The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Fear of a Republican Uterus

Posted on | January 20, 2011 | 28 Comments

James Taranto gets very close to the core of the dynamic behind Palin Derangement Syndrome: 

Why does their hatred of her burn so hot?
Ask them, and they’ll most likely tell you: Because she’s a moron. But that is obviously false. . . .
They say she is uneducated. What they mean is that her education is not elite — not Harvard or Yale, or even Michigan or UCLA. They resent her because, in their view, she has risen above her station. . . .
For many liberal women, Palin threatens their sexual identity, which is bound up with their politics . . .
It used to be a trope for liberal interviewers to try to unmask hypocrisy by asking antiabortion politicians — male ones, of course — what they would do if their single teen daughters got pregnant. It’s a rude question, but Palin, whose 17-year-old daughter’s pregnancy coincided with Mom’s introduction to the nation, answered it in real life. . . .
Liberal women are the active, driving force behind hatred of Sarah Palin, while liberal men’s behavior is passive and manipulative.

Taranto is very close to something here, and I wonder if the reason he doesn’t push the argument to its logical conclusion is because he is afraid that he would be denounced by hysterical women — yes, even Republican women, even some “conservative” women — if he spoke the blunt truth.

One of the necessary consequences of the Modern Professional Feminist Career Woman Lifestyle is that it tends to limit women’s procreative capacity. It isn’t merely that feminism’s embrace of the Culture of Death elevates abortion to sacramental status. Rather, it is that feminist notions of Progress require that women foresake (or at least postpone) the love-marriage-motherhood model of happiness in pursuit of careerist equality. Even if a woman does not actually go all-out in following the anti-phallocratic ideology — “Feminism is the theory; lesbianism is the practice,” to quote Ti-Grace Atkinson — her pursuit of the career woman lifestyle inevitably restricts her reproductive opportunities.

By the time she finishes college and grad school and establishes herself firmly en route to an upper-middle-class socioeconomic future, the Modern Professional Feminist Career Woman is 30 or older. Even if she could meet Mister Right, she’s not going to abandon her career — for she has been taught to consider life meaningless without a professional career — in favor of domesticity. Ergo, even if she marries and decides she can afford a baby, she’ll have to hire someone to raise it for her while she returns to the job from which she derives her sense of purpose and identity.

Such women are, however, usually skilled enough at math to recognize that their boutique babies — usually just one, but never more than two — will be vastly outnumbered by the offspring of women who aren’t following the Modern Professional Feminist Career Woman Lifestyle. Those other women, with their non-elite educations and their unruly broods of children, inevitably appear to the feminist career woman’s mind as The Problem.

Then along came Sarah Palin, with a state-school education and five children, saying things like, “You betcha!”

Some women who had been all in favor of the presidential ambitions of Hillary Clinton (Wellesley, Yale, exactly one child) were shocked into hysteria by the appearance of Sarah Palin on the national political stage.

Here was The Problem with a potential of exercising substantial political power, and it frightened them to death — her nomination as vice president was like a terrorist act on the part of the Republican Party. She had to be destroyed By Any Means Necessary.

James Taranto didn’t want to take his argument that far, because he knows it would destroy his own professional career if he ever told the truth about the feminist fear of a Republican uterus.

Category: Feminism, Sarah Palin

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