Illustrations: Carolyn Figel

The Terrible Power of Being a Political Woman on TV

What we miss out on when we demand fealty to a certain on-screen aesthetic

Eve Fairbanks
Published in
15 min readAug 28, 2020

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Being a woman in America can feel like riding a defective bicycle. You pedal and start to work up some speed, get up momentum until you’re sailing and the sweatiest effort is over — and then something in the mechanics catches, a spring or a wonk in the…

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Eve Fairbanks
GEN
Writer for

Eve Fairbanks’s essays appear in The Guardian Long Reads, The Washington Post, and other outlets. She is at work on a book about South Africa.