Count yourself lucky if you haven't heard about the Right-wing freakout over what Ella Emhoff, Kamala Harris's stepdaughter, looks like and how she has been dressed at the DNC.
I'm not going to link to any of the things I have seen, but I'll summarize by saying several men on Twitter exclaimed that while they believe women should be able to do what they want (oh, right), what Ella does just isn't okay somehow.
The original posters don't directly say what was wrong, but they include a photo when her mouth was making an unflattering shape. She's wearing glasses, has heavy eyebrows, doesn't have large breasts, and is wearing a sleeveless top that lets you see her monochrome tattoos. She's also wearing one of the campaign's camouflage-patterned Harris/Walz hats (which I admit are pretty ugly, but it's campaign-wear).
It's not a typically flattering photo, and that's why they chose it. Without trying very hard, though, it's easy to find flattering pictures of Ella Emhoff, who is in her mid-20s, interested in style (though not the kind Republicans generally value), and — I was surprised to learn — signed to a modeling agency.
As many people on BlueSky pointed out, this is about enforcing a strict idea of gender-norm conformity, and is of a piece with the Right's anti-trans hysteria. They want to control women and the definition of woman.
This is clearly true, yes, and — the specifics here still leave me shaking my head because I thought things had moved past this point. Clearly I am wrong.
Responses to the original poster included multiple snide comments about the fact that Emhoff does not shave her armpit hair, which is one of the OG examples of defining gender norms. Men get to have body hair generally, while women are supposed to be hairless young girls. Somehow it's fine for men to have hair hanging out of their pits but it's disgusting if women do. Logic has no meaning there.
Eyebrows, likewise. There's no Brooke Shields, post-Frida Kahlo moment for them. And tattoos... these guys seem to have missed the past few decades on that front. Even I don't notice tattoos any more and I thought I would never get over them.
They hate and judge everyone under 30 or 35, unless they look like a College Republican, and probably some of them as well.
It's another example of the fact that they have no interest in building a movement beyond their base of reactionaries. Controlling and dominating, especially women, is the name of the game.
One BlueSky commenter gave this great response to the freakout:
At some point the GOP are going to have to deal with the fact that The Stepford Wives was a dystopian horror film, not an inspirational how-to manual.
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