A magazine cover has never before made me as angry as Texas Monthly's cover featuring state Senator Wendy Davis as the winner of their "Bum Steer" award. So congrats, Texas Monthly, for descending to a new low this month and for doing your utmost to contribute to the poisoning of political discourse in our state.
As an antidote, though, I highly recommend Andrea Grimes' brilliant takedown: Let’s Talk About That Wendy Davis Cover of ‘Texas Monthly.’
Let’s Talk About That Wendy Davis Cover of @TexasMonthly, Shall We? by @andreagrimeshttp://t.co/...#HB2pic.twitter.com/7gp9BVgF6k
— RH Reality Check (@rhrealitycheck) December 15, 2014Grimes begins by talking about the hope that Wendy's pink sneakers, the ones that she wore while standing and filibustering for 13 hours in June 2013, represent for so many Texas women. As y'all may recall, Senate rules required that she stand the entire time, have nothing to drink or to eat, and talk about relevant matters (not read from Green Eggs and Ham). I am still in awe that Wendy had the stamina to do that.
After then reviewing the tradition behind the "bum steer" award, Grimes turns her attention to the magazine cover that accompanies this year's award:
But this magazine cover, y’all. This magazine cover is something else. Just months after Texas Monthly lauded Davis as a potentially serious political threat—along with San Antonio’s Joaquin and Julian Castro—under the headline “Game On?“, the magazine flung her into a cow pasture in an act of pure, derisive mockery. All for the crime of running for office and losing.Be sure to click through to the links that Grimes has provided. If you haven't been keeping up with the woman haters' attacks, they're jaw-dropping.And, perhaps more pointedly, for the crime of running for office as a woman. The cover follows a long bipartisan tradition of deeply misogynistic mainstream portrayals of women who work in politics. The tropes are easy enough to name: Sarah Palin as a dippy pin-up, Hillary Clinton as a ball-busting bitch, Condoleezza Rice suffering the double-whammy of racism and sexism as a GOP line-toeing mammy. When it comes to Davis, this cover—like many other less sleekly produced Davis renderings, from “Abortion Barbie,” to made-up Wendy condoms, to a variety of takes on the fact that she attended Harvard while married to a human man—doesn’t just caricature her. It portrays her as ugly, weak, self-absorbed and prissy. Whatever the failures of her campaign, those are not traits Davis possesses.