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It seems that lately the male/female divide is stronger than ever. While few would argue that Sarah Palin was fit for office, the venomous anti-Palin briefings from the defeated McCain camp are steeped in misogyny. Their election postmortem chiefly consists of a cost analysis of one of the few star turns of their campaign, which was her wardrobe; and the allegation that she once appeared in a hotel room in front of McCain aides "in nothing but a towel".
I'm not quite sure what the implication is here. Would they prefer to have waited for her for hours? A working woman with five children is definitely used to having brief chats in a towel. Nor, I imagine, was it a come-on, which appears to be the implication of these excitable wonks.
Dressed or not dressed, it seems that Palin couldn't please Republican advisers before she even opened her mouth. So why give her the job? Their tokenism was transparent enough without the need for a backlash.
Which leads me to another crime within a crime, the vicious contempt for women demonstrated by Messrs Ross and Brand. In essence, they punished a woman by publicly humiliating her grandfather for the crime of sleeping with one of them. The justification suggested by her occupation as a dancer in the Satanic Sluts rather reminds one of those miserable old judges who criticised rape victims for wearing provocative clothing.
Then there's Mr Justice Eady, the High Court Judge who found in Max Mosley's favour, supporting Mosley's "right" to wrong his wife. Presumably the Human Rights Act was not invented to protect the rich and depraved from publicity, or to add weight to the fatuous argument that one's sexual behaviour sheds no light on one's character.
Even dead national treasures are fair game these days, as long as they're women. Edward Stourton has a pop at the Queen Mother, RIP, in the book he's currently hawking around town, musing that the woman who famously stuck to London during the Blitz was a "ghastly old bigot". Somehow I don't think he'd have come to the same conclusion if he'd met Churchill talking about the Hun. If men don't know how to gossip without being cruel and dishonourable, they should leave it to the women.
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