Just a few days after Kamala Harris entered the race for the presidency, the conservative attacks on her are already taking shape. They’re both dark and predictable: She’s a slut. She’s childless. She’s too liberal. She’s too sexy. She laughs. Not in the right way.

It’s the 2016 anti-Hillary playbook all over again. But it’s 2024. And if Republicans lean too far into chauvinism and misogyny, they may find that this time around, they’ll have a lot more pissed-off women to contend with—and they may wind up ushering the first female president right into the White House.

Some of the accusations lobbed at Harris are true, insofar as she is indeed a beautiful woman who laughs and does not have biological children, although she is a stepmother to two: Cole Emhoff, who works in film, and Ella Emhoff, an artist, both of whom affectionately call Harris “Momala.” Harris has also racked up a series of professional accomplishments, working her way up in the California district attorney’s office before becoming the attorney general of the state and then a U.S. senator before ascending to the vice presidency.

But right-wing detractors are determined to undermine both Harris’ character and her achievements. One early line of attack is that “She actually did sleep her way into and upwards in California politics,” as former Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly put it on Twitter, arguing that Harris was “an unqualified political aspirant getting ahead based on smthg other than merit” and that attacking her on these terms is “relevant, and fair game.”

It’s not.

(But if it were, one might ask if Kelly herself would have gotten where she is if television news, and particularly the Fox network, didn’t favor female anchors who look a certain way.)

Here’s the story from whence this pearl-clutching about Harris stems: For roughly one year in the mid-1990s when she was 29 years old, Harris dated 60-year-old San Francisco politician Willie Brown, who was technically married but had been separated from his wife since the early ’80s. Harris and Brown broke up in 1995, and in 1996, Brown was elected mayor of San Francisco, a position he would hold until 2004. Around the time they were dating, and when Brown was speaker of the California State........

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