It took a little while, but Dave has fully apologized for his joke about Willow, realizing apparently that with her being the only Palin daughter at Yankee stadium, his joke must have been referring to her.
Good for Dave. Good for women. Amy Siskind over at Huffington Post noted recently that Letterman had invoked a new era of feminism, just as many of her co-bloggers were sadly finding new ways to excuse the sexist jokes ("hey, others have told sexist jokes - why is Letterman being punished?", or "she announced it", or "she put the kids on stage" or "they made rape/child molestation jokes about Willow in September, why'd she wait to complain until now?"). Amy's point is that old-style feminism is dead, perhaps because no one's listening anymore or all of its terms have been co-opted and twisted.
In its new guise, the blogosphere erupts, and the slurs against females young and old are reacted against. It's not perfect - it's happened rarely, but seems to be gaining a bit of steam. Hillary was able to effectively protest the phrase "pimping her daughter" because it was about her kid, with similar excuses heard at the time about "it's just language, it doesn't really mean to pimp", etc. - but she couldn't protest full page WaPo articles about her "cleavage" (then she wouldn't be a good sport), or "Nurse Ratched/ballcutter/rhymes with "rich", or a set of candidates' baseball cards where all the men were baseball heroes and she got to be a busty slutty groupie. Aside from botox jokes and numerous sexist slurs, Nancy Pelosi recently got to endure a "Pussy Galore" commercial out of the Republicans, while Meghan McCain's interesting political views are cut off by talking about her being "fat" (which really means that she's not anorexic like Kate Moss or Amy Winehouse, perhaps due to disturbing lack of substance abuse).
The Terms of Demeanment are bipartisan and focused on one sex (except when they slip over to make fun of homosexuals, cross-dressers, and a few other relatively defenseless segments of society). It doesn't help that some of the biggest proponents of "relax, learn to take a joke" sexism are women themselves, and I won't even start the long litany of reasons why this is true. It wasn't until yesterday that I got the irony of people noting Obama's "family should be off limits" in referring to Bristol's pregnancy. He of course was the child of a woman who dealt with an unintentional unmarried pregnancy at age 17, and had abortion been easy and approved at that time, we might easily have had President Biden discussing these matters instead.
The bigger issue is that women and girls carry the weight of these choices and developments - pregnancy, abortion, raising children, infant and child disability, as well as prime care-giver for the elderly and the prematurely infirm. The consistent disparagement of women from the "slutty", "ditzy blonde", "only a girl" to the various huge structural barriers to advancement to the perverse set of rules that get called into play for figures as diverse as Janet Reno, Carly Fiorina, Sonia Sotomayor, Dawn Johnsen, Sarah Palin, Madeleine Albright, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi - too masculine, too feminine, got too much help, too aggressive and power hungry, too cute, too ugly, looks frumpy in pants suits, trying to be too sexy in skirts/dresses, too old and wrinkly, too tan and tight skinned.
So why now? Just because - an ugly campaign season, uglier media season, more power on the internet, the assassination of Dr. Tiller aimed at women and their choices, frustration as simple goals for equality from long ago have turned into a marsh full of excuses and rationales, just because perhaps now is when the courage and energy to fight back has started to bubble up. Rosa Parks' move wasn't an isolated one, nor was it completely unpremeditated - it was part of a larger series of actions and careful movements that built on each other.
Plus when you mess with people's kids, they tend to go postal, a well-known fact - and is the point where harassment starts to lose its defenders. But that doesn't mean just don't mess with kids - it means to get our act together, to start acting respectable towards one-half of the planet. You can't laugh at this nasty shit at the comedy show and come home and wash it out in the sink - the stink lingers over our daily lives, our daily attitudes towards people we meet and live with and read about.
So what's next? More care. Just as a "joke" comparing Michelle Obama to a gorilla isn't funny, a "joke" making Sarah Palin into a "slutty flight attendant" isn't funny, neither for female politicians nor flight attendants, whatever your politics. Putting an asterisk next to sexism in no way diminishes sexism. Just because we've always been sexist doesn't mean today isn't the day to quit, just as a drinker would always like an excuse to quit tomorrow instead. Enough's enough. Just say no. Just say now.
Update: And in answer to Gov. Palin, who contends that "And this is all thanks to our U.S. military women and men putting their lives on the line for us to secure America's right to free speech - in this case, may that right be used to promote equality and respect," you're quite wrong in so many respects. America's right to free speech cannot be guarded by any military efforts, as history has shown time and again that war footing only endangers freedom of speech. Our internal commitment to justice through courts and fair law enforcement, and the people reaffirming daily this principle of free speech - the most important principle of all the amendments of the Bill of Rights - these are all more important than any efforts of the military.
The cant of obeisance to might and military endeavors is the antithesis of what the Founding Fathers struggled for. The unconstitutional effort of Congress to censure and quiet MoveOn for a private opinion about a politically motivated military officer, Gen. Petraeus, is just one example of the dangerous effects of this simplistic counterfactual rubbish of "support the troops". Worse, this choosing sides of who's most American, of who's most important, with the cynical perception that the military will most often side with your party, is disgraceful. I appreciate the military for its sacrifice in times of need, and sympathize with it when used for crass political purposes or misused for unnecessary blunders of war through the power-hungry vanity of our leaders and their lackey, amoral followers and enablers. But we are all Americans, and our greatest duty is speaking up, supporting the Constitution and the rule of law, whether soldiers witnessing torture in the military or citizens witnessing the abduction of the body politic or civil servants watching the wholesale ransacking of our Treasury. The Union will not be destroyed from without - it will rot from within, if not maintained.
We have a volunteer military. It is something of a representative sampling of American society, though heavily weighted to the less-fortunate and aimless, with a selection of those with a family military tradition. But like society at large, if there is no will for survival in the society, no adherence to morals, no courage to do what's right, the military will reflect this as well. If we have the need and the sense of purpose, most any one of us can step into the military and do these jobs. There are a few who work the front lines who might end up displaying more courage, but mostly courage is a matter of plain blind luck. Few will themselves to courage - most who find it just got shoved into a situation where it either comes out or completely disappears. And there's as much courage in risking your job to speak out and save someone from injustice, to speak against racism and sexism and torture and danger and corruption, to fight off street thugs or help clean up a neighborhood, as there is in most of the jobs in the volunteer military. There's courage to give up our easy lives and do what's more difficult, to help others when we'd rather focus on ourselves, to find little things to make the nation and world a better place to live. There are a million opportunities to display courage, and to act like sacrifice and honor only come from the military side of our nation is both misunderstanding honor, and belittling the worth of people as a whole. Most all of our jobs have some honor, and giving preference to serving chum in the chowhall over handing out burritos at Taco Bell is just a type of snobbishness.
Perhaps Gov. Palin harkens back to the days when North and South grabbed their weapons and set out to bloody themselves to pieces in the name of "honor", of WWI trenches piled high with casualties of suicidal frontal attacks. But the choices in 2009 require thought as much as deed, wisdom more than rash action, persuasive and calming and inspiring words rather than hollow lingo and sheer jingoism. We suffered through the Generals' folly in WWI, and we suffer through the civilian leaders' follies now. The use of force in our arsenal is certainly not to be undervalued, but if the arbitrary use of force is the most valuable protector of freedom we have, we're pathetic indeed.
