THE MEAN MOMMY MYTH
the identity politic that lost / won the election
What’s helped me today is writing a story about this election that makes sense with my life. Laurie Stone said one can find solace in narratives and Anne Helen Petersen offered some early discussions from a care and gender perspective. Tressie McMilan Cottom’s theory that Trump’s message worked because “things hurt: I’ll make them better” is Fairytale 101, struck me as spot on.
I also felt mad at Bernie Sanders who blamed Trump’s win on the left’s proclivity for identity politics, when in fact we did not employ them enough.
When women are portrayed as rejecting the “perfect mother” ideal, it creates space for a man to step in with empty promises of comfort that he too has already failed to fulfill. Men can then hold the fantasy of maternal availability for a vulnerable person pristinely along with the validation of anger when it’s not provided. This is why men have such a high investment in the image of motherhood and why Trump’s gendered campaign and women hating policies fit together so well.
A short story for you:
On Friday I was doing a pretty bad enough job parenting. I turned off Gabby’s Dollhouse which O was watching, one episode after the other. Olive got mad. She was mad that turned them off but also mad that I had used them to ignore her. It’s ok for her to be mad and also for me to have ignored her with TV btw, I’m not feeling guilty! What I do know is that it’s unfair to abruptly change the requirements: from being passive and permissive to having expectations, without at least a little ramp up. But the moment I want to assess is when her dad tried to step in. She was crying and pushing me away and he noticed, so he sat down on the couch to try and empathize with her. I was furious. Where was he when I was doing a bad enough job parenting? Instead of stepping in and being present with her when I was using TV to do something else, he came in when it was clear that I was already the bad guy. This helped to gloss over the fact that he had also made a promise: that once he’d finished some work he’d watch it with her.
I hadn’t heard the promise but I did push him out, preferring to take the brunt of her anger.
His felt like a Trump move: refusing to invest in the care economy, then using my failure to perform without that investment to create his own image.
Trump used people’s need to have their pain acknowledged along with women’s inability—or even disinterest—in upholding the perfect mother myth to create the illusion that only he had the healing touch that we all so desired.
Here’s why I’ve been feeling so sick.
Trump won the election by using a classic maternal narrative structure: I see you're hurt. I'll make it better. The perverse nature of employing this psychology while simultaneously provoking violence against women is why so many of us feel sick to our stomachs. It's another level of erasing women while extracting and exploiting the only identities our culture has deemed just ours.
The Cat Lady Attack
Let's turn back to the moment Harris was dismissed as a "childless cat lady." What the left rightly recognized was Trump's attempt to devalue women who aren't mothers, assigning cultural worth only to those who are. But there was something more insidious happening here. Trump wasn't just attacking Harris as a woman—he was expertly stripping at least half the value from her candidacy and claiming it for himself.
By reminding us that she hadn't had children, he implicitly argued that she wasn't a "real" woman and, therefore, couldn't offer the comfort and empathy that women are culturally expected to embody. Even though Harris led with compassion as her defining quality, she was fighting against the narrative that she wasn't physiologically ordained to provide it.
The Concession
Was it safe for her to have led more with these qualities? Probably not. But in her concession speech her ability to hold space was articulated much better than in her campaign. Do not despair, she soothed us in saying. The metaphor of us all as stars in a dark sky was one of the most beautiful references to what it's like living your own difference: a take on identity politics the democrats desperately needed to own before now.
The Cruel Irony
The irony, of course, is that Trump used these very same soft skills to win the election—while being even further removed from embodying them himself. Instead, he leaned into false masculine "strengths" to maintain dominance, while playing on the public’s deep need to feel seen in their pain. The violence he encourages would not be welcomed unless he was also promising to offer the "medicine" to heal a wounded warrior. It's like an abusive relationship, where men are now trapped not just with women but deep within themselves.
The Work of Distance
It was not a mistake for us to spend decades trying to deconstruct the meaning of "woman." But while we worked overtime to balance this duality—soft skills are your superpower, but they are unpaid—(white) men sat back and did nothing. In short, they were "lazy"—the same trait often assigned to women who claim a stake in men's labor (a.k.a. housewives). Now we're in a true bind: the stereotypical female characteristics that were once our unpaid assets are valuable more when employed manipulatively by men.
The Overall Theft
Trump reminded us that we have felt the pain of motherlessness. Then he told us that Harris wasn't a mother at all. But the crucial moment came when he promised to mother us better himself—precisely because he isn’t a woman. This is gender exploitation in its purest form, a classic case. And we fell for it, partly by distancing ourselves from a role we needed to claim: the imperfect person who is also a mom.