Saw her on my friend's twitter page last night, wondering how in "holy hell" Republicans like Mike Huckabee continue to be so dismissive of women in 2014, and, okay, we agree about that. So, why does she frustrate me so much?(Besides the fact that she will say it twenty more times, in twenty new venues, as a bunch of guys get fired up about what fresh air she is. For the "GOP is more than hate n'stuff," material she debuted five years ago that has as much current pop as an Everybody Loves Raymond marathon.) Follow me below the fold as I try to unpack my Maverick baggage.
Ok, I admit that I am the slightest bit jealous, even though I wish I could say otherwise, that all my various struggles have shaped my identity and character so much, that for me, lower-middle-class and gimpy is somehow the only way to fly, but I'm human, and struggle is hard, and I don't blame myself for sometimes wishing that I had a last name that opened doors instead of being mispronounced as a well-known Jewish holiday.(I do blame myself for seeing her a lot on television and saying things like "That must be a tough get...what'd they do,dangle Entemann's out the studio window?!)" Nobody needs me to do that--it's mean, but I guess I offer it in full disclosure, and also to illustrate that the "internalized misogyny" that we learn about in Women's Studies can be a living thing.I am, however, more proud than I can express that I could never have written thisarticle on dating, despite our occasional shared confusion about where to end a sentence.
However, my problem with Ms. McCain doesn't end with my feeling that the virtual world wouldn't find me refreshing if I gave in to my teenaged verbal tics on television("anyways" would probably be the likeliest culprit) but her "SHOCKED!" routine feels like old news at this point, especially since it seems fairly obvious that misogyny is some new variant of The Southern Strategy(The Down-There Strategy? Where's Atwater when you need him?) and I'm sick of the media falling all over itself to cover her timid nips at the hand that feeds her. I would like her to get some skin in the game instead of traveling around being "the cute one", even though I know that subcultures look different to the people inside than to the people outside, at twenty-nine, I'd suggest that she can do more than listen to her father explain how he is a "Different kind of Republican" than the yokel types that produce the Huckabees. They do it because they think it works, Meghan. It's probably hard to see that when these same people probably brought you Christmas presents your whole life, but I bet if you didn't have his name to protect you, you'd be seen very differently.