I love to watch how all of the lock-step liberals fall down, curl into a fetal position and start shouting gibberish whenever Paglia posts a column here. If you haven't figured out by now that independent thinkers like Paglia and Palin represent true feminism, then you don't understand what feminism is.

Ever notice how whenever Camille starts valorizing some new "feminist icon" she's basically just crushing real hard on that person? Camille needs to stop wrapping up her libidinous nonsense in academic doubletalk and just admit that she wants to fuck Palin.

Sarah is like a Pitbull and the fury and false mockery she arouses in the average pro radical feminist Salon reader is a pleasure to observe. It is good that your world view gets challenged but the sad thing is that because you spend so much time in an insulated world away from such opposing world views you are unable to respond rationally. I find it ironically amusing that the clique that has a fond penchant for using buzz words like 'women's rights' has such a narrow view of such that it likely excludes at least 50% of US women when it comes to how such pro radfems define it. It seems that the class that most likes to rail against 'stereotypes' is in fact the group most guilty of doing just that.

Still... ***"I LOVE the smell of irony in the morning!"

*** = A Puke A Lips Now. ;-)

Stunning how every letter sounds like Camille Paglia's thoughts and ideas about women and feminism. They seem so convenient...and they all praise her. This column reads like a sock puppet convention.

This entire premise of women who live on the "frontier" with radical right wing views as being the "real" feminists is total BS. Instead of sitting on the East coast making all these ridiculous guesses, you might actually go to the West and find out. I'm 5th generation Coloradoan, I also and lived in Southeast Alaska for 8 years. I've fished commercially; salmon, crab and shrimp. With the exception of one, all the women I know from the commercial fishing arena (is that "frontier" enough for you?) are more intelligent, well spoken and smarter than Sarah Palin. They do not espouse right wing religious radical BS,not only because they don't believe in it, but because they know that to survive in Alaska you have to get on with everyone. This is a pure and simple fact of living in Alaska. When you live in a place where the weather can take a life very quickly, you never know when you will need help or from whom, from any part of the political or religious spectrum. It's better not to piss off the neighbor who may save your life.

To say that Sarah Palin's politics and background make her the "new" feminist, when women of all political persuasions in Alaska and throughout the West, have been doing what Sarah has done for years, is completely erroneous. Sarah Palin is a vacuous blab ferret. She is so incredibly self-centered that she spends half of her debate time bragging about being mayor of the meth capitol of Alaska and talking about Joe Six Pack.

(way to get those votes from the 12 step community...)

Regarding your comment about Todd Palin being the "new" type of husband and that the Palin's represent a new paradigm in families; you are pathetically off base.

Where, exactly, have you been for the past 20 years?

OH, that's right...you have been a single woman in academia. I think, Camille, that you need to get out more. Like out west.

My husband is an ex-Bristol Bay fisherman. Believe me, there is an entire fleet of Bristol Bay fishermen who take care of the kids during the off season. All of them can cook, clean, etc. etc. This is not some big phenomenon with the Palins. In fact, there is an entire country full of families like this. The only difference between the Palins and the rest of the country? The rest of the country doesn't make 200K a year to hire help and fly around in a floatplane.

There are many women in the west who are tied to old beliefs and hundred year old patterns of paternalistic religions, paranoia and inbred backwards fear based thinking. (Cue in the beginning banjo cords to "Deliverance" ). That dog won't hunt as the "new" face of feminism no matter how long you keep barking. There is NO WAY, the actual smart women of the west who have fought that ignorant, abusive mindset for their entire lives will let us go backwards. Sarah Palin's aggressive self centeredness, radical right wing religious smugness and deliberate promotion of ignorance as the "new" smart, is a thinly veiled attempt to take away women's rights and it stinks like a boatfull of month old salmon gurry.

I have been reading your stuff for years. I never missed a column. But now I'm done.

Your defense of this simpering demagogue is disgraceful. You are now the perfect embodiment of the "counterintuitive," James Wolcott's word for pundits like Mickey Kaus who use contrarianism merely to give the appearance of independent thinking and cultural relevance.

Underestimate Palin at our peril? Screw you, Camille. It's far more perilous to overestimate her, as you did with George W. Bush back in 2000 and as you are so slavishly doing now. Palin is not smart, not ethical and not presidential. Her diction is not poetic, it is semi-literate, and her ideas are half-baked -- and calling her out on this isn't elitism, it's the recognition that a vice president should have a basic command of standard English and a firm grasp of the issues. Palin has neither, and anyone can see that. Calling her disastrous interviews "brutally edited" is a pathetic rationalization -- this woman will not give a single press conference!

If this is the "new" feminism, then feminism really is dead.

That was an interesting image. Her eye shadow did kind of look like snake scales- or am I thinking of Amy Poehler.