The Worst Kind of Woman

Far away, hard to remember now, in Berkeley in the '70's, I worked for an eminent psychologist, an exquisitely sensitive man with the knowledge to make sense of the nuances and shades he saw around him.

We talked a lot over drinks in those far away days, and it was all very pre-PC. I doubt a married 50 year-old these days would spend so much time in public bars with a 25-year old assistant, and it's too bad because what I needed in those days was a father who could speak my language -- the language of exquisite sensitivities and the desire to figure them out.

That's what I got over drinks in those days, and it's all I got or even wanted.

(One of the beauties of innocence, and its grown-up cousin chastity, is that whe you have either one, you can go where you want and do what you want to do, confident that you will not transgress. Heavens, in those careful days, I was seldom even aware of being tempted ...)

But the point of the story is not how I gained the benefit of these observations, but one of the observations itself. For my friend had studied personality development in young college women. Without knowing whether some wily fox had selected such an enticing study cohort, I'm pretty sure the study was carried out with little dalliance. It was the '50's after all and the ladies in question were privileged. One would have been in trouble trifling with them ...

So we talked often about this study, and I don't remember the details very well because I was so embroiled in the same issues for myself, and not at a sheltered Eastern women's college either.

But there was the occasional observation that surprised me because it answered a question I had not yet dreamt of asking.

So one day -- and remember again that this was long before PC had cleansed our language of some many comparisons, the invidious as well as the profound -- my friend commented: "She is the worst kind of woman."

I had no idea what it meant, and today I don't remember whether we were discussing someone we knew or someone caught in that study like a venomous bug in amber. So all I remember is the phrase, with its intimation that women were given to certain kinds of personal vileness, different perhaps from those that afflicted men and ... and perhaps this was the most trenchant part of the observation ... failings that could be recognized. Studied, catalogued and recognized.

No one thinks like this any more; or perhaps just the more retrograde religious people do. But it's a deep observation and I wish it were more in the public domain these days.

Because one of the "worst" traits of any human is the failure to appreciate the limits of one's authority; and one of the worst traits of women who have been out of the job market for an extended period is to fail to appreciate that there are things they don't know.

Sarah Palin toddled from the soccer field to the governor's mansion, surrounded by family. And when she got there, she used the constitutional powers of the governor to protect her family, with all the passion of a hockey mom rooting from the sidelines.

And that's not the rules of the game; it's not how the game is played, mostly because it's wrong. Political authority can't be used for private gain, not legitimately in a democracy.

In the corruption quagmire of Alaska, it could have seemed to Sarah Palin that getting a temperamental cop fired was not corruption since it didn't involved monetary gain for her personally. That's what she says now anyway, although the idea is a laughable as a point of public ethics.

And even if you believe that it's true -- and Palin's record for truth-telling requires one to deeply discount everything she says -- even if it is true, this is just one more example that the woman is vicious, but not too bright. And she is by no means a fine observer because she still thinks the goal of being in the public domain is to increase and protect her own family, and spread abroad the glory of their family vision. A hockey mom, from a state that is a cesspool of corruption, laying down the law on issues private and public from her self-chosen position at the sidelines of a child's game.

I don't remember what my friend thought was the worst kind of woman, but I think I have found a vivid example.

Lack of Reflectivity

It's hard for a certain kind of woman -- MY kind of woman -- to write about Sarah Palin without being catty. Women are much more sensitive than men to the power urges of the women in our midst, and Sarah Palin gives off massive surges of will-to-power. What else she does -- hence our negative response -- is pretends it isn't there; the will-to-power, that is.

This is foremost a matter of grooming, and perhaps Christian (or Muslim or Jewish Orthodox) grooming at that. So much of modern American womanhood has gone over to the style of the well-preserved hooker that it's surprisingly relaxing to observe a woman who projects a controlled attractiveness instead. She looks sexy but not-for-you. And why should she be "for you," with her five children? She looks like she likes to be sexy for her husband, and thus begins to fulfill damaged desires of many an American spouse of either gender.

I like it myself but I don't think it's real. I know no one her age, with a full-time job and five children, who looks like that; primarily because no one has the time, with all those commitments, to keep looking like that. Sarah Palin is at the age where stress and lack of sleep show on your face. It did on Meryl Streep; it did on Elizabeth Dole. There's a Dorian Gray quality to Palin's attractiveness that invites darker thoughts by those of us who have been there.

How do you get thin like that after 5 children? Not so easy. Regular exercise and diet? Doubtful. Bulimia? I would think so. The only other person I've ever known who was so perfectly, stylishly thin (and I lived in Los Angeles for a long time so I had plenty of people to observe) maintained her figure, and a million other secrets, by bulimia. Lovely young woman, but horribly conflicted, particularly about her own inability to handle her self-doubts without self-disgust.

Maybe it's not bulimia (and maybe it is) but these are the kind of thoughts that rise inevitably in your mind watching Sarah Palin in an interview -- control freak, manipulator, secret-keeper.

And then you watch the men around you fail to be uneasy, and you add a phrase, "man-eater," because it fits so well. Considering the world problems she has declared herself ready to resolve, she spends a wildly-disproportionate amount of time focused on disarming you instead, protecting herself, spreading her pheromones around the unnervingly large space she seems to need.

I can't help being catty. There's something wrong with this woman; and the worst thing about it is that so many people can't see it. She is just the one though to do a terrible amount of damage to the people around her before she does -- if this is even in the cards for her -- become aware of her willfulness and take stock of what it means.

In this she seems so much like John McCain, who survived terrible privations and did not learn from them what everyone else in the '60's learned: The Viet Nam war couldn't ever have been won, and one owed fidelity, especially after such sufferings, to the wife of one's youth.

If elected, what would these two do to make over the world in the image of their un-self-reflective dreams?