Sexist Political Criticism Finds a New Target: Kellyanne Conway

What powerful political woman is mocked for her clothes, is the target of pictures on Twitter depicting her as haggard and is routinely called a witch and a bitch?

If you guessed Hillary Clinton, you’re right.

But if you guessed Kellyanne Conway, you’re right, too.

Misogyny, it seems, remains a bipartisan exercise. Whatever legitimate criticisms can be leveled at each woman, it’s striking how often that anger is expressed using the same sexist themes, from women as well as men.

Mrs. Clinton “repeats her tacky outfits,” one Twitter critic sniped. The Inauguration Day outfit of Ms. Conway, a counselor to President Trump, looked like “a night terror of an android majorette.”

Mrs. Clinton’s hair has drawn relentless derision; one Twitter user recently asked: “Why does Kellyanne Conway always look like she’s still drunk & wearing make up from last night’s bender?”

And both women have been repeatedly compared to witches from “The Wizard of Oz,” most recently in pictures shared on Twitter tying Ms. Conway to the witch killed under Dorothy’s house.

The two women are at opposite ideological poles, but they stir up the same lingering cultural discomfort with ambitious, assertive women.

“These sexist memes are not the purview of one party,” said Karen Finney, a senior adviser to the Clinton campaign. “We fear strong women and women with power. These attacks are meant to delegitimize that power.”

Ms. Conway has drawn scorn, and been disinvited from some news programs, for her references to a “Bowling Green massacre” that never took place and her defense of claims about the size of the crowd at Mr. Trump’s inauguration as “alternative facts.” Yet some of the criticisms have taken on a distinctly sexualized tone.

Witness the furor over her sitting on her knees on a couch in the Oval Office during a reception for presidents of historically black colleges. While she drew fire for disrespect, some of the criticisms included digs about her spreading her legs and raunchy allusions to oral sex, Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton.

Representative Cedric L. Richmond, Democrat of Louisiana, told a now-notorious joke that hers was a “familiar” position in the Oval Office of the 1990s, drawing a rebuke from none other than Chelsea Clinton. (Mr. Richmond apologized Sunday evening.)

A “Saturday Night Live” skit riffed on Ms. Conway as a “Fatal Attraction” stalker, breaking into the CNN correspondent Jake Tapper’s house to seduce him into having her on his show.

“There seems to be great resentment of both as power hungry and wanting to control men,” said Marjorie J. Spruill, the author of “Divided We Stand: The Battle Over Women’s Rights and Family Values That Polarized American Politics.” “Whereas Hillary is called castrating or shrewish, Conway is often called a slut. The implication is that she is using femininity to control men.”

Many conservative women, from Sarah Palin to Ann Coulter, have emphasized their femininity to distance themselves from feminists, whom they accuse of hating men. In a recent interview at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Ms. Conway said she supported many feminist principles but said she would not call herself one because feminism is anti-male, pro-abortion and identified with the left.

“I think some of the reticence that might be coming across in not a huge chorus of defense of Kellyanne Conway in the face of these sexist comments is the feeling that she doesn’t have our back,” said Gillian Thomas, a senior staff lawyer of the Women’s Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union.

“It’s a shame,” Ms. Thomas continued. “If women were more united and speaking up at this behavior, including when it’s perpetrated by the left, we’d all be a lot better off.”

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