Feminist: I Read Your Paper for This? Pt.2

As you read this morning, I had a nice little dialogue with am New York today. I was already slightly annoyed by their article on Fey's portrayal of Palin costing the GOP votes, but that was only the beginning.

The paper was chock-full of annoyances, including a headline that read "McCain presses Ayers link: Releases ad about Bam's 'terror' ties" (I'm sure calling him "Bam" right next to "terror" isn't helping anything), and a lovely piece on how Angelina Jolie and Jessica Alba have lost their baby weight (I guess inquiring minds want to know, too bad I'm not one of them).

The worst of the bunch, however, was "Feminists: We fought for this?"

I was worried from the moment I saw the headline. I'm always afraid that we feminists might go too far when critiquing her. Not to worry, because the article isn't even about real people.

Sorry, let me correct myself, it's actually a "conversation" between living and dead feminists! The entire article, if you can even call it that, basically uses the names of feminist leaders to bitch and complain about Sarah Palin.

Honestly, I'm getting annoyed just writing this post, so I can't even articulate all of the things I wanted to say. Here are my major problems with this piece of crap article:

1) This is a newspaper - free or not - so shouldn't they have, I don't know, NEWS? Not a weird piece of fiction?

2) It feeds into the "feminists hate Palin b/c she's beautiful" b.s., with Bella Abzug complaining that Palin is an unintelligent beauty queen.

3) It turns all feminists into insulting caricatures. Hillary Clinton is off cackling in a corner, Abzug is described as having a "salty talk," etc.

4) It doesn't actually distinguish who is alive and who is dead, so this piece is really over a lot of people's heads! Sure, most know by now who Geraldine Ferraro is, and Bella Abzug is also a bit familiar, but how many have heard of Barbara Jordan or even Shirley Chisholm? It's sad, but true. So "quoting" people who are alive mixed in with people who are dead is hella weird.

5) Speaking of "quoting" dead people, here's my favorite (and by favorite, I mean disgusting) quote:

"I'd like to throw that Sarah Palin off a Bridge to Nowhere, right into the water," said one-time presidential candidate Shirley Chisholm.

Nice, right? Because that's exactly what I would expect the intelligent, successful, 1st African-American woman elected to congress, generally kick-ass Shirley Chisholm to say about Palin.

Really, if you want to talk about the problems you have with Sarah Palin, do it from your own perspective with your own name. If you want to talk about what she might mean for feminism, do it without insulting feminists or women or Palin. If you want to find out what feminists have to say about Palin, consider actually interviewing one of them!! Is that really so hard to understand?

Read the thing for yourself. Notice that they've changed the title to "Henican: Ghosts of the women's movement haunted by Palin."

Okay, I'm officially pissed off for the rest of the day. Thanks a lot, am New York.

(Cross-posted at Jump off the Bridge.)