Just over a year ago, a writer named Kristen Roupenian published a short story in the New Yorker called “Cat Person.” It chronicled a brief, mediocre romance. At first, it was hard to say what made the story newsworthy.
Still, just as #MeToo was taking off, “Cat Person” became history’s first viral short story. Something in Roupenian’s tale of Robert and Margot’s relationship -- testy, opportunistic -- felt familiar. And then there was the word mild Robert uses at their breakup, when he finally believes he has nothing left to lose: “Whore.”
“Cat Person” laid out the ways men can portray tolerance of and even affection for women while seething with sexist resentment of their power.
The “Cat Person” parable has been germane this past week. As the new US Congress convenes, with a record 102 women taking office, a crew of men in right-wing media and politics seems to believe they have tolerated this whole women-in-power exercise for too long.
On Thursday night, shortly after being sworn in, freshman Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan) boasted that the new Democratic House majority would “go in there and impeach” Trump, whom she called by a commonplace vulgarism.
Understandably anxious about impeachment, Republicans decried Tlaib. They pretended not to mind her political zeal, though; it was her coarseness they took umbrage at. For a woman of color, and one of the first two Muslim women in the US Congress, using a bad word is evidently criminal unseemliness. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, from Bakersfield, huffed and puffed about how indecorous Tlaib had been.
Tlaib has not apologized for her impeachment plan -- or her vocabulary.
Next on the Women to Hate List is Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She’s the newly minted congresswoman from New York’s 14th District and boy does she make bitter conservatives bitterer.
Having calculated that savaging House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was not firing up the he-man pitchfork crowd, conservatives are now trying to smear Ocasio-Cortez as young, dangerous, naive, stylish and a good dancer. They also seem unaccountably panicked that she was once known as Sandy.
To many of the attacks, Ocasio-Cortez has issued Twitter clap-backs that deftly surface the barely concealed sexism of her detractors. When conservatives last week tried to make hay out of a dance video she made in college, she made another dance video, chiding the Republican Party as prigs who hate women who dance.
To a prominent right-wing troll looking to get a rise out of her, she earlier tweeted, “Like catcalling, I don’t owe a response to unsolicited requests from men with bad intentions. And also like catcalling, for some reason they feel entitled to one.”
Catcallers and anti-dancing scolds are two sides of the age-old misogyny coin. What they’re saying to her, is that she’s either frigid and won’t respond to their catcalls or a “whore” because she dances too much.
Ocasio-Cortez’s responses make her detractors even more furious; no one likes to have his ugly misogyny brought to light. When Ocasio-Cortez, in white, stood to vote for Pelosi as House speaker, Republicans broke all precedent and booed her.
“Don’t hate me cause you ain’t me, fellas,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted. By turning up the volume on the Republicans’ terrified sexism, she’s made quick work of her haters.
By contrast, the latest attacks on Pelosi are listless. After seven years of trying to stir up hatred for the distinguished representative from San Francisco, conservatives seem to be running out of steam.
During Pelosi’s swearing-in as the first person to return to the speakership since 1955, and the first and only Italian American and first and only woman to hold the post, Pelosi found President Trump attempting to steal her thunder by staging a hasty press briefing.
Finally, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) announced Monday that she’s entering the 2020 race for president, and she also got some hazing from Trump, who often refers to Warren by a racist nickname.
Almost the second some pundits wondered ridiculously whether affable Warren is “likable” enough, “likability” was flagged as a moronically sexist metric.
Is the girl nice? Does she use salty language? Does she dance? Does she refuse to smile and flirt when you hoot at her?
These moth-eaten virgin-whore tropes have become self-satirizing. If you think misogyny has faded since the “Mad Men” days, you’re wrong. In fact, as women pack the halls of power, it seems more virulent than ever, as conservatives convulse in fear at losing their old rubrics of control. They lash out more than Don Draper ever did.
But rather than deafen themselves to the primitive hatred beneath the surface of “likability” and anti-dance discourse, figures like Ocasio-Cortez send up the subtext, just as Roupenian did in “Cat Person.”
Demeaning dancing and texting the word “whore” to a woman who scares you is, when you think about it, pretty laughable. And to have the dynamic laid bare is almost a relief.
No wonder Pelosi is running the House, Warren is running for president, Tlaib is calling it as she sees it, and Ocasio-Cortez is dancing. Their enemies are losing strength, while they’re gaining it.
Virginia Heffernan
Virginia Heffernan is an American journalist and cultural critic. She wrote this for the Los Angeles Times. -- Ed.
(Tribune Content Agency)
