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The GOP Is Seizing the Feminist Moment, So Why Can’t Democrats?

There’s nothing worse than watching the left’s inaction while Republicans happily call themselves the real feminists

Jessica Valenti
GEN
Published in
3 min readOct 20, 2020

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Ivanka Trump with the winners of the Pledge to America’s Workers Presidential Award in Washington, D.C. Photo: Joshua Roberts/Getty Images

I’ll give it to Republicans: As sexist as they are, they somehow manage to use all that misogyny to their advantage. While Democrats are still performing postmortems on the 2016 presidential election — reeling over the sexism that played a role in voters’ decisions — the GOP elevates religious zealots like Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court while praising her for the size of her family and marveling how the laundry ever gets done in such a busy house.

In that way, conservatives really have a leg up on their left-wing counterparts — their sexism is core to their belief system, and they’re not afraid to empower women who support that ideological project. Democrats, on the other hand, haven’t come to terms with how deep misogyny runs on both sides of the aisle and are so afraid of sexism that when given a young, diverse roster of exciting presidential candidates, they selected… Joe Biden.

We’re in the most powerfully feminist cultural period in decades — maybe ever — and somehow it’s Republicans who are seizing the moment.

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Published in GEN

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Jessica Valenti
Jessica Valenti

Written by Jessica Valenti

Feminist author & columnist. Native NYer, pasta enthusiast. I write about abortion every day at abortioneveryday.com

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