Jezebel managing editor Erin Gloria Ryan and I spent most of last week at the Conservative Political Action Conference, in part because we thought it would be hilarious fun (it was). I also went because I wanted to get a better sense of the right’s priorities for women. It’s that deluded instinct that got me standing in a cavernous, dimly-lit, red-tinted ballroom as conservative talk radio megastar Laura Ingraham cracked joke after joke about Jeb Bush last Friday.
“He could really close the gender gap,” she told a nervously tittering, slightly scandalized crowd. “Women would come out to vote for him. What woman wouldn’t like a man who gives her a blank check at Tiffany’s?”
Ingraham could make that kind of joke for three reasons: because Jeb Bush was deeply unpopular among the CPAC attendees (he came in fifth in the presidential straw poll and got extensively booed during a Q&A with Sean Hannity); because his wife Columba Bush was recently revealed to have very expensive tastes; and because—at CPAC, anyway—the gender gap is just that, a punchline.
According to virtually all of the people speaking from the CPAC stage and what seemed like a majority of the attendees, there is no difference between how men and women are treated in American society. The few speakers who mentioned, say, the pay gap at at all talked about it as a fanciful construction invented by the left to woo voters. Sexism, in the CPAC world, is a liberal figment meant to disempower women by making them feel weak, helpless, and taken advantage of.
Talking about inequality is a tool for division and it’s un-American, as senator and likely presidential candidate Marco Rubio told the audience: “Sometimes you wouldn’t know we’re an exceptional nation by listening to the left. They describe us as a nation divided on lines of gender and race and class. But Americans know we’re exceptional.”
The CPAC attendees are largely younger than Rubio, many college-aged or in their 20s and 30s. They’re also more libertarian-leaning. The people I spoke to didn’t care much about gay people getting married; they were either for it or saw it as a state’s rights issue. Plenty of them also wanted to see pot legalized, and though many were personally against abortion, they didn’t seem totally comfortable outlawing that either (the straw poll showed that 50 percent of the attendees who classified themselves as anti-abortion wanted some sort of exception for rape, incest, or life endangerment).
But they also seemed baffled— utterly so—at the idea of women, or people of color, or anybody else, having an unequal set of rights in American in 2015.
“They just don’t see it like that,” a reporter for a conservative publication told me. “We’re all equal in God’s eyes, that kind of thing. We may have different skills or talents, or come from different backgrounds, but we’re equal.”
There’s nothing wrong with that sentiment in theory, but the ways it played out in practice were deeply weird. Down the hall from Rubio, in a smaller, nondescript conference room, another likely presidential candidate and former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina urged an audience of mostly college-aged women not to buy the “War on Women” myth, which she’s previously called “baseless propaganda.” For Fiorina, that means hailing the hundreds of new abortion laws passed in the past five years as progress for women, and dismissing the idea that there’s any sort of serious residual pay gap between men and women (there is, and in recent years we’ve made almost no progress closing it). When she did acknowledge the pay gap, Fiorina argued that it was the fault of unions, the fault of individual women themselves, for leaving the workforce to raise children—anything but discrimination.
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