Palin: The Monster in Make-Up

I have never felt worse about being a woman. I mean, when I was a stick-skinny adolescent tagged with the painfully appropriate nickname "Plywood Oshkosh" after a local producer of those flat sheets of pressed wood, I felt badly. When my flat chest suddenly burgeoned into enormous and fleshy mounds spouting milk like would-be Vesuvians, I felt so alienated from my body and sex I nearly regretted having a baby. Oh and then there have been all the constant, smaller humiliations of being a woman, of acknowledging on a daily basis that yes, there is at least one trait held in common with Britney and Paris and Ivanna and the Olson twins. But none of this compares with the pain of hearing that Sarah Palin is on the Republican ticket.



Why does she bring more pain? Doesn't her enthusiastic political activism as a woman remove her well beyond comparison to the apparently brainless and self-centered antics of fashion-conscious celebrities? Is it just that she's a Republican? Is it just that her upswept hair reminds me eerily of those beehive hairdos inflicted upon an earlier decade? No and no and no and hearty no. What makes Sarah Palin so utterly painful to acknowledge as a woman, her candidacy for John McCain's Vice Presidential spot so terrifying, her potential to claim a spot in history denied any other American woman so revulsive is just that: she might claim a spot in history denied Ferraro 24 years ago, denied Hillary Clinton just this summer and the first woman to win a chance to govern the most powerful nation on earth just might be a woman who denies women the right to control the destiny of their own body. To have an anti-choice woman as a serious Vice Presidential contender is such a serious event that it calls into question everything feminism has accomplished, everything that my age-mates and I fought for back in the seventies, everything that Congresswoman Ferraro and Senator Clinton represented so well: the fact that our bodies do not control our destiny.



If Sarah Palin can abandon her disabled baby and pregnant daughter to run for the vice presidency, I think every bit of my present nauseous tumult of anxiety is eminently reasonable. This is not a seriously thinking, doing woman; this is something of a self-gratifying monster.