On Thursday, Right Wing News published the "20 Hottest Conservative Women In New Media," its fourth installment of such dreck. PoliticOlogy is running down the ten grossest aspects about the list. Click back to go to #s 10-5.
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4) It is straight up astounding that the boys didn't find a way to get Breitbart on here. I'm amazed they didn't dig him up and give him a retroactive two-day sex change (Weekend At Breitbart's) just to qualify for him the Top 10. If Breitbart were alive, he wouldn't have stood for this shit; he would have just put himself on the list and Twitter-bombed anybody who called him on it.
3) Sarah Palin? Really?
2) Number of these conservative women I follow on Twitter: 9, or 45%. Number of male judges I follow on Twitter: 1, or 12.5%. (NB: My conservative reading is fairly wide for a lefty blogger, but not so wide that I can tolerate the far-reaches of the right in more than 140 character increments; see "Akbar, Ali, temper tantrums of.")
I'll self-diagnose with fingers crossed and say I don't follow people on Twitter based upon their looks—Twitter icons make for hard judging anyway—which means: boys, you gotta step it up. The women are beating you in distribution 9:1. A fact which may explain point number one:
1) This is pretty clearly an attempt by a bunch of keyboard-jockeys to cut their more successful female counterparts down to size. The unmistakeable message of "20 Hottest Conservative Women Of New Media" is no matter how good your writing, how salient your points, how substantive your career, you're still just a thing to imagine having sex with, to be rated (and then berated) based only upon male-determined standards of attractiveness. The "20 Hottest" list had a patina of celebration to it—our female bloggers are not only smart but hot!—until this line: "After dropping the low score for each woman, the highest remaining scores made the list," which brought home that this just men reducing women to lustful objects, a process that always speaks more to the contemporary male's fear and loathing of women than their appreciation of them.
Like a typical liberal, I scratch my head at women who forcefully lobby for the conservative cause, mostly because conservativism has at this point become a masquerade for anti-women activity, cloaking attacks on women's health and freedom in the blanket of economic austerity, an act of avoidance so thorough that women now can no longer name the body parts that are being regulated. There's simply no possible argument that women would be better off in a conservative world than a progressive one; in fact, there's dystopian literature that argues convincingly to the absolute contrary.
BUT! There are clearly bloggers out there who see the conservative (or more liberatarian strand thereof) model of free markets and lean government as the fastest route to self-determinacy, and don't see gender as an exclusive political category. Awesome for them, and I'll follow them on Twitter right next to Ozzie Guillen and Fake Umberto Eco. But conservative or no, shouldn't this list piss them off? Shouldn't they be angry that for all their arguments, they're still just a top 20 list to a bunch of glorified frat boys? What's so conservative about undercutting conservative women?
-1) No one's arguing with the inclusion of S. E. Cupp.
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