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Paglia on Palin: "a brand new style of muscular American feminism," "combining male and female qualities in ways that I have never seen."

Continuing with the Paglia article, let's look at the part about Sarah Palin:

Conservative though she may be, I felt that Palin represented an explosion of a brand new style of muscular American feminism. At her startling debut on that day, she was combining male and female qualities in ways that I have never seen before...

As a dissident feminist, I have been arguing since my arrival on the scene nearly 20 years ago that young American women aspiring to political power should be studying military history rather than taking women's studies courses, with their rote agenda of never-ending grievances....

I am still waiting for substantive evidence that Sarah Palin is a dangerous extremist. I am perfectly willing to be convinced, but right now, she seems to be merely an optimistic pragmatist like Ronald Reagan, someone who pays lip service to religious piety without being in the least wedded to it. I don't see her arrival as portending the end of civil liberties or life as we know it....

A feminism that cannot admire the bravura under high pressure of the first woman governor of a frontier state isn't worth a warm bucket of spit....

Now that's the Sarah Palin brand of can-do, no-excuses, moose-hunting feminism -- a world away from the whining, sniping, wearily ironic mode of the establishment feminism represented by Gloria Steinem, a Hillary Clinton supporter whose shameless Democratic partisanship over the past four decades has severely limited American feminism and not allowed it to become the big tent it can and should be. Sarah Palin, if her reputation survives the punishing next two months, may be breaking down those barriers. Feminism, which should be about equal rights and equal opportunity, should not be a closed club requiring an ideological litmus test for membership.

Exactly. This is the way I feel too. I may not agree with a lot of things Palin stands for, but I celebrate this advance in feminism.

This is great for women, and it's especially great that it is happening from the conservative side, because feminism is already well-entrenched among liberals. Let feminism spread amongst conservatives, in this new version that is purged of all the off-putting trappings of liberal attitudes and issues.

Full post as published by Althouse on September 10, 2008 (boomark / email).