...In the same week as the Iowa legislators were waxing eloquent about alleged reproductive injustice, Republican Congresswoman
Nancy Mace, Representative for South Carolina, was engaging in a
one-woman morality play on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, accusing her ex-fiancé, Patrick Bryant, and three of his business associates, of “heinous crimes” against at least a dozen women and under-age girls, including herself, while law enforcement has done nothing.
Mace claims to have discovered, on her ex-fiancé’s phone, well over 10,000 pictures and videos, some of women (herself among them) being recorded in sexual acts without their knowledge, others of drugged, unconscious women being raped. She also claims that Bryant assaulted her on their last night together, that she had to flee and hide from him, and that she was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder as a result. Now she is speaking out to save the other women he and his colleagues hurt. “My purpose is to make sure these women will never be forgotten,” she vowed, “and the men who hurt them will never be allowed to get away with it or hide again.”
To accompany a nearly hour-long presentation in which she
repeatedly evoked God and portrayed herself as the instrument of His wrath (while also encouraging women to get in touch with their “death goddess energy”), Mace displayed a placard of the four accused men’s names and pictures with the caption PREDATORS—STAY AWAY FROM. She also showcased a phone number that she identified as a
Victim Hotline.
“Today I am going scorched earth,” she said in
her speech. “God uses imperfect people to carry out his perfect plans. I ask God to fill me up, to be his vessel […]. I ask for His protection as I expose the Devil’s hand today.” At one point, she held up handcuffs, daring anyone to arrest her for “standing up for women.” She also declared that there had been many efforts to “silence” her.
Mace did not produce any of the video and photographic evidence she claims to have discovered, and it’s not at all clear why she decided to give her melodramatic testimony on this particular day, or at all. What political or legislative objective did she intend to achieve? Why was it necessary to make her personal life into a public spectacle? Though she claimed that the Attorney General of South Carolina, Alan Wilson, is dragging his feet on the file (a placard identified him as “Do-Nothing Attorney General”), other
news reports have ascertained that an investigation by South Carolina police into Mace’s ex-fiancé and others has been ongoing since December, 2023.
Perhaps Mace simply felt like expressing her fury in public, exposing and shaming the four men in a manner that guarantees maximum humiliation of such magnitude as to jeopardize their rights to a fair trial if their cases do go to trial (none of them has yet been charged). The risk to Mace herself is minimal. A clause of the U.S. Constitution
protects members of Congress from defamation lawsuits for what is said in either chamber of Congress.
Perhaps Mace senses that constituents will rally behind her self-identification as a God-ordained scourge of bad men. Perhaps she is planning a run for South Carolina governor and hopes to wrong-foot the current attorney general, also rumored to be considering a gubernatorial bid. Perhaps it simply felt exhilarating to make “
explosive” allegations that position Mace simultaneously as helpless victim and avenging angel.
Regardless of what was in Mace’s mind, what she has done is to defame four men in the most egregious manner possible and to get away with doing so because of parliamentary privilege and female privilege. I haven’t seen outrage at Mace for her having used her position to take such personal revenge; on the contrary, coverage has generally been laudatory (CNN, for example, called her rant a “
stirring and highly unusual speech”).
It’s impossible to imagine a man doing anything similar (“The woman I almost married turned out to be a whore who defrauded other men ….”) without facing considerable ridicule and condemnation.
Mace offers a paradigm of the feminine style in politics, in which boasts of womanly valor often shade into cries of female victimhood. In the past year alone, Mace has been highly visible as a champion of women, whether it be discussing “glass ceilings” in her
commencement address at
The Citadel, a formerly all-male military college forced to admit women in the late ‘90s (where Mace was the first female graduate); going on the
offensive with interviewer George Stephanopoulos to allege that he was trying to “shame” and silence her as a rape victim when he asked about her support for then-presidential candidate Donald Trump; or engaging in identitarian one-upmanship with
Michael Eric Dyson by revealing
mildly flirtatious text messages he had sent her after the two clashed during a CNN panel discussion. In December of 2024, she had youth advocate James McIntyre
arrested for assault at the U.S. Capitol after he shook her hand.
Like innumerable women before her, Mace has discovered that assertions of womanly power need never be far from hair-trigger allegations of wounding and attendant utopian assertions (“
We have the right not to be intimidated and harassed! We have the right to feel safe and secure!”)
Still, there was something distinctive about Mace’s at-times denunciatory, at-times tearful monologue-cum-campaign-speech in the House of Representatives, which went markedly further than she had previously gone in centering herself as a victim-crusader. She even imagined herself “single-handedly” bringing justice to every raped woman. “
If Alan Wilson won’t do his job as Attorney General,” she thundered, “I will do it for him!”
...Mace’s determined self-dramatizing and her attack on the presumption of innocence raise serious questions about her ability to attend to constituents’ needs. If she truly cared about justice, she would hand the political reins to someone who is not caught up in the emotional spiral she has so elaborately detailed.
**
Nancy Mace is a pro-Trump Republican; Anita Somani is a pro-abortion Democrat. Both are feminist women who highlight their alleged concern for women with unhelpful anti-male posturing or #MeToo-style accusation. Mace’s Victims Hotline
offered nothing to victims: only the opportunity to share a story to help build the case against the accused. Somani’s proposed bill does nothing for abortion access or actual reproductive health. In their hands, the federal and state House floors have become staging grounds for feminist performance art rather than places where real legislation is debated and crafted.
Unfortunately, many women prefer the performance of outrage to the oft-mundane and time-consuming work of getting bills passed through the legislature. As more women gain political positions, narcissistic display and performative outrage are likely to skyrocket.
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