Over the past few days, a music video entitled Red, White and Milf (short for ”Mom I’d like to fuck”) has appeared all over the internet. It features a cowboy singing a novelty song about Sarah Palin (”she came to us from the hills of Wasilla / the babes are hot, but the winters are a killer”), while three women resembling the Republican vice-presidential candidate dance in skimpy outfits in the background.
Actually, dancing is the least of it. One runs her tongue along the barrel of a rifle, one whips another with a US flag, one dips her finger into a pie and feeds it to another, before smearing it over the woman’s face and licking it off. It’s a lot of suggestion, basically, leading to the moment when the cowboy opens a beer, holds it to his crotch and sprays it over the three women. They respond — how else? — by smearing it ecstatically across their chests.
For better or worse (I would say the latter), Palin is the highest-profile female politician in the world now, which makes the constant objectification of her particularly galling.
This began within days of her nomination, of course, when doctored pictures of her showed up on the internet, head superimposed on to a rifle-toting model in a stars-and-stripes bikini. At the same time, a company started manufacturing a ”naughty schoolgirl” Palin doll.
More recently, ”sexy Sarah Palin” Halloween costumes, featuring said bikini, have been selling on Amazon, a Palin blow-up doll has been created (”bypass the Bush and have some Milf”, reads a tag line), and this week Larry Flynt, the founder of the Hustler empire, released a teaser for his porn film Who’s Nailin’ Palin? There’s also a website devoted entirely to memorabilia stamped with Palin’s face and the acronym VPILF (you can work that one out) — which includes, jarringly, a maternity T-shirt.
There hasn’t been a huge backlash to this, perhaps partly because it’s been happening outside the mainstream media and partly because McCain’s running partner is such a difficult person for women to defend — especially when the political stakes are so vertiginously high. While Palin calls herself a feminist — ”a sign of perverse progress”, sighs the pioneering US writer Robin Morgan — her views exist at a frightening distance from any recognisable women’s rights agenda. In a disastrous interview on CBS, for instance, Palin was asked by the presenter Katie Couric: ”If a 15-year-old is raped by her father, do you believe it should be illegal for her to get an abortion?”
She answered: ”I would counsel to choose life.” When Palin was mayor of Wasilla, the town defied a Bill by the then governor of Alaska that local law enforcement should pay for the forensic kits used to collect evidence from rape victims; instead, in a state where the rates of rape are 2,5 times the national average, the victims were being expected to stump up $295 to $1 200 to have evidence collected. (Palin’s spokesperson has suggested she didn’t know about this; former state representative, Eric Croft, has said he finds this hard to believe.) She is also against same-sex marriage; in the circumstances, defending her sticks in any feminist’s craw.
But as the attacks on her have grown, they have come to seem more and more disturbing. This is partly because — like many of the sexist attacks on Hillary Clinton during the primaries — they have come from people who would usually consider themselves progressive. On the liberal Huffington Post website, for instance, one blogger wrote: ”Basically, I want to have sex with [Palin] on my Barack Obama sheets while my wife reads from the Constitution.” Great.
One person who has been speaking out against the trend is the feminist writer Melissa McEwan, who blogs at Shakesville (other websites that have addressed it are feministing.com and feministe.us).
She’s been conducting a ”Sarah Palin sexism watch”, and says that ”the most depressing thing has been to see not just conservatives being misogynist, but progressives too. People who are ostensibly supposed to be feminist see no problem with saying: ‘Well, because I don’t agree with her politics, it’s OK to use misogyny against her.”’
McEwan defends Palin because she recognises that these attacks have a huge knock-on effect on women in general — as Morgan says: ”Even in this case, where I disagree with the politics of the individual, the contempt shown for her, even when it’s expressed in the form of a compliment (‘I’d like to fuck her’), spills over on to all women.”
Taken with the sexist attacks on Clinton, this underlines the fact that any woman entering public life runs the risk of being reduced to the most basic female stereotype that springs to mind — in Clinton’s case it was the ball breaker (nutcrackers were produced in her image); in Palin’s case, the porn star.
McEwan says she has had emails from women saying: ”’You know, I used to think about going into politics, but now I see stuff like this, and I think there’s no way.’ … It’s basically saying, we’re going to require you to have skin so thick that you’re going to have to put up with this — and that’s a misogyny tax. You’re literally being taxed for being a woman.” She has also looked at the treatment of Margaret Thatcher and Geraldine Ferraro during their campaigns and found similar incidents, although ”it wasn’t so pornified”.
Morgan says she’s ”not surprised, but I am astonished” that such attacks are still made on female politicians, and believes that it will only be when there are as many women as men in politics, ”as many women presidents; as many women in real positions of power in business, in politics, in the media, that this will change”.
For now, while every feminist I know is praying that Obama is bound for the White House, it also seems relevant to puncture and attack these misogynist slurs — not for Palin’s sake, but for the sake of every woman who one day hopes to follow her into public life. – guardian.co.uk