Madonna set the mold for reinventing herself, and generations of women after her have picked up the technique. Show up at the office one day, and Caitlin has a whole new hair color and veneers. Come in the day after that, and Brianna’s wearing Osh Kosh overalls with her hair shaved off and wants you to call her Oliver.
But it’s not just the physical transformations, it’s the apparent personality changes. Women in politics and public life have made a technology out of wild mood and affect changes depending on what they want, and whether men are scrabbling fast enough to get it for them. One minute Senator Elizabeth Warren (Indian name: Shrieks-Alot) is screeching at some conservative man on the Senate floor:
The next minute, she’s pretend-crying in her car because the mean Republican men are trying to kill everyone. Again:
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has this game down pat. First, she reinvented herself as a Sophisticated Lady that everyone knows as “Alexandria,” despite the fact that she was plain old Sandy Cortez right up until she won public office. With leftist women, there’s never a shortage of things to yell and scream about. Or, in AOC’s case, to whimper and whine about. This is a woman for whom manipulation is as instinctive as breathing. When she gets in front of a crowd she wants to charm, Cortez starts talking in a tiny little girl voice in an obvious effort to make herself appear harmless, small, and cute.
And like Elizabeth Warren, she tries (with limited success) to turn on the tears when a vote on a bill doesn’t go her way. With her usual histrionics, Cortez stood on the steps of the Capitol after Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” was passed and said, “I think this is one of the saddest moments in modern American history.” Here’s Cortez almost-crying about it:
She’s despondent that able-bodied people won’t be allowed to get taxpayer funded healthcare from those who actually work for a living. Oh, the humanity.
Here’s what X/Twitter users had to say in reaction:
