Michelle Malkin describes the stages of leftist treatment of conservative women, drawing on her own experience, that of Condoleeza Rice, Laura Bush, Anne Coulter, and others, as being currently played out with Sarah Palin:
The first stage of Conservative Female Abuse by the Left is infantilization. Right-wing women canโt possibly believe what they believe about the sanctity of life, self-defense, free markets, or foreign policy. They must be submissive little dolls of the White Male Hierarchy. . . .
The second stage of CFA is sexualization. A conservative woman is not merely a sellout. She is an intellectual prostitute. Unable or unwilling to argue with them on the merits, detractors resort to mocking the physical appearance of their ideological opponents in skirts and denigrating them with vulgar epithets. . . .