The Catastrophic Rise Of "Girl-Boss" Politics

One of my long-standing critiques of “girl-boss” feminism is that some women interpret it as an excuse to behave like the worst men.

For example, some men, like 50-year-old Leonardo DiCaprio, can’t bring themselves to date a woman who isn’t at least a quarter of a century younger than they are. So isn’t it empowering when 49-year-old Charlize Theron brags about having sex with a guy 23 years younger than her?

And we’ve all heard of (or experienced) cases of men being physically abusive in relationships, so isn’t this TikTok trend where women karate-chop their husbands in the throat for speaking out of turn just hilarious?!

And as we all know, sometimes men speak over women in board meetings. So naturally, having an “equal seat at the table” means Jessica Alba telling male employees at her company to “Go home and ask your wife,” when they try to contribute to a meeting about product packaging.

None of this raises the bar, none of it makes society better, men and women just end up in a toxic, double-standard-laden race to the bottom, where everyone justifies their bad behaviour by pointing to the other side’s slightly worse behaviour.

Instead of reducing the number of terrible men in the world, we’re encouraged to celebrate as the number of terrible women increases.

I guess that’s one way to achieve equality.

Given how deep this problem goes, I’d never complain again if it were limited to a few women with maxed-out GOOP subscriptions. But sadly, politicians have figured out that they can use it too.

Take Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett’s recent choice to refer to a paraplegic governor from Texas as “Governor Hot Wheels.” Shouldn’t the party of “joy” and inclusivity aim to extend those values, even to people they disagree with?

No, silly! After all, the guy Democrats constantly condemn for his non-existent moral character once mocked a disabled reporter during a rally. So now, making fun of disabled people is fair game!

Or let’s consider Donald Trump’s well-documented decision to defy the Supreme Court and send a man who was in the United States legally to an El Salvadorian mega-prison. Shouldn’t the party of law and order have something to say about that?

Come on now. Joe Biden once clashed with the Supreme Court when he tried to forgive thousands of dollars of student loan debt via executive order. True, when the Court ruled against him, he obeyed their ruling and sourced the funds in other, more limited ways, but whatever, now following Supreme Court rulings is for suckers.

And sure, Donald Trump spent years undermining faith in democracy months before the 2020 election (once polling showed he was losing to Biden), refused to concede despite losing 59 of 60 legal challenges (the one win was about a matter that had no impact on the results), several of them with judges he appointed, and topped it off by sipping Diet Coke in the Oval Office as a mob he incited stormed the Capitol building and called for the execution of his then-vice president.

But Democrats have also raised concerns about election integrity in the past too, and even though they accepted the (historically close) results and resisted the urge to send a violent mob to the Capitol, election denial is now the new normal.

It’s quite something to watch the kind of accountability-avoidance tactics I mastered as a four-year-old play out on the political stage. But we’re still thinking too small. Because things get really #problematic when we apply this trick to international politics.