Snake in the Grass

What does it mean for a woman to be friends with a man? What is expected of her? What is her role? What are the assumptions we make about how she should behave toward him? And what happens when she steps out of line?

For Elizabeth Warren, the answer to this last question was, apparently, to be branded a snake, the millennia-old symbol of female duplicity and untrustworthiness, and to lose her bid for the Presidency because of it. So-called feminists did this to her. So-called allies. So-called progressives. They piled on her every tweet with an avalanche of snake emojis. They piled on every supporter’s statement online. They piled on every news article published about her. Even after the fervor of “snake week” wore off, the symbol remained, popping up every so often to remind women everywhere what happens when we…what, exactly? What did she do? What cardinal sin did she commit?

Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have been friends for a long time. He wanted her to run against Hillary Clinton in 2016. She declined, and the Left was offered Sanders to coalesce around instead. In late 2018, they met privately to discuss the 2020 election. During that discussion, Sanders said something to the effect of “a woman can’t win.” Warren complained about it to people close to her afterwards, and in January of 2020, days before a debate and just after she announced her bankruptcy reform plan, signaling her intent to target Joe Biden, with whom she has a long history on the issue, the story of this mild instance of sexism was published.

I debated about putting the word “allegedly” in there, but I didn’t and I won’t. I’m not a reporter, I’m just a woman on the Internet, and there is no doubt in my mind that Bernie said it. He, in fact, expressed the same sentiment just recently, after Warren dropped out. Millions of people in this country have said it at some point in this and the last election cycles — the only two recent elections where we have had the opportunity to seriously question the prospect. What’s more, I don’t think that anyone posting snake emojis actually believes he didn’t say it. I have never seen any of them put up an actual case for Sanders not having said it. I have, instead, seen countless redirects to Sanders’s feminist bonafides (flimsy, at best, but hey, he has female friends), followed by defenses of the statement, pointing to the many women and feminists who have bemoaned the same fear. This was Sanders’s own response, in fact, after issuing a flat denial. But the claim “he is a feminist and feminists have said the same thing” points to the fact that “he is a feminist” is not, in fact, evidence worthy of consideration. But alas, that hardly matters. The real offense here was Warren conceding, after trying in vain to duck the question, that yes, Sanders had said a mildly sexist thing to her once. And it is this implication of sexism that makes Warren a “back-stabbing (fill in the blank),” a “snake-in-the-grass,” a liar, and a bad friend.

There will be thousands of post-mortem written about Warren’s campaign, but as a woman supporting her online from the beginning, I can say without a doubt that “snake week” was the moment that doomed her. It was the moment suspicion became conviction. It was the moment when the sexism became misogyny. We like to think of the two as the same thing, but separating them paints a clearer picture of what women deal with. If sexism is the nebulous set of rules that women must abide by, misogyny is the enforcement of those rules. Under this framework, it is easier to understand how and why women and feminists often engage in punishing women. You do not have to be a sexist (i.e. believe in the rules) to enforce them. The enforcement protocols are deeply engrained cultural behaviors, and for many people, mostly men, donning the label of “feminist” can dissuade them from doing the work of examining these behaviors. Sanders and his supporters may not believe in legislating women’s behavior (i.e. they are not sexist), but they have certainly punished women for failing to follow the rules (i.e. they have exhibited misogyny). And after “snake week,” for many on the Left, those rules now prohibited saying anything even mildly supportive of Warren.

Which brings me back to the question of what it means for a woman to be friends with a man. Being a tom-boy, growing up with two older brothers, and existing as I have in male-dominated spaces for as long as I can remember, I’ve always been extremely comfortable making male friends. And I guarantee you every single one of them has said something mildly sexist to me at some point. And, despite what the boys at Pod Save America proclaimed at minute ’47 in their episode during “snake week,” I still found it fairly easy to remain friends with men. Hell, I married one. The only deal-breaker is what happens when you point it out. That’s when you know. I would never have married my husband if he weren’t open to listening, apologizing, and changing. The friends I have kept have always been able to do the same. The only friend I have lost over this was not. And the truth is most women don’t point it out most of the time. Depending on the severity of the infraction, the importance of the relationship, and other myriad factors, most slights go uncorrected, in part because we don’t want to deal with a potentially volatile man, and in part because we don’t want to know. We want to believe the best of you. We trust that, if you are capable of respecting us, you probably respect women in general. The pain of learning we were wrong, well…

There should be a word for the particular type of disillusionment a woman feels when she realizes a man she loves only respects her as an exception to the rule.

I lost a friend this election. Someone I considered one of my best friends, someone who had helped me through the lowest point in my life thus far. He listens to Chapo and Cum Town, he reads Jacobin and watches TYT, he identifies with the “Dirtbag Left,” and yet, prior to this election we were always able to work out our differences on political subjects, find the nuance in between our stances, and recognize each other as allies. Or at least, I thought we were. As I’ve been reflecting on our relationship, I’ve come to recognize that the give-and-take was far less mutual than I recognized at the time.

So what happened? About a month before I last saw him, he said the thing I was dreading would come as soon as the primary began: he was going to have to start going all in for Bernie. He said it like a little kid getting amped up to play with a new toy, imagining all the fun he was going to have. And I, in turn, imagined all of the ways his idea of fun would destroy a relationship that had been a literal lifeline to me for two grueling, painful years. It took a month and a half for that relationship to completely collapse.

Every conversation I had with him after that moment required me, at some point or another, to explain misogyny and sexism to him. He claimed that he had gone through Warren’s plans to try to find a reason to support her, failing to understand the double standard at play, and that such a claim, far from suggesting good-faith, revealed a bias that needed to be overcome. When I pointed out that he seemed to be espousing a new iteration of “I’d vote for a woman, just not that woman,” since Warren was the go-to stand-in for “the woman I would vote for” in 2016, I mentioned AOC as the next in line. He laughed and told me “no, AOC is canceled.” This was before her endorsement of Sanders. Now, of course, she’s the poster-girl of “see, we can’t be sexist,” even as they dogpile her mentions anytime she steps out of line. I kept trying to change topics, wanting instead to talk about things that connected us, but he always insisted, I would inevitably get angry, and he would then bemoan the fact that we couldn’t just speak civilly about it.

“Why do you take it so personally?” he would ask, again and again.

“Because I see myself in Elizabeth Warren! I see myself in Hillary Clinton! I recognize the way that you talk about them, the way that people discredit them, and I can see it happening to me, for no other reason than because I’m a woman!” I would cry, to no avail.

The fracture in our relationship became so severe that I had panic attacks and couldn’t sleep because I would receive texts from him during the night, and every time my phone would buzz, I’d jolt myself awake, tensing for a new hours-long bout of circular reasoning, moving goalposts, defensiveness, accusations, justifications, and finally, mollifications so that I would be willing to do it all again the next day. After two weeks of this, I told him that this was a boundary for me, and I wouldn’t do it anymore. He didn’t like my use of the word “boundary,” because he saw it (rightly so), as victim terminology, and he was convinced that we were only arguing over politics.

Racism and sexism and homophobia and ableism and all the rest of the myriad bigotries have been cordoned off under the banner of “identity politics” for so long that many people do view them as just politics. Maybe it’s easier to dismiss them as a separate issue that way, regardless of how much scholarship there is that points out that these things are structurally baked into all other political issues. But bigotry, as experienced by the target, is abuse. So yes, I used the language of abuse prevention to express my position. And as soon as he crossed that boundary again, I cut off contact and began mourning the loss of a friendship I had relied on for two years. So you see, I have a hard time with people who tell me it’s just bots.

But I want to get back to this question of male and female friendships. And I want to flip the script. Friendships, after all, are supposed to be mutual, a two-way street, give-and-take. Friends lift one another up, support each other, encourage one another to be their best selves. And yet, our cultural perceptions of male and female friendships put all of the onus on the woman in the relationship. We are expected to be therapists, cheerleaders, and advocates, always there to massage the male ego when it gets bruised, while simultaneously being held responsible for reforming these flawed men.

I cannot tell you how many times I have seen Warren and Sanders conflated throughout the course of this primary. I understand that elections are about comparisons and contrasts, and that comparing them was easy, as they held similar policy views, but very few people in the media and online ever took the time to point out the contrasts between them. She was treated like a cast-off of his movement that had only just become sentient and independent. She was a “copy,” in (Sanders’s campaign co-chair) Nina Turner’s words, her own individual history of studying and experiencing the world of politics and economics completely erased, or rewritten as though the only value, the only virtue she had was in service to Bernie.

And how many times did I see women who had soured on Bernie’s movement due to toxicity refuse to consider Warren because they felt she was somehow responsible for him? That she had to condemn the worst parts of his movement, because expecting that of him was either too much to ask or a lost cause.

It’s why my biggest criticism of her campaign, other than the offensive DNA test, which she took great effort to correct for, was making a non-aggression pact with Sanders at the outset. Anyone who had been in Hillary’s camp in 2016 knew it was a trap. He and his supporters would dog-whistle, undermine her credibility, paint her as a traitor and a wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing, and if she fought back in any way, however mild, it would be considered a betrayal. She avoided doing so for as long as possible, but the press forced the question in January, and she paid the price.

When I criticize the decision to make the pact, it is not to blame her. I am done blaming women for trusting men who do not deserve it. I also know that, had the public learned that a pact had been offered, and she refused to join, it would have had the same effect. With Sanders, the friendship itself was a trap, and Warren has been in it for decades.

I don’t want to put any women off of having male friendships. The male friends I have, on the whole, have been wonderful and healthy and nurturing. But to any men out there: listen, learn, and be better. To any women out there, another dose of “protect yourself from men who will hurt you” advice: if he is only willing to lift you up to a position of equal footing, be careful. That may seem fair, but it is not equal footing, because you are indebted to him for your success, you see. This goes for emotional support as well: if he resents you for being happier than him, and always seems to manifest some drama to bring you back down to his level, be cautious. If he encourages you in your own self-doubt, not explicitly, but subtly, agreeing with your more humble ambitions and never suggesting you might look further, take note, and dare more. If you are colleagues in any way, and find yourself in a position where you seem to always need his good word to gain any traction, keep him at arm’s length, and build your own networks. If you find yourself being asked to take his side in every disagreement he may have with another woman, reassess, and push back. If confronting him about sexism always results in a truce of “agree to disagree,” find friends who are able to agree. Not because women are perfect and untouchable, but because misogyny will always come for you. You aren’t special. If it hasn’t turned its unmitigated ire on you yet, it is only because you haven’t threatened it enough.

And when it does, what is it but a betrayal? A stab in the back? What is it but a revelation, an unmasking? Someone you thought was worthy of your trust, demonstrating that you were wrong? Why is it that a woman who betrays a male friend’s trust is a snake, and a man who betrays a woman’s trust is still a friend?

Who is the snake? The man who, when his female friend and colleague admits to him her ambition to do something no woman has ever done, greets that vulnerability with doubt based on her gender? Or the woman who tells the truth about the exchange only after being asked repeatedly on the national stage? Who is the back-stabber? The man who, in his denial, impugned her honesty and integrity on national television? Or the woman who confronted him about it afterward? Who is the wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing? The man whose campaign and supporters, while under a non-aggression pact, consistently attacked and undermined the woman’s credibility? Or the woman who after nine months, finally stood up for herself?

Who is the traitor to the cause? The man who, at 78, after learning that the woman he had failed to recruit to run in 2016 had decided to do so, chose to join the race after her, splitting the progressive lane? Or the woman who dared to think she could make a better case, get more people on board, expand on economic progressivism to include issues of gender, race, and disability, who could assuage moderate fears of feasibility by doing the homework and providing detailed plans?

Who is the one who cares more about their ego than the progressive agenda? The man who “wrote the damn bill” or the woman who sought input from community leaders and incorporated other candidate’s plans into her platform after they left the race, always giving them credit for their work? The man who, after having a heart attack at 78, decided to stay in the race instead of dropping out, taking care of himself, and endorsing her when her poll numbers were on the rise? Or the woman who, after enduring a year of sexist attacks from his supporters, after hearing from countless people in her campaign and on the trail how much damage their toxic behavior had done to the progressive image, still reached out to negotiate the terms of an endorsement? Is it the man who rejected any negotiation, requiring full capitulation or nothing? Or the woman who then abstained from rewarding such tactics, allowing the causes she championed to continue to exist outside of association with him? The man who encouraged his supporters to view him as their only hope, leaving them to despair if he doesn’t make it? Or the woman who put her head down, got back to work in the senate, and is making a concerted effort to support down-ballot candidates, demonstrating for her supporters that there are other places to direct their energy?

The answer to all of these questions, we are told again and again and again, is the woman. “She owes him.” “She is nothing without him.” “She made us do it.” If this sounds like abuse, well, misogyny as experienced by the woman is abuse. And I am done treating abusive men like good friends. I am drawing boundaries. Men can be snakes, back-stabbers, liars, and all the rest.

And Bernie Sanders has been a terrible friend.