After a week of listening to Donald Trump supporters defend his longstanding biting remarks about the supposed weight gain and personal history of a former Miss Universe, Alicia Machado, who now supports the candidacy of Hillary Clinton, one might be forgiven for thinking that Republicans are tone-deaf about the experience of most women in America in 2016.
The National Republican Campaign Committee, though, is perfectly well aware that most women have a strongly negative response to body shaming. That’s probably why, in a close race for a congressional seat in Maine, it started running an ad last week accusing the Democratic candidate of pushing legislation designed to body-shame teenage girls.
The problems: the Democratic candidate is a woman, Emily Cain; and the ad is misleading.
Cain is infuriated by the NRCC ad and, in response, released one of her own on Tuesday directly addressing her own weight issues. “Like a lot of women, I’ve struggled with my weight,” she says in the ad. “It’s hard. It’s very personal.”
“The issue of women and girls, and body issues and self-esteem, is a core issue of mine,” she told the Guardian.
The original ad drawing Cain’s ire claims that she supported a bipartisan bill to start to address childhood obesity – about 30% of Maine’s children were considered overweight or obese in 2010 – that would have required schools to regularly weigh children and report aggregate data to the state. In the ad, the legislation is derided by women, posing with school-age children, as “a violation of our kids’ privacy” and deemed an effort to weigh “our teenage girls”. The bill failed to pass in that session, and schools were asked to submit the data to the state on a voluntary basis, since many of them collect it anyway. Similar legislation passed the following year.
Cain called the attack ad “way over the line”, adding: “This is really exploiting the vulnerabilities of teenage girls and their families.”
And though she was expecting conservatives in the state to attack her about the legislation – they did in her first race for the seat, in 2014 – she was surprised that Republicans went the body-shaming route instead of sticking to privacy. “I don’t know why politicians want to keep talking about women’s weight,” she said. But she added: “I’m not going to run away and hide from this attack.”
Still, forcing a woman to defend her legislative efforts to identify and eventually reduce childhood obesity by accusing her of trying to invade the privacy of teenage girls is an interesting tactic for a party whose standard-bearer has repeatedly dismissed women who disagreed with him as unattractive or overweight.
Trump’s statements are reportedly having an effect, though perhaps not with conservative-leaning women who already support him.
At a Clinton rally on Tuesday, a 15-year-old girl told the nominee: “I see with my own eyes the damage Donald Trump does when he talks about women and how they look.” She asked how to “undo some of that damage”.
Clinton’s advice: “We need to laugh at it, we need to refute it, we need to ignore it.”
