How Sarah Palin Invented Bill Maher’s Liberal Excuse For Misogyny
By: Sarah Jones
I love Bill Maher’s Real Time. I never miss it if it can be helped.
But I watch knowing that Bill Maher represents a wide swath of liberal men who continue to have blind spot of which they are unaware. Friday night he explained his defense of the First amendment (and thus Rush) by offering an apology to any women who may have been offended by his past remarks. Maher did note that he couldn’t understand why any of us would be allying ourselves with Sarah Palin, which brings us to the issue at hand.
We most certainly are not allying ourselves with Sarah Palin, but that won’t stop the world from doing so, and that is the problem.
Here’s the deal. A long time ago, Bill Maher called Sarah Palin a “tw@t” and likened her to a slutty looking flight attendant. I am certainly no fan of Palin and her victimized reaction to Bill was a part of a long string of her playing the sexism card to get out of not knowing that Africa was a continent. I was damned embarrassed by her and sick of her dodging her inexperience and lack of knowledge with crocodile tears. Palin did try to stir up a Bill boycott, but it was ineffective, or impotent as she would say. I gather Americans were tired of her crying wolf and just didn’t care. Also, the ugly truth is that what Bill said had a measure of truth to it, stemming from Palin’s own actions.
But I still didn’t like it, because I knew it would open the door for other men to say such things about women who didn’t behave like Sarah. And I just don’t like the words slutty and tw@t being used in a public forum to describe women. True, Palin sold herself as a stripper for the GOP. She was proud of being called the hottest governor from the coldest state, by her own dad no less. She wore clothing that enticed and distracted from her words on purpose. She wore impossibly short skirts on platform stages, sometimes with her bare legs crossed just so, causing the skirt to hike up mid thigh. Palin was the pretty face for ugly ideas and the Republican party milked that cash cow until Gabby Giffords was shot and Palin took the self-pity and victimhood a step too far by blaming the media.
Palin is a public figure and she more than invited such coarse dialogue, in fact she engages it in herself. This is a woman who called her constituents “asinine” in a press release from the Governor’s office and who refers to the President’s “cojones” on national TV. Sandra Fluke is a private citizen who testified at a congressional hearing in a dignified manner. She did not appear wearing short shorts and red leather Naughty monkeys. She didn’t wink at the boys.
Palin was a disaster for women because she was everything we fight against; to be dismissed as being just an object for sale, or to be ignored if we do not offer such enticements to men. The message of Palin is that all of our power, even at work, is supposed to come from our sexua| desirability to men. How exactly is that female empowerment?
But flight attendants? This isn’t the 60’s. There are both male and female flight attendants and as someone who flies frequently, I haven’t noticed a one of them to be as daffy or ignorant as Palin, nor present themselves as a piece of eye candy hoping you won’t ask them for safety instructions.
Bill Maher’s defense of Rush’s First amendment rights is exactly what many of us women knew Sarah Palin was going to do the dialogue. She courted such talk. She expected to be excused for her laziness because she was pretty and hot. This led Bill to make the comments he did and now, years later, to excuse Rush for even worse misogyny under the guise of the First amendment. How did we land in this gutter of public discourse?
We women saw this coming the moment Sarah Palin stepped onto the stage in her red leather pumps and tight, short skirts, winking her way through a debate. But I’ll be damned if it wasn’t liberal men who told me in droves to “relax” and lectured me to just ignore her from their unknowingly misogynistic sense of presumed authority. Ah, male privilege. We know they mean well, but they just don’t get it.
Of course, they can afford to dismiss Palin. Unlike me, they didn’t find themselves in a business meeting with Palin supporters during the 2008 election and have the client tell them with a smirking insinuation that Sarah Palin is “my kinda gal.” They weren’t being hit on and dismissed at the same time because Sarah Palin had suddenly made it okay again in the work place to be an Object of Patriarchal Desire and Dismissal.
And they don’t now have to put a lid on their rage as Act III of the Palin play reaches its denouement.
So, because late night HBO comedian Bill Maher called Sarah Palin a tw@t, now day time talk show host Rush Limbaugh is free do demand that women air sex tapes of themselves if they have contraceptives paid for by insurance? Meanwhile, in reality land, I was denied a needed surgery by my insurance company last year because, and I quote, “it could be used for contraception.” I suffered in agony instead.
So while everyone debates the finer points, we women are lost in the haze of desperate false equivalencies and distractions. The Right wants the President to return Bill Maher’s donation because of comments he made years ago as a comedian about a person who did offer herself up as a sex object. She did pose in short shorts on the cover of Newsweek, pantyhose and all, while leaning on the American flag in a symbolic gesture of her complicit oppression of women’s liberty via her behavior.
Bill never demanded that Palin air a sex tape of herself for the public if she wanted to voice her opinion on important health matters. But then, how could he when Palin has never voiced a coherent, dignified opinion on any important matter without sounding like exactly what she is: a wind up doll full of mismatched talking points for the Koch brothers.
Yes, I say this with certainty, having studied her record extensively. This is a woman who told a male opponent that it was cool that he knew so much about the issues, but voters don’t care about things like that. This is a woman who has used her opponent’s Jewish sounding name to damn him in the eyes of voters. This is the woman who did the same thing to Barack Obama, insinuating that he was a Muslim and thus not qualified for office. This person is not a serious politician or even a serious private citizen speaking up on an important issue that impacts her life. And this person gleefully engaged in vile, bigoted attacks on other public figures. She’s not exactly standing on firm ground when she cries sexism while engaging in racism and ethnocentrism at every turn.
Palin’s message has always been, “Love me because I’m hot. Take me seriously even though I’m hot. But never call me out on the fact that I do not deserve to be taken seriously because I refuse to learn anything I should know in order to do my job competently, or else I will cry sexism and dilute the meaning of the word for the women who really are being demeaned just because they are women.” This offends many of us, because some us do not expect to skate by on short skirts. But what does the word sexism mean now that Palin has distorted it into a meaningless attack strategy (offense is the best defense). Bill called her a nasty name, and by giving in to that temptation, he only sunk the rest of us with her.
And these are the parts missing from the debate. The war on women has been going on for a long time. It never really stopped, but during the Bush years, it became hot to give up our personal dignity and become an admired object, suggestively plasticized so that we could float in a pool with our breasts alone. This was the New Feminism. We were not good enough as we were. We had to be cut and carved and then give it all away for free. Our power was to come directly from our willingness to allow men to define us. Go, power!
This reminds me of the liberal/libertarian type men who think “freedom” and “civil liberties” comes down to the Patriot Act and stops there. They have not even noticed women sitting in prison in this country for having a miscarriage, or women being murdered by their partners, or women having to put up with sexua| advances by creepy bosses in order to keep their health insurance. Or now, having to defend the need for contraception. The indignity of it all is surreal. Kudos to Bill Maher for bringing up the Arizona bill that doctors can lie to women about their health in order to keep them from seeking an abortion.
He’s a brilliantly funny comedian and he can give voice to things that no one else is willing to say out loud. He did that with Palin, only he could have done it without the word tw@t. Allow me to say what no one else will: Sarah Palin attempted to turn all women into patriarchal lap dogs so tw@t isn’t really the worst of it, and yet this is exactly what she wanted. She wanted to bring the dialogue down to her level, to be the poster face for conservative persecution via sexism, as she concurrently works to take us all back to the tower for not pleasing daddy.
Maher defends Rush, as one potty mouth to another. Hey, I dig Maher’s potty mouth, but he’s on HBO, not American Forces Network. Families aren’t watching Bill. And as much as I like Bill, sometimes his comments about women are just embarrassing. He likes his women sassy and smart and I believe he prides himself on this because he thinks it means he sees women as full human beings.
Almost.
Because the one place Bill hasn’t gone yet is into our hearts, and our hearts were broken when Sarah Palin made her entrance in 2008. We knew then that we would be having dialogues like this for years, and here we are. We are not allying ourselves with Sarah Palin; she and the media did that for us. We do not stand by her come hither as a cover for lack of preparation. And here’s a hint: This is exactly what we have been enraged about for almost four years now. We were not given a choice – we are being lumped in with Sarah Palin instead of Elizabeth Warren, Hillary Clinton, Olympia Snowe or Barbara Boxer.
Yes, Palin sold herself willingly as a sex object and Bill made fun of her for it. Yes, she’s more than willfully ignorant; she’s a walking repudiation of the women’s movement. And no, it’s not that we are afraid to be sexy or will be offended if you find us so. It’s that we don’t want it to stop there.
We invite you all to look deeper, into our hearts and minds, and find us sexy because we’re smart and strong and own ourselves. Find us sexy because we have our dignity and we don’t give it all away. Find our self-containment and self-reliance sexy. Find our self-empowerment sexy. And understand it when we fall into the collective rage of centuries of oppression being brought back and glorified by the media.
I often think of two women when I get to this point. Hillary Clinton, who went through the most publicly humiliating thing a spouse can go through, and Eleanor Roosevelt, who withstood hatred for standing next to African Americans, thus validating them as equals at the time. Feminism is about egalitarianism for all, not a power-over structure. As such, women like Sarah Palin make a mockery of the word feminist when they apply it to themselves. Women understand our position. We know what we’re fighting against. We know about the blind prejudices of even the men who love and adore us.
It breaks our hearts, but we know.
Maybe now, after watching the Right make the false equivalency between Bill Maher’s attacks on the public Palin and Maher defend Rush Limbaugh’s attacks on a private citizen via the First amendment, y’all will start to get it. What’s ironic is that some liberal men don’t see is that this dialogue is a microcosm of what happened when Congressional Republicans refused to let a woman testify on the matter of contraception. The boys are all talking about how women should feel and what is important, blah blah blah. But when we tell y’all what is important to us, do you hear us?
I wrote about Sarah Palin because she broke my heart, and broke the hearts of the women I love. The night she was introduced to us, my best friend called me up crying. “Did you see?” She sobbed. “Yes, I know,” I replied, as chills ran up my arms.
I know.