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Hello and welcome to the Double X Gab Fest for Thursday, September 23rd.

I'm Hannah Rosen, a founding editor of Double X.

I'm here in the Washington studio with the lovely Margaret Talbot of the New Yorker.

Hi, Margaret.

Hi, Hannah.

And we have in New Haven with us, Emily Bazelon, the other editor of double X. Hi, Emily.

Hey, guys. Today we have a rather politics-heavy gab fest, and that's because there's just a lot of interesting stuff going on in politics. We're going to talk about Christine O'Donnell, who came out of nowhere to win the Republican primary in Delaware. And then we're going to talk about Rebecca Traster, who writes for Salon,

her new book called Big Girls Don't Cry, which is an analysis of the 2008 election and the historic moment that that was. And then we're going to talk about a new article by Susan

Faludi in Harper's called American Electra, Feminism's Ritual Matricide. So we have one cheerleader for feminism and one grave digger for feminism today. But let's start with Christine O'Donnell. Wow. I don't really know where to begin. I've actually been steeping myself in O'Donnellisms this morning from her talks on masturbation, which she gave in the early 90s, to her new form of constitutionalism.

And I'm not really sure which one is more interesting.

Or what the relationship between them, although actually we are discovering the relationship between them.

So, Emily, do you want to start by talking about a little bit about her very particular constitutional theories?

Well, yeah, I mean, I feel like it's easy to dismiss Christine O'Donnell as a joke if you're not part of her intended audience. She has

said that masturbation is like adultery and she's against that and she has talked about dabbling

in witchcraft. And those aren't things that we usually associate with serious politicians. And so,

you know, people are having a field day about her. But I think that's just a complete underselling

because underlying her statements about the Constitution and other and her emphasis on liberty,

is this kind of, I think, emerging Tea Party doctrine in which the Constitution

becomes revered, not simply because it's our founding document and has values that we agree on,

but because there's a direct line from it back to the Bible.

Yeah. And if you, sorry, go ahead. No, I was going to say I had a kind of Yahoo moment the

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