Yes, Gloria, there is profound sexism
Mostly from leftist women.
"Feminist anger against Sarah has exposed the fact that feminism is not about women's success and achievement. If it were, feminists would have been bragging for years about self-made women who are truly remarkable achievers, such as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, or former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, or Sen. Elizabeth Dole, or even Margaret Thatcher. Feminists never boast about these women because feminism's basic doctrine is victimology. Feminism preaches that women can never succeed because they are the sorry victims of an oppressive patriarchy. No matter how smart or accomplished a woman may be, she's told that success and happiness are beyond her grasp because institutional sexism and discrimination hold her down. . . Sarah Palin is an exemplar of a successful, can-do woman, and the feminists simply don't know how to deal with her. I hope she will usher in a new era where conventional wisdom recognizes that feminist negativism is ancient history and American women are so fortunate to live in the greatest country on Earth." SF Gate, Sept. 21
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While we're talking about sexism, why don't we revisit John McCain's joke about Chelsea Clinton and Janet Reno?
You first. Did you write it?
Oh no. Not me. It's joke that McCain told at a Republican fundraiser.
http://www.salon.com/news/1998/06/25newsb.html
or...
http://news.aol.com/political-machine/2008/02/19/mccain-why-is-chelsea-clinton-so-ugly/
Um, no.
Feminism is about deconstructing patriarchy, a word which literally means "rule by the father." Patriarchy says things like women are too infantile to make decisions about their own reproductive capacities, so daddies have to do it for them.
Patriarchy says phallic displays of military might are "strong," "good," and effective means of solving problems. Club the other guy before he clubs you, rather than use empathy and communication to solve problems.
Patriarchy plays up a mythos that women need to be protected by these "strong" (cough cough) men, as if we sisters, or we sisters and brothers, cannot take care of each other.
Patriarchy is about religions that say assinine things like, "wives be subject to your husbands" and "no women shall have intellectual authority over a man." (These sentiment are both expressed in the Christian Bible.)
Patriarchy is about appointing/hiring women based on their looks and their ability to woo men with their sexuality rather than their abilities to use their intellect. (Sarah Palin could not even DEFINE the Bush Doctrine, and her ditzy claim to foreign policy expertise was that she could see Russia from parts of Alaska. But damn she holds the boys' attention in those tight little skirts and heels!)
Patriarchy tends to celebrate dominance and power-over thinking rather than collaborative efforts.
So you see, Sarah Palin is a patriarchy lovin' males wet dream. --one who happily concedes to all that the patriarchy stands for. Don't touch my gun, but feel free to SEIZE my daughter's uterus! (--comes from the days when daughters and wives were chattel. These are days that Palin would happily take us back to, given her stances on sex ed and birth control. A woman with no agency over her reproductive system is a woman who is very likely to end up economically dependent on a man, and have no recourse if she is treated like a damn slave or maid.)
And that is why women on the left don't support her. --because most everything that she believes will set all OTHER women back 100 years. --because everything she believes will set human evolution back 500 years. The rest of the world--the parts that are doing well, not sliding back into their OWN fundamentalist dark ages-- is moving towards collaborative thinking, nonhierarchical systems, interdependence-based paradims in regard to economies, the environment, and social structures. The America that wants to pretend that there is still no reality beyond the farm ala 1860, the America that wants to believe that "rugged individualism" is going to get you through the information age and a global economy, the America that still believes that a woman's primary role is still breeder and/or sex object, the America that wants to ignore entire scientific fields of climate change, geology, paleontology, evolutionary biology-----
is the America that is letting the rest of the world pass us by.
This is the only America that supports Sarah Palin.
As for women being so fortunate as to live in the "greatest country on earth," I am really curious as to how many other countries you have BEEN to! (So far I have been to 6, including in the Middle East.) And if you have even been abroad, were you hanging with and debating with locals, or were you in some little Club Med Americana bubble?
I concede that we have relatively good infrastructure here. Other than that---we throw around a hell of a lot of propaganda about what "freedom" means in this country. But we don't even have the freedom to love the way we want, for a while we lost the freedom to DISSENT where anyone could hear us, we don't have the freedom to GET SICK without going bankrupt, we don't have the freedom to take tea with family and friends ones b/c we are always racing against our watches... We basically have the freedom to keep shopping for sweat shop made junk, the freedom to obey the corporate masters, the freedom to objectify women, and to breed men to be killing machines to make rich people richer.
What we call freedom in America IS A RUSE. Absolutely, there are places that are worse. --largely places where we have propped up dictatorships, warlords and corrupt royal families. But we can do so much better.
Real feminism would help. The illusion of feminism, the smoke screen of faux feminism, will only make things worse for everyone. Sarah Palin is a PAWN--of those who hold genuine feminism and true equality for all in the deepest contempt.
Fundamentalist Christianity and gender equity are fundamentally incompatible. These people--Palin's clan-- represent the deepest kind of sexism there is.
Thank you for the Marxist view. You've made yourself clear. If that's "real feminism," we've seen from reporters, they could at least be polite and stick to issues.
Oh, and which of the 5 or 6 Bush doctrines did you wish her to speak to?
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