*Politics* Seeing the future in Krystal Ball...
Krystal Ball (yes, that really is her real name) is a 28-year-old woman running for Congress in Virginia as a Democrat.
Last week, photos of her showed up online, initially in various right-wing or Republican-friendly blogs. They are of her, at age 22, with her now ex-husband, at a "naughty" Christmas party. I won't link directly to the photos... you can find them yourself easily enough. But there's nothing in them that is any worse than what probably anyone reading this has done when they were younger or after a few drinks (or, in some of our cases, just recently and stone-cold-sober!). Are they "naughty", or "in poor taste"? Maybe, depending on your point-of-view. Are they "sinful", "immoral", or damning enough to disqualify her from office? Absolutely not, in my not-so-humble opinion.
Given that she's running in a strongly Republican district, this has probably sunk her campaign. And, given the statement that she released in response, I think that's a very sad thing. I would strongly recommend reading the entire thing... it is well worth it, as she has some good, smart things to say...
"I don't believe these pictures were posted with a desire to just embarrass me; they wanted me to feel like a whore. They wanted me to collapse in a ball of embarrassment and to hang my head in shame. After all, when you are a woman named Krystal Ball, 28 years old, running for Congress, well, you get the picture. Stripper. Porn star. I've heard them all..."
"The tactic of making female politicians into whores is nothing new. In fact, it happened to Meg Whitman, one of the world's most accomplished business women, just last week. It's part of this whole idea that female sexuality and serious work are incompatible. But I realized that photos like the ones of me, and ones much racier, would end up coming into the public sphere when women of my generation run for office. And I knew that there could be no other answer to the question than this: Society has to accept that women of my generation have sexual lives that are going to leak into the public sphere. Sooner or later, this is a reality that has to be faced, or many young women in my generation will not be able to run for office."
I'll be honest... I hadn't heard of her before reading about his. But after reading that, well, damned if I don't wish I could vote for her!
Let's be honest here... Ms. Ball is one of the youngest people to run for Congress. She's, for lack of a better term, a member of the "Internet" generation. She's, in all likelihood, been online since at least middle school. I would bet she's got a profile on Facebook, has a Twitter account, might use Skype, probably had a silly MySpace page in high school, and maybe has a bunch of old emo posts on Livejournal. In other words, a good bit of information about her life is probably available online. JUST LIKE IT IS FOR ME, AND PROBABLY FOR ALL OF YOU, TOO. Which means that we're going to start seeing a LOT more of this in the future. And it also means that we all need to remember that it's more important to call the people who are in (or running for) office out regarding their ideas about policy and their voting record than it is to call them out because they had a silly night of drinking at a party years ago.
Just my opinion, of course.