Why do "pleasing women" do the dirty work for patriarchal men?
Weaponizing idealized femininity can help you get away with the most diabolical stuff possible. But no amount of botox will make you equal to a man in a sexist organization.
Kristi Noem and Pam Bondi will go down as just some of the many demoted henchmen and women who have done heinous things in this era. How they got there and why they were chosen also matters.
Part of their legacy is that they are stars in a lineup of women whose idealized femininity has been weaponized to “soften” the image of men and organizations that are doing horrible actions.
Women have always been key to softening the image of highly problematic men and brutal regimes.
These women tend to be conventionally pretty, pleasing to the male gaze, well-dressed, and most often white and wealthy.
Remember when we were introduced to this version?
Ivanka was pivotal in delivering us into our current predicament and the MAGA era. When she joined the campaign back in 2016, her “soft” image next to her father, especially after he was caught on tape talking about assaulting women, gave him a kind of halo effect.
I often think about a woman I once met at a party who had met Ivanka Trump in person. This woman worked in the fashion industry, and had been invited to a meeting where Ivanka was present. This was back during the first Trump campaign, when Ivanka’s primary business was still selling high-heeled pumps (what an innocent time!).
How did she describe Ivanka? “She was so nice,” this woman said to a circle of people that formed around her to hear the tale. “She had such a nice smile. I had to keep reminding myself who she is, even though she looks like Barbie and smells like vanilla.”
The woman telling this story was a Black woman who described herself as deeply opposed to MAGA politics, and yet she said she still found herself feeling the seductive pull of a “nice,” pretty, female celebrity.
Even though she was standing face to face with this person: someone who smiled reassuringly on television and told women to trust someone who we now know is an Epstein files regular, and an accused rapist. She promised that he would “look out for those suffering and struggling” (welp).
Why are pleasing, conventionally feminine women like this so important to male-dominated organizations, especially those with a penchant for brutality?
In part because of the feminine power of appearing nice.
We are highly conditioned to feel that women who are performing patriarchal femininity are “nice.” The appearance of pleasing niceness is incredibly powerful, especially if you’re a male-dominant organization like the current administration, where men outnumber women by a ratio of five to one, and especially if you’re enacting policies that are unpopular and marked with brutality.
Research bears out that we are primed to believe that women who conform to conventional beauty standards are more trustworthy (especially if they are white) more cooperative, and more righteous, sympathetic, and deserving of protection. An attack on a woman who looks like a smiling Barbie is much more likely to come off as mean and offensive, versus, say, an attack on a protester wearing a tank top and yelling at a cop.
And yet, taking Noem as an example—before she was head of DHS, she had a wide history of ugly deeds. These ranged from lying about meeting North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un in her published memoir (they had to redact and re-print), to misusing public funds to buy luxury items for herself as governor of South Dakota (while the state was in a budget crisis), and canceling millions in funds for LGBTQ+ and equity programs. And, we can’t forget that she famously bragged about shooting her own dog.
As head of DHS, her legacy is horrific: at least two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis were killed under her tenure —Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti. Six people died in ICE custody. ICE has detained hundreds of children. Noem oversaw the deportation of over 250 refugees to a brutal prison in El Salvador deemed “hell on earth” without due process. At least 260 who were granted DACA protection as children were deported and arrested. Countless families have been separated. Hundreds of thousands have been deported, many disappeared.
What’s in it for women like this, who carry out the awful deeds of powerful men, is the same thing that’s in it for other men, of course. In male-dominated organizations, the approval of other men can lead to power and status, even if it means betraying yourself and others. (See: the men’s hockey team stunting for misogynistic jokes; see also: Pam Bondi perjuring herself in service of protecting a powerful man from the Epstein files).
I always find women in these positions interesting, though. Their “patriarchal opportunism” as I like to call it (betraying yourself and others to seek approval from powerful men for power and status), doesn’t change the fact that these regimes ultimately look down on women, and diminish them.
Which means that unlike a man who has pretty clearly sold their soul to access power (like, say, JD Vance), these women only stand to advance so far before they are put in their place.
These women will never ascend to the top of their party’s ticket. Their party will never put them in the Oval Office. MAGA is, essentially, an anti-women movement. Does that plague them, in the back of their mind? Does Pam Bondi chafe at the fact that no amount of sucking up or competence will make her as eligible by her party’s standards as, say, the clownish Kash Patel?
There’s always an aspect of lowering oneself, knowing that your body and its presentation is a tool to provide a soft mask for the men that you shill for—something that these women’s male colleagues will never have to contend with.
I realize that these women are not known for having much of anything resembling a moral center. But does this not irk these women on some level? Or are they simply glad to rise as far as they can by seeking approval from men who will never see them as their equals?
In the end, Noem may have forgotten this central truth of her situation, and flown too close to the sun. True, the brutal immigration crackdown and occupation of Minnesota raised national outrage, and the president needed someone else to take a hit for it.
But Noem’s ouster also came after a tense, two-day congressional hearing that largely centered on a controversy over a $220 million border security advertising campaign that featured Noem— mostly on horseback, with Mount Rushmore in the background. Noem testified to Congress that Trump had approved the entire campaign. Trump claimed he never knew anything about it.
But if you watch the ad video, you can’t help but wonder if it was the price of the ad campaign that bothered her boss and the powerful men in the room, or the content. The campaign opens with iconography of Noem astride a horse in front of a national monument as the camera pans around her, with a voiceover that centers her: “I’m Kristi Noem,” she says in the opening lines that are peppered with the obligatory references to forefathers and grit and freedom.
Then we watch Noem in action, riding a horse through a prairie full of running American bison. She intones truisms about America’s greatness, paired with warnings to any outsider who dares cross its borders. Toward the end, images of the president are layered in as she delivers the closing line: “From President Trump and me, welcome home,” she says. Almost as though the two of them are equals.
Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s film director who helped soften and mythologize the Third Reich through her films, importantly did not put herself in her work for the party. She cultivated an image focused on beauty, power, and the “Aryan” ideal, bolstered by her feminine identity as a former dancer and actress. Her work operated to prop up the image of the men that she worked for, not to center herself.
That may have been Noem’s fatal mistake: not her brutality or unprofessionalism, but forgetting her place. She may have forgotten that within her party, her only power is ultimately serving the men above her, not centering her own ascendancy.
She was never meant to be an equal, much less a center of attention. In the ad footage of her, nothing comes to mind so much as the image of that old American icon: the Marlboro Man.
But she was never meant to be the Marlboro Man. She was never meant to be the man. She was hired to be a pretty face.
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I love this post because it both explains the phenomenon of Ivanka, Kristi and Pam (and their many predecessors ) and it shows us how even the best Botox job cannot protect you from misogyny and tyranny. No one is safe. So they make a choice to do this, but even they aren’t protected. Like you’ve said in the past — patriarchy doesn’t protect anyone.
This reminded me of a crucial scene in The Handmaids Tale, Serena Joy had been instrumental in the ideology, theology and politics of Gilead of “solving” and “curating” the low birth population. Serena expects to be let into the room to plan further and to be praised. Her husband goes into the government room and the door closes shutting her out. On twitter someone wrote “Serena Joy is the architect of her own prison.” You can only rise so far, you’ll never actually be one of us. They used her ideas and discarded her. These types of women want status, money and power. I think many of them very male centred to start with. Their motivation is seeking male approval, they’re either very insecure or they’re used to pleasing men to get want they want or be rewarded later. They’re never girls girls that support other women or implement policies in women’s favour. It’s internalised misogyny and selfishness that sees them as an exception a political pick me “I’m not like other women.”