Mamas and Daddies - don't let your daughters grow up to debate like Sarah Palin!!
A friend of mine took her daughter to a debate tournament of junior high school students this weekend...
and one of them actually winked during her presentation.
In this election we've seen there are women role models and then there are women role models.
There are millions of young girls across the country who are watching Caribou Barbie...
Winking and flirting and 'you betcha-ing.'
Not answering questions. Making unsubstantiated personal attacks.
We wanted the glass ceiling broken, but not this way. Is she the type of role model we want our girls to see - and imitate.
We know political debates are often more about likability and popularity than substance.
And we all know there are different rules and different score cards for men and women. It's almost impossible for women in prominent positions to break out of the stereotypes and find the balance between bitch and ditz to be respectable. Kathleen Hall Jamieson outlines the problems brilliantly in her book Beyond the Double Bind
Women who are considered feminine will be judged incompetent, and women who are competent, unfeminine.
Lots of women politicians have trouble finding the difference between 'too hot' and 'too cold'...
poor Hillary couldn't get a break in this paradigm.
But we know where Palin stands. She's playing 'too hot' all around. The sex card - and the pitbull-Barracuda Mean Girl card.
Tina Fey's hit on it, with the gestures and the intonations - but it's something the pundits have avoided discussing like the plague. They ignore the sex-card sub-text. The punditacracy seems to uniformly claim the Norman Rockwell slut act somehow translates into 'likable.' They seemed suprised that the public opinion response to the debate favored Biden, because they thought Palin was so 'likable.' But I guess in an industry full of Fembots reading the news and spouting of whichever campaign-spun talking points they like better, I guess the standards are different.
Even Gwen Ifill was like what they heck could I do if she's not willing to answer the questions? Hmm, how about at least pointing that out as a moderator?
Instead of a role model who women can be proud of, we could find the next generation of girls working to become nasty, rude, uninformed sex kittens -- one of those women who rises to the top for all the wrong reasons.
Palin is not just a moron, she's an oxymoron - giving lip service to family values while making her 17 year old daughter endure the public spotlight at such a tough time in her life, claiming feminism while supporting policies that are a throw back to the dark ages, being all 'mavericky' while pulling out the Bush-Cheney-Rove Republican business as usual tactics and policies at every turn, rising to the role of Governor while not seeming to have mastered high school level civics lessons.
I say there's a special place in hell for women who wink during debates.