Via anthropologist, paleontologist, and Neanderthal expert John Hawks' regular "Neanderthal anti-defamation files" feature, media diva Sarah Palin said of aspiring teabagger Presidential candidate Rick (man-on-dog) Santorum

Why do they have to bring poor Neandertals into it?

...

"I will not call him the knuckle-dragging Neanderthal," Palin continued. "I'll let his wife call him that instead."

Oh, well, this is so easy a caveman could do it.

Source: john hawks weblog

First of all, it's always funny to be reminded that over-the-top doth-protest-too-much homophobic conservative Republicans are sometimes married to members of the opposite sex.  Complete and total bias on my part, I know.  But that really was my gut response: "Rick Santorum is married?" Not that there's anything wrong with that.  Nor even anything implausible about it.  I'm just more used to the Ted Haggard / Jim Baker / Larry Craig / Fred Phelps / Jim West / George Alan Rekers / Richard Curtis / Mark Foley / Brent Parker / Matthew Glavin / Bruce Barclay / Glenn Murphy / Eddie Long / Troy King / David Dreier / Roy Ashburn / Ed Schrock / Jeff Gannon / Terry Dolan model of Republican homophobia.

Second of all, though, Palin was (for once) lashing out at Santorum in a perfectly appropriate fashion.  Columnist Ruth Marcus puts the seemingly Neanderthalist non-sequeteur in context

Just in case his wife doesn't take Sarah Palin up on her offer, I'll say it: Rick Santorum is a knuckle-dragging Neanderthal.

The former Pennsylvania senator and wannabe president was bad-mouthing Palin the other day for being a no-show at CPAC, the annual conservative gathering and showcase for presidential hopefuls.

"I wouldn't have turned it down," Santorum said of Palin's decision not to attend, "but I don't live in Alaska, right, and I'm not the mother to all these kids, and I don't have other responsibilities like she has."

All these kids? Santorum has seven, which by my count makes him two kids busier than Palin.

Oh, wait, I guess not. He's father to all these kids, not mother.

And we know who stays home with the kids.

Source: The Washington Post

That guy really is a little shit stain. I'd just add that the incident really does illustrate what a genuine outlier Sarah Palin is to the Republican mainstream.  I genuinely don't understand what the fuck she's up to these days, but once upon a time she really was a force for change -- positive change no less! -- in the Alaska Republican establishment.

I'd just add that that impulse of hers, even more than her sex or gender or even complete decent into id and not just ideology, explains the animosity against Palin by deep establishment Republicans like Rick Santorum.  She's no stupider than they are.  She's no less hypocritical than they are.  She's no less avaricious.  Nor fiscally responsible. Nor prepared to create and execute national-level government legislation or policy than they either.  But unlike the Santorums, the McConnells, and the Bohners of the party establishment she has little tolerance for those qualities in others further up her party's food chain.  And as an almost literally self-made woman, whatever her own too-real faults in the domain of reproductive rights, she really doesn't have much tolerance for their knuckle-dragging attitudes towards women.

Shame she no longer seems interested in using her abilities to do good rather than to do well.

Well that was pretty quick. Melissa McEwen at Shakesville posted the late Mary Daly’s popular “origin of the word sin” quote by way of eulogy an early feminist icon. And, despite multiple apologies, promptly got threadjacked by accusations of transphobia. Enough so that another blogger at the site closed comments on the post.

The bone of contention being Daly’s evident transphobia. Which isn’t terribly widely know — little-known enough, for instance, to have caught the generally hyper-inclusive McEwen off guard.

If I have the main 70’s era categories of feminism that would have been current in Daly’s ascendancy she was a gender essentialist and not a gender equalitarian. That essentialism was a pretty big deal and one that, I’m pretty sure, is pretty incompatible with sympathy for the transsexual and transgendered.

Yes, you might argue, perfectly reasonably as many trans people do, that the real “essence” of one’s sex is determined by identity and not chromosomes. But that’s not going to carry a lot of weight with anyone who believes that, say, by its very nature the Y chromosome is irretrievably degenerate or that the planet needs to be “decontaminated” of individuals with that defect.

With that understanding transphobia is 100% consistent with gender essentialism. Racism and genocide would be consistent with antagonism towards gender equalitarianism. To an essentialist like Daly a man using plastic surgery and testosterone suppressing drugs to “pass” as a woman would be as viscerally offensive as a person of color using plastic surgery and melanin-suppressing drugs to “pass” as white would be to David Duke

That said, regardless of her motivation for analyzing the gendered status quo one can still learn from her analysis of its structure and flaws. Enough so to say she was a significant figure in gender politics independent of her essentialism. You might not want to touch most of her proposed solutions with a 10-foot pole, but one can learn from her analysis. And draw one’s own, non-essentialist, non-exclusivist conclusions.

Photo by Flickr user _BostonBill. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Ok, so a woman I know dressed up as a male cross-dresser last for a Halloween party last night.

Now you’d think that all a woman would have to do to look like a cross-dressed man would be… to wear regular party clothes, right?

No. Because most public cross-dressing isn’t about being female, it’s about being feminine. It’s an image not of women as they are but… well… as they ought to be. My friend, being merely herself, wasn’t up to the task.

A blonde wig, enough eye makeup to make her lids sticky, enough red gloss to do likewise to her lips, conspicuously false breasts with conspicuous bra straps, nylons with garters showing, and a garishly out-of-season white mini-skirt/fuzzy-top combination seemed to help, however.

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Various people have made much of the recent “Halloween/Slut-o-ween” trend in women’s costumes. Chelsea Girl of Pretty Dumb Things, not surprisingly, puts it better than most in her post on the matter. Here’s her description of outfits she encountered

I’m not particularly interested in getting my panties in a moralizing wedge over the choice of a fully-fledged adult woman to dress as a naughty nurse, or even over an uninformed kid’s choosing to wear some garb that’s age inappropriate. As much as I’m disinclined to suggest that this Ho-rrific trend is the second sign of the apocalypse—we all know the first was Xanadu, the Broadway musical—I am, however, interested in looking at what it means that the go-to Halloween garb for adults seems to be some variation of streetwalker.

I briefly attended a Halloween party this past weekend. In attendance was a Sexy Cop, a mini-skirted Marie Antoinette, a Gold-Digger, a Naughty Nurse, a Hot Devil and a woman with a deerstalker cap dressed as Sherlock Ho. (There was also a Tinkerbelle, a Marilyn Monroe, and a denim cut-offs wearing Amy Winehouse, but while those costumes may have some kind of intrinsic erotic charge, none of them were designed with sheer T&A-showing titillation in mind, so I’m not counting them.)

Her thesis is particularly dear to my heart. Read her entire disquisition here.

While my gut reaction is to simply agree with Chelsea Girl and the lamentably long-dark Olympia Monet that this one-night-a-year attire, like the Disney-fied corporate “big girl pants” of Victoria’s Secrets, may only highlight everything indoctrinated heterosexuals aren’t supposed to be. As Monet put it:

Before you start hammering me about the fact that my job is promiscuity, let me be clear: I have nothing against women wanting to dress provocatively or act promiscuously; it’s the deception I object to. If a woman wants to let her stuff hang out one night a year, why dissimulate? Why not actually go to Halloween as a stripper? Or a nudist? Or a showgirl? All three of those professions would enable the costumee to wear little to nothing without seeming like such a fraud.

The problem as I see it is that women are still unable to come to terms with their own sexuality and the desire to express that sexuality, so instead of being up front about wanting to be seen as attractive or sexy, she must instead be a sexy cat, or a sexy nurse, or a sexy devil. She uses the uninhibited holiday of Halloween to give voice to her pent up sexual energy, get drunk, snog with some stranger at a party, all under the protection of Slut-Kitty, her alter-ego.

I cached her post here.

In the face of my cross-cross-dressing friend, though, I’d like to suggest what might be going on with the Sexy-Golf-Caddy and Sexy-Insurance-Assessor (if there weren’t such this year there surely will be next) is that even women are feeling pressure to go out in drag.

I’m not sure where the pressure’s coming from, whether it’s from we men, or increasingly out-of-reach beauty-myth aspirations, nervousness about increased sexualization-without-sexuality in the media, compensation for being taken so seriously there rest of the year, or even exorcizing demons of an economic-dependency past as financial and social circumstances begin to approach… and, sometimes locally, exceed… parity with men, or maybe taking advantage of a formalized opportunity to temporarily snap under the pressure from an increasingly pornified male cohort. Like I say, I don’t know. But as Monet put it, that the emphasis isn’t on being a stripper but a stripper cat, on being not a prostitute but a prostitute firefighter sniffs of the same impulse that drives so many cross-dressers to go out as Liza Minnelli in Cabaret instead of her mother in Wizard of Oz or to eschew Norma Jean Mortensen for her hyper-feminized alter ego.

Anyway… one night a year I think it’s ok to go out as a cross-cross-dresser. But I think it would be nice if more people, like my clever friend, were aware of what they were doing as opposed to the new-trending multitudes who, I’m afraid, may not be.