A magazine cover has never before made me as angry as Texas Monthly's cover featuring state Senator Wendy Davis as the winner of their "Bum Steer" award. So congrats, Texas Monthly, for descending to a new low this month and for doing your utmost to contribute to the poisoning of political discourse in our state. As an antidote, though, I highly recommend Andrea Grimes' brilliant takedown: Let’s Talk About That Wendy Davis Cover of ‘Texas Monthly.’
[refresh the page if you cannot see the Tweet above] Grimes begins by talking about the hope that Wendy's pink sneakers, the ones that she wore while standing and filibustering for 13 hours in June 2013, represent for so many Texas women. As y'all may recall, Senate rules required that she stand the entire time, have nothing to drink or to eat, and talk about relevant matters (not read from Green Eggs and Ham). I am still in awe that Wendy had the stamina to do that. After then reviewing the tradition behind the "bum steer" award, Grimes turns her attention to the magazine cover that accompanies this year's award:
But this magazine cover, y’all. This magazine cover is something else. Just months after Texas Monthly lauded Davis as a potentially serious political threat—along with San Antonio’s Joaquin and Julian Castro—under the headline “Game On?“, the magazine flung her into a cow pasture in an act of pure, derisive mockery. All for the crime of running for office and losing. And, perhaps more pointedly, for the crime of running for office as a woman. The cover follows a long bipartisan tradition of deeply misogynistic mainstream portrayals of women who work in politics. The tropes are easy enough to name: Sarah Palin as a dippy pin-up, Hillary Clinton as a ball-busting bitch, Condoleezza Rice suffering the double-whammy of racism and sexism as a GOP line-toeing mammy. When it comes to Davis, this cover—like many other less sleekly produced Davis renderings, from “Abortion Barbie,” to made-up Wendy condoms, to a variety of takes on the fact that she attended Harvard while married to a human man—doesn’t just caricature her. It portrays her as ugly, weak, self-absorbed and prissy. Whatever the failures of her campaign, those are not traits Davis possesses.
Be sure to click through to the links that Grimes has provided. If you haven't been keeping up with the woman haters' attacks, they're jaw-dropping.
For those who might be thinking, "But hey, it's probably also part of TM's tradition to use such ugly caricatures of their 'bum steers," Grimes then compares this magazine cover with those featuring previous male winners. I'm sure that y'all will be shocked to learn that the male award winners were not depicted in a similarly unflattering light. Not even close. Grimes returns to what is particularly troubling about this award:
Consider the reasoning behind Davis’ nomination here. Again, “bum steers” are generally awarded the prize for general doofusery—see Perry, Rick—or the kind of self-aggrandizing overconfidence that leads people to do remarkably stupid, even sometimes criminal, things that embarrass the state and its most prized institutions—see Armstrong, Lance and Jones, Jerry. But Davis? Davis lost an election. Something that is perhaps not particularly surprising in a state where lawmakers have actively worked to disenfranchise low-income Texans, and Texans of color—in other words, Texans who vote Democrat—with explicitly racist voter ID laws.
Agreed. Despite the long odds, Wendy Davis and other outstanding Democratic candidates stepped up and ran for statewide office in 2014. And lost. Badly. Sure, that was disappointing, but not entirely unexpected or unforeseeable. It was never Wendy's race to lose, so the ridicule being heaped on her now is rather disproportionate.
Then Grimes really slams Texas Monthly for their "outright mockery" of Wendy Davis' efforts. At very satisfying length. If you haven't already done so, I hope that you'll read her entire article. I want to close, though, by talking about one of Grimes' concluding paragraphs:
Is it any wonder Texas Democrats have trouble gaining ground in mainstream political conversations? When they are roundly mocked for making any attempt to try? You tell people that their beliefs are pointless bullshit—in this case, literally—over and over again, and eventually you end up with a state with the lowest voter turnout in the entire country and a decades-long GOP monopoly on every office in Austin.
That's true, but lots of fed-up Texas women learned a great deal about registering voters, phonebanking, and blockwalking as we volunteered our time to try to elect Wendy Davis and Leticia Van de Putte and so many other outstanding Democratic candidates. We lost that election, but we're nowhere near done fighting to take back our state from the woman-hating Republican Tea Party of Texas.
As for the Texas Monthly staff, y'all can go straight to hell.