The latest shot heard ’round the world came not from a gun but from a syringe of fertility hormones belonging to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Last weekend on Instagram, the congresswoman announced her plan to freeze her eggs and document the process. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, seated on a sofa, showed the array of medical supplies that she will need to prepare her body for an egg retrieval. Cautioning viewers not to “be weird about this,” she pulled up her white top, swabbed her bare abdomen with alcohol, took a deep breath and injected a fold of flesh she pinched with her fingers. “That wasn’t so bad,” she told us with visible relief.
This was a revolutionary moment.
It’s not at all unusual that Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, a 36-year-old professional woman, might make this choice. And it’s not surprising that a politician as media savvy as she is might talk about that choice online. Last year Representative Sara Jacobs did so, too, documenting her own egg-freezing experience.
But heavens, seeing a public figure in such a vulnerable, private moment — literally baring her underbelly still carries quite a jolt. And the reality of Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s huge public following only intensifies this effect. By now, millions of people surely have seen her egg-freezing videos.
Many applauded her transparency and bravery. Others insisted that her private life should be kept private. And some right-wing commentators seized on the occasion to proclaim their pronatalist bona fides. The conservative blogger Matt Walsh lashed out on X, for example, calling Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s decision “baffling” and boasting that he would have kids in their 20s “by the time I turn 50,” dismissing later-in-life pregnancy as “backwards and ridiculous.”
By documenting her egg-freezing process, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez showed herself seizing control of her reproductive life while leaving the topic of marriage out of the equation. She has made her body public but offered no comment on her domestic situation — a reversal of the usual order.
But she is doing more than that. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has ushered in a new era — call it the new age of young female leadership. And she is doing it in conjunction with an oblique suggestion on the ABC Sunday show “This Week” about a 2028 White House run. (She said she hasn’t “ruled out the possibility.”) On Sunday Ms. Ocasio-Cortez documented herself administering another hormone injection in the ABC green room. (She brought her supplies to the TV studio in a lunch box.) This took place against a backdrop of an enormous picture of the Capitol. The connection could not be any clearer.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is getting ahead of all the skeptical questions she rightly anticipates regarding her suitability as a candidate for the highest office, such as: How could we let a childless woman in her late 30s be president? Isn’t she likely to get pregnant during her first term, when she’d be between the ages of 38 and 42? And given that, wouldn’t she be unable to perform her political duties? By attempting to postpone motherhood, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is telling us not to worry; she’s thought of everything. She grasps the concern and is addressing it. Never mind that many men who have recently run for president have not provided answers to questions about whether their aging bodies will leave them fit for leadership throughout their term.
Like millions of other women her age, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is grappling with the impossible goal and financial burden of having it all. To the women negotiating that tight window of time between their 30s and early 40s, when they want to build both careers and families, she is saying: I am one of you. Feminism has done little to make this balancing act any easier. Despite all the rosy claims to the contrary, the burdens of family still fall disproportionately on women.
Imagine a 30-something male politician reassuring us that he will put off fatherhood while serving in elected office. It’s risible. No one worried that having another child would impede Vice President JD Vance’s work. Men in the public eye are almost never defined by their parental status. Nor are they defined by their bodies’ internal functioning. Men remain impervious to the kind of bodily surveillance women routinely endure. Senator Mitch McConnell, 84, has been absent from his post for nearly two months while managing to keep details of his medical status shrouded in secrecy.
Until now, female candidates for president — including Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris — have all been well past their reproductive years. They may have been mothers or stepmothers, but these women did not need to answer any queries about future child-rearing. But Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, is at the dawn of a new age, and she knows it.
And so, rather than deny or ignore her biology, and rather than take the more defensive (if understandable) stance that her body is her business, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is acknowledging that she has been and will be the subject of discussion, scrutiny and inspection. This is true for all women in the public eye (and, frankly, all women).
The congresswoman’s telegenic, stylish persona has attracted unusual amounts of attention and critique for years. Remember the flak she caught for wearing a “Tax the Rich” gown to the Met Gala in 2021? Knowing she can’t stop this, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez owns the narrative about her body. She has shared her makeup routine in a Vogue video, discussed the meaning of her trademark red lipstick and hoop earrings, and now is displaying her fertility choices with the same confidence. Her Sunday video even combined a glam session with the makeup and hair team backstage at ABC and her injection routine, pairing two types of bodily rituals. “We need to show more depictions of women having full lives,” she said on Instagram. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is refusing to disappear the reality of maintaining a female body.
Women remain, as linguists say, the “marked” sex, the nonstandard, defined as the opposite of the male norm. There is no one effortless way to look as a congresswoman, no uniform of business suit and tie that allows her to blend in. Most female politicians handle this by approximating male attire with some tweaks. Usually that involves a blazer, pearls, and very discreet hair and makeup — ideally, none of which gets talked about.
But there is power in rejecting this model. Power in embracing the variety of embellishments available to women — earrings, lipstick, dresses, different hair styles. And an extension of this power can be a woman experimenting with baring her belly, along with her reproductive journey. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is consciously working to fuse her body and mind on the public stage, to show us what real, human, embodied and, yes, female power can look like. She will not be a mere “thing in a suit,” as she said.
Administering her second set of injections in the ABC green room, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez already looked like a pro, distinctly more adept and comfortable with the process. No apparent flinching. No deep breath. This is her new normal, as it is for millions of women. And it’s the beginning of another kind of normal, too — a normalizing of what the next generation of female leadership can look like for all of us.
Rhonda Garelick is the founding director of the Institute for Public Humanities and Arts at Hofstra University, where she is also a distinguished professor of literature. She is the author of four books, including “Mademoiselle: Coco Chanel and the Pulse of History” and the forthcoming “Why Fashion Matters.”
Source image by J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press.
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