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[Yeah, it’s not Thursday but I didn’t feel like waiting or post-dating this. —fl]

Ann Bartow of Feminist Law Professors raises an issue that every decent, right-thinking independent sex blogger and HNT participant ought to take personally. It’s about the circulating video footage of wingnut Vice-Presidential candidate in a bathing suit when she was around 20 years old.

Egalia at Tennessee Guerilla Women points how here that blogs linking to Sarah Palin’s 1984 beauty pageant swimsuit competition are attempting to trivialize her for doing something traditionally feminine when she was young, using this HuffPo piece as an example. Of course the odious Daily Kos is all over this as well. Actually one of the bloggers at Kos manages to ramp up the sexism an additional notch by comparing Palin to this then teenaged South Carolinian, who certainly gave an oddly rambling and incoherent answer to an interview question during a beauty pageant, but who, last I checked, was not running for political office. And, it should be noted, who turned out to be fairly poised and mature in the face of aggressive widespread mockery.

She said it here.

Seriously!

The first blogger I “outed” myself to was Blogher co-founder Susan Mernit. She was giving a presentation on anonymous sex-blogging at Gnomedex 2006, an über-tech conference. one of her points was, first, that while they were all gathered to talk about developments in, primarily, Web 2.0 infrastructure what she was finding most remarkable were the resulting social developments (often almost dismissively shorthanded in nerd speak as “content.”) In particular she said people… men but especially women…

As I said in my old post, the audience responses from men were pretty uniformly alarmed, and knowledgeable enough about details of on-line sex-related security to have practiced some of it themselves. They were also nearly as uniformly certain that “if you’re not careful” then writing about sex, or posting your photos, or even looking at them when you’re young could come back to bite you later when employers or admissions offices Google your background.

On the other hand, in a way that surprised me at the time, the relative handful of tech women in the audience, ages ranging from twenties at the low end to maybe fifty at the high end, were perfectly sanguine about it. Which, in retrospect, strongly reinforced Mernit’s thesis. Their reaction was “no big deal, more and more people are doing it and when ‘in the future’ happens it’ll be no bigger a deal than having a tattoo is today.

Well, two things come to mind immediately after contemplating the Palin pagent video. #1: To paraphrase William Gibson, “in the future” has already arrived, it’s just not evenly distributed yet #2: Whoever initially posted that video was probably a man who still imagined it’s a “gotcha.”

But here’s the deal: chances are very good that if you’re a blogger reading this post you’ve written about your own sex life. And chances are pretty good you’ve participated in popular and consequently non-scandalous Osbasso’s Half-Nekkid Thursday meme. Which, incidentally, started… roughly around the time Mernit made her presentation! And therefore chances are the immature troll who posted that Palin video is the kind of asshole who whacks off to your photos in private but would discriminate against you in public. And whoever snickers along with them saying “yeah, she was a beauty contestant, what a bimbo” is also insulting you! Oh yeah, and they’re also threatening you. So yeah, they’re not just sexist, they’re immature, knee-squeezing, not-caught-up-on-the-21st-Century assholes who’d do the same to you given half a chance.

So! Governor Palin is a corrupt, imprudent, professional-line-crossing wingnut. Fine. Governor Palin is scary-unprepared to uphold the Constitution and administer the executive functions of the United States of America (or even, it would seem, execute the far more limited functions of President of the Senate — the VP’s day job till the President’s unanticipated departure.) Got that too. But unlike every one of her many, many “fail stamp” flaws, that she ever paraded in a bathing suit… or for that matter birthday suit… or had Teh kinky Sex… or had Teh Sex at all… either in her youth or last week is not a blot on her character. It’s not a disqualification for office. It’s not even a big surprise since people have been doing those things since long before Edward Land introduced the first Polaroid camera. Instead it’s what ordinary people do, and have done. If certain asshats got a problem with that it’s their problem, not hers. If they think it’s a point against her, surprise! It’s a point against them.

Action item: when you see the future isn’t distributed properly like that leave a comment saying get over it. Even better? Get used to it. Sod off works too.

I mean, yeah, most of us still post under internet aliases, and most other people don’t post anything at all, because the future still really isn’t well-distributed at all. Yet. Challenging mouth breathers who think that video, or who’s in it, or how they got there is significant is one way to help break up the lumps.

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Also see: “The Price of Profanity” (not.)