Rebecca Traister* says that when women dare to respond to male incivility their labelled as disruptive and examines the response to a recent speech by a US Congresswoman which called out the behaviour.
Yesterday, US Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (pictured) stood up and gave one of the finest speeches recently heard on the floor of the US House of Representatives, calling out not just Florida representative Ted Yoho for having called her “disgusting,” “out of your freaking mind,” and a “fucking bitch” on the steps of the Capitol Building in front of reporters on Tuesday, but also elucidating how that kind of language is normalised and deployed against all kinds of women, on all kinds of days.
It was a remarkable piece of oratory, clear and thoughtful about some of the knottiest dynamics of gendered power imbalance in political, public, and personal life.
After Yoho’s outburst was reported, he had offered up a floor speech purported to be apology, though it was actually far closer to pallid self-justification.
“Having been married for 45 years with two daughters, I’m very cognizant of my language,” Yoho had said, in a speech in which he did not mention Ocasio-Cortez’s name, and in which he nonsensically refused to “apologise for my passion, or for loving my God, my family, and my country.”
It was this non-apology and not his original outburst, Ocasio-Cortez said, that led her to make her own speech, in which she eviscerated Yoho’s use of familial pablum and domestic association with women as evidence of his respect for them.
Ocasio-Cortez pointed out that she, too, was someone’s daughter, and that that did not in any way insulate her or other women, also daughters and wives, from the impact of degrading and sexist diminution.
“You can have daughters and accost women without remorse,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
“You can … project an image to the world of being a family man and accost women without remorse and with a sense of impunity. It happens every day in this country.”
The electric speech gave ringing voice to the experiences, frustrations, and anger of millions of women and men who have had their days, lives, and realities shaped by often abusive, sometimes vulgar expressions of patriarchal power.
Among Ocasio-Cortez’s talents as a politician is her ability to connect and communicate clearly, intellectually, and emotionally, with masses of people; the speech she gave on Thursday put those talents on full display, and she was widely praised for it.
But some of the coverage of the impact and resonance of Ocasio-Cortez’s speech perpetuated exactly the gendered power imbalances the speech was meant to challenge.
The conflict started by Yoho, to which Ocasio-Cortez was responding, got retold, in the New York Times, as an instance of her aggressive political ambition, rather than as a response to the very forces that have long made political power elusive for women like Ocasio-Cortez, and an assumed norm for men like Ted Yoho.
The Times’ story on the speech bore the headline “A.O.C. Unleashes a Viral Condemnation of Sexism in Congress” and kicked off by noting that Ocasio-Cortez, the youngest woman in Congress, “has upended traditions.”
It called her speech on Thursday “norm-shattering” and described supporting speeches made by her colleagues as a moment of “cultural upheaval.”
All these words somehow cast Ocasio-Cortez and her female colleagues as the disruptive and chaotic forces unleashed in this scenario, suggesting that they shattered norms in a way that Representative Yoho’s original, profane outburst apparently did not.
(Perhaps Yoho’s words weren’t understood as eruptive and norm-shattering because calling women nasty names, in your head or with your friends or on the steps of your workplace, is much more of a norm than most want to acknowledge).
Times reporters wrote that Ocasio-Cortez “excels at using her detractors to amplify her own political brand” (Ocasio-Cortez’s “brand” is the subject of frequent coverage; it’s rare that powerful white men are understood as having built brands; they just have careers).
The Times described how, in the wake of Yoho’s words, “the media-savvy Ms. Ocasio-Cortez had sprung into action to create disruptive and viral events.”
It may seem innocuous to call her “media-savvy” but that too turns a strength — media fluency and, with it, communicative acuity — into a diminishment and obscures the fact that Ocasio-Cortez had not created the disruption in the first place.
In describing her team’s decisions about how to respond, the Times put scare quotes around their plans “to discuss how she ‘was accosted and publicly ridiculed,’” rather than simply reporting that she had been … accosted and publicly ridiculed.
The whole thing suggests that she had somehow connived to set this all in motion; that her actions were the active and self-serving ones.
There is no acknowledgement here that Ted Yoho, not lacking political and professional ambition himself, was also building his brand by deciding to accost Ocasio-Cortez in front of reporters.
Nor is there acknowledgment that it worked for him.
The percentage of those who had ever heard of “Ted Yoho” has risen exponentially in the past 48 hours.
What is also true and unsaid here is the way in which degradation and dismissal of women has been key to the building and maintenance of disproportionately male power in political, economic, social, and sexual life.
And that’s before we get to the ways in which the ubiquity of dehumanising and aggressive language toward women can have very real violent implications, as so much contemporary mass violence, shows all too often.
How else to clear the field except to render your peers incapable, unlikable, unprofessional?
Whether or not men are saying it out loud, via street catcalls or in front of political reporters, the reduction of their would-be female peers has helped clear away potential impediment to their own professional trajectories.
But white male opportunism, whether in the form of aggressive insult displayed by Yoho, or merely accepting the advantages that broad systemic disrespect of others affords them, is rarely examined as the kind of active force that it has always been.
Instead we are trained to recognise the reactions of those who are not white men to white men as some sort of useful path to power.
We are told, in lots of ways, that people who are not white men get to play certain kinds of cards — race and gender cards — to get ahead, whereas white men just … get ahead.
White male power is so assumed as to be wholly indistinguishable from what we simply recognise as “power,” and with it, the whispered implication that those with authority have somehow earned that authority fairly and squarely, while those who challenge authority and its abuses are wily manipulators.
This rankles particularly here, since what Ocasio-Cortez did so well this week was part of her job, the part that is about representing people and their experiences, and communicating effectively on behalf of those who’ve experienced disadvantage.
In other words, she actually did earn whatever gains she made this week.
Meanwhile patriarchal power abuse remains so expected as to not be notable as a violation of norms or civility, as disruptive or chaotic.
As we read commentators tell the story of women’s ambition and savvy and drive, all of which are surely politically animating forces — as they have been for all the many men who have preceded them — I hope people can remember that the analysis is not wrong, exactly, but that it is woefully incomplete.
Because until we can see how white men have taken advantage of sexism and racism for their own gain — how they’ve built their own “brand,” — on the backs of the fucking bitches, we’re not really reading a full story.
*Rebecca Traister is a columnist at the Cut and writer for NYMag. She can be contacted @rtraister and at rebeccatraister.com
This article first appeared at thecut.com.
