Two weeks into 2019 and there are some powerhouse ladies out there making headlines. Elizabeth Warren has announced her candidacy for president, so it’s worth a read over at the New Yorker to find out how she is taking on entrenched corruption in the most organized way possible.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been in office for one week exactly and has opponents riled up about everything from her tax plan to her dance moves. Don’t miss her own Instagram video giving it back to her critics outside her Congressional office, taunting: “I hear the GOP thinks women dancing are scandalous. Wait till they find out Congresswomen dance too!” Meanwhile, Maureen Dowd encourages her to dance on without losing sight of the main goal. Why the main goal can’t include exposing some of the backward ways of the old guard in Washington, especially vis-à-vis their views on women, is a question for a different post, but it seems like the new Congresswoman can be forgiven for coming out swinging.
There is something suspicious about how many of the same people who hated Hillary Clinton now have it out for Elizabeth Warren and AOC. The people over at McSweeney’s swear (fingers crossed) that it has nothing to do with the fact that they’re women but count their lucky stars that the dancing video rescued them from the follies of a socialist insurgency.
In other news about what it feels like to be a woman in 2019, The Paris Review reflects on the anger, the frustration, and the humiliation of being a woman navigating the daily threat of violence in the great U.S. of A., and Kristen Roupenian talks about being expected to answer for Cat Person as though it were auto fiction when her story went viral in the New Yorker last year.
Meanwhile, Oyinkan Braithwaite discusses the way beauty is elevated to the level of virtue in an interview with Electric Lit about her novel My Sister, the Serial Killer, while Lareign Ward poses the argument that the much-maligned romance novel might just have a thing or two to teach us about a world in which women’s desires are allowed not just to exist but to define the narrative. Revolutionary, indeed.