Elizabeth Warren Is Running for President: Here Comes the Misogyny!

Senator Elizabeth Warren has announced that she's launched an exploratory committee to run for president in 2020, so here I am introducing the inaugural post in the Elizabeth Warren Sexism Watch!

First of all, I want to give a shout-out to every asshole who invoked Elizabeth Warren as their "I'm not a misogynist" card when Hillary Clinton was running, arguing that they only hated Clinton because of who she is not because she's a woman and they couldn't possibly be misogynists because they would totes support someone less individually detestable like Warren, but whooooooooops now that she's running they totally don't find her "likeable," either. Huh!

On Twitter, Ashton Pittman has an excellent thread on this subject, with receipts. His thread begins here.


Elizabeth Warren was oh so very likeable when she was a hypothetical presidential candidate in a theoretical presidential race — not an actual woman seeking actual power in an actual contest for the actual presidency, but a prop in misogynists' game of deflecting the rank misogyny they were aiming at Hillary Clinton.

Now that the stakes are real, and it's not just an abstract exercise in denying their bias, suddenly that likeability factor has vanished in a cloud of stinking sexism.

(And welcome Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to being the new token Woman for Whom I'd Totally Vote Who Isn't This Woman Who's Actually Running.)

As I have noted many times before: Everyone likes women who are doing something for them, and very few people like women who are the boss of them.


No one, of course, hates women who want to be the boss of them more than Donald Trump, so inevitably he greeted Warren's announcement with a fetid stew of misogyny, racism, and disablism, saying during an interview on Fox News: "She did very badly in proving that she was of Indian heritage. That didn't work out too well. I think you have more than she does, and maybe I do too, and I have nothing. So you know, we'll see how she does. I wish her well. I hope she does well. I'd love to run against her. ...I don't know [if she believes she can win]. You'd have to ask her psychiatrist."

And off we go to 2020. Maude help me.

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