out that she looks tired, or haggard, or “when she’s belittled for purportedly using her femininity as a tool.” Then the writer made an about-face and looked right at the point. Conway “is using her femininity against us. It’s not out of the realm of possibility—and is in fact quite likely—that Conway has considered that no matter what she says or does…she will be criticized in bluntly sexist terms because she is a woman.” I’d add that she also likely knows that, on the terms of contemporary feminism, she will be defended in equally blunt terms, too.
Later on, Jennifer Palmieri, the director of communications for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, lamented in the Times that Steve Bannon was seen as an evil genius while Conway, equally manipulative, was just seen as crazy. When Saturday Night Live portrayed Conway like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction in a sketch, that, too, was sexist, as were the memes that compared Conway to Gollum and Skeletor. But if you stripped away the sexism, you would still be left with Kellyanne Conway. Moreover, if you make the self-presentation of a White House spokesperson off-limits on principle, then you lose the ability to articulate the way she does her job. Misogyny insists that a woman’s appearance is of paramount value; these dogged, hyper-focused critiques of misogyny can have an identical effect. Generic sexism is not meaningfully disempowering to Kellyanne Conway in her current position as an indestructible mouthpiece for the most transparently destructive president in American history. In fact, through the discourse established by feminism, she can siphon some amount of cultural power from this sexism. SNL called her a needy psycho? Nevertheless, Kellyanne persists.
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Of all the Trump administration women, none have been defended more staunchly and reflexively than Hope Hicks and Sarah Huckabee Sanders. After Hicks resigned in early 2018, Laura McGann wrote a piece at Vox arguing that “the media undermined Hicks with sexist language right up until her last day.” News outlets kept citing the fact that she was a model, McGann noted, and calling her a neophyte—whereas, if Hicks were a man, she’d be a wunderkind, and the media wouldn’t dwell on her teenage part-time job. Journalists wrote too much about her “feminine” personality. Outlets have “questioned her experience, doubted [her] contributions to the campaign and inside the White House, and implied her looks are relevant…to anything. It adds up to another insidious narrative about a woman in power that is familiar to successful women everywhere.” In order to scrutinize Hicks the way she deserved to be scrutinized, McGann wrote, we needed to forget about her “tweenage modeling career.”
The idea—impeccable in the abstract—was that we could and should critique Hicks without invoking patriarchy. But women are shaped by patriarchy: my own professional instincts are different because I grew up in Texas, in the evangelical church, on a cheerleading squad, in the Greek system. My approach to power has been altered by the early power structures I knew. Hicks worked as a model while growing up in bedroom-community Connecticut; she attended Southern Methodist University, a private school outside Dallas with an incredibly wealthy and conservative population; she became a loyal, daughterly aide to an open misogynist. She seems to have been shaped at a deep, true, essential level by conservative gender politics, and she has consistently acted on this, as is her right. Talking about Hicks without acknowledging the role of patriarchy in her biography may be possible, but to say that it’s politically necessary seems exactly off the point. In Vox, McGann cited Times coverage of Hicks as implicitly sexist; after her resignation, a Times piece cited me as implicitly sexist, in turn. I was one of the members of the media dismissing Hicks “as a mere factotum,” the Times wrote, quoting a tweet of mine: “Goodbye to Hope Hicks, an object lesson in the quickest way a woman can advance under misogyny: silence, beauty, and unconditional deference to men.”
It is entirely possible that I’m wrong in assuming that these attributes made Hicks valuable in Trump’s White House. Maybe she wasn’t as deferential as reporters claimed. (She was certainly silent, never speaking on the record to the media; she’s certainly beautiful.) But it doesn’t seem coincidental that a president who has married three models, was averse to his first wife’s professional ambitions, and is upsettingly proud of his daughter’s good looks picked a young, beautiful, conventionally socialized woman to be his favored aide. Of course, Hicks was hardworking, and