Fresh blood for the vampire
by Camille Paglia
(...)
Conservative though she may be, I felt that Palin represented an
explosion of a brand new style of muscular American feminism. At her
startling debut on that day, she was combining male and female
qualities in ways that I have never seen before. And she was somehow
able to seem simultaneously reassuringly traditional and gung-ho
futurist. In terms of redefining the persona for female authority and
leadership, Palin has made the biggest step forward in feminism since
Madonna channeled the dominatrix persona of high-glam Marlene
Dietrich and rammed pro-sex, pro-beauty feminism down the throats of
the prissy, victim-mongering, philistine feminist establishment.
In the U.S., the ultimate glass ceiling has been fiendishly
complicated for women by the unique peculiarity that our president
must also serve as commander in chief of the armed forces. Women have
risen to the top in other countries by securing the leadership of
their parties and then being routinely promoted to prime minister
when that party won at the polls. But a woman candidate for president
of the U.S. must show a potential capacity for military affairs and
decision-making. Our president also symbolically represents the
entire history of the nation -- a half-mystical role often filled
elsewhere by a revered if politically powerless monarch.
As a dissident feminist, I have been arguing since my arrival on the
scene nearly 20 years ago that young American women aspiring to
political power should be studying military history rather than
taking women's studies courses, with their rote agenda of never-
ending grievances. I have repeatedly said that the politician who
came closest in my view to the persona of the first woman president
was Sen. Dianne Feinstein, whose steady nerves in crisis were
demonstrated when she came to national attention after the mayor and
a gay supervisor were murdered in their City Hall offices in San
Francisco. Hillary Clinton, with her schizophrenic alteration of
personae, has never seemed presidential to me -- and certainly not in
her bland and overpraised farewell speech at the Democratic
convention (which skittered from slow, pompous condescension to
trademark stridency to unseemly haste).
Feinstein, with her deep knowledge of military matters, has true
gravitas and knows how to shrewdly thrust and parry with pesky TV
interviewers. But her style is reserved, discreet, mandarin. Sarah
Palin is like Annie Oakley, a brash ambassador from America's pioneer
past. She immediately reminded me of the frontier women of the
Western states, which first granted women the right to vote after the
Civil War -- long before the federal amendment guaranteeing universal
woman suffrage was passed in 1919. Frontier women faced the same
harsh challenges and had to tackle the same chores as men did --
which is why men could regard them as equals, unlike the genteel,
corseted ladies of the Eastern seaboard, which fought granting women
the vote right to the bitter end. (...)
http://www.salon.com/opinion/paglia/2008/09/10/palin/print.html
