![]() ![]() They suffer from much higher rates of completed suicides. “Men suffer from being under patriarchy,” the congresswoman said. Feminist writers and thinkers have raised this notion for decades, pointing out how men themselves are victimized by toxic societal constructs. This doesn’t affect me the most.”īut men also keep quiet, Ocasio-Cortez pointed out, because of the burdens and antiquated expectations of masculinity. But I think men, sometimes they think, I’m not a woman. And we need men to be speaking up in that way as well. “I think sometimes the way white folks don’t like to talk about race and they say, ‘We just want to center the person who’s most impacted, so it’s not my role to do anything or take a space and speak up.’ But we know that when white folks take up space and say the right thing in rooms of other white people, that is the most shifting activity that can happen, more sometimes than any protest or any person writing a letter to the editor or anything like that. “I think there’s plenty of well-meaning reasons why men may feel like it’s not appropriate for them to talk about it,” she continued. The battle for bodily autonomy and human dignity, she said, will only be won if men themselves join in the fight. In those weeks after Roe’s demise, Ocasio-Cortez was ubiquitous: at rallies and on television, demanding that her colleagues move with urgency to protect access to reproductive health services and calling on men in particular to share their stories of how they had benefited from decades of legally protected abortion. Our conversations came as the fallout from the Supreme Court decision and the looming likelihood of another Donald Trump presidential campaign had Democrats, including the congresswoman, wondering if they might actually find a way to hold onto Congress in November. Days earlier, a conservative comedian had sexually harassed her on the steps of the Capitol Building, and as we spoke, his leering video of the confrontation was still bouncing around the internet. We discussed her three years in Washington, the hostile reception she says she still receives from colleagues, the misogyny and the abuse she endures. ![]() I sipped at the coffee she’d brewed for us as we began a series of wide-ranging conversations-about abortion, the upcoming midterms and 2024 presidential race, and the future: for the progressive movement she helps lead, the Democratic Party in which she is perhaps the most polarizing member, and for herself, both politically and personally. Three weeks later I found myself sitting on the couch in her congressional office, beneath a wallful of framed photos and across from the small bed where her French bulldog, Deco, hangs out when he spends the day at work with Ocasio-Cortez. “About providing just a very real position that this is not over and we’re not giving up.” “A lot of that was about a human need,” Ocasio-Cortez said of why she took to the streets that day. ![]() The best and possibly last-depending on how quickly some combination of fascism, religious fundamentalism, and climate change comes for us all-chance a source of hope that things can get better in their lifetimes. The clear heir to an ascendant progressive movement. To many foot soldiers of the fractured, contradictory coalition that is the progressive left, she represents something singular: the future. The right wing’s night terror in the flesh. Constitutionally opposed to sitting down, shutting up, and conforming to the patriotic play-theater of Washington. Arguably more famous than any other person in American politics without the last name Obama or Trump beloved and loathed at competing ends of the political spectrum. For a fleeting moment in front of the Supreme Court, it was possible to see the full, complicated public totality of the woman we’ve come to know as “AOC”: a 32-year-old second-term congresswoman representing one of the country’s most diverse districts. ![]()
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