The view from the UK liberal press

'Fair game?

She's the subject of a porn film and a sex doll has been made in her image. So why hasn't there been a bigger backlash against the misogyny aimed at Sarah Palin'

But as the attacks on her have grown, they have come to seem more and more disturbing.
This is partly because - like many of the sexist attacks on Hillary Clinton during the primaries - they have come from people who would usually consider themselves progressive.
On the liberal Huffington Post website, for instance, one blogger wrote: "Basically, I want to have sex with [Palin] on my Barack Obama sheets while my wife reads from the Constitution." Great.

One person who has been speaking out against the trend is the feminist writer Melissa McEwan, who blogs at Shakesville (other websites that have addressed it are feministing.com and feministe.us).
She's been conducting a "Sarah Palin sexism watch", and says that "the most depressing thing has been to see not just conservatives being misogynist, but progressives too.
People who are ostensibly supposed to be feminist see no problem with saying: 'Well, because I don't agree with her politics, it's OK to use misogyny against her.'"

McEwan defends Palin because she recognises that these attacks have a huge knock-on effect on women in general - as Morgan says: "Even in this case, where I disagree with the politics of the individual, the contempt shown for her, even when it's expressed in the form of a compliment ('I'd like to fuck her'), spills over on to all women."

Taken with the sexist attacks on Clinton, this underlines the fact that any woman entering public life runs the risk of being reduced to the most basic female stereotype that springs to mind - in Clinton's case it was the ball breaker (nutcrackers were produced in her image); in Palin's case, the porn star.

McEwan says she has had emails from women saying: "'You know, I used to think about going into politics, but now I see stuff like this, and I think there's no way.' ... It's basically saying, we're going to require you to have skin so thick that you're going to have to put up with this - and that's a misogyny tax. You're literally being taxed for being a woman."
She has also looked at the treatment of Margaret Thatcher and Geraldine Ferraro during their campaigns and found similar incidents, although "it wasn't so pornified".

from The Guardian, Friday October 24 2008