It does seem that the primal mean girl instinct is to diss the enemy’s hair (or, more proactively, to just tug her ponytail ). Hanna raised an interesting question when discussing Carly Fiorina’s open mic slip: Is an insult from one woman to another worse than an insult from a man? If the man in question is Don Imus , then no. But otherwise, this kind of incident only creates an opportunity for female politicians to be dismissed as catty schoolgirls. The success of Palin’s “mama bears ” in Tuesday’s primaries proves that solidarity amongst women can be an enormous driving force in politics. I’m all for “unladylike” women throwing punches, but not at the cost of appearing trivial in the media backlash . I think Tina Fey’s Mean Girls truism says it best: “You all have got to stop calling each other sluts and whores . It just makes it okay for guys to call you sluts and whores.”
