In last weekend’s New York Times’ Magazine, Rebecca Traister offered what may be the most, if not the only, constructive examination of the two female politicians who will now be forever linked by the January 8^th shootings in Tuscon, Arizona.

Whether or not you believe there is any connection between the first assassination attempt ever made on an American female politician and the gun-slinging rhetoric of the first Republican woman ever nominated for the vice presidency, what’s undeniably true is that despite the vast philosophical and intellectual chasms between them, Representative Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona and the former Alaska governor Sarah Palin have something in common: they are both cowgirl politicians. In this, they are symptomatic of the too-narrow ways in which the United States is willing to accept women as leaders.

I’m no fan of Sarah Palin, and I’m too ornery to believe that when you criticize one woman, you criticize them all, but I have to admit it was refreshing to read an article about these two women that didn’t somehow pit one against the other. It’s been such a common thread in the commentary since the shootings, much of it far more subtle than the gunsite image marking Giffords’ district on the Palin campaign’s map, that it was almost in its absence that I sensed it most.

That’s one of the reasons why I’m trying to do the same here. My first instinct was to go glass-half-empty and gripe about the ways the cowgirl politician type left real women, well, hogtied. But maybe that’s ground well-grazed. (Sorry, done now.) Though I hope this is only the first of many steps I take towards fulfilling my New Year’s resolution to improve my sometimes too-sour disposition, I will simply say that I suspect no cowgirl politician, real or iconographic, would occupy a place in the cultural imagination if the average American male did not also find the cowgirl in question sexually attractive.   [Read more...]