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.

The “Jezebel”/“Witch” tropes:

Harris has been subject to attacks that she is a “Jezebel spirit” in recent weeks that are increasingly vitriolic. They are also extremely predictable. Patricia Hill Collins has been theorizing this noxious, racist trope, which paints Black women as demonic, excessively powerful, and sexually promiscuous, since the 1990s. The trope also of course plays a role in justifying brutally punishing women perceived through this lens: Queen Jezebel, in the Old Testament, was defenestrated, trampled, and eaten by the dogs as payback for persecuting prophets and worshipping false idols. Lance Wallnau, the right-wing Christian leader who has one million Facebook followers, is explicit in linking this trope to that of a witch: “[Harris] can look presidential and that’s the seduction of what I would say is witchcraft,” he said in one video on X. It’s not accidental that Hillary Clinton, and Julia Gillard, the first female prime minister of Australia, were portrayed as witches too—a way of dismissing their power and influence as uncanny, unnatural, even evil. Saying the quiet part out loud, Wallnau comes out and admits that he is influenced here by race as well as gender. He said in another video that Harris represents “an amalgam of the spirit of Jezebel in a way that’ll be even more ominous than Hillary, because she’ll bring a racial component, and she’s younger.”

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that people who operate with these tropes are dehumanizing women in any literal sense—indeed, the trope is a way of tarnishing women embodying human, all too human, qualities, such as speaking our minds and having political commitments. Again, Wallnau is helpfully lucid on this point: “For the record, Kamala isn’t a demon and no living soul on planet earth is a demon. However, people, political parties, and organizational structures can be under demonic influence,” Wallnau wrote in September.

Of course, someone like Wallnau is an extremist—albeit one with a lot of influence, in being hailed as a prophet in the New Apostolic Reformation, which the Associated Press describes as “a decentralized yet highly networked” and “politicized” movement. But the sense that Harris and other female politicians simply cannot be trusted, and that their power is a dark and frightening force, is unfortunately widespread. The language of “Jezebel spirits” has a foothold even in down ballot races: in Indiana, the Republican candidate for Lieutenant Governor painted the state election as a contest between “strength and godly boldness” and the “Jezebel spirit” of the Democratic ticket… which three women are leading.

The “Robot”/“Fake” Tropes

In my first book, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, I note the intriguing trope wherein women who behave in ways that are counter to feminine social norms are often perceived as empty inside: their actions as not quite belonging to them, as not motivated by their own authentic beliefs, desires, values, and intentions. This gives rise to scenes in literature such as Albert Camus’s “little robot woman” in The Stranger, who the (I would argue highly if unconsciously misogynistic) narrator Meursault spies taking off her “mannish” coat to sit down and order a meal at a café, and circle some programs in a radio guide. She is behaving in an incredibly ordinary manner, at one level. And yet the fact that she’s a woman out on her own, being served rather than serving, not pleasing others but rather herself, and manifesting appetite and agency (she is described as “wolfing down” her food), gives rise to the sense that she is uncanny and robotic. This, I argue, is plausibly due to the fact that she’s reversing the roles in the script, which reliably instils a sense that someone is somehow “‘off,’ off-putting, peculiar, and creepy.” As I go on to write: “They may [then] even be perceived as uncanny or robotic: as if they are an imposter in the role, merely “going through the motions.” This doesn’t mean they are perceived as less than fully human, though. It means they are being viewed with the kind of suspicion and even disgust or horror liable to arise when someone’s behavior seems socially anomalous. She is not playing her part in the script. And so we have grave doubts about her character or persona—or even doubt she has one.” I relate this to the “robotic” charge often leveled against Hillary Clinton: that she, too, was playing a role historically exclusively reserved for men, and aspiring to displace one man as well as succeed another.

Witness, then, some of the one-word summations of Kamala Harris in a New York Times focus group of twelve female Trump voters: Teri, 44: “robot.” Relatedly, Melissa, 43, called her “fake.” She took the word right out of the mouth of Gaylin, 31: “That’s what I was about to say.” “She’s so scripted that you don’t know if she believes in what she’s saying.” Krys, 52, called Harris a “follower.” Who or what is she following, asked the moderator. “I don’t know. And that’s what scares me. Is she following Biden? Is the following the administration? It’s like somebody is giving her a script,” she responded. Another (male) voter, canvassed in an article about the effects on voters of Harris’s gender, said he was ready for a female president: “But not her—she’s a puppet.”

Misogyny is often a matter of thinking that women have ideas beyond their station—for a paradigm example, in seeking highest political office. Here, for a variant, women who seek such power are dismissed as having no ideas at all; their heads are empty. They are puppets, manipulated by unknown or sinister forces. Even at the level of visual perception, they seem strange and uncanny to some people: stiff, hollow, wooden, and, again, robotic. Their energy somehow doesn’t seem to be coming from inside them; nor, it is extrapolated, are their values. They are held to be not only inauthentic but dangerously manipulable; liable to be prevailed upon by mercurial social forces.

The “fake” trope and its variants afflict women at the highest levels of politics in potent, inchoate, and deeply predictable ways. It comes down, in large part, to the sense that women just don’t belong in the presidency or similarly powerful positions. And the trope even extends to women who are perceived as not belonging in positions of power in education. On a hunch, I once examined the frequency of mentions of being called “fake” versus being called “genuine” in student evaluations of male versus female professors. Yep, I called it. The graph for “fake” looks like this, where orange dots represent the frequency of the word for female professors; blue dots, the male ones:

Female professors are more likely to be described as “fake,” sometimes by many orders of magnitude, in all but two subjects. The results flip, albeit by a somewhat smaller margin, if you look at the word “genuine:” male professors are more likely to be so described, in all but one subject.

The lesson is clear: women occupying or trying to occupy male-coded positions of power and authority are seen as fakes, as frauds, as imposters, thanks to the workings of misogyny. It has nothing to do with her personality or qualifications or even the w­­ay she is depicted in the media because it’s not about her, specifically; it’s simply that she is a her displacing a (white privileged) him who is perceived as entitled to occupy the role as part of his birthright. No matter how wildly unqualified and incompetent and terrible he might be in the position. As I’ve written in summary of widespread political perceptions before:

She was “the most cautious” of politicians; disturbingly inscrutable. Who is she really, behind her “expertly coiffed,” “airbrushed,” and “expensively tailored” exterior? As one pundit put it, she “has many masks but who has seen her face?” Said another: “She is either very conservative or she believes in nothing. We better hope she’s conservative.” … There is a “Machiavellianism just short of mendacity” visible in her demeanor. In lacking an authentic political vision, her policies are based merely on “apprehension of what the electorate might like.” She “believes in nothing but power.”

You might have thought these perceptions were about Kamala Harris, or Hillary Clinton before her. They weren’t; these words were written about Julia Gillard, Australia’s first female Prime Minister, when she was running for re-election over a decade ago.

This is the way unconscious misogyny continues to play out on the political stage: people who say they’d love a woman, just not this particular woman, because she’s a Jezebel or a witch or a robot or a fake… or insert trope that’s been used to dismiss the last half-dozen female candidates.

As a writer, I believe it’s important to know your limits. I recognize, and at this point embrace the fact, that potential Trump voters are not reading my words. Nor, by and large, are people who are considering sitting this one out because of misogynistic misgivings about Kamala Harris (as distinct from genuinely progressive scruples about her, which I am not looking to litigate here). But I know that, within this community, I am writing to many good folks who have connections with such people. You are their family members and neighbors and colleagues and Facebook friends and actual friends. When they raise the specter of these tropes about Harris, or share the memes on social media, you can correct them—gently or sharply, directly or indirectly, by calling them in or out. You will know best how to do it. Just know that you do not have to be helpless in the face of people’s inchoate suspicions that Kamala is a witch or a bitch or a fake or a puppet. You can point out that many said the very same thing about so many other women before her. And that, if we don’t start getting wise to these misimpressions—the understandable but demonstrable effect of the misogynistic reluctance to grant women masculine-coded power and authority—we will end up with an evil man installed once again in the White House.

Don’t fuck this up, America. Let’s show the world that we are capable of better.

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