Anti-masturbation witch wants women to be more like hobbits.

Christine O’Donnell is the Republican candidate for the US Senate in a special election to be held in Delaware in November. She defeated the Republican insider candidate, a guy who’s been in Congress for ages and used to be the state’s governor, with the support of the mass movement for paranoia and fantasy known as the Tea Party.

The Tea Party are a radical right wing alliance of nutters that have been taking over the Republican party, and their success in putting O’Donnell in the candidacy is a sign of their strength. Their movement is opposed to the government spending money on the economy or healthcare, as well as black people in positions of power, as can be seen from the number of birthers among them. Their racism even extends to recently holding a rally in Arizona IN FAVOUR of their new apartheid laws against people of Latin American descent. They’ve provided a rallying cry and natural home for a lot of Americans who are seriously confused about reality. These same nutters have looked for wacky people like them to represent them in office.

Christine O’Donnell is just such a mentalist. In uni she converted from Catholicism to become an Evengelical Christian, and takes the Bible super seriously. The way she sees it, it’s not just a holy book but also a biology textbook, after she claimed there was “just as much, if not more evidence” supporting creationism over evolution, science and dinosaur bones that are way, way old.

But perhaps her most well known pro-Bible belter is her stance on masturbation. She made herself famous as a vocal opponent of taking matters into your own hands. Check the video below of her denouncing wanking on MTV in 1996:

In the video, she famously says “If he already knows what pleases him and he can please himself, then why am I in the picture,” which seems to imply that she hasn’t heard that WOMEN CAN MASTURBATE TOO. This fits pretty well with her view of women and what they should be – dutiful Stepford wives living meek and quiet lives and never expressing any thoughts or desires of their own, sexual or otherwise. Men, on the other hand, are raging buckets of hormones just driven to satisfy urges they can’t control, as seen from her comments that nude sunbathing would make it “very hard [sic] for their boyfriend not to want to take it further”, and her call to ban freak dancing because it was responsible for an “epidemic of date rape” (personally I thought rapists were responsible for rape, but there you go.)

Quite why she’s decided to take up such a lost cause as trying to persuade people that masturbation is bad is beyond most sane observers, especially considering the Bible never mentions it. Her anti-wank crusade has been cobbled together on the basis of interpreting other bits of the Bible and what they have to say about “lust”.

O’Donnell calls herself a feminist, but a bit like her twisted understanding of what goes on in our pants, she doesn’t seem to be very clear on what that means:

“I consider myself an authentic feminist. Not as defined by the modern movement. And, let me clarify that a little bit more. I was an English major, so break it down: -ist means one who celebrates. As a feminist, I celebrate my femininity.”

Aha, I see what you did there! Except feminism categorically isn’t about reinforcing a traditional, patriarchal view of women as being essentially “feminine” (submissive, chaste, wearing petticoats, chained to the kitchen sink etc.) Feminism is for everybody because it wants to free us all from the tyranny of men and women having to be defined by false ideas of femininity and masculinity. For Christine O’Donnell though it’s about biblical literalism and keeping your hands out of your pants.

For a picture of what she wants women to be like, we have to go to an unusual place for the debating of gender roles: Middle

This is what a feminist looks like, apparently

Earth! Seemingly the fantasies of her political views reflect a real love of fantasy literature, after she described the Tea Party as being like Aslan (“not a tame lion”), and tried to prove J.R.R. Tolkien was a feminist.

Even the most hardened fan of Lord of the Rings would have to admit that Tolkien didn’t really write in many female characters. And almost all of them are pretty, stupid and not much given to swordplay, orc fighting or anything that the books are actually about. Tolkien was an old fashioned old guy who spent most of his time making up tales with other old fashioned old guys, and exciting as they may be they’re hardly progressive on the issue of women. Their role is to be the beautiful eye candy cooking up banquets for when the heroes get home. Sounds great, reckons Christine.

In her essay, ‘The Women of Middle Earth,’ O’Donnell describes characters like Belladonna Baggins (mother of Bilbo), who, by her own admission is in the book for “about four lines”, as “content, even utterly satisfied, in the role of a wife and mother.”

“To me, Belladonna is the unseen grandmother whose prayers guide and protect her family as they go on to accomplish great tasks. She is the picture of a woman who has led a full life. The few lines written about her tell us that Belladonna did not have many adventures after she married, for her husband provided a great home for her. Belladonna’s independence in her earlier adventurous life before marriage provides a catalyst for Bilbo, her male heir . . .

. . .Some critics claim that Tolkien’s serene version of femininity is offensive to the modern female viewer. As a modern female viewer, I find the assumption itself offensive . . . Everything about Tolkien’s Arwen is tranquil, serene, calming. These qualities are part of the charm of the womanhood she expresses. There are many types of women in the world. Arwen represents one of them. She represents a pillar of calm that is a source of strength for her man. Her great contribution to the war is the strength she provides to the future King.”

Women: Know Your Place (in The Shire).

O'Donnell's natural supporters may be alienated by the latest revelations

This week it came out that she’d done her own small bit to make the world a bit more like the one inhabited by elves and wizards, when she revealed that when she was younger she “dabbled in witchcraft”!

“I dabbled into witchcraft. I never joined a coven … I hung around people who were doing these things. I’m not making this stuff up. One of my first dates with a witch was on a satanic altar, and I didn’t know it. I mean, there’s a little blood there and stuff like that … We went to a movie and then had a little midnight picnic on a satanic altar.”

This came to light after footage of her on a talk show back in the 90s was released by it’s host, Bill Maher. The best part is he says he has loads more embarassing material of her which he will keep releasing until she comes on his show, (“It’s like a hostage crisis: every week you don’t show up, I throw another body out”), so the laughs at the expense of the politically crazy look set to keep on coming.

Bonus: Just so you don’t think this was a lone episode of the Tea Party selecting a total mad bastard as a candidate, check out Tim D’Annunzio, a guy they tried to make a Congressional candidate in North Carolina, who believes the US government is the antichrist, believed he was the messiah, that God was going to drop a 1000 mile high pyramid in Greenland and that he’d found the Ark of the Covenant in Arizona.