Dear Britain,
I should be honest with you about the circumstances from which I begin this letter. Your esteemed editors asked for the American perspective on Theresa May, specifically whether we think of her as a feminist. But she’s barely discussed at all. Certainly not in a women’s empowerment capacity; perhaps because our own president is an admitted sexual predator, our vice-president is practically an anti-Choice celebrity, and the closest thing we have to hope is the first daughter, standing in front of a microphone and mouthing the word “women”. Those are just a few of the more pressing feminist concerns, but, overall, things here are much, much worse.
If I may be so bold as to speak for my fellow Americans: we have a vague awareness that things are not going so great over there either! But for the most part, we aren’t spending much mental energy on May, or anything unrelated to the Trumpian vortex of scandal. The last time I remember being invested in UK politics, “Brexit” was discussed mostly as a silly portmanteau.
In the crises buffet, your situation is somewhere between the stale rolls and the salad dressing — but I mean that as a compliment, really! In the past month in America, we have lived through a decade’s worth of scandals (I haven’t slept in weeks). All of this is to say that the general US reaction to May is something of a Mariah Carey “I don’t know her”, if only out of opinion fatigue. Still, there are opinions to be had, and they are not great.
Up top, there is an awareness of the leopard-print shoes (nice, cute). The potentially reductive thread of wardrobe is counterbalanced by a near total lack of mention of her husband (unclear if anyone even knows she has one), and the footwear commentary is rivalled in frequency by references to Margaret Thatcher. These include but are not limited to “Thatcher-lite”, “milquetoast Margaret Thatcher”, and “Imagine you found a Thatcher mask in a thrift shop, put it on for laughs, then couldn’t take it off, so now you call yourself Maggie”. The insult is that she is Thatcher-esque, but also embarrassingly less Thatcher than the original Thatcher. Mostly, people point to May’s anti-immigration populism and compare her to Trump, if only a more refined and less corrupt version. Across the board, the verdict on her holding hands with him at the White House in January is: weird.
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Zooming out, this international push towards far-right nationalism has struck fear in the hearts of those who don’t feel they would much enjoy a global reprise of autocracy. With Trump, and now your own Thatcher-Trump hybrid (as we see it), two of the foremost examples of modern democracy seem to be languishing under state-sanctioned xenophobia. Perhaps the only moment of “not-despair” to be had by the western world in recent months was Marine Le Pen losing the French election. (Alas, the French were better than us all along.)
As to whether May is a feminist, the question seems as ornamental as the LK Bennett clothes with which American Vogue opened her profile back in March. Or, as a friend put it, May’s positioning as a role model for women is “irrelevant”. I think May is a threat to progressive values overall, so even if she were boldly fighting to level the playing field, the effort toward one sort of equality would be cancelled out by an attack on another. Xenophobic nationalism doesn’t get a free pass just because it’s done backwards and in heels.
Cheerio,
Lauren Duca
PS The Legs-it front page was still bullshit, though.