Hm, this makes an interesting point — that the Vanity Fair profile of Sarah Palin is unfair (and may cause feminists to begrudgingly defend her) because it focuses disproportionately on her parenting.

People tend to be far more tolerant of sexism—or, sometimes, entirely blind to it—when they dislike the woman it is leveled at, as Hillary Clinton experienced. … in this case, it is a problem that Palin’s parenting is considered a flaw at all.

I actually thought the profile was really great, and disagree with the idea that Palin’s performance as a mother and wife should be off-limits — because she herself has placed such an emphasis on those aspects of her identity. And this is pretty unique to Palin’s rhetoric, at least so far as I can tell, and it means the Hillary Clinton comparison is sort of unfair. Palin’s constant talk about family values and “hockey moms” and “mama grizzlies” and all that makes her parenting, I think, a fair subject for criticism. She defined the terms on which she’d be criticized. You can’t even argue that it’s unfairly conflating the personal with the political, because that’s what she does every day. The article points out that nobody ever stopped to criticize any male politician’s dad credentials, but the point is that male politicians rarely run on a dad platform.

Also really telling is what the profile’s author, Michael Joseph Gross, has said about the process of writing it:

I couldn’t believe these stories either when I first heard them, and I started this story with a prejudice in her favor. I have a lot in common with this woman. I’m a small-town person, I’m a Christian, I think that a lot of her criticisms of the media actually have something to them. And I think she got a bum ride, but everybody close to her tells the same story.

(Source: equalitymyth)