage in American politics?

Macaca Pancakes, Yum!

"The kids needed me'' may be poll-tested, but it's also a narrative I can't say no to—unless, and this is absolutely unfair—a man is telling the tale. For instance, I heard George Allen on the radio Tuesday saying how it was worth losing to Jim Webb because his 9-year-old daughter made him pancakes last Saturday, and that I found pukatrocious.

As for the crazy goddesses, I'm just as fond of them all the same as I was of my Aunt Ginny who spoke to dead people; they've earned those off-the-meds moments, and may even feel they are required. Though snits like that do suggest that somebody's power is being threatened, which is why I also take them as a sign that the abortion lobby worries that Obama—who is 100 percent pro-choice, despite Hillary's claims to the contrary—might fail to get into the kind of big pointless fights that raise a lot of cash for interest groups.    

But how DID Hillary become a US Senator?

Meghan,

Chris Matthews was more interested in being nasty than being right. But isn't there something to the fact that the reason Hillary's a US Senator, the reason she's a candidate for president...is the fact that her husband was president at all?  Reverse the first paragraph of that Gloria Steinem article  again and ask yourself this: Imagine a talented man who falls in love while at Yale law school student and decides to follow his wife to a very provincial city - Little Rock, say - where he makes a decent but hardly national reputation for himself. Then he follows his more important wife to Washington, where for eight years he works as a full-time spouse. Is such a man qualified to be a senator, let alone president? I know that this is the old reductive narrative, I know we all know this, and I know it's reverting to the basic facts, but personally I find the fundamental presumption of Hillary's candidacy impossible to get away from.

The thing I don't get about Hillary, and never have, is why she is championed by feminists like Steinem. To me, a woman who owes her fame and reputation to her husband - and we would never of heard of her, a Little Rock lawyer and the governor's wife, if it weren't for his own New Hampshire surprise -doesn't inspire, however smart and talented she may be. I can see that there would be other reasons for New Hampshire women to vote for her, but because she's a role model for women? I don't get it.

For the record, I'd also like to note that everyone I know, even the most apolitical, is suddenly talking about American politics. Personally, I've found it hard to care deeply about the primaries, which always seemed to be months away. But—pathetically, predictably—now I'm gripped, absolutely gripped, by the whole thing, am even scouring YouTube for the latest soundbites. There's an actual race! There are interesting issues! Sexism! Racism!  I can't be the only one out there who feels that way - might this be the election that gets the non-voters out to vote?   

Gloria, Hillary, and Feminism Revisited

Dahlia (and others): I don't think your point and mine are mutually exclusive. I certainly agree that sexism/the death of feminism is not why Hillary lost Iowa; she lost Iowa, and Obama won, for the very reasons you point out: Obama represents the possiblitiy of change, a break from baby boomer preoccupations and impasses, a break from, well, the Clinton era. (Andrew Sullivan summed it up powerfully in his Atlantic Monthly piece a while back.) These are the reasons many young women I know are supporting Obama. And sure, Steinem overstates the issue and writes from a prescriptive, first-wave point of view that doesn't float my boat. And yet I really do think, as I said earlier, that Steinem captures something crucial about the challenges facing women in America right now, namely, a pervasive, subterranean unease about women and power that rears its head in surprising ways. This unease would dog, it seems to me, even the female candidate "with Obama’s innate confidence and openness" whom you call for, Dahlia. Sure, such a candidate would probably perform better than Hillary is performing. And gender wouldn't be the main factor in her candidacy -- just as it is not the really the main factor for many Democrates, including me, as they try to make up their minds about Hillary vs. Obama. But there would still be the same tiresome debates about what a female presidency meant, and in what ways a woman was or was not tough, and so on.

What I hoped to point out is that in so frequently describing how gender isn't the main factor in this presidential race, we are sometimes quick to assure ourselves that it isn't a powerful factor. I absolutely agree with Melinda that many of Hillary's negatives have little to do with her gender. Yet what so many of the debates about Hillary have reminded me is that as a nation (and as a media) we are strangely anxious about identifying any element of sexism to begin with -- and that's what I find striking. And that's why I liked Steinem's piece, even given its quite obvious limitations. Her point that today gender is harder to overcome than race may be spurious. And yet the notion that gender issues are easier to whitewash than racial ones seems right on. I'm curious: Do you really think that if some men had heckled Obama about race at a campaign stop, a national newspaper would have printed a headline referring to his response to "seemingly racist remarks"? Maybe, but I have a hard time imagining it.