Photo of Meghan McCain by Tobyotter via Flickr

Yesterday, Atlantic reporter Mara Gay offered her readers a handful of takes on the state of women in the Republican party. “Pundits are predictably split lines on whether to love or fear Liz Cheney’s new red-blooded, anti-Obama, neoconservative foreign policy group, Keep America Safe,” she wrote. “But they agree that she is part of a vanguard of conservative women who are rising to lead the GOP.” And, from the looks of it, they certainly do. Still, following the Meghan McCain Twitter incident — where the daughter of the former presidential candidate was called, among other things, a slut for her tank-topped, sweatpantsed TwitPic appearance — one has to wonder whether this isn’t something of a mixed blessing: Sure, having its very own roster of nationally recognizable female icons might, at first glance, be a positive, but the length of the leash that’s been afforded to them seems to undermine any would-be positive gains here.

Take a look at Sarah Palin. When unveiled, as part of this past fall’s main political event, she brought to the national Republican party stout dedication to … the sort of ever-smiling, folksy character that most television audiences from the 1950s and ’60s would remember as being the perfect second-tier female figure — it was June Cleaver at the Republican National Convention (complete with a horribly cliched storyline about an over-zealousness for shopping). Whether or not the portrayal was fiction, it was hardly the portrait of a political powerbroker. And it was a window into just how far Republican women have come.

Now comes the nonsense with Meghan McCain. McCain, who, with her Tweeting and her cursing and her MTVing, was doing her level-best to help her party shake its (to co-opt her phrasing) pantsuit-y properisms, was put in her place for it. After posting the image, and receiving a whole bunch of flack, McCain reported that she’d been called a slut. She then wrote, in what seems like a rather measured response to such misogyny, that she was “going to take some more time to think about it but seriously I was just trying to be funny with the book and that I’m a dork staying in.” Shortly thereafter she tweeted that she “want[ed] to apologize to anyone that was offended by [her] twitpic,” further declaring that she had “clearly made a huge mistake” and is “sorry 2 those that are offended.” This last statement was, no doubt, the result of a public-reaction calculation, made to minimize any damage that the photo might have caused. But this isn’t the gross part. Nope. The gross part would be the fact that some of her Twitter followers were so threatened by the (very minor, it seems) appearance of sexuality in one of their (assuming here, that most of her Tweeting readership is sympathetic to her political views) emerging leaders, that they all ganged up to shut it down. Chalk up another win for the in-the-kitchen-character-building set.

Whether the likes of Carly Fiorina, Meg Whitman, and Liz Cheney will have to face — if they should ever climb into the true national spotlight — such a character reduction remains to be seen. But, with the GOP trending toward allowing for a larger role for women, it would serve them well to refrain from taking away their freedom to be anything but mid-20th-century homemakers.