It's Still a Double Standard, Folks

Various feminists seem strangely fixated on claiming that a woman whose views they disagree with, and who is young (for politics) and attractive and without elite academic credentials is bad for feminism.

Now, as I said in the last post, I disagree strongly with SP’s social views and do not think they are good for women.

However, as a feminist I think there’s a lot wrong with highlighting certain women as bad for feminism where we wouldn't make a point of highighting men with those views as bad for feminism.

First of all, I don’t know of a Men Against Dan Quayle (or W) site like this. Or a Women Against [Insert Republican Male’s Name Here] site.

Nope. These rants are something… special.

I also notice that various female bloggers like to make fun of Palin’s intelligence.

Which strikes me as odd, as well.

Let’s take the recent Charles Gibson interview. The person who coined the term “Bush Doctrine” states: “The Times got it wrong. And Charlie Gibson got it wrong. There is no single meaning of the Bush doctrine. In fact, there have been four distinct meanings, each one succeeding another over the eight years of this administration — and the one Charlie Gibson cited is not the one in common usage today.”

Now let’s turn to the young (for politics), attractive man on the other side of the aisle. Does he get criticized for not-so-intelligent comments?

After all, Obama got many more softballs than Palin in his Charles Gibson interview in 2007, with no probes to reveal foreign policy ignorance, despite Obama’s suggesting he would meet hostile heads of state without preconditions.

Obama doesn’t get why we’d be paying HIGHER taxes than in the 90s even with maintaining the Bush tax cuts, even though this is pretty simple math based on inflation. Don’t they teach math at Harvard?

Obama claims seriously that a transparency bill co-sponsored with a Republican senator, was backed by everybody on both sides of the aisle, his only act of bipartisanship in his entire time in the Senate, was a serious substantive challenge.

On the night of the last primary, Obama unironically declared his victory as "the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal."

Obama’s grasp on his own opinions is hazy. From 2004 to 2008, he has gone from being for to being against decriminalization of marijuana, for to against health benefits for illegal immigrants; against to for mandatory minimum sentences;

Obama’s “lipstick pig” comment is strangely similar to a cartoon appearing days before he made the comment.

Finally, Obama failed at doing the five-minute Google search (ironically, given the context) and allowed his team to make a massively tasteless attack. Obama’s team mocked McCain for not being web and email savvy. One would think they might know that McCain was Chairman of the Senate Telecommunications Subcommittee. Articles in the MSM indicate that he reads emails every night. He doesn’t type them because of the injuries he incurred as a Vietnam POW.

I’m not being a Republican apologist here. McCain’s made mucho flip flops and gaffes as well. And of course, these are not mocked to the degree Palin’s are either.

Listen, folks. If women get mocked for things men don’t, if women get called toxic where men are simply called wrong, if women are called clumsy and foolish where men are just new to the town, if women “need to bone up” where men are “being advised by experts” on foreign policy, know what that’s called?

A double standard.

And when you have one of those, and the categories are male and female?

There’s a word for that too.