So much has been said about Sarah Palin since the 2008 elections. Few people outside of Alaska knew much about her prior to the VP bid that made her an instant celebrity. Now she’s a media sensation with more than 610,000 Twitter followers.

Palin did one good thing for women (and coincidentally, for herself) by calling attention to sexism during her 2008 campaign. Who could have guessed that Fox news would ever care about double standards, however briefly? But let’s be clear, taking upskirt photos of a female politician is sexist. Questioning her credentials is not.

The problem with Sarah Palin is that though she markets herself as the ideal modern woman, she advocates policies that limit our rights. She is the perfect example of a why a woman candidate is not necessarily a woman’s candidate. Feminism advocates the right for women to be treated as men’s intellectual and professional equals. Based on this criteria, Sarah Palin is a major league anti-feminist. Here are the top 3 reasons why Sarah Palin is bad news for young women. Read More »

Say, have you heard of Camille Paglia? If not, good news: it turns out that you are not old. You’ve also, apparently, managed to avoid the massive headaches that she’s been inflicting on thinking people for the better part of the last two decades. Now, for the bad news: she’s back, and she’s aiming to annoy the world once more.

Here’s the deal: Camille Paglia was the Ann Coulter of the ‘90s. She wrote a book, Sexual Personae, which dealt “shockingly” with issues of sex and gender, in that it basically re-iterated the talking points of idiot wife-beaters across the nation. (Here’s a sample quote: “If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts.”) This book turned her into a popular media personality, and spawned countless essays and TV appearances; she was the go-to girl when conservatives needed to call upon some random crazy to bash women.

The peak of her career, of course, came when she took it upon herself to defend rapists, by saying that women who got drunk or wore skimpy clothes in the presence of men deserved to be sexually assaulted, because men simply could not be expected to contain their awesome sexual power. In her words, “woman’s flirtatious arts of self-concealment mean man’s approach must take the form of rape.” Read More »