Trump adviser Conway target of misogyny
Hatred of powerful women is bipartisan, experts say
What powerful political woman is mocked for her clothes, is the target of pictures on Twitter depicting her as haggard and is routinely called a witch?
If you guessed Hillary Clinton, you’re right.
But if you guessed Kellyanne Conway, you’re right, too.
Misogyny, it seems, remains a bipartisan exercise. Whatever legitimate criticisms can be leveled at each woman, it is striking how often that anger is expressed using the same sexist themes, from women as well as men.
Clinton “repeats her tacky outfits,” one Twitter critic sniped. The Inauguration Day outfit of Conway, a counselor to President Donald Trump, looked like “a night terror of an android majorette.”
Clinton’s hair has drawn relentless derision; one Twitter user recently asked: “Why does Kellyanne Conway always look like she’s still drunk & wearing make up from last night’s bender?”
And both women have been repeatedly compared to witches from The Wizard of Oz, most recently in pictures shared on Twitter tying Conway to the witch killed under Dorothy’s house.
The two women are at opposite ideological poles, but they stir up the same lingering cultural discomfort with ambitious, assertive women.
“These sexist memes are not the purview of one party,” said Karen Finney, a senior adviser to the Clinton campaign. “We fear strong women and women with power. These attacks are meant to delegitimize that power.”
Conway has drawn scorn, and been disinvited from some news programs, for her references to a Bowling Green massacre that never took place and her defense of claims about the size of the crowd at Trump’s inauguration as “alternative facts.” Yet some of the criticisms have taken on a distinctly sexualized tone.
Witness the furor over her sitting on her knees on a couch in the Oval Office during a reception for presidents of historically black colleges.
While she drew fire for disrespect, some of the criticisms included digs about her spreading her legs and raunchy allusions to oral sex, Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton. Rep. Cedric Richmond, D-La., told a now-notorious joke that hers was a “familiar” position in the Oval Office of the 1990s, drawing a rebuke from none other than Chelsea Clinton.
A Saturday Night Live skit riffed on Conway as a Fatal Attraction stalker, breaking into the CNN correspondent Jake Tapper’s house to seduce him into having her on his show.
“There seems to be great resentment of both as power-hungry and wanting to control men,” said Marjorie J. Spruill, the author of Divided We Stand: The Battle Over Women’s Rights and Family Values That Polarized American Politics. “Whereas Hillary is called castrating or shrewish, Conway is often called a slut. The implication is that she is using femininity to control men.”
Spruill noted that Conway in fact had leaned back to take pictures as a favor to the participants, but that some critics had cast the pose as a sexual come-on.
Conway suggested in an interview with The Daily Caller that there would have been more outrage at the comments if she had been a liberal woman, adding, “And it is not just if I were a liberal woman, but if I were a pro-abortion rights one.”
Conway did not respond to a message left with her assistant requesting comment for this article.
Mirya R. Holman, an assistant professor of political science at Tulane University who studies gender and politics, said, “This does mimic what conservative women have said in the past: ‘You liberals think you’re so enlightened but we still get people saying vile things about us.’ ”
“To me, the 2016 election was hopefully an opportunity to be reminded that we’re not in some kind of postgender society,” Holman said. “There’s a smaller set of acceptable behaviors for women.”