Sisterhood Farcissism

by digby

Adele Stan makes a good point in this piece about Sarah Plain’s so-called feminism. It’s always irked me that she derides a movement that made it possible for her to become the success she is today, but there’s more to it than that. She picks and chooses from the things from which she has personally benefited and tosses aside all those from which she personally has no need —- like unfair pay and sexual violence. As Stan also points out, she isn’t operating as an empowered woman in a man’s world. She just a simple narcissist:

I have seen Palin derided in sexist terms, and called on progressives to cut the crap when I see it coming from our own. But I wouldn’t count on Palin to step up for a liberal feminist — unless Palin found a way to make it about Palin herself.

“There is a narcissism in our leaders in Washington today,” Palin writes in America By Heart (via the Huffington Post). “There’s a quasi-religious feeling to the message coming from them. They are trying to convince us that not only are they our saviors, but that we are our saviors… as candidate Obama proclaimed on Super Tuesday 2008, ‘We are the ones we’ve been waiting for, we are the change that we seek.'”

Yet it’s Palin who has a so-called reality show, “Sarah Palin’s Alaska,” based around her own life in her home state. It’s hard to get more narcissistic than that. And it’s Palin who wants to reshape feminism in her own image — to hell with any woman who’s faced a different form of sexism than she has.

I cringe when I see some of the things people say about her too, and have also called out progressives for being jackasses. But that doesn’t make her a heroine either, especially when she’s so incredibly disrespectful and arrogant to her fellow females in similar situations.

Stan calls it “farcissism” which I think is just perfect.