Jezebels, Witches, Robots, and Fakes: Four Misogynistic Tropes to Fight as the Election Approaches

People will say they’re not eschewing Harris because she is a woman. They're often mistaken.

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We’re just over a week out from the 2024 election, and I am, like every right-thinking person, feeling pretty terrified. But I am keeping the faith: I still believe that Harris will win, for reasons I’ve been into here before: Black women’s organizational brilliance; women’s fury about Dobbs; and the fact that Harris isn’t subject to some of the same gender biases that dog female candidates who have to go through the primaries. (They then invariably suffer by comparison to their close male counterparts.)

But it’s our job, again, to be on high alert for the misogyny that will undoubtedly cost Harris with a significant portion of the electorate. Fairly obviously, it’s not just the seven percent of voters who say they wouldn’t vote for a well-qualified woman that we have to worry about. It’s also the many more voters who will perceive both Trump and Harris through a more or less subtly gendered lens, and forgive his many misdeeds and gaffes, while holding her to unduly high standards. (Remember the question facing us: not who is perfect, but who is the best person of the two candidates available. With American democracy on the line, the answer is not difficult.) And there are also many tropes through which gender biases are currently playing out: perceiving Trump as strong, successful, genuine, and a “real leader” (all too obviously, he is none of these), while having a view of Harris tainted by misogynistic tropes, scripts, and stereotypes.

Image credit: WBUR

We are attuned to some of these—saying that Harris is overly emotional or hormonal, say, when it’s clear that the shoe is on the other foot with respect to these two candidates. (That Trump is angry and volatile is noted more often than that he is petty and sentimental.) Similarly, the insidious idea that Harris is somehow overly sexual, or that she “slept her way to the top,” is fairly easily called out as the result of the noxious ways some people seek to dismiss and derogate conventionally attractive women seeking positions of power. (Trump, just to remind you, has been legally declared a rapist.) What is less widely known, and demands vigilance in this moment, are the following tropes that are reliably used to tarnish female candidates.