AOC’s Attractiveness Drives Us All Mad

Tressie McMillan Cottom
5 min readOct 29, 2020

I am in the middle of a storm, literally and figuratively. Somehow I missed that a hurricane is blowing through my town. That means I am going to make this a very quick diatribe on beauty, power, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the lies we tell about social mobility. No spell-check or editing. Sorry.

This is a continuation of my rantings on Twitter in response to a typically stupid attack on AOC:

I mean, that’s just so trite that its not worth the bother. I made the mistake of responding that AOC’s physical attractiveness (“pretty”) drives the right to these delusional, stupid critiques.

I say it is a mistake because I should have anticipated what would happen next. It happens every time I include even a cursory physical description of a person.

This is what happens: people point out that AOC isn’t “just” pretty. They argue that she is also “smart”. Even when they agree with me, they want to “humbly edit” me to point out that right critiques of AOC are about how smart she is. The implication is that AOC’s physical attractiveness is, at best…

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Tressie McMillan Cottom

Sociologist. Writer. Professor. MacArthur Fellow. Books, speaking, podcast: www.tressiemc.com