Incensed by those Hillary Clinton nutcrackers, the “Iron my shirt!” catcall, and Tucker Carlson’s claims that he involuntarily crosses his legs whenever he hears the junior senator from New York speak?

Still pissed-off when men gushed all over themselves that the Alaskan governor was one hot babe — and meanwhile, her handlers kept her from answering questions from the media?

Then Amanda Fortini’s recent New York magazine article, “How the Year of the Woman Actually Set Women Back,” is a must-read.

Fortini’s thesis is that feminists might have been concerned by what the media did to Hillary “Bitches Get Stuff Done” Clinton, but it proved to be nothing compared to the ditz-ification of Sarah “I’ll Have To Get Back to You on That One, Katie” Palin. It’s bad to be bitchy, but it’s worse to be an incompetent boob.  “Among the darker revelations of this election is the fact that the vice-grip of female stereotypes remains suffocatingly tight,” Fortini writes.

The author argues that how close Palin came to shattering that ultimate glass ceiling, she set women back  — women in power, especially — with her “dim beauty queen” ways, as “the kind of woman who floats along on a little luck and the favor of men.”  In other words, too ditzy to be Commander-In-Chief.

[Palin's] blithe ignorance extended from foreign policy to the symbolic value of her candidacy. By stepping into the spotlight unprepared, Palin reinforced some of the most damaging and sexist ideas of all: that women are undisciplined in their thinking; that we are distracted by domestic concerns or frivolous pursuits like shopping; that we are not smart enough, or not serious enough, for the important jobs.

Fortini is spot-on with the following argument, which is that women, unfortunately, have to work twice as hard to win the same respect as men and mistakes made by a woman can be more likely to characterize her whole gender, rather than her individually:

It’s true that Sarah Palin is only one woman, and we’ve seen male candidates of questionable readiness, like the oft-mentioned Dan Quayle, and even presidents of questionable intelligence, such as George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, whom Clark Clifford once called “an amiable dunce.” But because so few women are present at the highest levels of government, they carry the burden of representing their gender more so than men. In politics as in business, an unqualified woman does more damage than no women at all. She serves to fortify the stereotypes that the next woman will have to surmount.

It’s hard to parse apart whether Palin herself threw the kindling on the fire for this characterization, so to speak, or if the MSM decided who Palin was going to be and ran with it.  One could argue the case for both points, and feminist blogs will likely be hashing that one out for months to come.

Well done, Fortini.