Governor? I Hardly Know 'Er!

I'm supposed to lead with how a woman's sexual independence is sacrosanct and should never be used as a weapon to impugn her reputation, integrity or fitness for office. But seeing as I'm about to talk about Sarah Palin, the "fitness for office" already has a fat red line through it, so I'm feeling pretty safe. This isn't me making a personal or political judgment either, I'm just reiterating a point she herself made, not unemphatically. Public service or positions of authority aren't for everyone. I give her credit for realizing that a life of making decisions about road maintenance budgets or being the celebrity guest judge at a state fair jam-tasting contest really isn't as exciting as it sounds. OK, the jam-tasting was a bad example because that sounds pretty awesome actually, but the rest of it... Snoozeville, am I right? She did exactly what a 21st century politician should do: use elective office to big-up your Twitter follower numbers and spin it into a reality TV show. Who wants to sit around all day not commuting death sentences when you can be pretending to like camping on TLC? For money! Being commander in chief of the state national guard is fine, but real power is knowing somebody somewhere is asking the girl at the Fantastic Sam's to do their best to replicate your up-do.

So now that we're clear: women having sex is fine. Women in political office having sex is OK to the same extent it's OK for dudes. And if they want to twit-pic some or all of it, you know what, who am I to object? America 2011. Breathe it deep.

I'm not really sure now what I'm supposed to do with the SCANDALOUS!!! revelation that, at some point in her pre-married life, Sarah Palin fucked a basketball player. Author Joe McGinnis spent hours, days, months, years of his life compiling all this information into his new book wherein we learn:

-The image Sarah Palin works very hard to craft and project does not 100% track with who she is as a person.
-Sometimes she's kind of a bitch.
-At one point, she had elective intercourse with another consenting adult, to whom she was not at the time married.

I guess I'm having a hard time seeing how this new information is supposed to do anything. It certainly doesn't disqualify her from the office she's currently not running for, of that at least I am certain.

Maybe I can feel a little bit better about her knowing that she knocked boots (we used to call it that back then, "knocking boots") with a black guy and is therefore, despite her Tea Party associations, not actually a horrible racist? What keeps me from that, though, is the characterization in the article that she had a "fetish" for black guys. I'm not sure how or why that particular word choice was made, but we know that fetishes don't always reflect our personal, intellectual or political positions on a topic. For instance, I don't have any particularly strong feelings (or, frankly, information) one way or the other on the plight of lesbian clowns, I just know they make me really, really happy for very short bursts of time.

So you know, maybe she's not a horrible racist, but one of those nice, well-meaning, self-loathing ones who will occasionally let the object of their irrational fear and social scapegoating time-share in the ole birth canal. I'm hoping if it's OK to let 'em into our vaginas today, we can let 'em into our schools tomorrow. I'm an optimist.

Also, at the time she stalked, ambushed and devoured poor, unsuspecting human giant Glen Rice, she was a sports reporter. She only really did what all sports reporters wish they could do. Most sports reporters are heterosexual men. That's just how it demographically works out. Entertainment industry depilatory technicians, you get a different demographic subset. Some jobs are just like that. But if they were honest, of all that crowd holding voice recorders around Tom Brady after a New England Patriots game, what percentage of those dudes would do anything to fuck that guy? They'd wish they had a vagina first, of course, so it's not in a gay way. But Sarah Palin must have been the envy of every other jock sniffer in the sports information department: she was able to taste just a little bit of that oversized, toned, Byronic, virtuosic, next-level masculinity instead of just ogling it from afar as a pale, hairless echo.

I have more information about Sarah Palin now. But do I know more about her? Can't really say that I do. To be fair, I haven't actually read the as-yet unreleased book. Drawing uninformed conclusions based on scant bits of uncorroborated, anecdotal infotainment snippets isn't the most responsible course of action, but it does seem symmetrical and appropriate in this particular instance.