Elizabeth Warren is getting 🐍 Ssswifted by Sanders supporters (and 4Channers, rightwing sock puppets and bots).
Here’s why they should stop: The woman-as-snake metaphor is misogynistic—whether aimed at Warren, Swift, or all the way back to Biblical Eve. billboard.com/articles/colum…
Here’s why they should stop: The woman-as-snake metaphor is misogynistic—whether aimed at Warren, Swift, or all the way back to Biblical Eve. billboard.com/articles/colum…
Brigading on the Internet is harassment. Even more so when the root of a fan dispute is so obviously a simple but basic difference in interpretation. But the 🐍 symbol as used against women has a particular ugly resonance that stretches deep into history.
The snake is a creature of horror. But it has no limbs and can’t build or create, that can only make a hissing noise rather than vocalizing, that slithers on its belly, the lowest of beasts. It can’t win with strength, only treachery.
The misogynist implications are obvious.
The misogynist implications are obvious.
But when used as it was against Taylor Swift and now Warren, the snake symbol is focused on something very specific: “disloyalty” to men with whom they have been close. For Swift, it was Calvin Harris and Kanye West. For Warren, it’s Sanders. 
In the Bible, Eve was framed as a temptress who sinned against God, but even more so, her “master” Adam, by conspiring with the serpent to trick him into eating the forbidden fruit. The intended reaction: How could she! She owed everything to him! She was MADE from his rib!
Swift was seen as “disloyal” to her ex Harris and her frenemy Kanye—because she asserted her right to divulge her involvement in a hit song, and because she publicly pushed back against lyrics that suggested she and Kanye might have sex and that he was key to her fame.
And now Warren is being framed as a “snake” for confirming what Sanders ADMITS he said: That he raised doubt on a woman’s ability to beat Trump. Of course the media has amplified this into something more—and Sanders has pivoted by saying he thinks “a woman can be president.”
Warren has made clear that she heard Sanders say he doubted the chances of a woman in THIS election—and disagreed with his take. Sanders hasn’t contradicted her framing at all; he’s merely shifted the goalposts.
If it were two men it would be framed as a difference among rivals.
If it were two men it would be framed as a difference among rivals.
But here, it’s presented as Warren, a fellow senator of similar age, stature and accomplishment to Sanders, being “disloyal” to him—low, treacherous, cunning, sly. And worse, it’s being used to frame her as a trickster, trying to secretly throw the race to Biden or even Trump.
Assertion of power by women in the presence of men—failing to defer to them, to let them get away with things—has historically been labeled as “treachery.” Men duel and spar; women “backstab.”
America, and the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, deserve better than that.
America, and the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, deserve better than that.
