Monday, April 24, 2023

THE VIEW OF CANDACE OWENS FROM NOWHERE

Last week, The New Yorker published Clare Malone's terrible profile of Candace Owens. The piece isn't quite as bad as Kelefa Sanneh's godawful 2009 profile of Michael Savage in the same magazine; that story portrayed Savage not as a spittle-flecked bigot but as "a marvellous storyteller, a quirky thinker, and an incorrigible free-associater" who "sometimes sounds ... like the star of a riveting and unusually vivid one-man play ... or a fugitive character out of a Philip Roth novel." In Malone's depiction, Owens is a conservative but not, somehow, a conservative culture warrior. To Malone, Owens is a thinker and sage.
Broadly, she sees her remit as moral guidance for the Internet age, helping impressionable minds sift through a raft of images and concepts.... She delights in speaking ex cathedra, and her focus on women and the family feels particularly timely in a political moment shaped by the effects of the pandemic and the overturning of Roe v. Wade. “I think moms are starting to pay more attention to what’s happening,” Owens told me. “It’s not necessarily just transgenderism. It’s everything that’s happening in the classroom. And suddenly it feels like we’re in a custody dispute with the state for our children.”
This is textbook right-wing culture-warring -- We're not agenda-driven political operatives, we're just a bunch of moms who think all this stuff doesn't make sense! -- but Malone thinks Owens wants to save souls rather than win votes (and market share). She can't quite believe Owens is a bog-standard ideologue:
Owens picks topics of broad cultural concern, but her answers to big questions are often knee-jerk contrarian. Responding to a study about record levels of sadness among teen girls, she said it was due to our “perverse” hookup and drinking culture which tells people “that aspiring toward family is backwards.” In a video titled “Are Women Ruining the Workplace?” she determines that “things have gotten worse at work since women joined” and that men have to navigate “a bunch of land mines.” When Skims, Kim Kardashian’s shapewear line, used a model in a wheelchair for a line of adaptive underwear for people with disabilities, Owens did a brief segment about it. “I don’t really understand how far we’re going to take this inclusivity thing,” she said.
This isn't "knee-jerk contrarianism." A knee-jerk contrarian would be to the left of conventional wisdom once in a while. Owens never is.

The Candace Owens message is the main message of the 21st-century right: Anything that's not to my taste is abnormal and evil.
... her show, she said, is about “what enrages me,” a list that includes the Black Lives Matter movement, the body-positivity movement, the trans-rights movement, Ozempic, the Kardashians, Madonna’s plastic surgery, Colin Kaepernick, and the Democratic Party. Owens, who was wearing gabardine trousers with sparkly suspenders, also takes issue with women wearing yoga pants in non-workout settings. “This weird culture of telling women to de-beautify themselves and to be more masculine—I mean, it’s just bad,” she said.
(Owens thinks yoga pants make woman look "more masculine"? She really ought to ask a few heterosexual men whether they agree.)

Malone takes Owens's performative traditionalism at face value, never recognizing that Owens is running the same scam Phyllis Schlafly ran years before Owens was born: denouncing women who want to be more than homemakers while being one of those women herself.
Owens embraces the Internet label of “trad wife.” The prototypical trad wife frames her choices around the traditional gender roles of marriage and dresses femininely, with an emphasis on looking good—makeup, kempt hair—for her husband at all times. The term is often used by conservative proponents of homesteading, homeschooling, and large families. On Instagram, where Owens has more than four million followers, she documents her pre-dawn workouts, solicits advice about a teething toddler, and shows off her pantry organization. But there’s often a sharp edge to her posts. In a recent Instagram story, Owens wrote, “I cook dinner for my husband 5-7 days per a week. How’s that for feminism.”
Owens produces a daily podcast and -- this goes unmentioned by Malone -- employs domestic help. There's nothing wrong with that, but if you offload some of the drudgery while maintaining a high-level career, don't call yourself a "trad wife."

It's clear that Malone is no match for Owens, who alternately intimidates her and then pulls back, pretending to be just another suburban mom:
When I asked Owens whether a gentler tone was ever useful in trying to win people over to her side, she told me my question was sexist—her e-mails were at turns sharply organized, argumentative, polite, and lashing—and asked for specific examples of things that she had said that I found unnecessarily harsh. I mentioned her anti-body-positivity commentary and frequent use of the worst anti-trans slurs. “A woman telling the truth is not harsh,” she replied. “Lizzo, is in fact, fat.” Owens continued on, attaching a number of pictures of the singer, then signed off, “Just pulling up to a nursery to purchase some plants! Thank you for the productive conversation!”
We've spent eight years debating the tone of Donald Trump's rhetoric. Is that sexist? Why doesn't Malone acknowledge that this is a dodge? Or press Owens to defend her trans-bashing? Malone is clearly not Isaac Chotiner or Jia Tolentino -- New Yorker colleagues who would have done a much better job with this profile -- but could she at least try?

Owens herself is delighted with the piece:


As is her employer:


Do better, New Yorker.

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