That Is Not What I Meant At All Poem by gershon hepner

“That is not what I meant at all, ”
J. Alfred Prufrock said,
and feminists recall
now Sarah’s at the head.
The fact that she has got
a womb does not make her
a feminist; she’s hot,
which they do not prefer.
Lipstick, God and guns
aren’t what a feminist
desires; as for buns,
they are not on the list.
Allow the inner dog
to bark, don’t let the male in,
make sure you catalogue
the faults of Sarah Palin.

William Kristol (“Both Sides Now, ” NYT, September 15,2008) writes about the rejection of Sarah Palin, John McCain’s choice as Vice-Presidential candidate, by feminists:
And he chose as his running mate Sarah Palin, one of the least-known outsiders to be picked in modern times, and the first woman on a Republican ticket. This in turn sent other establishments into a frenzy. The media establishment was horrified. Its members expressed their disapproval. Palin became more popular. They got even more frustrated. And so we had the spectacle last week of ABC’s Charlie Gibson, one of the most civil of the media bigwigs, unable to help himself from condescending to Palin as if he were a senior professor forced to waste time administering a Ph.D. exam to a particularly unpromising graduate student. As for real university professors, especially the academic-feminist establishment, they’re even more upset. Wendy Doniger of the University of Chicago’s Divinity School wrote last Tuesday of Palin: “Her greatest hypocrisy is in her pretense that she is a woman. The Republican Party’s cynical calculation that because she has a womb and makes lots and lots of babies (and drives them to school! wow!) she speaks for the women of America, and will capture their hearts and their votes, has driven thousands of real women to take to their computers in outrage. She does not speak for women; she has no sympathy for the problems of other women, particularly working-class women.” Doniger might have been further discombobulated to read a report the next day by McClatchy’s Erika Bolstad about a McCain-Palin rally: “For most women attending the event — many waited two hours in line to get into a field house at Franklin & Marshall College — Palin was a bigger draw than McCain.... Women wore pink ‘Hot Chicks Vote Republican’ buttons; one hoisted a McCain placard bearing a hand-scrawled message: ‘Guns, God, Lipstick.’ ” “Guns, God, Lipstick”? This is what feminism has come to? One can only imagine how many feminist comp lit professors are walking around campus, muttering to themselves the lines from T. S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”: “That is not what I meant at all. That is not it, at all.”

9/15/08