On Wednesday, a new poll stated that John McCain has regained a narrow lead over Barack Obama in Florida, largely due, in the pollster's words, to "your prototypical Hillary Clinton supporters" crossing over to McCain (pdf).

It's more than strange. How can purported feminists even contemplate voting for McCain when his creepy, fighter-jock attitude toward women has left a trail throughout his public career? Let's look at just three dots of gender jokes over time and see if we can connect them.

First, there's the boffo ape-rape joke. "Did you hear the one about the woman who is attacked on the street by a gorilla, beaten senseless, raped repeatedly and left to die?" McCain reportedly asked an audience during his 1986 Senate campaign, according to Arizona's Tucson Citizen. "When she finally regains consciousness and tries to speak, her doctor leans over to hear her sigh contently and to feebly ask, 'Where is that marvelous ape?'"

McCain's aides said last month that he doesn't recall telling the joke, but they don't deny that he did. Then there's the c-word. In his book The Real McCain, Cliff Schecter writes that at a 1992 campaign stop, with reporters nearby, McCain was joined by his wife Cindy and two campaign aides. "At one point, Cindy playfully twirled McCain's hair and said, 'You're getting a little thin up there.' McCain's face reddened, and he responded, 'At least I don't plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you cunt.' McCain's excuse was that it had been a long day. If elected president of the United States, McCain would have many long days."

Finally, there's the Buffalo Chip moment at the Sturgis biker rally earlier this week. We don't know what Cindy was thinking when her husband lost it over his male-pattern baldness, but on Monday, when McCain volunteered her for a "beauty pageant" before some 50,000 bikers at the annual South Dakota motorcycle rally, she played along, gamely waving and smiling. "I was looking at the Sturgis schedule," said the senator, reading from notes, "and noticed that you had a beauty pageant, so I encouraged Cindy to compete. I told her with a little luck, she could be the only woman to serve as both the first lady and Miss Buffalo Chip."

McCain hasn't spoken about it, but many in the press have claimed for him that he probably had no idea the contest was topless and occasionally bottomless (much less that, during the weeklong boozin', druggin' hogfest some of the girls occasionally get roughed up, all noted in this ESPN dispatch, widely circulating days before McCain's visit). But presumably, McCain did realise that this was a biker rally - a good place to find someone you want to have a beer with.

So what if he knew, some liberals, like sex columnist Dan Savage, counter. "We're not the party of idiotic, knee-jerk prudery, and we look ridiculous when we pretend that we are."

Try telling Hillary-strength feminists that objecting to these sorts of slurs is prudish, though. And when you combine them with McCain's stubborn resistance to women's rights - on equal pay, workplace discrimination, abortion, you name it - you should have a formula for female vote repellent. The man's even voted to "amend the definition of those eligible for the State Children's Health Insurance Program (S-Chip) to include the unborn - while voting against legislation to expand S-Chip's coverage to low-income children and pregnant women at least six times," as In These Times recounts in its August cover story, "McSexist".

And, ladies, don't forget his promise: "I've said as often as I can," he reassured the National Review, "that I want to find clones of [justice Samuel] Alito and [chief justice John] Roberts" to fill supreme court vacancies.

Ah, but those are issues, and all of us tend to selectively block out entire slabs of issues. You might, however, expect that this trio of degrading digs are exactly the sort of big, sexy, cartoon-bright news items that would bust through the gauze of voting records and get the full-monty media treatment of, say, Jesse Jackson saying he wanted to cut off Obama's "nuts", a Paris/Britney ad or even a day's worth of the Rev Jeremiah Wright. Not so much, though. Hillary die-hards flirting with McCain can plausibly say they haven't seen much beyond his myth. Corporate media can claim it isn't connecting the dots for them because the dots are too dirty for TV. The Buffalo Chip story, for instance, never made the networks. On cable – surprise - Fox barely touched it, other than a bit on Fox and Friends, according to a Media Matters search. Of course, MSNBC was all over it, showing the cleaner clips from a video of the 2007 Miss Buffalo Chip contest that included booty-shaking, banana-fondling, pickle-licking and (this last even MSNBC host Keith Olbermann had to skip) simulated fellatio.

As for the ape rape joke, even a sanitised version seems too nasty for the New York Times or Washington Post. Meanwhile, the mainstream media is unwilling to quote McCain blurting a word as old-fashioned as trollop, and is even less likely to print "cunt" or even the neutralised version, the "c-word". To appreciate the effect of this kind of prudery - and how the press de-sexistises McCain - check out this skit by the Public Service Administration.

As usual, it comes down to the media's and the public's reluctance to give up the image of McCain as a rogueish but honourable "maverick", a Peck's bad boy you want to tousle before you take away his slingshot and pet frog.

NBC's Andrea Mitchell has reasoned that McCain's nastiness is due to his handlers keeping the poor guy "inside a bubble". Hardball's Mike Barnacle and Politico's Roger Simon were quick to agree.

When it comes to his rough public treatment of women, McCain and his apologists have the excuse at hand that he's an early-'60s, martini-and-mistress Mad Men kind of guy, an image not without its retro charm. One of the fascinations of the series is the way it allows us to see the open culture of sexism at work. It doesn't happen like that anymore, so it's a little like a CGI effect, comparable to seeing Arnold Schwarzenegger sit up after a shotgun blast to the chest in Terminator. (And like the Mad Men lead, Don Draper, McCain is a war hero, a status that wipes clean all slates, including Draper stealing a dead soldier's name and McCain's cheating on his first wife with Cindy.)

Meanwhile, Obama, one of our most feminist presidential candidates ever, continues to be black. And that leads to the turnabout-is-fair-play question that's been asked a lot, but needs to be asked at least through November: What if Obama had offered Michelle up in a biker beauty contest, or had called her a cunt? Tabloid headlines of "baby mama" undoubtedly would be revived, and African-American family values would be roundly condemned as fundamentally risky for the White House. Of course, many Clinton supporters have given up the ghost and moved on to Obama. But those Hillary hold-outs, perhaps re-stoked by talk of putting her name into nomination at the Democratic convention, are bitterly clinging to Obama's slights against womanhood ("You're likeable enough, Hillary") while closing their eyes to McCain's sledgehammers. It's like sleeping with the enemy.