Women’s magazines seem to hate roughly half of their audience, and they aren’t afraid to show it. Elle just turned up the heat on Megyn Kelly in a piece that drags her for being conservative while female.
Sady Doyle, the author of the hit-piece “How Do We Criticize Problematic Women?”, thinks that people only like Kelly when she’s under attack.
“When we saw Kelly primarily as a victim, she was framed as a blameless heroine…When we see Kelly now as primarily a conservative propagandist—which is what she is and always has been—that victimhood is mostly erased.”
The only good conservative woman, by her logic, is a conservative woman under fire. Liberals preach tolerance, but could sure use some practice. Conservative women hate being victims. They’re some of the most outspoken advocates against victimhood culture (matched only, of course, by conservative men). The Left desperately wants us to be victims. Most of us say, “no thanks.”
According to Doyle, Kelly is famous because of Donald Trump’s infamous “blood coming out of her wherever” line. But by the time that happened, Kelly had been hosting her own Fox News show, The Kelly File, for two years. Trump did not make Megyn Kelly famous, and to say that he did is to ignore her real accomplishments.
Women’s media – that strange corner of the media universe that wants you to love your physical flaws and also not have any – treats conservative women as a lower class of women. They’re undeserving of the same rah-rah feminism these magazines typically preach. In that same Elle piece, Doyle writes, “Any harm done to Kellyanne Conway by calling her ‘Skeletor’ is vastly outweighed by the harm Conway has done, and intends to do, to the American people.”
The message is impossible to miss: Body shaming is taboo unless you’re doing it to a conservative, in which case, go insane go insane throw some glitter make it rain. The piece calls Ivanka Trump an “ethically bankrupt opportunist,” but leaves the reader to guess what opportunities Ivanka has taken, and what ethical breaches she has committed.
The magazine has glowing remarks about other political women, however. Their home page features a segment called “Why I Ran,” with photos of four women working in government and as party officials. Zero of those women are Republicans.
The problem isn’t limited to Elle. Glamour goes the awkwardly cheery route, praising both Lena Dunham’s new haircut (the magazine almost obsessively tracks her every move) and profiling an artist who made a boat shaped like her genitals. Cosmopolitan stays out of politics, for the most part, but did once publish a piece on how Cubans were skinnier when their country was under a repressive regime (starvation will do that to you).
These magazines are making Kamala Harris their current “It” girl, just as they did to Wendy Davis a few years ago. No conservative woman, no matter what she does, has a shot at the star treatment. Those magazines tout a feminism as flimsy as their glossy pages.
