The stage is set for a full-blown mud-slinging match after Gawker published an anonymous first-person account of how Christine O’Donnell who is running for Senate, got frisky with a journo five years ago on a drunken Halloween binge.

The smutty piece on the “One-Night Stand with O’Donnell” details how the Tea Party-backed senatorial candidate, punch-drunk and clad in a lady-bug costume made overtures to the journo she had just met. She seduced him to bed, but both were too sloshed for action.

Now Gawker is facing the flak for its misogynist disclosure in what is being called an instance of “slut shaming”, branding women impure for their sexual agency and giving them a patriarchal thumbs-down for “loose” behaviour.

Gawker too had a point when it hit back to the vitriolic criticism from the Christine O’Donnell camp saying that she herself had meticulously built up an image as a “chaste woman” and indulged in “slut shaming” herself to earn political brownie points. Gawker said that Christine O’Donnell portrayed herself as a woman who looked down on libertines, and justified that the public ought to know about the prude with a holier-than-thou attitude who threw herself at a stranger.

The media, political watchers and the blogosphere is agog with this latest trend, be it the effort to vilify Krystal Ball by the Republicans, or up close and personal encounters of the icky Christine O’Donnell revealed to the public, with details of how she deals with, or does not, with body hair.

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