It's 2020 and women are exhausted

So many of my interactions with friends these days have become commiseration sessions about the state of our politics. When will the indignities end?

Elizabeth Warren.
(Image credit: Illustrated | Alex Wong/Getty Images, jessicahyde/iStock)

Back in 2018, Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren met for an off-the-record conversation. Warren says that during that conversation, Sanders told her a woman could not win the presidency in 2020; according to Sanders, he said it would be difficult, not necessarily impossible. Now that both parties involved are running for president, this exchange has been made public, as have their conflicting memories of what was said. And yet only one of these two people — the woman — has had her social media inundated with images of snakes to underscore her apparent duplicitousness.

As the 2020 presidential race approaches its final throes, Warren and her fellow female candidates are being distilled to the most basic and dehumanizing of stereotypes. Because in our American patriarchy, when accomplished, outspoken women pursue positions of power, they are routinely painted as unreliable and unlikable — snakes in human form.

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Zoe Fenson

Zoe Fenson is a freelance writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her writing has appeared in Longreads, Narratively, The New Republic, and elsewhere. When she's not writing, you'll find her doing crossword puzzles in cocktail bars or playing fetch with her cat.