This has to be the strangest blog kerfluffle in history.

Ann Althouse wrote a post in which she made the mistake of trying to reason with an outraged liberal feminist who took offense at Ann’s comments about a picture of lefty bloggers snapped after their lunch with former President Clinton. Althouse subtly tried to make a point about the female bloggers arrayed around Clinton like flies drawn to a honeypot when into the comments section, Jessica from the blog Feminsting showed up to identify herself in the photo (she’s standing directly in front of Clinton) while availing herself of the opportunity to take a completely off the wall shot at Althouse:

“The, um, ‘intern’ is me. It’s so nice to see women being judged by more than their looks. Oh, wait…”

In a somewhat jocular fashion, Althouse responded:

“Well, Jessica, you do appear to be ‘posing.’ Maybe it’s just an accident.”

Althouse, who blogs from the Moonbat Capitol of the World (Madison, Wisconsin) should have known better. Her half jest was met with a lecture by Jessica:

It’s a picture; people pose. And I’m not sure I understand your logic anyway. If I “pose” for a picture (as opposed to sulking and hunching over?) then I deserve to be judged for my looks? I don’t see anyone talking sh*t about the other bloggers smiling pretty for the camera.

Cry Victim! And let slip the blogs of war!

Althouse put on her lawyer’s hat and once again, tried reasoning with the unreasonable:

Jessica: I’m not judging you by your looks. (Don’t flatter yourself.) I’m judging you by your apparent behavior. It’s not about the smiling, but the three-quarter pose and related posturing, the sort of thing people razz Katherine Harris about. I really don’t know why people who care about feminism don’t have any edge against Clinton for the harm he did to the cause of taking sexual harrassment seriously, and posing in front of him like that irks me, as a feminist. So don’t assume you’re the one representing feminist values here. Whatever you call your blog….

For the rest, you’ll have to follow various links to lefty blogs to get a sense how this dispute has descended into the most vile personal attacks. The episode morphed from a discussion about Clinton’s well known treatment of women and how feminists have been hypocrites for their unwavering support of his satyristic behavior into attacks on righty bloggers for what liberals see as hypocrisy about emphasizing female breasts. Atrios (predictably) pasted a picture of Helen Reynolds on his blog in one such attempt. And Jane Hamsher weighed in with equal predictability, attacking conservatives for…something…”

The obsession by creepy wingnuts with oggling Bill Clinton’s jock and any boobs that get within 60 feet of it continues. Mrs. Snickering Right-Wing Beat-Off hoists herself into the fray, but one has to wonder looking at the bizarre and disturbing photo above — are her agressions displaced?

The photo is of lovely Pamela of Atlas Shrugs and Glenn Reynolds at the PJ Media kickoff luncheon.

And then Hamsher got to the nub of the matter; conservatives are sexually repressed:

These people make the 19th Century Viennese look sexually well-adjusted.

A perusal of other lefty sites (and the comments at Althouse’s blog) reveals this to be the primary critique of the left regarding the right and female breasts; we are ashamed of our bodies and therefore simply aren’t liberated enough to enjoy the sexual act. And this brings us back to young Ms. Jessica and her “pose” in the photo from the Clinton lunch.

Actually, from a personal standpoint, I find Jessica a very attractive young woman. What my opinion of her would be after she opened her mouth and began to speak, I can only imagine.

Most men I know have had “dates from hell” with women like Jessica. Usually of the blind variety, the evening starts off well enough but rapidly degenerates into an intellectual quagmire as nothing the male says or does assuages the outrage felt by the brave victim standing up for truth, justice, and the female orgasm.

That said, I’ve often felt that feminists are almost as fixated on the female form as males. At least from the perspective of how that form is both a trap and an edge that most women use to excellent advantage. Where the feminist and the American male differ, however, is in the perception of that most marvelous of evolutionary adaptations found in the human species; the female breast.

Jessica features breasts in some prominent positions on her website as Althouse points out. And while I must confess that when looking at her picture from the Clinton lunch, I was much more taken with her general womanly form than impressed by her mammary endowment, I can nonetheless see where those men who are fixated on the female breast would take her “pose” as an effort to accentuate the positive so to speak.

For in the end, most feminists (indeed, most women), do not understand the male member of the species. We are a diverse lot when it comes to our sexual hot buttons. Some prefer the posterior rather than anterior. Others are moved to poetry by the length and shape of a woman’s leg. Still others are held in rapture by a set of mesmerizing eyes. For myself, there is something about a woman’s back, the way her slender shoulders droop languorously into a well formed, yet softly beckoning upper arm that sets my heart racing and blood pumping.

And yet for all of us, the sight of a naked woman’s chest or the thought of one almost universally elicits a desire to copulate. It has ever been so and I imagine will always be thus. To deny the humanity of this simple, powerful evolutionary urge or to decry its existence is ludicrous.

I understand that many feminists take issue with the way the female breast is used in our society - especially in marketing various products to males. Does it cheapen or denigrate women to be portrayed thusly? I have never bought into the notion that such advertising “objectifies” women any more than women objectify themselves when accentuating their physical attributes via clothing or makeup (a tradition that predates modern marketing) at the expense of their numerous other gifts. It could be that in hierarchal societies where males have absolute dominance, such behavior is forced upon women as their only means to exercise control over their own lives. But today? In this or most any other western country? I wonder if the long running feminist outrage over the exhibitionary nature of the female form isn’t losing much of its relevance in a society that recognizes and indeed celebrates the achievements of women in all walks of life.

This doesn’t obviate the very real discrimination against women in the workplace. Nor does it excuse the behavior of some men who abuse women physically and psychologically. But I think it does reveal a new paradigm that most liberal feminists ignore while stubbornly clinging to old verities about the position of women in western society. The world is changing. And those changes, allowing women to joyously express their own sexuality in ways unthought of by many of us in our youth, is a symptom of a tidal shift in attitudes by both men and women about a host of issues dealing with the interpersonal relationships between a man and a woman.

In short the feminists are winning. But acknowledging that singular fact would make their critiques and even the Movement itself virtually irrelevant overnight. It is a supreme irony that one of the very issues that feminists belabor the loudest - the objectification of women and the exploitation of their bodies - has lost much of its potency thanks to the attitude of most non-feminist women toward sex and the by play between a man and woman in the bedroom.

So go ahead, Jessica. Stick out that chest and be proud. Celebrate your power over men using the tools that 175,000 years of homo sapien evolution have given you.

Now if only we could convince you to keep your mouth shut…(just kidding).