The View has just been masquerading as empowered television for women all these years. After today, they might as well call themselves shills for the Patriarchy.
Former governor Mike Huckabee and his daughter, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, faced off with the panel of fearsome female screechers on Wednesday, and while they weren’t expecting a friendly welcome, appeared to get more than they bargained for in their segment.
“Who approved you coming here?” co-host Joy Behar asked Sanders to kick off the segment. “The Mooch? Is that why he was fired? I’m shocked that you’re here, both of you.”
Behar then laid into Sanders specifically, criticizing her choice of profession. “I feel sorry for you that you have to go out and defend these lies every day,” Behar condescended.
If that weren’t bizarre enough — putting down a woman for her choice of career and then lampooning her boss as though members of Behar’s preferred political party were somehow paragons of virtue — the gaggle of ladies then went after Mike Huckabee, not because he supports President Donald Trump (that, of course, came later), but because he would dare to allow his own daughter, whom he presumably controls, to work for a man they couldn’t fathom liking.
“The things that he says about women are horrendous,” Behar shot at Huckabee, referring to the president. “Having said that, how can you let your daughter defend him?”
Both Huckabee and Sanders tried to reply as cooly as they could. Sanders defended Trump, saying that she’s experienced nothing but professional behavior in her interactions with the president.
“I’ve spent a lot of time with the president,” Sanders said. “I’ve never felt anything but respected and empowered to do exactly what I’m there to do every day and that is my job.”
Huckabee praised the president’s record for hiring women. “He’s given my daughter an incredible opportunity,” Huckabee said. “Look at the women that he’s hired not only in the White House, but also the women that he’s hired in the private sector.”
Behar snarled in return but was oddly silent.
You can watch the exchange here (yes, the segment title does, indeed, reference “Trump’s lies” as if they were a foregone conclusion):
Behar is, of course, no intellectual heavyweight, and The View isn’t exactly a rousingly intelligent exchange of ideas between masters of political science, so it’s not like viewers can expect anything aside from what’s regularly delivered (or, for that matter, much beyond the inscrutable shrieks of underinformed left-leaning “feminists”).
But at the very least, viewers might expect The View, a show for women featuring women, to acknowledge that Sarah Huckabee Sanders is a grown woman who can make choices that her daddy doesn’t have to approve. After all, this is the post-Patriarchal world, right? Women discussing big ideas? Holding higher office? Handling the media? Instead, they treat Sanders with shocking sexism, playing into the deep assumption of misogyny they’ve routinely claim they’re at the forefront of battling.
It’s, of course, no surprise. No woman who disagrees with Joy Behar can think for herself. She’s just a tool of the Patriarchy, complicit in her own systemic oppression.