Misogyny directed at Kamala Harris is rife on social media. One doesn’t need to go far to find misogynistic slurs and narratives being routinely pushed against her. Chief amongst the narratives is that Harris “slept her way to the top”; the idea that Harris’ political success is the result of calculated sexual favours, rather than her actual competency or merit. Along with this narrative comes the predictable onslaught of misogynistic slurs.
Where does this narrative come from? In the mid-90s, Harris dated San Francisco politician Willie Brown for around a year. Harris was 29 and Brown was 60. Brown had been separated from his wife for over a decade when he started dating Harris, though Brown remained technically married. Harris and Brown’s relationship was not a secret, and they made public appearances as a couple. Around this time, Brown appointed Harris to the California Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board and the Medical Assistance Commission. This is why detractors claim that Harris “slept her way to the top”.
However, the facts do not support this claim. Harris was already working in Alameda County district attorney’s office in 1990, and was recruited to work as an assistant DA by the San Francisco district attorney in the late 1990s. She then became the San Francisco district attorney herself after winning an election in 2003. Harris enjoyed considerable career success long before and long after her relationship with Brown, and there is no reason to attribute Harris’ achievements to this short relationship. As this Slate article points out, there have been many members of the Medical Assistance Commission over the years; we only know about Harris because of her subsequent achievements outside of the position.
It is troubling that people are so quick to attribute Harris’ career success to her relationship with a man despite the lack of evidence for this claim. This is partly motivated by the misogynistic trope that successful women are only capable of reaching their position nefariously because they are not as competent as men.
This narrative also involves the hyper-sexualisation of Harris; as will be shown below, social media users speculate intently about her sex life, and use highly sexualised slurs when referring to her. This is a form of misogyny to which a great number of public-facing women are subjected. Harris’ value is reduced to the pleasure she can bring to men.
Some of the posts on social media misleadingly describe Harris and Brown’s relationship as an “affair”. The two posts documented below both use this terminology to describe the relationship, although Brown and his wife had been separated for over a decade when he and Harris began dating. The third post claims that Harris “dated Willie Brown while he was married with the wife and two kids at home… she doesn’t care about the American people”. All three of these posts therefore misrepresent Harris’ relationship with brown, and in doing so they feed into the misogyny against Harris on social media.
Some posts straightforwardly imply that Harris used sexual favours to promote her career. In the following post from X, a user says that “Kamala hasn’t gone down this fast since she wanted a job from Willie Brown”, implying that Kamala’s relationship with Brown was motivated by her career aspirations. In the next post, a commenter on Instagram claims that Harris “Sucked her way to the tip”. The implication is that Harris’s success is the illegitimate result of sexual favours, rather than something achieved through merit.
A number of videos on YouTube and Bitchute propagate this narrative. In the following video from YouTube, political commentators claim that Harris tried to “sleep her way into politics and into power” through her relationship with Brown.
The next video is from Bitchute, and is titled “Kamala Harris is a literal whore – Pastor Steven Anderson”. In the video, the commentator uses Harris’ relationship with Brown as the basis for leveling false and misogynistic accusations against Harris.
The following two posts from Facebook imply that their primary view of Harris is as a “filthy whore” and a “slut”. This degrading and misogynistic content likely has its roots in misinformation about Harris’ relationship with Willie Brown.
There are plenty more posts on social that casually refer to Harris using misogynistic slurs. In the following examples from Gab, Harris is referred to as “the whore of Babylon”, “#Kamalaslut”, and a “useless commie slut”. But this is just a sample; it is very easy to find more examples.
Conclusion
At this point, we must remind ourselves that the consequences of hate speech online can go beyond social media. Here, a Fox News Associate refers to Harris as the “original Hawk Tua girl”, referencing a viral video in which a woman gives advice on how to perform oral sex. Earlier in the year, the New York Times reported that Trump has referred to Harris as a “bitch” on multiple occasions.
We also see that there is a double standard afoot. For example, Harris’s political opponent Donald Trump has received significant assistance from his wealthy father to start his business career and has reportedly cheated multiple times on his wives. If the standards that are applied to Harris were applied consistently to Trump, the former president would be seen as undeserving of his achievements in politics and his sex life would be placed under a microscope. However, the same standards are not applied, and many of the same people who refer to Harris as “the slut” appear to have no problem expressing their support for Trump. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the perceived sexual misbehavior of women is seen as particularly intolerable when compared with their male counterparts.
The misogyny that we see from anonymous accounts on social media is both influenced by and influences offline discourse about Harris. Those concerned with preventing misogyny in the real world should therefore be concerned about preventing it on social media.