I'm finally watching the full 9 minute video and "I have thrown men out of bars for using the same language as Mr. Yoho" is a power move I never expected to see in the halls of Congress in my lifetime, what a GIFT https://twitter.com/clairewillett/status/1286431537282523137

god there are so many barn-burner moments in this but "man who justifies his own sexist language because he has a wife and daughters gets schooled on how normalizing sexist language actually gives other men permission to use it against the aforementioned wife and daughters" is

I also love that her whole thesis is "I am Magnificently Unbothered by the comments of a small pathetic man because whatever we're all used to this, but I refuse to let his bullshit fauxpology on the Congressional floor go unchallenged", god this is so good she's so good at this

he wanted the male power boost of making a girl cry

he did NOT want to be challenged as an equal in the halls of power by someone with infinitely greater media visibility, oratory skill, and charisma than him, who has just as much right to be there

the sense of visceral relief I felt at hearing someone pointedly and publicly explain all the reasons why it's bullshit to say "I can't be sexist because I'm nice to the three women I'm related to"

that was fucking legendary

lots of complex thoughts to parse about generational feminism here

AOC has given herself permission to call out sexist attacks against her in a way that, for example, Clinton could not, because the image she was trying to project required that she show no weakness to men

and some of that is just the very unique situation of being Hillary Clinton and the bipartisan unanimity of those sexist attacks, which came from both sides

but I think some of it is also that 2nd-wave feminism really emphasized having to adopt performatively masculine behaviors to survive in male-dominated spaces

like they have to literally forget you're a woman to remember that you're a person and see your professional credentials

i think for a lot of women in their teens, 20s, 30s, our mothers taught us we had to kind of just steel ourselves to deal with this shit, and along the way there was sort of a collective mental shift of like "hey, what if we stopped treating this as inevitable"

so I think it matters a lot that someone who is not just a woman in the public eye, but an elected US legislator with the power to enact real change, is so unapologetic about saying "the way you have treated me is not acceptable and women are done shutting up about this"

and part of why it's so satisfying is that it is EXTREMELY clear how Yoho assumed this was going to play out: he would be able to both say whatever the fuck he wanted, and then give a half-assed speech to dodge all the consequences of it, because that's how this ALWAYS WORKS

but instead, he got his ass handed to him in a defeat so bruising it should have been on pay-per-view instead of C-SPAN, and this will forever be how the rest of us outside of Florida even learned his name, which should cause other shitty men to quake in fear tbh