Vanity, All Is Vanity

Blah blah blah Tina Fey blah blah Vanity Fair blah Maureen Dowd blah blah blah sucks blah scar blah blah weight blah blah "showing tit" blah blah blah.

Anyway! Yes, Maureen Dowd has some fucked-up business that she needs to attend to, seeing as how she's swallowed the whole "being a powerful woman is about lipstick and heels" thing like a hungry bluegill going for a worm, and if her previous work did not convince you that she lives in this state of perpetual insecurity re: Whether Maureen Dowd Is Performing Gender Correctly and/or Whether Someone Else Performs Gender Better than Maureen Dowd, this will. ("Overcompensating," I think, is the term one uses.) It is basically about how Tina Fey used to be so hideous that no one could look directly at her for fear of being blinded, but then became pretty so that everyone could love her, including Maureen Dowd. Because you can't be a woman, you see, unless you give dudes boners. You know who gives dudes boners? Maureen Dowd! She would like to tell you all about the boners she gives dudes, because there are lots of them, you see, because she's really pretty and she wears these high hee -- hey, wait, where are you going?

Anyway again, did you know that Tina Fey used to weigh as much as I do? Also, she was alive during the early '90s, and therefore had a terrible haircut! Look at how fat and ugly she is:

WHAT A FAT. WHY IS SHE SUCH AN UGLY FAT? GO BACK TO YOUR FAT CAMP, YOU GIANT FAT.

However, seeing as everyone else in the entire universe has already formed and published an opinion on this, I can probably skip the question of whether Tina Fey was ever unattractive (answer: no, but the '90s were - dig up pictures of yourself in your Before Sunrise giant bohemian smock dress or rebellious Jordan Catalano pageboy for confirmation) and focus on one entirely relevant and interesting bit of the piece:

Fey saw an entertainment reporter on TV say that Palin had been gracious toward Fey, but Fey hadn’t been gracious toward Palin. “What made me super-mad about it,” Fey says later, “was that it seemed very sexist toward me and her. The implication was that she’s so fragile, which she is not. She’s a strong woman. And then, also, it was sexist because, like, who would ever go on the news and say, ‘Well, I thought it was sort of mean to Richard Nixon when Dan Aykroyd played him,’ and ‘That seemed awful mean to George Bush when Will Ferrell did it.’ And it’s like, No, that’s not the thing. This is a comedy sketch on a comedy show.” “Mean,” we agreed, was a word that tends to get used on women who do satirical humor and, as she says, “gay guys.”

“I feel clean about it,” she says. “All these jokes were fair hits.”

This is very true, and something I hadn't really thought of before. So, um, neat. Careful readers may notice some not-so-subtle effort on Dowd's part to identify herself with Fey. She's not mean - you're a big sexist! Etcetera. The key difference is that with Fey, the hits are fair.