That made me think about the old political phrase "a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty." It was an attack, not a description of the perfect woman. Here's David Brock explaining the phrase:
If [Clarence] Thomas was completely innocent, Anita Hill would have had to be insane to go on national television and tell a lie under oath. Grasping for an explanation of the inexplicable, doing everything I could to ruin Hill's credibility, I took a scattershot approach, dumping virtually every derogatory—and often contradictory—allegation I had collected on Hill from the Thomas camp into the mix.... She was, in my words, "a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty."...What works as an attack on a woman's fitness for public life is also a description of the perfect woman.
Some conservative friends... did warn me quietly that the "little bit nutty and a little bit slutty" line, a reference to the classic nuts-and-sluts defense in sexual harassment cases, was in poor taste, or at least politically foolish, in that it handed my critics a club with which to beat me. The phrase certainly stuck, and it would be unearthed and brandished in my face in all future controversies over my work... I had fallen in with radicals of the Gingrich-Limbaugh stripe. After all, how far was the "nutty/slutty" line from Newt's rants about the "grotesque" and "sick" Democrats, or Limbaugh's slurs on blacks and women?
My Imaginary Reader gasps and splutters out: Different times, different parties, different purposes.
Have I made you uncomfortable enough to call me crazy?
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