Remember the 1990s and the Clinton scandals? Remember how, after a while, all the media attention was like so much white noise and it became a chore to pay attention? Remember how most people you knew wished those spittle-flecked Republicans would just STFU already? Maybe you don’t. Maybe you recall those as the Bush years and you and your friends just wished all those spittle-flecked Democrats would blow it out their ears for once? The point is that a constant barrage of hyperbolic negativity often has the opposite effect from what was intended. It doesn’t breed agreement; it breeds apathy and discontent.
So it is with the subject of Sarah Palin. She is constantly under attack and disrespected by feminists on the left, who often don’t know much about her other than what they hear in the echo chamber that is the left-blogosphere. The noise level has ratcheted way up since she started describing herself and her conservative sisters as feminists and “Mamma Grizzlies.”
As a writer who teaches people how to write, I can tell you that you’ll lose your audience if constant negativity is your opening strategy, which is why I almost didn’t finish reading the NYT op-ed by Anna Holmes and Rebecca Traister, A Palin of Our Own. It droned on and on for nine solid paragraphs (out of 15 total) of negativity and bad logic, using few, if any, examples or citations to back up questionable partisan speculation about Sarah Palin.
I’m glad I did finish it though, because it is the most promising sign yet that feminists on the left are finally willing to address their #1 problem: internal issues regarding women and the Democratic Party. For a while now feminists on the left have been engaged in a profoundly destructive focus, clearly seen in the various campaigns to tear down Sarah Palin, the vitriol directed at her and other Republican women, and the impulse to, ironically, defend feminism against expansion. It’s a weird dynamic akin to xenophobia, and it has cost them the ears, hearts, and minds of many women of every generation, but especially those of us who didn’t get to go to the best colleges or didn’t go to college at all, and who don’t live in fabulous urban areas. In other words, most of America. The kind of internal focus promoted by Holmes and Traister in their article will be a necessary step in creating a constructively focused feminism that can attract these women back. Read the rest of this entry »







