Embracing misogyny to "own the cons"
By Scott Tibbs, March 1, 2019
There is a lot of love for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the Left, but sometimes things get a little absurd. One such example is a photo of AOC walking past five men with the caption "When you see a Strong Woman in real life for the first time."
I know the people who retweeted and liked this photo think they are "owning the cons" (assuming all of these men are Republicans) but in the excitement of "owning the cons" they actually were insulting all of the women in these men's lives. Seriously, do you really think a bunch of guys who look like they are under 30 they have never seen a "strong woman" before? That is quite an assumption. Their mothers, sisters, aunts, and female friends are not strong women, obviously. A statement meant as a rib of white males was actually very misogynistic.
Look, I am not taking anything away from Ocasio-Cortez's accomplishments. No matter what the turnout was in the primary, unseating someone who had been in office for twenty years is a major accomplishment, especially for a first-time candidate. She works the media perfectly and gains national attention with many of her tweets, gaining saturation media coverage that most candidates for Congress will never be able to get. But there is no way she is the very first "strong woman" these guys have ever seen.
The progressives who fawned over that description actually revealed a lot about how they view women, in assuming that these men do not know strong women. They assume that women who come from a conservative background are not strong women, which is patently false, bigoted, ignorant and misogynistic. I can name a bunch of strong women just in my own family - women who faced unexpected severe tragedy and fought through to be well regarded, loved and respected by everyone they knew, decades before AOC was even born. I know women a decade younger than AOC who are strong women - and also happen to be conservatives.
Yes, by all means celebrate what AOC has been able to achieve in only one year. But do not insult and degrade tens of millions of other women in the process. And for crying out loud, drop the bigoted assumptions of conservative women that are the foundation of tweets like that.
Opinion Archives
E-mail Scott
Scott's Links
About the Author
ConservaTibbs.com