Senator Elizabeth Warren once appeared on Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, TBS’s unwatchable Daily Show spinoff. This pairing had potential — for the first time, Bee had a chance to appear funny in comparison with her guest. “I am exhausted. I am personally broken,” said Bee, referring to the political scene. “People come up to me all the time and they’re like, ‘What do I do? What do I do? Help me!’ So my question to you is: What should I tell them?”
Gesturing wildly and with an edge to her voice, Senator Warren had marching orders ready: “You get in the fight, and then you fight as hard as you can,” she responded.
“But what does that mean?” asked Bee.
“Oh, come on! You know what it means! It means when you’re told to be quiet, you don’t sit down and be quiet,” replied Warren. “You stand back up.”
.. Warren may wish for capitalism’s demise, but as long as it’s here, she plans to do as well as she can out of it.
.. Elizabeth Warren is becoming a brand. “She’s the Apple of politics,” said Adam Green
.. Warren “has tried out for many roles:
- writer of silly self-help books (back when she was advertising herself as ‘Dr. Phil’s financial guru’),
- academic, Naderite populist,” and more. It is now her turn to play a more familiar role:
- “First Lady of the Left.”
.. Merge the
- “man of the people” cult of Bernie Sanders with the
- “You go, girl!” cult of Hillary Clinton into one movement,
embodied in the very person of Elizabeth Warren, and you could have something unstoppable in 2020. This is the master plan.
Warren will be
- the anti-Trump champion,
- the feminist champion,
- the working-class champion,
- the young people’s champion,
- the media sensation,
- the pop-culture star,
- and — don’t you dare forget — the (totally authentic)
- racial minorities’ champion all in one.
.. Elizabeth Warren cannot deliver the goods. The senior senator from Massachusetts is awkward and halting, even enervating in her relentless hectoring. Her false enthusiasm — the country, she insisted to Samantha Bee, will come out of the Trump years even better than it was before because “we don’t have any other choice”
.. Elizabeth Warren is the kind of politician that only a true believer could love.
God’s Gift to Men
Wonder Woman is a very simple, soft, “relatable” lady. She adores babies and ice cream and snowflakes. She is sweetly oblivious to her own beauty and its devastating effects on those around her. She has absolutely no problem with men. She loves men! In fact, once she’s left her Amazon family behind, she barely bothers talking to another woman for the rest of the movie. Gadot has real presence and charm as an actress—one longs to see her in something worthier of her talent. But the imperative to eradicate any hint of bossiness or anger from her character weighs heavily on the film, threatening to turn it into one long, dispiriting exercise in allaying male fears about powerful women.
.. Diana is a stranger in a strange land, perpetually and adorably perplexed by the ways of men. (The film’s screenwriter, Allan Heinberg, apparently took his inspiration for her fish-out-of-water predicament from Disney’s Little Mermaid.)
.. She doesn’t know that it is improper to ask a man questions about his anatomy while gazing coolly at his naked form in the bath; she is unaware that an invitation to sleep with someone means something more than sleeping next to them... it’s Steve who has the tactical sense and the job of mansplaining the true nature of their mission. (She’s under the impression that if she manages to kill Ares, she will end war forever.).. At the climax of her final, set-piece battle with Ares (who is not the German general she had initially fingered, but a British politician posing as her and Steve’s friend), Ares tries to persuade her that human beings are too corrupt and nasty to deserve her help—an idea initially proposed by Antiope... Like so many recent girl-power extravaganzas that seek to celebrate what a long way we’ve come, baby, it ends up illustrating precisely the opposite... It merely propagates the unhelpful myth that if a woman is nice enough, pretty enough, feminine enough, she can do such things without ever causing offense, or being called a bitch. Really, if you want feminist inspiration, you’re better off skipping Wonder Woman and going back to watch the wiseacre heroines of the 1940s: the ones played by Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, Rosalind Russell, and Barbara Stanwyck. They were wittier and gutsier and not half as worried about busting balls.
When Progressives Embrace Hate
The leaders of the Women’s March, arguably the most prominent feminists in the country, have some chilling ideas and associations. Far from erecting the big tent so many had hoped for, the movement they lead has embraced decidedly illiberal causes and cultivated a radical tenor that seems determined to alienate all but the most woke.
.. She has dismissed the anti-Islamist feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali in the most crude and cruel terms, insisting she is “not a real woman” and confessing that she wishes she could take away Ms. Ali’s vagina — this about a woman who suffered genital mutilation as a girl in Somalia.
.. Plus, they’ve argued, many of these tweets were written five years ago! Ancient history.
.. “Happy birthday to the revolutionary #AssataShakur!” read the tweet, which featured a “#SignOfResistance, in Assata’s honor” — a pink and purple Pop Art-style portrait of Ms. Shakur, better known as Joanne Chesimard, a convicted killer who is on the F.B.I.’s list of most wanted terrorists.
.. Like many others, CNN’s Jake Tapper noticed the outrageous tweet. “Shakur is a cop-killer fugitive in Cuba,” he tweeted, going on to mention Ms. Sarsour’s troubling past statements. “Any progressives out there condemning this?” he asked.
In the face of this sober criticism, Ms. Sarsour cried bully: “@jaketapperjoins the ranks of the alt-right to target me online. Welcome to the party.”
.. There’s no doubt that Ms. Sarsour is a regular target of far-right groups, but her experience of that onslaught is what makes her smear all the more troubling. Indeed, the idea that Jake Tapper is a member of the alt-right is the kind of delirious, fact-free madness that fuels Donald Trump and his supporters. Troublingly, it is exactly the sentiment echoed by the Women’s March: “Our power — your power — scares the far right. They continue to try to divide us. Today’s attacks on #AssataShakur are the latest example.”
.. What’s more distressing is that Ms. Sarsour is not the only leader of the women’s movement who harbors such alarming ideas. Largely overlooked have been the similarly outrageous statements of the march’s other organizers.
.. Ms. Perez also expressed her admiration for a Black Panther convictedof trying to kill six police officers.. But the public figure both women regularly fawn over is Louis Farrakhan... Ms. Mallory posted a photo with her arm around Mr. Farrakhan, the 84-year-old Nation of Islam leader notorious for his anti-Semitic comments.. “And don’t you forget, when it’s God who puts you in the ovens, it’s forever!” he warned Jews in a speech at a Nation of Islam gathering in Madison Square Garden in 1985. Five years later, he remained unreformed: “The Jews, a small handful, control the movement of this great nation, like a radar controls the movement of a great ship in the waters.” Or this metaphor, directed at Jews: “You have wrapped your tentacles around the U.S. government, and you are deceiving and sending this nation to hell.” He called Hitler “a very great man” on national television. Judaism, he insists, is a “gutter religion.”.. Mr. Farrakhan is also an unapologetic racist. He insists that whites are a “race of devils” and that “white people deserve to die.”.. Feminists will find little to cheer in his 1950s views of gender: “Your professional lives can’t satisfy your soul like a good, loving man.”.. But the nightmare of the Trump administration is the proof text for why all of this matters. We just saw what happens to legitimate political parties when they fall prey to movements that are, at base, anti-American. That is true of the populist, racist alt-right that helped deliver Mr. Trump the White House and are now hollowing out the Republican Party. And it can be true of the progressive “resistance” — regardless of how chic, Instagrammable and celebrity-laden the movement may seem... Will progressives have more spine than conservatives in policing hate in their ranks?.. what I stand against is
- embracing terrorists,
- disdaining independent feminist voices,
- hating on democracies and
- celebrating dictatorships.
If that puts me beyond the pale of the progressive feminist movement in America right now, so be it.
Jennifer Garner’s Good-Girl Image Has Become Her Business
Jennifer Garner hasn’t been a major movie star in years. So why are gossip magazines so invested in her?
.. good girls praise their husbands and their children on social media. They don’t cuss publicly. They have two glasses of wine, max. Good girls might have a job, but nothing in a power position. Good girls have domestic hobbies. Good girls don’t wear earrings that are too big or skirts that are too short or heels that are too high. Good girls use Match.com or eHarmony but never Tinder. Good girls might not be regular churchgoers, but they definitely believe in God. Good girls got him to put a ring on it. Good girls go to bars only in packs of other good girls. Good girls don’t want to talk about that one time they ended up in bed with someone they didn’t know. Good girls aren’t necessarily liberal or conservative, but they don’t think it’s very nice to talk about politics on Facebook. Good girls are legion. They’d never dream of making another woman feel bad about herself. And yet they so often do.
.. Fox argued that the idea of the “good girl” was one of three ways of controlling women’s submissive place in society.
- The most extreme and obvious way is through seclusion, in which women are not allowed entrance into the male spheres of society.
- The second is protection, in which women are allowed access, but only with a male chaperone or guide.
- The third, Fox argued, is normative restriction, in which women are ostensibly free, but still highly controlled — only the control comes from within, through the internalization of how a proper, acceptable, happy woman should act, look, and speak.
- And the primary way women have historically and contemporarily restricted themselves is through adherence to the idea of the “good girl.”
.. Girls are also surrounded by suggestions that they self-objectify — but only for show, and never for their own pleasure. Like Garner’s character in Alias, a good girl might put on lingerie to play a character, but only so long as she knows, and everyone else knows, that she remains a good girl beneath.
.. In order to maintain her brand’s viability — and bankability — Garner must continually prove her goodness. When her husband cheats on her with the nanny, she decides to fight for the family. When he continues to date the nanny, the family continues to go on vacations together — because it’s better for the kids. Goodness, at least in its American puritanical form, is all about suffering: The amount you endure, with a smile on your face and a “bless his heart” when asked about your husband’s back tattoo, is a testimony to just how truly good you are.
.. When she finally filed for divorce after nearly two years of separation, “sources” emphasizedthat she wasn’t ready for dating because Affleck was the love of her life. All of Garner’s decisions — including the one to have Affleck live in their pool house, and then nearby — were purportedly in service to “the important important thing: their children.” See: the invitation for Affleck to accompany Garner when she goes to speak in the Bahamas, because, as one source told Us Weekly, “Jen feels it most beneficial for the kids to have their father present.” When the news broke that Affleck’s affair predated the dissolution of the marriage, she stayed in “mama-bear mode … putting the kids’ happiness first”.. “She will always appear to be taking the high road,” Lainey Gossip explains. “Pleasant, keeping to herself, working on fitness with a friend.”.. White female celebrities are a tough sell right now, but Garner — who has managed to market herself as both conservative and liberal, a good girl but not a good girl tainted by relation to Trump — fills a specific need... The company employs a complex algorithm, tested across its titles and others, to determine which celebrities sell magazines at a given moment. They wouldn’t have put Garner on the cover if the data didn’t suggest that she sold. (The cover’s sales were up 18% over the week before)... The cover photo was not from Garner and Affleck’s recent trip to the Bahamas, but from a previous trip, two years ago, after they first publicly announced their divorce. Affleck may have accompanied Garner to the Bahamas with their children, but the magazine needed a photographic suggestion of their uncoupled happiness — so they just photoshopped a different color shirt on him and let the headline do the suggestive work.Garner regularly provides evidence of her good-girl-ness, but when she doesn’t, the magazines and paparazzi and headline writers and “sources” do the work for her... Garner might not be trying to tell other women how to live their lives, or shaming them for their inability to perform a certain type of femininity. But the salience of her image quietly does that work, regardless.