New York Times "gender editor" Jessica Bennett assembled a group of female Times writers to analyze Samantha Bee's feckless stunt against Ivanka Trump. Culture critic-at-large Amanda Hess suggested Bee was calling out Ivanka's "pink-washing" her father's aims with vague feminism. Opinion writer Bari Weiss replied Bee's C-word "really backfired," and she ended up "looking like a bully."
JESSICA BENNETT: O.K., so about Samantha Bee. I get it, it was a vulgar thing to say. Was it a sexist thing to say?
AMANDA HESS: I do think that Samantha Bee was criticizing Ivanka as a woman. [Her emphasis.] To me, the word is the surest way to reduce a woman to her gender, in the most vulgar way possible: It’s both. And the line comes in this specific context, as a rebuke of Ivanka posting a photo to Instagram — she in her floral summer dress, her son in his choo-choo train long underwear, their foreheads pressed together in their idyllic mother-son embrace — just as news broiled of parents being separated from their children across the country.
Ivanka has always tried to use her status as a woman and a mother to soft-pedal her father’s aims, to pink-wash them in vaguely feminist sentiments and feminine images without actually accomplishing any pro-family policy. This was Samantha Bee excoriating Ivanka Trump, woman to woman.
BARI WEISS: But it really backfired. Bee comes out from the whole thing looking like a bully, despite the fact that she was criticizing one of the most powerful women in the world, and the word she used is a big part of the reason why. Bee didn’t use it as some kind of daring reclamation. She used it exactly the way men have always used it: as a way to viciously humiliate a woman by shaming her about her physical body.
Weiss also disparaged Trump and the people around him as locking common decency, and then Bennett raised the double-standard complaints:
BENNETT: Do you think there’s a double standard when it comes to the punishments meted out for conservatives stepping in it versus liberals? What would have happened had a comedian called Sasha or Malia Obama that word?
WEISS: Forget Sasha and Malia, who are different because they were children when their father was president and didn’t have jobs in his White House. Just imagine for a moment that Sam Bee said the same about Michelle Obama or Susan Rice. There is simply no question about how TBS would have responded. There would be no more Full Frontal. [Or it just would have never made it into a TelePrompter.]
BONNIE WERTHEIM: As a counterpoint, there are reports that the president has wielded this word against women, and he seems to be doing fine. Or, at least, he still has his job.
HESS: I feel like whatever other psychological and personal dynamics may be going on there, Trump brought Ivanka into the White House to function as a shield in just this way. Regardless of party, everybody knows the first kids are off-limits. But in this administration’s web of family and political entanglements, the first daughter is also (O.K., I had to look this up) the president’s “senior adviser.”
The Times didn't publish (and perhaps the women didn't discuss) how Chelsea Clinton was a professional campaigner for her mother, and how that's a different example than the Obama daughters. But then, Bee happily introduced Hillary at a 2017 women's conference with a bucket of goo: "You deserve to hear it 100 times -- it should have been you!"
