As far as I can tell the male American world now divides into two parties: those with crushes on Sarah Palin versus those with crushes on Tina Fey.

What makes this spectacle especially fascinating is its hall-of-mirrors quality. Superficially, it appears that Tina Fey’s popularity is derived from Sarah Palin’s. Tina Fey rose to her current peak with her uncanny Palin imitation. However, if you look more closely into who the two women essentially are, ambiguity sets in and one has to ask who is imitating what?

Clearly the symbol language around Sarah Palin – the moose hunting pitbull in lipstick – evokes an emerging archetype I’ve been calling the Ass-Kicking Woman: the woman who uses force and charm together in such a way that people do exactly what she wants in full knowledge that they are doing exactly what she wants… and they would have it no other way. (This is the ideal by which I am raising my daughters.)

However, is this essentially who Sarah Palin is, or is she simply playing games with disguises? Isn’t she just obediently following a fashion set by the left (similar to the past fashions of civil rights and environmentalism), mothballing her brass buttons and navy broadcloth and dressing up her complacent self in daring wolfskins? And what’s under those wolfskins? Wow, look: an essentially submissive, sheep-like attitude toward a thoroughly obsolete retro 20th Century paradigm which sees resolutions of conflict only in the good guys annihilating or dominating the bad guys… Wolfskin under sheepskin under wolfskin…

Tina Fey, on the other hand uses a mixture of satire and charm to advance what appears to be her own causes, using costumes to expose the costuming of her ludicrous counterpart. In a very real way, then, couldn’t it be said that it is Sarah Palin who is imitating Tina Fey? Essences who plays games with surface as exercise of essence. It’s almost as if artificiality is its nature. What is this?

These are interesting questions, but in the end there’s a much more interesting question to contemplate: The whole world agrees that the Ass-Kicking Woman is compelling, or, to put it in plainer language: she’s hot.

And check it out! The catsuit of this Halloween: dressing up to imitate Tina Fey imitating Sarah Palin. Mind-blowingly perfect.

To my lucid-schizophrenic sensibilities (which can’t help but think it can divine the zeitgeist from mass poetic projections – especially when these projections are clearly sexualized, since after all sexual fetishization is essentially desublimated poetic experience), this signals a very important shift in attitude toward power. Recall again the 20th Century paradigm of political domination and its chief virtue: overwhelming force. The 20th Century commander almost couldn’t feel his power at all without the overcoming of resistance. If the conquered did not hate being conquered, but instead felt something bordering on gratitude for being subdued… were they really conquered? Was it an act of power or was it wimpy diplomacy? This ideal is clearly exhibited in second-wave feminism, a movement of intensely and intentionally unattractive women who threatened to dominate the world and purge it of everything a man could love. These were women who hated femininity in the name of femininity, and who couldn’t imagine exercising every power at her disposal to both dominate and serve. No: she was a 20th century woman, still so deeply dominated by the patriarchal paradigm that she had to win by the man’s rules using the man’s tools. The game of culture, however is not a game played by the rules, but rather a game played over rules themselves. As long as a player accepts the rules of the game as given, that player is losing the game. As long as the player is ashamed of her ownmost virtues she is hobbled. The game is the overcoming of shame.

Does this mean men will now be eclipsed by women? Is there a masculine counterpart to the Ass-Kicking Woman? The power struggle is not man versus woman. How nonsensical was that framing? Loyalty to one’s sex against the other sex? The new struggle as I see it is between androgynous complexity versus vulgar sexual unambiguousness. It is one of cultural humanity who accepts its own artificiality and self-responsibility as its true nature versus primitive humanity who helplessly and blindly submits to isolated instinct after instinct, whether the instinct is the market instinct or the vengeance instinct or the man-worship instinct…

I guess I’m a sexist of some sort.

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Natural woman is unnatural.