Zohran Mamdani, who was elected mayor of New York, and his wife Rama Duwaji vote at The Frank Sinatra School of the Arts on Nov. 4 in Queens.Alexi J. Rosenfeld/Getty Images
We live in an era where you can say just about anything about women and get away with it. And between the newly elected New York mayor’s partner being branded an “aloof wife” to Trump’s calling members of the media “piggy,” “ugly,” and “stupid,” last month was a particularly busy time for such name-calling. Before you reply with an adult version of “sticks and stones may break my bones,” let’s be clear: these words aim to roll back women’s advancement in the workplace by decades.
Let’s start with Rama Duwaji. Ahead of New York’s mayoral election, The New York Post described Zohran Mamdani’s 28-year-old Texas-born, Syrian-American wife “aloof” for keeping her social media channels focused on her own work as an animator, illustrator and ceramicist rather than posting dutifully about her husband. “Aloof” also for skipping out on some debates, even though Duwaji is widely credited as being the creative force behind her husband’s campaign.
While it didn’t sound like a direct insult, with that one word the Post raised a curious eyebrow over Duwaji’s behaviour. As a Cosmopolitan writer pointed out, on the surface, the “aloof wife” aesthetic could be embraced by women, as it holds the promise that they can attain personal success and not be at the mercy of their man’s policies, politics, employment or agenda. But realistically, no one will be able to pull this off as effortlessly as Duwaji appears to – and it creates new pressure on women to balance being casually indifferent while still being adequately invested in both your partner’s career and your own.
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“There’s a strange duality or sometimes even a strange multifacetedness to the expectations of women. She’s somehow supposed to be the perfect partner and yet also have her own career. She’s supposed to have it all and want it all,” observed Zorianna Zurba, a pop culture expert at Humber Polytechnic in Toronto.
Zurba added that Duwaji is clearly showing up for her husband emotionally and with her labour, but for women, that support is supposed to be more visible. “We need to show up in a kind of super proud, super bubbly, effervescent shimmering kind of support.”
In other words, we need to care a lot, but also not care too much. It’s exhausting. No wonder that for many women on social media the term “aloof wife” initially appeared to be an answer to the question of how to be a woman in a heterosexual relationship right now. A recent essay published in British Vogue titled “Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing Now?” went viral, seeming to point to a trend that this form of coupledom is not only deeply unsatisfying for women, but that we should stop pretending it’s aspirational. Today’s heteropessimism is likely the result of a growing ideological gap between men and women, the failure of modern dating apps to offer meaningful relationships and, perhaps foremost, the sticky persistence of traditional gender roles.
With “aloof wife,” The New York Post showed that a dozen years after we hit peak corporate feminism, with Sheryl Sandberg telling a generation of women to “lean in,” our current political climate is making it impossible for women to just be themselves in the world.
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Maybe it shouldn’t have been a surprise, then, to see a recent, incendiary op-ed run by The New York Times with the headline, “Did Women Ruin the Workplace?” Although it changed the headline after an uproar, when a paper of record asks whether women should be employed in meaningful positions at all, we can’t let them off the hook. (Not long after, Trump called one of the same newspaper’s journalists “ugly, both inside and out” for her reporting on him aging in office.)
When it comes to language, it’s easy to keep upping the ante. Which brings us to the recent slur that, to me, is the most dangerous: “Quiet, piggy.” Trump said these words in response to a Bloomberg journalist questioning him about the Epstein files, which promise to show how the lives of girls and women were swept under the carpet to protect the balance of power in favour of men.
“Trump not only acts as a role model, empowering other men to similarly denigrate women, but he also reinforces the message to women and girls that for us, speaking up, asking questions, attempting to exert influence in the world is an invitation to abuse,” said Shari Graydon, CEO at Informed Perspectives, a non-profit working to bridge the gender gap in Canadian public discourse.
It’s also no coincidence that this is happening at the same time that major institutions have been quietly removing the word “diversity” from their core values – including in Canada, with the Bank of Montreal being the latest. And at the same time that Prime Minister Mark Carney decided to drop Canada’s feminist foreign policy. We are trending in the wrong direction: The Reykjavik Index for Leadership, which measures how equally women and men are perceived for their leadership abilities across all G7 countries, is at its lowest level since the phenomenon started being tracked in 2018.
As benign as “aloof” might seem, it’s the type of comment that reminds us that there’s never been a perfect way for a woman to be in the world. And now, for many of us, there isn’t even a right one.
Leah Eichler, a self-proclaimed word nerd, writes regularly about our evolving use of language