Academic

Salon Is Currently Featuring An Article About Sarah Palin Entitled ?The Dominatrix?

By Ann Bartow

Here. The subtitle is: “Sarah Palin is trying to seduce independent voters. But she comes across like a whip-wielding mistress who wants to discipline a naughty America.” And it is illustrated with this graphic:

Here is an excerpt:

Right now, Palin has Democrats quaking in their boots — and with good reason. But all hope isn’t lost. For even if this election turns out to be a referendum on the national libido, Palin may scare off more voters than she attracts.

Because to anyone who isn’t a true believer, Palin comes across not as a fantasy pinup, but as a dominatrix. And the S/M demographic isn’t going to put the Republicans over the top in the swing states.

For the die-hard Republicans who lusted over Palin at the convention, her whip-wielding persona was a turn-on. You could practically feel the crowd getting a collective woody as Palin bent Obama and the Democrats over, shoved a leather gag in their mouths and flogged them as un-American wimps, appeasers and losers. “Drill, baby, drill!” the chant ecstatically repeated by the GOP faithful during Rudy Giuliani’s speech, acquired a distinctly Freudian subtext after Palin spoke. The more Palin drilled the Democrats, the more hotly the base yearned to drill her. (We will leave it to shrinks to determine whether the GOP hardcore has the hots for Palin because she’s reaming the Democrats, or because authority-worshippers tend to have secret fantasies of being reamed themselves.)

Got that? Palin wants to “drill” and “ream” her enemies. Unlike Joe Biden, when she rhetorically attacks the political opposition, it’s completely sexualized. It’s not because she is a Republican. The Supposedly Liberal Doods are pretending this is so, but we saw how they treated Hillary. As this writer points out, in the early 1990s Hillary Clinton also got tagged as a dominatrix, see e.g.:

That’s an image that made the rounds a lot in various forms during the recent Democratic primary, which you can see for yourself via Google because I’m not providing any links. Portraying politicians as people who want to hurt you during sex seems to be a form of derogation used almost exclusively against women. Think a bit about why that is.

–Ann Bartow

Full post as published by Feminist Law Professors on September 11, 2008 (boomark / email).