“I’m As Mad As Hell, and I’m Not Going To Take This Anymore”: Does That Make Me Sexist?

Some of you may know that my title comes from the 1976 film Network. The movie exposes the media’s failure to report how Americans really feel during times of war and upheaval and what they did about it: They got honest. In that spirit, this piece is about honesty.

Like Campbell Brown, I too have had it. I have had it with people like Elizabeth Hasselbeck telling me that questioning Sarah Palin is “deliberately sexist.” Recently, at a Republican rally in Tampa, Florida, Hasselbeck said, “The questioning of Governor Palin’s shopping spree was deliberately sexist.” I disagree.

In fact, I challenge Hasselbeck. When a presidential candidate is running on a ticket advocating reform of government spending, yet approves $150,000 to clothe and paint his VP nominee, how can we trust him? What does reporting a $150k shopping spree have to do with sexism, anyway? Wasn’t Senator John Edwards called out for spending $400 on haircuts? Was that sexist?

Why is it every time a pundit or reporter questions Sarah Palin’s designer clothes or anything, it’s suddenly sexist? Even Elaine Lafferty, the former editor in chief of Ms. magazine, and a faithful Democrat (she claims)—who’s now consulting for the McCain campaign—blogged on Tina Brown’s The Daily Beast that she is tired of the Democratic Party taking women for granted. I suppose Lafferty hasn’t met the thousands of Democrats that I know who support, appreciate and approve of a woman as a leader, but not just any woman. Rather, an intelligent woman.

So I question Palin’s intelligence. If she claims to be in touch with the international community, even if only through reading newspapers and magazines, then why does she foolishly say “I can see Russia from my house” when asked about international affairs? Can one honestly say that’s an intelligent answer? If so, then what is intelligent? I don’t know.

No matter how intelligent Palin may or may not be—and let’s have a healthy debate here at 12th Street on intelligence—I am skeptical of her ability, and as mad as hell about it.

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Rape Kits, Pitbulls, and Libel; Just Another Normal Day With John Reed

What Would Palin Think?

Last week 12th Street was considering its public stance.

We did an interview with an author who is no stranger to controversy. John Reed, author of Snowball’s Chance and organizer of next year’s 9/11 Toga Party, was delighting us with snippets of his upcoming book, Tales of Woe.

We’ve got to wait until 2009 for MTV Books to release that one, but if you like tales of “suffering, suffering, suffering,” of the kind normally reserved for your worst imaginings, then this will be the book for you. A man who had sex with his bicycle is caught (on the saddle?) by the hotel’s maids, then convicted and put on the sex-offenders list. This is “one of the few light stories” in the book, Reed said.

What he told us next, however, demanded a little more debate.

I asked John if we were ready for Woe. This was his answer:

Tales of Woe, MTV 2009

“Uh, I thought I was prepared, and I certainly wasn’t. The stories in this book are sicker and more upsetting than anything anyone can possibly imagine. And, by the way, anything you can imagine, any horrible thing you can imagine happening to a person—it’s happened. Some people are not going to be happy about it. There’s a double dog rapist (a guy who raped two dogs) that scares me. There’s no law against raping dogs in Alaska, which is of course yet another reason to get behind Palin. We should decriminalize dog rape nationwide. And then, who knows … the world.”

At first glance, you might think this is funny. A natural thought after reading this might be, “I wonder whether they make the dogs pay for the rape kits in Alaska.” Several people I spoke to about this paragraph actually asked that question immediately, including one of the editors here. This is good, risky satire [note: this link isn’t PG], the type of controversy that—coming from England, where our tabloids are ruthless—I’m very fond of. (See here, here, and here. And here).

But give it a second read, and ask yourself: is he referring to the pitbull/lipstick comment? Is he saying it would be alright to rape Palin?

No. Or at least not intentionally. But that’s what it could be taken to mean. And if someone out there might read a pro-rape-of-Palin sentiment in this paragraph, is that something we want to risk?

Well, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is fairly clear on this issue. If you go through their Bloggers’ FAQ to their post on Online Defamation Law, it’s spelled out pretty clearly; libel is a “false and unprivileged statement of fact that is harmful to someone’s reputation, and published ‘with fault,’ meaning as a result of negligence or malice.”

Further down the post is the following:

“Libelous (when false):

• Charging someone with being a communist (in 1959)
• Calling an attorney a ‘crook’
• Describing a woman as a call girl
• Accusing a minister of unethical conduct
• Accusing a father of violating the confidence of son

Not-libelous:

• Calling a political foe a ‘thief’ and ‘liar’ in chance encounter (because hyperbole in context)
• Calling a TV show participant a ‘local loser,’ ‘chicken butt’ and ‘big skank’
• Calling someone a ‘bitch’ or a ‘son of a bitch’
• Changing product code name from “Carl Sagan” to ‘Butt Head Astronomer'”

I like the EFF. Anyway, this is clearly not libel. However, should it be shown, beyond a reasonable doubt, that John was sanctioning rape of Alaska’s governor (which, I might repeat, he certainly was not—although I wouldn’t say he’d be too afraid of a comment like that), perhaps that would attract attention that we would otherwise avoid. We all know what that’s like. What would Palin think of this post? I bet she’d understand the power of words used creatively.

Anyway, I welcome your comments on this matter. And you can read the rest of the interview here. In the W&D Program, learning how to give a close analysis of a text is the cornerstone of our classes. They’re training us to be aware of this stuff, and to understand its impact. I think this harks back to the controversy over Nirvana’s song, Rape Me. Kurt was attacked by some feminists for its lyrics, and accused of taking a jab at the media for abusing his celebrity status, but he said it meant “You can hurt me, but I’ll survive,” and was, in fact, an “anti-rape” song.

In the end, after a long debate, we didn’t run the Alaska stuff, but I ask you: Did we make the right decision? I’m undecided. Convince me.

If you comment, please keep it decent. Thanks.