Picture in your minds for a moment a geriatric Playboy bunny, her skin wrinkled like a dried prune and showing the ravages of the aging process, wearing her tattered Playboy bunny outfit being held together with safety pins and duct tape and a rip and a tear away from a full-scale wardrobe malfunction, subserviently behaving like a house slave serving at the pleasure of the masters.
That is the very essence of Phyllis Schlafly, an oxymoronic woman who made a career of telling women not to have careers and to say home barefoot and pregnant, serenely oblivious to the harsh day-to-day realities around them. And for every time women have made significant progress, there have been women like Mrs. Schlafly working overtime to oppose it.
Certainly, she does not represent all that is best about women-- and certainly she does not represent women's fulfilled potential. What she really represents is a form of objectified trophy wife, an appendage with a marriage license relegated to the kitchen, where she is to be seen and not heard.
Worse, like Dr. Laura and Sarah Palin after her, Schlafly preaches so-called family values, but their actions demonstrate anything but a commitment to family. They sit in judgment of others, preaching but not necessarily practicing what they preach as gospel.
And as Adele Stan astutely points out in the Huffington Post, "Phyllis Schlafly has long been the target of sexism in her own party. One of the conservative movement's foremost intellects, Schlafly is rarely celebrated as such, and instead finds herself relegated to the G.O.P.'s ladies' auxiliary."
Let's face the facts, folks. McCain may have had Sarah Palin forced down his throats by those within the GOP. It's a de facto shotgun wedding, a match made in hell based on political calculations, and now they are reaping what they sowed. And as Gloria Steimen recently pointed out, "Sarah Palin is like Phyllis Schlafly, only younger."
Remember that political button we feminists once wore that stated "Who is Phyllis Schlafly and why is she saying these things about us?"
Substitute "Sarah Palin" for "Phyllis Schlafly" and then you'll get the basic idea.
As a fellow feminist once said, "Phyllis...it rhymes with 'syphillis.'"
A choice, not an echo?
Sometimes, I wonder if female chauvinist sows do wear lipstick after all.
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