Good post here from Dana Pico of Common Sense Political Thought.
Our friends on the left, aghast at the selection of Governor Sarah Palin (R-AK) as the Republican vice presidential nominee, have been looking for ways to attack her. Amanda Marcotte claims that Governor Palin — and therefore Senator John McCain (R-AZ) — are sexist:
But here’s the thing—Palin is a lot more sexist than Obama by any stretch of the imagination, and if you lose sight of that, then the McCain campaign’s strategy has worked on you, sucker. Sexism, like racism, is better understood as a systemic issue, and Palin puts her full support behind sexist systems.
Is this a statement that, in effect, if anyone disagrees with your ideas about what constitutes the better interests of women, they are, ipso facto, sexist? And if the answer is yes, does that mean that there is no room at all for debate as to what constitutes sexism?
Miss Marcotte doesn’t have the time to answer every comment — she does work, you know — on her very-heavily-trafficked blog, and she didn’t respond to mine. But it seems to me that our friends on the left are creating a female form of Uncle Tom: if women do not adhere to a particular set of liberal political positions, then like blacks who deviate from the Black Political Orthodoxy who are labeled Uncle Toms (or, as the Philadelphia blogger styling himself the Field Negro calls them, “House Negroes”), women who deviate from the Feminist Orthodoxy are called, well, I guess that they haven’t worked up as good a name as Uncle Tom, but that’s the type of thing they want to use.
But there’s an undercurrent that seems slightly repugnant and arrogant and demeaning, all at the same time. We white men are allowed and expected to have all sorts of political opinions, and while our friends on the left might not like some of them, there’s no particular demeaning expectation that all white men must Think Alike. They might think that we’re stupid or evil, but most of them don’t somehow think we are controlled. Yet when it comes to women who don’t toe the Established Feminist Line, why there’s just something wrong with them, they aren’t real women, they have betrayed their sisters.
This is almost exactly equivalent to the way liberals treat black men who have the temerity to ignore their race's group think. Is this what feminism is all about, reducing the choices available for women? Or is it what liberalism is about, forcing group-think behavior on various segments of the population?
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