And since when does criticizing the behaviour of a virulent anti-feminist fascist patriarchy-supporter, who happens to be a woman, break any “oath of feminist solidarity”?
Do all feminists need to agree on everything?
Are the actions of fascist-misogynists inherently beyond feminist critique when they happen to sport vaginas?
Are any comments made not entirely in her favor here immediately classified as rape-apologia?

What is at issue isn’t that her photo was unassailable from every perspective, it’s that a condemnation was issued from, and blown insanely out of proportion by, a patriarchal misogynist media, and that it was leveled on solely misogynist premises to misogynist ends.

Taking it as given that the women-hater media machine is completely out of line, can’t we still criticize McCain up the wazooo for her anti-feminist beliefs, as well as openly consider possible anti-feminist and patriarchy-internalizing implications of her amplifying her cleavage, making a cutesy hetero-normative sexy face and posting it on the interbutts, even if that implication would be so banal as not to warrant discussion had the whole thing not been exploded by the media?

I agree that a world in which there’s no sex class and both men and women are equally free to abstain from or choose freely to display their sexuality is at this point (and maybe always will be) entirely imaginary.

But to me that doesn’t mean we can know that the photo is an artifact of McC’s being part of the sex class. (Although if I had to bet I’d come down on the side of “probably.”)

Because in the imaginary world above, the default is as likely to be *both* men nor women enjoying displaying sexuality as *neither* enjoying it. The key difference would be egalitarian view of sexuality distributed across men and women, not removed from both. Looking at animal behavior, it appears that showcasing oneself for those one finds attractive is natural behavior. If we knew for sure the default would be the no sexy twitpics, then sure, we could say that McC’s pose is necessarily an artifact of the patriarchy.

The reason I’d say “probably” is that the photograph corresponds generally to a patriarchy-acceptable one and if it looks like a duck, etc. But the nuance is that such a photo could still exist in the post-patriarchy and be part of a free marketplace of such photos existing irrespective of gender. And therefore there’s a chance, if slight, that the motivation behind it isn’t to comply with sex class norms, but simply to have fun — a motivation that I think is a fairly patriarchy-free one.

The reason female worms have it better off than female humans may be because there, um, are no female worms. All worms are hermaphrodites.

Actually, there are many types of worms that are not hermaphroditic and have separate male and female sexes.