Congresswoman Lauren Boebert speaking with attendees at the 2022 AmericaFest at the Phoenix Convention Center in Phoenix, Arizona. Image via Gage Skidmore.
GOP Rep. Lauren Boebert's failed reelection bid in the midterms capped off a "grim year for MAGA women," according to a new analysis from MS NOW, exposing how little they are getting from the paradox they are trapped in.
Writing for the outlet on Saturday morning, prolific commentator and journalist Amanda Marcotte broke down how Boebert attempted to sell herself as a "contradictory" vision of femininity to male conservatives.
"She titillated the right and annoyed the left with her over-the-top performance of a MAGA man’s contradictory fantasy of a woman who is both sexually liberated and a demure wife and mother," Marcotte explained. "Boebert was the forerunner to a type that has become ubiquitous in the Trump era: Republican women who gain fame and power by submitting to extreme beauty standards, while still insisting that they are good and pious ladies. Observers dubbed their combination of heavy makeup and rumored plastic surgery 'Mar-a-Lago face.'"
Marcotte argued further that Boebert's reelection loss to Democrat and retired Naval officer Eileen Laubacher in a supposedly safe red district showed why her particular "version of MAGA womanhood was always doomed to fail: The facade did not last long."
"It quickly became evident that hers was a turbulent marriage, and she ended it in 2023," she wrote. "Later that year, she was ejected from a showing of the musical 'Beetlejuice,' and camera footage showed her and her date apparently groping each other in front of other theatergoers. Facing a possible loss in her more swingy Colorado district, she relocated to a district nearby, winning a safe Republican seat in 2024. In the 2026 blue wave, though, even that wasn’t enough to save her seat."
She continued: "Boebert’s defeat capped off a year of such women being pushed out of power, either by voters or by male GOP leaders who needed handy scapegoats. Noem proclaimed the health of her 34-year marriage to Bryon Noem, until rumors of an affair with her aide Corey Lewandowski helped lead Trump to fire her. (Both Noem and Lewandowski denied having an affair.) Mace will be leaving Congress in January after a failed bid to be her state’s governor. Leavitt gave up her podium in August... Katie Zacharia lasted only a few days this year as White House press secretary, despite being showily Christian and sporting a standard Mar-a-Lago face."
Marcotte also suggested that, in trying to create a new paradigm for conservative women, people like Boebert instead "created an impossible and oppressive standard for" them, in which they are "expected to fulfill male fantasies without having even basic reproductive rights, much less freedom of their own."
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