Nancy Reagan, the deceased former first lady with the petite frame and grandmotherly catchphrase against the ’80s Uzi drive-by drug wars, was doing just fine resting in peace before Ben Shapiro’s sister decided to invoke her name to slut-shame Madonna.
First, I know what you’re thinking, and I’m thinking it too: Ben Shapiro has a sister?! For years I assumed that Shapiro ― much like Jared Kushner, Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, and this guy ― was a Republican war robot made from hatred and bigotry, whose sole mission was to infiltrate young white men’s thoughts. But I guess a weathered Birkenstock and a discarded cheerleading boot made it work just long enough to create not only Shapiro but a sister.
On the ninth day of December, Abby Shapiro decided to compare a saintly woman of God to Nancy Reagan in an attempt to slut-shame her:
All because a woman with agency and autonomy posted images of her scantily clad 63-year-old body. Madonna was held up as the opposite of how a demure white woman of a certain age behaves, or should behave.
What Abby Shapiro forgot to do was check the Carfax. Had she done so, she would have known that Nancy Reagan, like most of us, had a past.
A (gasp) sexual (gasp!) past.
[faints holding rosary beads]
[ghost of Stephen continues typing]
According to an excerpt from Kitty Kelley’s “Nancy Reagan: The Unauthorized Biography” published in 1992, Nancy had quite the youth before settling down with old Ron. I won’t be posting said excerpt here, but it claimed that a grown woman engaged in consensual sex acts with grown men.
Twitter had a time with it, dragging the ghost of Nancy Reagan across social media. It’s safe to say the intent of Abby Shapiro’s tweet (classy vs. trashy) blew up in her face. But the reaction, and the tweets that followed, showed exactly how many of us feel upon learning that a buttoned-up Republican, a poster child for those who long to be boring, was busy before she became Mrs. Reagan.
Can you hear that noise? It’s the shattering of the purity illusion that Nancy didn’t ask for but totally played into. This is what America does. It takes the fun out of everything. It asks only that the women be one way and the cisgendered hetero men... well, they can do anything they want, really. How Neanderthal of us.
For some reason, we are obsessed with women’s sexual pasts. There are gossip columns filled with speculation as to who is dating whom. Currently I know that Kim Kardashian is dating Pete something-or-other, and I hate that I know this. I don’t want to know this. I can’t not know this. But Nancy Reagan is serving almost a dual purpose here; she’s an interesting study in sexism, ageism, culture, and the right’s unrelenting shaming of women’s sexuality.
America is rooted in slut-shaming and the patriarchal premise that no woman can have more than one sex partner, and said sex could’ve only happened in high school and the boy must live in another town and preferably another state. We are so preoccupied with female virtue that even some women have adopted the male-centric view of chastity just to shame other women.
It’s a part of the American tenet, so much so that it’s in the Ten Commandments: “Thou shalt not covet the songs of Cardi B.” We are so concerned with the sexual history of individual women that it’s deemed appropriate to report on. What does Kamala Harris’ dating life have to do with her being vice president? Not one thing. She’s been married since 2013, yet when she was on the presidential campaign trail, several publications posted articles like “Kamala Harris’s Boyfriends & Dating History: Who Has She Dated?” and “Roseanne Barr says Kamala Harris ‘slept her way to the bottom.’” We are obsessed with knowing the dating history and body count of women because we believe it tells us something about their moral standing. We believe it gives us insight into who they are.
We also believe it puts them at a table in the cafeteria where they’re not sitting with us. And while I would love to say that we are above the cafeteria politics that permeated our high school years, sadly we are not. America is basically a nation of pimply teens in ill-fitting clothes trying to stake a claim to “cool” while whispering rumors about someone we barely know. We hope to take the spotlight off ourselves, if only to point it at the person we believe should be shamed.
“For the root of this we have to go to the original tweet that was meant to shame Madonna,” said Michelle Hope, a sexpert, educator and activist whose life’s work consists of, but is not limited to, healthy conversations about sex. “I think we also have to look at who Madonna was up against: Nancy Reagan. Look at Ronald Reagan and Nancy’s views on the AIDS epidemic and look at what Madonna did during that time; she put her career on the line.”
“We got lost in the hypersexualization of Nancy Reagan and we lost the bigger picture, the hypocrisy,” she said. “We lost hundreds of thousands of people to AIDS under her and her husband’s presidency.”
It’s true. The Reagan administration got a firsthand look at the devastation that AIDS caused. In fact, the first reported AIDS death in the U.S. was a few months after Ronald Reagan took office, yet it took some four years and 5,000 deaths for the 40th president to even mention the word “AIDS,” much less acknowledge those who had lost their lives to the virus. But don’t let me tell it ― let’s hear it from a left-leaning communist rag like Teen Vogue:
In an obituary, Slate remembered Nancy as Reagan’s “protector” and the “greatest guardian of her husband’s reputation.” With that kind of influence over her husband, Nancy could likely have encouraged the president to speak out about the disease that was killing their country’s citizens. It’s not as though she was shy about the issues plaguing the country at that time.
So yes, be like Nancy Reagan ― which is to say, be like most conservative women, who have sexual pasts they don’t discuss. You know, those folks who repress that part of themselves that once lived without judgment, only to judge later. Shame those who live out loud, as a way to prop yourself up.
Because that’s all that was happening here. Abby Shapiro needed to feel good about herself. The only problem was she posted two women whose lives weren’t really that far apart, and somewhere between those ladies who were supposed to be diametrically opposed, you could find the rest of us, clutching pearls and looking online to see who has the best prices on fainting couches.