The XX Factor: What women really think.



  • Flailing Like an Alaska Salmon


    Damn, man, whatever happened to Schadenfreude? Isn’t anyone here going to enjoy seeing Sarah Palin struggle tonight? God knows I can identify with the sympathy angle—I once gave a job talk at Brown that felt, from my end, a lot like that Katie Couric interview – but in no way does that translate into hoping she does well enough to redeem herself in the debate, in order to somehow represent on behalf of women in general. On the contrary: I’m looking forward to watching Palin flail (and come on, people, in an unscripted and explicitly polemical format she’s going to flail like an Alaska salmon on the dock.) To me, watching her incompetence get exposed is like payback for the last eight years of staring at a naked, and thoroughly unattractive, emperor. And you know what? I was a lot more qualified for that Brown job than Palin is for VP, but I still wasn’t the best candidate, and my prospective employers deserved to find that out.

    I think both compassionate people like the rest of you and spiteful harpies like myself can agree that cutting Palin extra slack – whether because of her gender or her supposed persecution at the hands of “the press” – is a profoundly unfeminist thing to do. And while I agree that strategically, Biden will be wise to tiptoe around Palin’s gender (avoiding the appearance of condescension, etc.), I look forward to a brave post-feminist world in which, one day, the debate partners of lightweights like Palin will be at liberty to mop the floor with said lightweights—not because they’re women (or men), but because they’re arrogant fools.

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