In the recent midterm election, the Democratic triumphs are so numerous that it’s nearly impossible to keep up with them all. Still, the party’s faithful have taken special delight in the defeat of Rep. Lauren Boebert, who lost what was supposed to be a ruby-red district in Colorado to her Democratic challenger, retired Rear Adm. Eileen Laubacher. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton even got a little saucy, posting “Bye, Felicia” on social media, a reference to a famous line dismissing an annoying character in the 1995 movie “Friday.”
Clinton’s special animosity to Boebert is fitting. The former first lady has long angered conservatives for rejecting the limits of traditional femininity. Since Boebert was first elected to Congress in 2020, she has implicitly sold herself to the MAGA base as the anti-Clinton. She titillated the right and annoyed the left with her over-the-top performance of a MAGA man’s contradictory fantasy of a woman who is both sexually liberated and a demure wife and mother.
Boebert’s story reveals why the sexed-up version of MAGA womanhood was always doomed to fail: The facade did not last long.
When she first reached Congress at age 35, Boebert drew heavy media attention for her departure from the way conservative Christian women typically present themselves. The congresswoman favored tight jeans (complete with a gun holster), short skirts and so much makeup it was hard to recognize her without it. She also portrayed her gun-loving family life as wholesome and chaste, despite meeting her husband when she was 16 and he was 22, and dropping out of high school to have the first of her four children with him. She used this Christian persona to attack other women’s rights, including access to birth control.
Boebert was the forerunner to a type that has become ubiquitous in the Trump era: Republican women who gain fame and power by submitting to extreme beauty standards, while still insisting that they are good and pious ladies. Observers dubbed their combination of heavy makeup and rumored plastic surgery “Mar-a-Lago face.”
Coupled with a loud proclamation of traditional values, the look allowed women to rise high in the ranks of the GOP. Karoline Leavitt, known for her oversize cross necklace and filler-enhanced lips that the president regularly praised, became White House press secretary. Kristi Noem was appointed secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina grabbed headline after headline for things like bragging about her active sex life at a prayer breakfast in 2023. Conservative activist Laura Loomer, who like Noem possesses what the Hollywood Reporter described as a “makeup-caked, angular cheekboned, full-lipped” face, has been Trump’s frequent traveling companion.
But Boebert’s story reveals why the sexed-up version of MAGA womanhood was always doomed to fail: The facade did not last long. It quickly became evident that hers was a turbulent marriage, and she ended it in 2023. Later that year, she was ejected from a showing of the musical “Beetlejuice,” and camera footage showed her and her date apparently groping each other in front of other theatergoers. Facing a possible loss in her more swingy Colorado district, she relocated to a district nearby, winning a safe Republican seat in 2024. In the 2026 blue wave, though, even that wasn’t enough to save her seat.
All these women were markedly different from the buttoned-up conservative women of old, but don’t mistake their more overtly sexual presentation for liberation.
Boebert’s defeat capped off a year of such women being pushed out of power, either by voters or by male GOP leaders who needed handy scapegoats. Noem proclaimed the health of her 34-year marriage to Bryon Noem, until rumors of an affair with her aide Corey Lewandowski helped lead Trump to fire her. (Both Noem and Lewandowski denied having an affair.) Mace will be leaving Congress in January after a failed bid to be her state’s governor. Leavitt gave up her podium in August.
Loomer put her podcast “Loomer Unleashed” on hiatus after the midterm losses. White House chief of staff Stephen Miller’s wife, Katie, who has a “YOLO” tattoo and joked that her husband was a “sexual matador,” dropped her family values-toting podcast this month. Katie Zacharia lasted only a few days this year as White House press secretary, despite being showily Christian and sporting a standard Mar-a-Lago face.
All these women were markedly different from the buttoned-up conservative women of old, but don’t mistake their more overtly sexual presentation for liberation. On the contrary, they created an impossible and oppressive standard for women: They were expected to fulfill male fantasies without having even basic reproductive rights, much less freedom of their own.
The prim church ladies of the GOP past were annoying, but at least their self-presentation and conservative values were consistent enough that leaders like Phyllis Schlafly could have long careers. In trying to be both highly sexualized and hostile to women’s sexual liberation, however, the modern MAGA women found the contradictions unsustainable. Being flamboyantly sexy while opposing women’s sexual liberation is a very thin tightrope to walk. Most eventually fall off.
The post Lauren Boebert’s loss caps a grim year for MAGA women appeared first on MS NOW.
Author: Source Author
From MS Now.
Leave a Reply