Of course, no female candidate who hoped to gain an ounce of public approval could have survived that first sentence in the Vanity Fair story: the plaintive wail of a child whose misery was tied to the political ambitions of his parent. No woman, dead or alive, could hope to win the nation’s heart by writing about seeking communion in a Kansas bar while her husband drove carpool in El Paso. 

…During the 2014 gubernatorial race, the New York Times Magazine ran a story headlined “Can Wendy Davis Have It All? A Texas-Size Tale of Ambition, Motherhood, and Political Mythmaking.”

…The tight knot for women in politics (and perhaps in life) has been, will always be, this: Everything associated with motherhood has been coded as faintly embarrassing and less than — from mom jeans to mommy brain to the Resistance. And yet to be a bad mom has been disqualifying, and to not be a mom at all is to be understood as lacking something: gravity, value, femininity. Just this month, Tucker Carlson wondered, about New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whether “someone who’s never even raised children gets the right to lecture me about morality,” as if parents are given a moral compass upon the birth of a child.

…As our expectations for fatherhood rise, even when the fathers castigate themselves for absences, the judgment hasn’t been harsh. 

…How can we get to a place where women’s relationships to their domestic lives are not undermining? Those who’ve been out there have tried a million approaches. 

…“I knew that my male colleagues had come when they were 30. They had a jump on me because they didn’t have children.” But of course they had children; there was simply no expectation that they’d be responsible for raising them.

…Because fatherhood hasn’t been a structural impediment in the way motherhood has, the proportion of childless male presidential candidates has been statistically less significant; neither Cory Booker nor Pete Buttigieg gets asked much about the fact that he doesn’t have children and how that’s shaped his view of the world. Buttigieg, in fact, often positions himself as childlike in wondering what the world will look like in 35 years, when he’s Trump’s age.

…Those privileges aren’t really about fatherhood; they are about childhood.

White men — in life, on streets, in cop cars, within their families, on the pages of magazines, and in politics — are permitted to fuck up, to gain our sympathy and protection. They are offered the possibilities of blamelessness, selfishness, naïveté, and second and third chances. They are offered the benefits of youth itself, no matter their age. It doesn’t matter whether they have kids or how they raise kids; these men who want to lead us get to be kids.

What Changes When the Presidential Field Is Full of Mothers

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Warren has always been an exceptionally charismatic candidate. We just forget that fact when she’s campaigning — due, in large part, to our deep and lingering distrust for female intelligence.

Warren is bursting with what we might call “charisma” in male candidates: She has the folksy demeanor of Joe Biden, the ferocious conviction of Bernie Sanders, the deep intelligence of fellow law professor Barack Obama. But Warren is not a man, and so those traits are framed as liabilities, rather than strengths. According to the media, Warren is an uptight schoolmarm, a “wonky professor,” a scold, a wimpy Dukakis, a wooden John Kerry, or (worse) a nerdier Al Gore.

…Casting Warren as a sheltered, Ivory Tower type is odd, given that her politics and diction are not exactly elitist.

…Warren really is an intellectual, a scholar; moreover, she really is running an exceptionally ideas-focused campaign, regularly turning out detailed and exhaustive policy proposals at a point when most of the other candidates don’t even have policy sections on their websites. What’s galling is the suggestion that this is a bad thing.

…Likability is in this way a self-reinforcing accusation, one which is amplified every time the candidate tries to tackle it. (Recall Hillary Clinton, who was asked about her “likability” at seemingly every debate or town hall for eight straight years — then furiously accused of pandering every time she made an effort to seem more “approachable.”)

……Warren is accused, in plain language, of being uppity — a woman who has the bad grace to be smarter than the men around her, without downplaying it to assuage their egos.

…It’s significant that the “I hate you; please respond” line of political sabotage only ever seems to be aimed at women. It’s also revealing that, when all these men talked about how Warren could win them over, their “campaign” advice sounded suspiciously close to makeover tips. In his article, Payne advised Warren to “lose the granny glasses,” “soften the hair,” and employ a professional voice coach to “deepen her voice, which grates on some.” Payne seemed to suggest that Elizabeth Warren look like a model and sound like a man — anything to disguise the grisly reality of a smart woman making her case.

…Educators say that 21st century girls are still afraid to talk in class because of “sexist bullying” which sends the message that smart girls are unfeminine. …We can deplore all this as antiquated thinking, but even now, grown men are still demanding that Warren ditch her glasses or “soften” her hair — to work on being prettier so as to make her intelligence less threatening.

The Media Gaslighting of 2020’s Most Likable Candidate

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