#and don't get me wrong there is plenty of sexist crap they pulled in the show

[broughttoyoubytheletterf]

I was just thinking about one of the narrative choices I really enjoyed in MSec.

So, I always low-key hated that we never got a real kidnapping or assassination story line focused on Elizabeth. Who doesn’t want that angst? It’s practically a trope in this kind of show for a reason.

But it makes sense thinking about how they approached and handled her character and the fact that she was a woman in a sexist world and specifically how woman characters (even and maybe especially powerful woman characters) are usually treated in mass media in regards to their desirability/sexuality/femininity. 

They didn’t take the easy route when it came to those stories. The time she’s injured worst? When she’s trying to negotiate a world-altering peace deal between sworn enemies and she happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. She isn’t targeted by a crazed fan who is obsessed  with her sexually or a religious fundamentalist who hates her because she’s a woman. She’s hurt because of the nature of her position, it has nothing to do to be with being a woman/the cliched (but still real) reasons people attack women. 

Even when she does actually get a stalker, the stalker largely focuses on her children. Think of other shows where the creepy pictures she got of her children would instead have been a shot of Elizabeth half dressed in her bedroom window or some other semi-sexual photo. The person hacking her? Not someone with pictures pasted in his closet of Elizabeth, but a hired hand for a businessman who targeted Elizabeth for her immense political power and bold policy ideas. He didn’t care that she was a woman, he cared that she had the President’s ear. There’s not a single sexual reference anywhere in the stalking storyline. Again, think of how many shows effectively sexualize stalking. It’s a golden opportunity for shows to allow their powerful female characters to be treated as a sexual object in a way the in-universe supposedly doesn’t allow. (It’s torture porn in a way). 

The one time she is specifically attacked because she is a woman, with Andrada, she immediately gets her comeuppance (she punches him in the face) and more importantly it is treated extremely seriously by everyone around her. Every single person is aghast that this happened and wants to take major action. Not a single staff member, even a one-off stand-in for a typical asshole, suggests that she let it go/it wasn’t a big deal/he just touched her ass/get over it. Neither Russell nor Conrad suggest that she overreacted. We know how in the real world there would be more than a few people who would be like “He barely touched you, it’s the price of doing business.” And most fictional universes would have made the assault more prolonged or had the thing Elizabeth had to deal with be that nobody was taking her seriously. 

The kidnapping storyline? Given to her white male chief of staff.

Of course sexism exists in this universe and there are plenty of men who treat her as a sexual object, but it’s never the focus of the story. Think of the Moldovan general  (and instead of unbuttoning her blouse to speak to him, she buttons it higher and puts on a jacket) or the press attention on her legs. Sometimes she uses her femininity/sexuality in a weaponized manner, say when she parades around in a new outfit to distract the press or jokes about flirting with the guy for the paperwork, but it’s extremely rare. In fact that off hand joke about how the guy has a crush on her and she’s not above using it stands out so much it serves more to highlight her desperation to improve things with Henry. It jars so much with how she usually acts.  

When she’s President the people against her are obviously partially motivated by sexism (as we see pretty clearly laid out in the climax of that storyline and when Hanson slips and refers to her being a woman as the problem) but that’s never their outright stated purpose. The sexism is cloaked just the way it is in real life. It’s subtle and hidden, it’s never thrown in our face in that torture porny kind of way (not the best analogy, but media loves to make any kind of portrayal of sexism (or indeed racism or homo/transphobia) a huge production so it’s very very obvious). 

I don’t know quite what I’m saying with all of this, I’m mostly just rambling, but fuck do I love me some Elizabeth McCord and Madam Secretary and it really shows that there were women writers and producers in charge.