Christine O or Pristine the Virgin Queen as she’s dubbed in some corners of the Internets, is the new “it” girl.\u00a0 Since her surprise victory in the Republican senate primary in Delaware, she’s all over the headlines the youtube and the cable.<\/p>\n
We see and hear her in many incarnations.\u00a0 There she is in the 1990’s on Politically Incorrect<\/em><\/a>, a woman in her thirties who still looks childlike and has big curly hair leftover from her college days in the 1980’s, promoting chastity and discussing her brief flirtation with Satan.\u00a0 In more modern times, when asked about the whisper campaign started by her supporters<\/a> that her primary opponent is secretly gay, O’Donnell replies that the opponent needs to “put his man-pants on.”<\/p>\n You can listen to a radio interview<\/a> where a conservative announcer loses patience as she insists that in a previous senate bid, she\u00a0 “tied” Biden in two counties that she clearly lost.<\/p>\n Post primary, she’s been handled, dressing now in Palin red and even adding eyeglasses to give her gravitas.\u00a0 She skips Meet the Press<\/em>, but stops in to visit the friendlier Scarborough Country<\/em> because she had “business in New York.”\u00a0 Pristine has now been parodied on SNL and been the subject of countless masturbation and witchcraft jokes.<\/p>\n Is it ok to laugh or should we be taking her more seriously?<\/p>\n After all Palin was funny at first.\u00a0 Remember the good old days when she spectacularly messed up with Katy Couric and Charlie Gibson?\u00a0 She might not have cost McCain the presidency; his complete befuddlement at the economic collapse probably sealed his doom, but she certainly didn’t help.\u00a0 She should have retreated after the election, but instead she quit her job, went to work for Fox, got a fat advance on her book published by another Murdoch entity, and is now being touted as a likely contender for the Republican presidential nomination.<\/p>\n The joke has worn thin, and those of us who believe in evolution, like social security and understand that regulating health insurance companies does not mean “death panels,” are all a bit nervous and have stopped laughing.\u00a0 Even if she can’t get elected, Sarah can certainly rile up her base.\u00a0 Does Pristine represent a similar threat?<\/p>\n Probably not.<\/p>\n Is it because unlike Palin, O’Donnell has never actually been elected to anything?\u00a0 Nope.\u00a0 Is it because she’s dumber than Palin, more gaffe prone?\u00a0 Doubtful.<\/p>\n It’s because she’s an unmarried woman with no kids who talks about chastity and decries masturbation while shaking her long locks and looking like an overage cheerleader.<\/p>\n There’s something just too weirdly jarring about this.\u00a0 All we can do is wonder about what’s really in her dirty drawer or what led her while in college to give up her sexy ways and become a celibacy crusader.\u00a0 \u00a0Lots of spiritually seeking young people get religion.\u00a0 Some may become missionaries in foreign lands, feed the hungry, go into seminary or join a religious order, but few translate their fervor into founding an organization devoted to promoting abstinence.<\/p>\n Maybe something happened.\u00a0 It’s hard to look at her, especially in those clips from the 90’s when the bloom was still on the rose, and not wonder.\u00a0 Was there some football hero she had a crush on who got her drunk and cruelly pimped out an incapacitated Pristine to his friends?\u00a0 Was she too guilt-ridden and perhaps disturbed by her own vulnerability to call it rape?\u00a0 Was her decision to be chaste a way of empowerment, keeping herself from ever feeling so used again?<\/p>\n That’s where my mind goes.\u00a0 Others may have their own theories.\u00a0 You can’t help having a theory.\u00a0 Closet lesbian?\u00a0 Out and out hypocrite?\u00a0 Hormonally challenged?\u00a0 Tease?<\/p>\n Rush Limbaugh and Jon Stewart both think her opponents will make too much out of Pristine’s anti-masturbation stand and the voters won’t care.\u00a0\u00a0 They may be right in that the jokes will become silly and her opponent can’t run on being the pro-jerk-off candidate.<\/p>\n But maybe Limbaugh is just trying to change the subject, canny enough to know that there’s something about Pristine that doesn’t make sense and won’t resonate with voters.<\/p>\n Palin may be a phony who uses her kids as election props, but she has kids to use.\u00a0 Most of us don’t buy her narrative, but her audience does.\u00a0 She’s a “mom”.\u00a0 She’s not only a “mom,” but a “special needs mom.”\u00a0 One of her sons is a veteran.\u00a0 Her daughter made a mistake, but chose life and responsibility.<\/p>\n Palin gets that her audience isn’t anti-sex. They simply believe sex should be heterosexual and within the context of marriage.\u00a0 Outside of that it’s sin.\u00a0 They understand that human being are prone to sin and no one is perfect.\u00a0 Thus Sarah’s daughter Bristol can be forgiven as long as she’s learned her lesson and has the baby.\u00a0 An abortion would have been unforgivable, but “choosing life” is brave and they love her for it.\u00a0 Doesn’t matter that who knows who is actually raising the baby while Bristol dances with the stars and collects fees for lecturing other teens.\u00a0 Doesn’t matter that we were treated to a fake engagement during the Republican National Convention.\u00a0 It’s the myth that counts.\u00a0 Sarah’s “momma grizzly” rhetoric hits home especially for woman who’ve succeeded at little else in their lives besides having children.<\/p>\n Pristine is something else.\u00a0 There’s a strangeness to a woman who extols traditional values but is unmarried, childless and chaste at forty-one.\u00a0 We could take it if she looked more like the repressed lesbian\/nun types with which we are familiar. \u00a0\u00a0If she resembled your mustached, never married great-aunt, the one who sacrificed her youth taking care of her widowed mother while buying generous gifts for her nieces and nephews, voters might buy it. They’ve heard that story.\u00a0 They could even feel a little sorry for poor Pristine, too plain to ever catch a man.\u00a0 But the problem is Christine is just too sexy for her celibacy.<\/p>\n She comes off at best as a scold, a high-maintenance prude who never met a man who could measure up to her ideal husband — Jesus Christ.<\/p>\n There are of course women who do marry Christ.\u00a0 They are called nuns.\u00a0 But they choose the veil and not politics and cut off their locks.\u00a0 Pristine is a Catholic while the majority Tea Partiers including Palin are Protestants.\u00a0 Catholicism despite JFK and Joe Biden is still viewed by many “real” Americans as a foreign church.\u00a0 The scandals haven’t helped. Joan of Arc may have led France, but there is no American mythological equivalent and real America disdain the French.\u00a0 Our nuns may be beautiful like Ingrid Bergman or even cute and feisty and fly like Sally Fields, but they don’t rule.\u00a0 Moms rule.<\/p>\n Real American women leaders aren’t nuns, they’re moms.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Christine O or Pristine the Virgin Queen as she’s dubbed in some corners of the Internets, is the new “it” girl.\u00a0 Since her surprise victory in the Republican senate primary in Delaware, she’s all over the headlines the youtube and the cable. We see and hear her in many incarnations.\u00a0 There she is in the … Continue reading The Deification of Momdom or Why Christine O’Donnell is No Sarah Palin<\/span>