I guess this is my lucky day where Echidne of the Snakes is concerned. Gosh, I hate taking the same blogger to task twice in the same day (and two posts in a row!) but she has a post that illuminates the liberal hypocrisy about feminism and appearance.
Everybody knows how much liberals hate the emphasis on appearance. I mean, Echidne had an absolute cow when Ann Althouse pointed out the hypocrisy of women bloggers supporting Bill "I Did Not Have Sex with That Woman" Clinton solely because he supports the right of a woman to kill her baby anytime before birth, and doing so in a blouse that emphasized her breasts. Ann was rather sarcastic in her "Let's Look at Those Breasts" post on the subject of female bloggers and Bill Clinton. And Echidne tried to stay out of it...sort of.
I am very tempted to join in the fray and to start sending arrows here and there, but I will restrain myself, don a neutral pin-striped business suit and write about something very erudite and academic.
Which is tits and their role in feminism. And don't worry, I first bound my own breasts very tightly. If I stood slightly angled towards you I might come across as almost breastless. Or breast-free or something. Except that now I can't breathe at all. Argh. Proper erudite feminism is damn inconvenient.
Anyway, about breasts. My feminist view on them is a very simple one: they are the property of the person who has them on her chest, having breasts does not preclude having brains and having breasts is perfectly acceptable in the public sphere. And women are not responsible for controlling the reactions of some men to the presence of breasts, women don't have to don burqas for the sake of these men or to bind their breasts, either.
Add to this simple and sane idea the idea of situation-appropriate clothing, and I see nothing wrong in Jessica's outfit in the picture. Most of the other bloggers in the picture are dressed in business-casual, and so is Jessica.
Of course, the fracas wasn't simply about the appropriateness of Jessica's shirt (which had a pattern that caused an unfortunate emphasis). It was about the appropriateness of appearing in public with a president who had multiple accusations of sexual inappropriateness (to put it mildly) with a variety of women. The accusations included adultery, sexual harassment, and rape. I'm just not nimble enough to stick my head up my ass and ignore a man's conduct (even if he's POTUS) just because he supports the right to kill infants till birth.
But I digress. That wasn't the point of this post. Really. The point here is how feminists argue longly and loudly about how women shouldn't be judged by appearance. So imagine my amusement when I ran across Echidne's post on the Ann Coulter talking action figure. The appropriately feminist comments are illustrative.
Marcus: WTF? No adam's apple?!!!
Animus: And how do its measurements compare to Barbie's?
TheaLogie: It's not necessarily saying that Coulter has to be a man to hold the views she does. It's saying that in spite of her attempts at glamor, generally speaking she's as unattractive as the views she rants about.
Tikistitch: Creeeeeeepy! Though I must say, Coulter finally makes sense as a Barbie doll.
It's good to know that when liberals make fun of a conservative woman's looks, it's because her views are unattractive. It's not that they are being childish and shallow.
But how do they justify calling Fred Thompson's wife Jeri a trophy wife and endlessly discussing whether she's an asset or liability? I find the "I didn't know trophy wife was derogatory" argument to be a bit disingenuous. But be that as it may, it seems somewhat hypocritical for liberals to constantly tell us it's unseemly to discuss Hillary Clinton's possible magic plastic surgery and cleavage while constantly commenting on the looks of conservative women from Jeri Thompson and Ann Coulter to President Bush's daughters.
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