PALIN: Why Feminists Hate Sarah Palin: It’s Academic

Why Feminists Hate Sarah Palin: It’s Academic

October 2, 2008 - by Mary Grabar

Feminists have long blamed male oppression for women’s cat fights. But this election season, feminists have engaged in the worst kind as they lobbed personal insults at Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin, who more than any of their feminist standard-bearers seems to not only have “had it all,” but to have done it all. Conservatives have rightly noted this deterioration of the “sisterhood.”

The histrionic attacks are rooted in something much deeper than simple political disagreement.

What the feminists hate is that, on the job, Palin is one of the boys.

That Palin thinks like a man, or logically, is what has made the left livid. As appropriate to their modes, they respond emotionally. The men in their movement, who have become one of the girls in terms of thinking, respond with personal insults, even going so far as to mock the looks of her baby, as [1] Bill Maher recently did.

But if one looks to other arenas, like the humanities departments in universities that have been transformed by feminism, one can see that such personal attacks are entirely consistent with the left’s version of intellectualism. When I entered graduate school in the 1990s I quickly found out that character assassinations had become the staple of literary scholarship.

This change followed the takeover of humanities departments, like English, by women, beginning around 1980. That year women began out-earning men with regard to doctorates in English, by two percentage points. The percentages rose, until in 1995 women began earning about 60% of such Ph.D.s, a figure that has remained roughly consistent since then.

The influx and domination of women in the field has had a devastating impact on intellectual discourse, for not only did men capitulate to women’s demands on affirmative hiring practices, but to their demands to change the tenor and standards of scholarship itself.

The 1980s saw a concomitant change in the popular culture, as women wedged their way into boardrooms and military academies. While John T. Molloy may have in 1978 urged women to dress and act for success by imitating their male business colleagues, psychologist [2] Carol Gilligan, in her 1982 bestseller [3] In a Different Voice, promoted women’s ways of thinking, based on emotion and consensus, as superior to the old patriarchal mode of logic and independence.

The result of such modes of thought, in my field of English, has been the attrition of majors, as students flock to more masculine fields, like business administration. Among the humanities, it is English departments that suffer the worst reputations as inconsequential and useless places.

Even the radical magazine The Nation ran an [4] editorial last March by staff writer William Deresiewicz bemoaning the loss of the profession’s prestige and its relegation to a service unit, where basic writing skills are taught to undergraduates (who increasingly require remedial help, I might add) — ironically the province of women in pre-second-wave feminist days. While Deresiewicz may wrongly attribute the decay to the lack of exciting new theories since Judith Butler’s book [5] Gender Trouble, it is precisely the patriarchy-challenging feminist theories of those like Butler that brought the profession down.

In 1952, the poet [6] Allen Tate could herald the “man of letters” in a speech and claim for him a salvational role for our culture. While around the same time Modern Language Association presidents in their convention speeches could assign to their profession the task of providing a moral vision for the nation, today’s MLA presidents bring down high culture by conflating it with the lowest popular culture like obscenity-laden rap music, as Patricia Yeager, MLA president, did in the March 2007 issue of [7] PMLA.

In order to climb the tenure ladder, one must join in the emotional championing of the “oppressed” and reject linear (logical) thought even as carried out through the grammatical structure of writing for spectacle, performance art, and female pop icons like Madonna and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

But this kind of “scholarship” provides evidence of an extension of what the academic establishment had been trying to do since the 1960s — overthrow the West at the roots, at its intellectual base. The anti-logical theories of postmodernism, where truth itself is questioned, parallel feminist thinking. Reason, as part of the “Western patriarchal hegemony,” is indicted over and over in jargon-laden obscurantist academic prose.

While anti-reason theories circulated and were repeated in academic discourse, in politics the new ethic of “caring” was promoted by Bill Clinton and in the media by women’s talk shows like Oprah, Ellen, and The View, where politics was wedged into teary discussions about makeovers in fashion and self-esteem. Barack Obama, with his “community organizer” experience, recalls the efforts of women with settlement houses, as proto-social workers.

Women — and men who think like women — rule the liberal media and grant such emotion-based politics legitimacy. But the other side of the “caring” coin is the personality-based “critical” side — a nasty, catty one, indeed.

The confusion of the two spheres, the application of “caring” that is appropriately reserved for the domestic sphere where all fetuses are allowed to be birthed and nurtured, is illustrated by Palin, who does not make such confusions. She does not infuse public policy with those notions suited for the home by promoting increased welfare, negotiation with terrorists, and efforts to “understand” the root causes of terrorism, as Obama said we should do in his post-9/11 speech.

And she enjoys an approval rating among [8] men of 62 percent, nine points higher than among women. Those in middle America who have not been taken up by the postmodern theories dominating our universities, especially at Ivy League schools like Barack Obama’s Harvard and Michelle Obama’s Princeton, like what they see.

Palin presents the American ideal: the frontier woman who lovingly takes care of her family, with a shotgun if necessary. The feminist and her male followers who attempt to change American culture through histrionic grievances, demands, meetings, and mass protests see in Palin a glaring example of how their ideas were not only wrong, but unnecessary and, indeed, harmful to women’s advancement.

Now that she tossed out the political tribute to Hillary Clinton and Geraldine Ferraro in her speech on the day John McCain announced his choice, Palin needs to continue in the patriarchal vein and not give lip service to feminism.

Unlike the closed halls of academe, where hiring and curriculum decisions are made by the priestly class of politically correct Ph.D.s, with virtually no oversight by the public, American voters will make the decision this November 4.

URL to article: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/why-do-feminists-hate-sarah-palin-its-academic/

URLs in this post:
[1] Bill Maher: http://politicalhumor.about.com/od/sarahpalin/a/palin-jokes.htm
[2] Carol Gilligan: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_a_Different_Voice
[3] In a Different Voice: http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FDifferent-Voice-Psychological-Theory-Development%2Fdp%2F0674445449&tag=pajamasmedia-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325

[4] editorial: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080324/deresiewicz
[5] Gender Trouble: http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FGender-Trouble-Feminism-Subversion-Identity%2Fdp%2F0415924995&tag=pajamasmedia-20&linkCode=ur2&cam
p=1789&creative=9325

[6] Allen Tate: http://www.isi.org/books/bookdetail.aspx?id=7c6c117d-656e-4001-875b-1c8be5489848
[7] PMLA: http://www.mlajournals.org/loi/pmla
[8] men: http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/09/09/palin.poll/index.html?iref=mpstoryview