Actually, forget what I was saying about Uma Thurman being a "poor dear"

The woman who really deserves our sympathy is former Reagan speechwriter (and recurrent fawner over his legacy) Peggy Noonan. You see, it seems that the dainty Miss Noonan's dignity was violated recently by an experinece being searched at an airport.

I'll let Miss Noonan's words, and what seems to me their undoubted subtext, speak for themselves.

It was like a 1950s women's prison movie. I got to be the girl from the streets who made a big mistake; she was the guard doing intake. "Name's Veronica, but they call me Ron. Want a smoke?" Beeps and bops, her pointer and middle fingers patting for explosives under the back of my brassiere; the wand on and over my body, more beeps, more pats. The she walked wordlessly away. I looked around, slowly put down my arms, rearranged my body. For a moment I thought I might plaintively call out, "No kiss goodbye? No, 'I'll call'?" But they might not have been amused. And actually I wasn't either.

Amused? No. But you couldn't wait to get to your hotel room to see if they had Showtime, so you could watch The L Word in private, could you, Peggy?

Being (publically) a lady of dignity, Miss Noonan can only react with Molly Ringwald-style slack-jawed mortification to such things that offend her sense of propriety. (At least without the presence of her big strong Mr. President Man to shield her.) Things like...

I experience it when I see blaring television ads for birth-control devices, feminine-hygiene products, erectile-dysfunction medicines. I experience it when I'm almost strip-searched at airports. I experience it when I listen to popular music, if that's what we call it. I experience it when political figures are asked the most intimate questions about their families and pressed for personal views on sexual questions that someone somewhere decided have to be Topic A on the national agenda in America right now.

I declare, these Cotillions are so drainin'. Because you know, those things just aren't talked about in polite society (do try not to spill your tea, dear). And yes, Peggy, if music is popular, we in the reality-based community do indeed call it popular music, whether we like it or not. I don't like Madonna's latest stuff (that I have heard) very much, but it's selling.

And as The Revealer (from which blog I learnt about Noonan's near-mute, defenseless suffering because she is merely a woman after all) reminds us,

disregard the seeming contradiction of a conservative columnist's newfound modesty over the very same sex issues that propelled her favored candidates to office.