Sarah Palin As Patriarchal Hegemony

Here is a question: There are four people running for the top political jobs in the country, none of whom write their own speeches, why is it the media only says of the lone female candidate, "She doesn't write her own speeches you know"? The implication being if you have a penis, well you could have written your own speech if you felt like it. But, what? You have a vagina?? Well, then it's questionable.

There is a reason that this sort of thing still goes on I believe. It has to do with the transition of feminism away from the liberal tradition of people like Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill, which was built around a belief in the innate potentialities of all people regardless of their sex, and towards a view that sees women as perpetual victims who require "liberation" (in a neo-Marxian sense usually) from the "patriarchal hegemony." People who follow this second way of viewing feminism refuse to look at women as individuals. For them women are not individuals, but members of an oppressed class. This allows practitioners of this particular ideology, of which there are many in the media, to denigrate the accomplishment of women who fail to have the proper "gender consciousness" (modelled on the idea of "class consciousness" of course.) The storyline is hidden, but far from subtle: "If Sarah Palin were really a strong woman," so they argue," she wouldn't be a Republican." Therefore they feel the need to undo the reality of her actual person hood by claiming she is some sort of living, breathing Potemkin Village; for many in the MSM Sarah Palin has to be a fraud or a Rovian plot... anything but what she actually is.

Fundamentally, this new form of feminism offers not a "liberation" but a cage. It sets up a system of prescribed choices for women. It tells them what political or moral values they can "legitimately" hold and which ones are anathema. It does the same with their career choices and even with the kinds of relationships they "should" have with men. So when you are given the example of a woman who breaks these prescribed choices, such as looking like a strong "liberated" woman while being a Republican, they will attempt to uphold the character of their ideological vision rather than admit the possibility that Sarah Palin is exactly who she wants and needs to be.

But there is another option, and that is a return to the view of feminism expounded by Liberal thinkers like Wollstonecraft and Mill. Such a view allows and encourages women and men to make what they would out of themselves, based upon their personal ways of looking at the world they find themselves living within.

Such a view also requires when we come across the Sarah Palins of the world that we deal with them as they are, and not as we would like them to be.