Sarah Palin: Revenge of the Vagina (Monologues)

American Thinker ^ | June 26, 2009 | Stuart Schwartz

[neverdem]

Sarah Palin is Eve Ensler's worst nightmare.

That's all you need to know to understand the dramatic impact of the individual who continues to be the target of a cultural and political elite that looks for "anything that will criminalize and/or humiliate Palin and her family."  Sarah Palin, of course, is the charismatic, conservative Alaska governor who is unapologetically traditional and Christian in her politics and values. And Eve Ensler is the feminist who wrote the play The Vagina Monologues and has been enshrined by our cultural elite for her bizarre, sometimes depraved, and often just plain silly promotion of a sexual organ as the font of all wisdom.

To understand the Palin hatred, almost always expressed in sexual terms (the David Letterman assessment of her as "slutty" is fairly mild in the Palin-hater scheme of misogynistic insults), you have to understand the profound absurdity of our leftist culture. Ensler's play has been arguably the most visible part of the elite arts scene for more than a decade, performed by adoring feminists at more than 4,000 campuses and college communities in the United States in the past year alone. Her vagina-as-god message has attracted more than twenty awards and a flock of celebrities and politicians anxious to be associated with the playwright who "invented the vagina."

Her original off-Broadway play featured the "good rape" of a 13-year old girl by a lesbian woman who abuses the girl after getting her drunk in order to cure her of the aftereffects of a rape by an adult male some years before. Why is it "good"? Because lesbian abuse of a minor strikes a blow against an established worldview that, according to Ensler and her supporters, must be replaced with...Ensler and her supporters.

The Ensler worldview has become a dominant part of a culture -- most evident on university campuses and in trendy, upscale urban areas -- that promotes spiritual transformation through gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender sex -- not even relationships, just sex.  In this, the world's brutality comes from traditional relationships, which lead to the kind of abuse that Ensler has raised more than $50 million to combat.  How dominant is this view? The New York Times put              its cultural stamp of approval on the world according to Ensler, describing her as "brilliant," a "messiah heralding the second wave of feminism."

Into all of this strides Sarah Palin, who is refreshingly and wonderfully normal, appealing to the vast majority of Americans who don't read The New York Times (303,062,059 at last count) and shake their heads in dismay at the almost endless lineup of celebrities rhapsodizing over the opportunity, like actress Glen Close, to get "2,500 people to stand and chant the word c**t."  Or who, unlike the educators bringing culture to their children, don't think that expanding "the identity category of ‘woman'" to "male-to-female trans individuals" will bring peace on earth and goodwill toward...well, all politically sanctioned victims.

Palin is enormously attractive to a majority that has found itself increasingly scorned for middle class values that emphasize morality, tradition and civility (see Bruce Walker's "The Murder of Civil Life" in American Thinker for insight on this). This wide swath of traditional America has found its "proud sense of respectability and family commitment," conservative critic Michael Medved writes, threatened by a cultural avalanche of sex-as-wisdom media and a political class that encourages government dependency by culturally-appointed victims in both public and private life.

Enter the Alaska governor on the national stage. Just when the average American thinks all is lost and Washington is Mordor-on-the-Potomac, Sarah Palin does the unthinkable in a politician: she serves, she works, she makes sense, and she is unapologetically a mother, a wife, and a Christian. She battled corrupt politicians of both parties in Alaska and won, prompting Fred Barnes of The Weekly Standard to describe her, a year before she became the running mate of John McCain, as a politician of "eye-popping integrity." No victim, she: Sarah Palin absorbs the shocks of life the way a ShamWow absorbs water.

Her stewardship of Alaska government has broken the logjam of corruption created by decades of Republican and Democratic politicians, including the incumbent she defeated, and reversed the rating of the governor's office by Alaskans from last to leading all states. Her leadership has enticed Canada and major oil producers to join her in putting together a gas pipeline deal that will do more for U.S. energy self-sufficiency than all the czars and czardines of the Obama administration put together.  "By defying naysayers," Investors Business Daily editorialized this month, "Sarah Palin is now vindicated."

Ordinary Americans are responding. Jay Valentine writes in American Thinker that she would "fill a stadium if she were reciting a cookbook." She has been glowingly compared with Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy and -- worst of all, in the eyes of liberals -- Franklin D. Roosevelt (her connection with the average person is a "rare talent" shared by the iconic originator of the New Deal).

And so, too, is the Ensler left. Just as rape is "good" when done for politically correct purposes, so is demonizing an accomplished woman when she threatens the liberal culture that has dominated the past decade. The media establishment has been particularly vicious in its attempt to trivialize her by reducing her to a sexual object. The Associated Press, for example, routinely photographed her as a vice presidential candidate from an angle that emphasized her calves, deliberately playing on images of strippers; Reuters had a more Ensler-like body part in mind when it paired her with a "jacuzzi (sic) floozy"; Yahoo focused on her breasts; Slate, owned by the Washington Post, was reliably Ensler-like when it tagged her as a pornography archetype, the "Sexy Puritan"; and entertainer Sandra Bernhard won applause and laughs from theatergoers and mainstream Washington D.C. media when she warned that Palin would be "gang-raped by my big black brothers" in retaliation for her conservative views.

Palin does not only threaten liberals; she also threatens culturally elite conservatives, who unashamedly savaged a woman who is so...so...well, gauche that she actually admits to praying. Town Hall (by way of the San Francisco Chronical) columnist Debra J. Saunders spoke for a conservative establishment that resented Palin's extraordinary effect on voters when she wrote,   "I wish Sarah Palin would just go away."  Columnist Kathleen Parker of the Washington Post and National Review attracted cheers from the elite right when she spat, "If BS were currency, Palin could bail out Wall Street herself."

The Washington Post, which has devoted much of the past decade celebrating the Ensler culture, nastily declared that her "greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman."  Those were among the kinder words written by one of its showcased writers on faith, a University of Chicago divinity school professor who also derisively noted that someone who "has a womb and makes lots and lots of babies (and drives them to school! wow!)" does not a woman make.

So what does make a woman...politically, that is? Hate and cultural conformity, to judge by the venom spilling from the nation's elite.  Ensler promotes this, exhorting women to "vote with your vaginas" and put Democrats in office. She has urged them "to get our vaginas to the polls", in this last election warning that a vote for Palin is the equivalent of a vote for rape...the bad kind. Women -- and those non-traditional men who have escaped gender stereotypes to embrace a walk down the "vagina trail" -- should ask themselves: what would your vagina do?

However, judging by the sea of women in the enthusiastic crowds Palin continues to attract, Eve Ensler is not getting the answer she prefers.

[jla]

All you're doing is spewing your venomous and hateful personal opinion of another, i.e., Sarah Palin.
Easy to do when her life is out there for all to see and folks like yourself can sit back and take cheap shots at her.
Tell us about the flowerplough family. What state does Mrs. flowerplough govern? Oh, and post some images. I'm sure the flowerploughs are just as attractive as the Palins. It's already been made clear that any flowerplough isn't any where near as intelligent as Sarah Palin, yet perhaps a flowerplough is as photogenic. Hmm?

[antisocial]

“I see Sarah as another Obama, an Affirmative Action Selection, with followers and fans who confuse presentability with competence.”

Is that what your vagina told you to say?

[Extremely Extreme Extremist]

You said it, EEE, not me.

Nothing wrong with admitting the truth. I'll be the first to admit that I support Palin because she's an accomplished and attractive woman. There's nothing sexist or affirmative-action about it.

I remember Palin trying to finesse her brat’s forthcoming brat

All you're doing is deteriorating your argument when you engage in uncivil comments about the Governor and her children. So I'll disregard the rest of your snarky comments about her family.

And then the embarrassing interviews with Gibson and Couric.

Embarrassing interviews, only if you see them through the leftist lens of the media, which apparently that's what you're doing. Perhaps you should focus on content instead of style, lighting, and camera angle, in which Palin held up. You conveniently disregard her excellent speeches announcing her selection in Dayton, her acceptance speech, her VP debate with Biden, her IN pro-life speech, and her speech celebrating AK's birthday in Auburn, NY which makes some of her missteps irrelevant.

Unprepared and inexperienced as she was, she and her handlers shoulda had a better handle on what to expect from the media mavens.

Not when you're under the thumb of your boss who prohibits you to say what you really want to say. Try looking at post-election interviews she has done and see the contrast.

And since the election, the main Sarah news I get is about how she promised to appear at some Repub event, but now maybe won’t, but still might, unless she gets asked out to the Prom by a cuter guy.

Maybe there was some miscommunication with her state staff, maybe the RNC and its Congressional affiliates really did this to embarrass her. No one really knows. The fact of the matter is:

(1) Palin is still Governor and has duties to attend to
(2) She has no Washington insiders or hacks
(3) Everyone was aware that any visits or speeches outside the state will be state-related (except for the IN right-to-life speech)

Like you said, EEE, she’s not a man. Looks to me like that’s the main thing she’s got going for herself.

So it's sexist to cheer on an attractive and accomplished woman who happens to be a staunch conservative? I don't see any conservatives cheering on Kay Baily Hutchinson, Elizabeth Dole, Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe, etc. Why is that?

[Extremely Extreme Extremist]

Tell us about the flowerplough family.

ROFL. I'm envisioning moles and prairie dogs eeking out a living underneath an abandoned Iowa farm.

[avacado]

Do yourself a favor and research every detail about how Sarah got the Alaska Highway pipeline deal going. All you are discussing is tabloid crap. If that is all you can digest, then fine, the press put it out there for your type to swallow.

Now go research the pipeline and research her state budget since she has been governor.

She is exactly what this country needs.

[denydenydeny]

It dismays me to no end to see people, even here, using Saturday Night Live as a primary news source.

[Extremely Extreme Extremist]

Still waiting for you to list the government or pro-feminist programs Palin used to get where she is today.

[avacado]

"It dismays me to no end to see people, even here, using Saturday Night Live as a primary news source."

I have two friends who have kids, wives, jobs, and both get their "news" from the Jon Stewart Show.

[denydenydeny]

The Ensler worldview has become a dominant part of a culture -- most evident on university campuses and in trendy, upscale urban areas -- that promotes spiritual transformation through gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender sex -- not even relationships, just sex.

Exactly, exactly, exactly.

I could not care less what adults do voluntarily with each other's organs and orifices. My whole problem is with gay culture, which has completely sexualized the larger culture.

Now, in every medium, the expression of affection between two people can only mean that they wish to have sex with each other. There is no other possibility. There is no such thing as agape,, there is only eros. House and Wilson? Harry Potter and Ron Weasley? Their friendships are only sybmolic of their desire to sodomize each other--in the contemporary there can be no other interpretation.

The real problem, as I always say, is not just an aesthetic one. It's that, when all relationships between people are sexualized, you must keep in mind that children are people too. And the long-term implications enrage me.

[flowerplough]

Do yourself a favor and research every detail about how Sarah got the Alaska Highway pipeline deal going.

Do me a favor, yourself, avacado, and do the research for me. Then post a summary. Thanks.