Every woman has a moment when she realizes her body is public property. For me, it happened the summer I turned 16; I got in the habit of walking a few miles every day, usually to the library. For the first time in my life, men in cars would shout through their windows at me as I walked. It didn't matter what they shouted—whether it was complimentary or threatening, "beautiful" or "show me your tits." What mattered was that, for the first time in my life, I developed the quintessentially female sense of being watched. I learned to see myself from the outside—learned that I simply could not take up public space without being judged, first and foremost, on what my body looked like, and whether the people around me liked looking at it. I started dressing to avoid the comments. I started to think twice about going outside.
As I say: Every woman learns this in her own time. But if there are any little girls out there who watch Fox & Friends to learn about the world (and I pray there are none, for many reasons) they probably learned something about this on Tuesday, from seeing Bill O'Reilly's treatment of congresswoman, firebrand, and frequent ELLE.com target of adoration Maxine Waters.
Waters was shown, in a clip, delivering a typically ferocious statement on the patriotism of the marginalized ("We have suffered discrimination. We have suffered isolation, undermining. But we stand up for America, oftentimes when others who think they are more patriotic, who say they are more patriotic, do not") with O'Reilly's smirking face displayed next to hers in split screen, shaking his head and grinning and doing everything short of making cuckoo motions by spiraling his finger around his ear. When the clip concluded, he delivered his assessment: "I didn't hear a word she said. I was looking at the James Brown wig."
O'Reilly's commentary would have been awful in any context. (Under pressure, he has since apologized, calling the joke "dumb.") But even as his dismissal of Waters hit the airwaves, the internet was already passing around an example of similarly stinky viral garbage, this time aimed at two entirely different female politicians: British Prime Minister Theresa May and First Minister of Scotland Nicola Sturgeon, photographed in a meeting where they reportedly discussed the possibility of Scottish independence, and seen on the cover of the Daily Mail with the headline "Never mind Brexit, who won Legs-It!" Whilst discussing matters of global import, you see, they had both worn skirts.
It's not exactly a surprise that this still happens to women in 2017. After all, many of us just spent the weekend debating and/or deploring the case of two female teenagers and a little girl being denied service on United Airlines for wearing leggings. (The child was reportedly made to change into a dress; the teens, who were held to a dress code as part of United's "pass traveler" program, were denied service altogether.) Our cultural policing of women's bodies starts early—by fifth grade, you can be judged sexy enough to endanger the flight safety of your fellow passengers—and only gets worse with age.
Nor is it remotely surprising that women of color like Waters get hit the hardest. That O'Reilly sneered at her hair, specifically, was not a coincidence. Black women have long suffered from the racist belief that their natural hair is "unprofessional," and been harshly scrutinized based on how they choose to wear it; there are many reports of women being forced by employers to change their hairstyles, or who simply were not hired at all because of the styles they wore to the job interview. Just take a look at #BlackWomenAtWork, which took off on Twitter in response to the Waters insult. To say that you can't take a black woman seriously because her hair looks funny is not a casual insult; at best, it's deeply ignorant, and at worst it's a calculated attack on her right to occupy a professional setting.
What is surprising, and depressing, is that there is apparently no level of power or influence that a woman can attain in order to escape this kind of treatment. Theresa May is the U.K. prime minister; she is the single most powerful woman—scratch that; most powerful person—in her country, and one of the most powerful women in the world. Sturgeon occupies a similar position of prominence and trust in Scotland. Maxine Waters has been a member of Congress since 1991; she has had a voice and a place in the halls of American power for nearly three decades. No one could reasonably argue that these women are only notable for their bodies, or that they haven't earned the right to be taken seriously. In fact, they enjoy a level of privilege most of us will never know. And yet, in a moment, any random talking head or would-be witty newspaper editor can reduce them to a collection of body parts to be evaluated by the public. If it can happen to them, it can happen to anyone. And it does.
Indeed, there's evidence that the more a woman tries to escape this scrutiny, the harder it hits her. During last year's election, some critics made hay out of the fact that Hillary Clinton paid $600 for her haircuts, something which supposedly demonstrated how out of touch she was with the common man. What those critics ignored, of course, was that if Clinton ever appeared on the campaign trail with unkempt or unstylish hair, she would be treated…well, she would be treated the way we have routinely treated Hillary Clinton, whose "bad hair" has been a regular item on scandal pages since 1992. God forbid, after three straight decades of hearing about it, that she give in and pay extra just to avoid the conversation.
Politically engaged readers will no doubt object to mixing Waters, Clinton, and May. It's true that every woman listed here has her own political agenda. Some of them are blatantly at odds with each other; May, for instance, is responsible for executing the hyper-conservative and nationalist Brexit agenda, whereas Sturgeon represents Scotland, which voted to remain within the EU and is pushing to leave the United Kingdom altogether. But this erasure of their individual politics and voices is precisely the point.
Catcalling, or policing what girls can wear in planes or schools, is intended to make women feel insecure in public spaces—to remind us that, no matter what our own ambitions or goals may be, if we are in public, we exist to be looked at and judged. I didn't want to think about what my chest looked like at 16; I just wanted to go to the library, like the sheltered dork I was. The catcallers reminded me I had to get through them first.
Female politicians have seemingly gotten past all that and made one of the most significant, and transgressive, moves into public space imaginable. They're not just public, they shape the public, making the rules and decisions that govern everyday life throughout the world. Yet we still reduce them to their bodies. We're not just trying to scare them out of the public eye; we're demoting them, reminding them that they are still women, after all, and—just as O'Reilly said of Waters—what they have to say doesn't matter, because we can just refuse to listen.
After O'Reilly's comment, the hosts of Fox & Friends turned to a vigorous debate of Maxine Waters' looks. "I think she's very attractive," said host Ainsley Earhardt. "I love James Brown, but it's the same hair," O'Reilly responded. It went on that way, with a few more hours to go before O'Reilly apologized to the public. In all the talk of her looks, her voice—what she had to say, her right to be heard, what she meant in her comments about American politics or American patriotism—was lost. As it always is.
