The End of Likability Politics

[demmiblue]

The nasty women of America are delivering on their promises—and they don’t care what their conservative male colleagues think.

Last month, Politico asked how Elizabeth Warren could “avoid a Clinton redux—written off as too unlikable before her campaign gets off the ground.” The piece (written by a woman, sigh) ran the day the Massachusetts senator announced she was “exploring” a run for the White House. No time to lose, apparently, when it comes to setting the narrative. A supersmart ambitious Democratic woman? Aroint thee, witch!

Because what is likability if not a deference to men—with a self-deprecating smile? A likable woman doesn’t talk too loud or too much. She doesn’t take up too much space, isn’t too sexy or too dowdy, and gracefully eludes confrontation. In short, she doesn’t demand anything that men would rather keep for themselves, be it political power or sexual autonomy or the right to be safe after having a couple of drinks. A likable woman doesn’t challenge women, either, by reminding them of the compromises they’ve made and the edges they’ve trimmed off their personalities.

Recently, though, there have been encouraging signs that women have stopped looking over their shoulders every five minutes for male approval—and it’s driving conservative men berserk.

Take Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Everything about her sends them up a wall. She’s young, female, brown, and left-wing—the polar opposite of Congress’s white, male, right-wing oldsters. She says she’s working-class but somehow has nice clothes. She’s made a couple of slips in interviews, so obviously she’s an ignorant ditz. Grover Norquist even compares her proposal to raise taxes on the top income brackets to slavery.

Most recently, conservatives leaked a video of Ocasio-Cortez dancing on a rooftop during college. Maybe they thought a young woman looking carefree and adorable was the equivalent of appearing in soft-core porn—something former Republican senator Scott Brown actually did, by the way, without suffering any harm to his reputation as a solid all-around good guy with a pickup truck. On Lou Dobbs’s show, Republican strategist Ed Rollins called her a “little girl.”

The new congresswoman’s response to all this was to tweet a video of herself dancing into her office. Then, when Republicans booed her for voting for Nancy Pelosi to chair the House, Ocasio-Cortez tweeted merrily: “Don’t hate me cause you ain’t me, fellas.” The old ways of chastising uppity women, evidently, are backfiring.

https://www.thenation.com/article/aoc-tlaib-warren-womens-march/?utm_medium=socialflow&utm_source=twitter

[dlk]

1. Hopefully, It's a New Day-It's Certainly Time!