Blonde on Blonde: Conservative Women, Heart Attacks, and Muggles

Imus kicked off a contentious Blonde on Blonde segment this morning with an inherently contentious question: Are Conservatives too quick to levy the charge of sexism against people who criticize Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann?
 
“Sometimes,” Deirdre Imus conceded. “I think Conservatives can be overly protective of that, and be quick to say sexism because it happens a lot with these attractive women who happen to be Conservatives.”
 
Lis Wiehl noted that the reason Palin and Bachmann are targets, regardless of their politics, is because they are strong women. “They’re going to come back and either laugh it off and have some humor about it,” she said. “Or, they’re not.”
 
Both women have chosen the latter approach, though Deirdre pointed out that Hillary Clinton, a Democrat, was never really able to laugh at herself either. But Lis quickly turned the tables on her sparring partner, noting that Deirdre has, at times, made fun of Clinton’s attire.
 
“When do we ever talk about men like that?” she asked. “What they’re wearing, or their shrill voice?”
 
Deirdre quickly shot back that men are frequently mocked if, like Bachmann’s husband Marcus, they have a particularly effeminate voice. Even so, he’s probably better off being married than not, because a recent study showed that married men receive faster treatment for heart attacks than their single counterparts.
 
And so, Imus wondered, “Is this further proof husbands should just shut up, and listen to everything their wives say?”
 
Not if your wife wants to off you, as Lis noted, prompting Imus to regale the audience with the story of his aunt, who was so convinced her husband was cheating on her that she put huge amounts of saltpeter on his peanut butter sandwiches. The result? “He was walking around with a limp noodle in his shorts,” Imus said.
 
Interesting. “What’s your excuse?” Bernard jumped in.
 
In even more depressing news, rabid Harry Potter fans are seeking psychiatric help to cope with the release of the franchise’s final film, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part Two. While the attachment to a movie can seem ridiculous on its face, Deirdre had sympathy for the miserable Muggles.
 
“It’s this real need in our society to emotionally be attached to fantasy,” she said, adding that people become emotional for reasons good and bad, normal and abnormal. “There’s that emotional need to fill that fantasy. So what are people going to do now that they’ve so filled their lives with it?”
 
Lis, for one, had no patience (or, it seemed, comprehension) for the question at all, saying she doesn’t understand how people can invest themselves so completely in something so trite. “How do people even have time to get emotionally attached to movies?” she said.
 
As the two Blondes bickered, Imus attempted to settle the matter once and for all: “Does it matter how big a man’s penis is?”
 
To which his wife quickly, curiously, emphatically replied, “YES!”
 
-Julie Kanfer