When Palin got the VP nomination I was offended. Here is a woman I've never heard of, with little executive experience and she is good enough to become second in command?! I was insulted. No matter what the reason, how dare a politician just shove a woman in the spotlight and expect ladies everywhere to go wild.
This New York Magazine article is one of the best I've read in regards to summing up the "year of the woman" in American politics.
On the surface it may appear that women got a huge boost by actually getting close to holding executive roles in the Oval Office. However, with the smack talk that has been thrown at Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin was not justified. Even though both women were scruntized in very different ways the criticism they recieved was uncalled for basically pinning Clinton as a bitch and Palin as a ditz. Both stereotypes women have been trying to avoid now that they actually have some social mobility in society.
Click here to read the very well said article, but below I will post my favourite quotes about the public demise of both women.
On Hillary:
"Clinton took the first label, even though she tried valiantly, some would say misguidedly, to run a campaign that ignored gender until the very end. “Now, I’m not running because I’m a woman,” she would say. “I’m running because I think I’m the best-qualified and experienced person to hit the ground running.” She was highly competent, serious, diligent, prepared (sometimes overly so)—a woman who cloaked her femininity in hawkishness and pantsuits. But she had, to use an unfortunate term, likability issues, and she inspired in her detractors an upwelling of sexist animus: She was likened to Tracy Flick for her irritating entitlement, to Lady Macbeth for her boundless ambition. She was a grind, scold, harpy, shrew, priss, teacher’s pet, killjoy—you get the idea. She was repeatedly called a bitch (as in: “How do we beat the … ”) and a buster of balls. Tucker Carlson deemed her “castrating, overbearing, and scary” and said, memorably, “Every time I hear Hillary Clinton speak, I involuntarily cross my legs.”
On Palin:
"In the past few weeks, Sarah Palin has been variously described as a diva who engaged in paperwork-throwing tantrums, a shopaholic who spent $150,000 on clothing, a seductress who provocatively welcomed staffers while wearing only a towel, and a “whack-job”—contemporary code for hysteric. Worse, she was accused by a suspiciously gleeful Fox News reporter named Carl Cameron of not knowing Africa was a continent, of being unable to name the members of NAFTA, indeed of being unable to name the countries of North America at all. (“But she can be tutored,” Bill O’Reilly told Cameron, as though speaking of a small child.) More significant than the dubious origins of these leaks, or the fact that the campaign that cried “sexism” at every criticism of its vice-presidential nominee was engaging in its own misogynistic warfare, is the fact that all of the allegations were so believable. After all, Palin had earned herself a reputation as, in the words of one Fox News blogger, “something of a policy ditz.”"
So, anyone wanna run for public office now? I sure as hell don't.
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