“Let her pound your gavel over and over!” Just one of the suggested uses for the This is NOT Sarah Palin Inflatable Love Doll, now available for mail order from adult product manufacturers Topco. (Link NFSW.)

According to the item’s description on Topco’s website, “Sarah Palin makes sexism sexy” and is “the hottest thing to come out of Alaska in years.” And these are some of the website’s tamer descriptions of the product, with others listing the various ways you can, ahem, ‘enter’ the doll. (There are three, by the way).

Wow. If only women had as many ways to enter the White House.

But Palin isn’t the only candidate in this campaign who been has reduced to a sex toy and a stereotype.

There’s also the Head O State, a seven-and-a-half-inch dildo in the shape of Barack Obama. With its “golden color and firm, smooth feel,” its manufacturers promise that the “Head O State will stand up right and last all night.”

And the Hillary Nutcracker (whilst not exactly a sex toy) has “stainless steel thighs” that will “crack the toughest nuts.”

John McCain, as far as I know, has been left out of the mix.

These products, I suppose, are nothing more than logical extensions of the sexism and racism already rampant in this electoral campaign. If the McCain-Palin campaign, along with certain media outlets, can get away with portraying Obama as a Muslim terrorist, who’s going to care about a representation of him as a giant African-American sexual apparatus?

I don’t want to start America-bashing from my lofty, maple leaf perch, because Canada’s male-dominated, whitebread politics leave much to be said. But when it becomes acceptable for a vice-presidential candidate to be commodified as a literal sex toy for men to poke and prod as they please, Americans need to start asking themselves some tough questions about the way sexuality is constructed in their country.

And we need to thank our lucky stars that the Stephen Harper inflatable love doll hasn’t found its way to a store near you.