Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
I think Kamala’s (just noticed that my default was to her first name rather than surname like male VPs) gown would have been better in a fit and flare version, to balance out her bustiness. I do like the color.
Thank you for noticing, that’s a per peeve of mine and I pointed it out on the politics forum but got lambasted for bringing it up.
I have mixed feelings about that. I think sometimes people will default to first names for a female politician because it diminishes her. For instance, I think people who insist on saying Nancy instead of Pelosi are doing it, consciously or unconsciously, because they feel the very feminine name Nancy will be taken less seriously.
However, Kamala Harris has an incredibly identifiable first name, and she has incorporated it into her branding (her Senate campaign famously had slogans centered around how to pronounce her first name, and her campaigning has always placed her much more identifiable first name at the center of the campaign). So I think people who default to Kamala are often doing it simply because they associate her so strongly with her first name and less so with her second, to the point that I think if you said Harris, there are people who would need a second to realize who you were talking about.
Similarly, I think people often defaulted to Hillary because it distinguished her from Bill, and that her political campaigns tended to embrace her first name specifically to frame her as an individual and not as "a Clinton."
So while I agree that often it's a misogynist choice, I do think on a case-by-case basis it might not be misogynist. And in Kamala's case I think it's less likely to be misogyny.