Vanity Fair’s February cover story, “Blowhards Beware: Megyn Kelly Will Slay You Now,” offers little we don’t already know about Megyn Kelly. She is conservative, but has won over certain liberals like Chris Matthews and Joy Behar. She is confident, strong, and immensely successful. She has a husband and is blonde, but sometimes wears pants on television — the Fox News equivalent of chopping off a man’s scrotum in the town square while surrounded by a horde of menstruating women, burning their bras. Though she often resorts to the typical fearmongering and misinformation-spreading you’d expect from anyone in her role, people like her. She also has some questionable opinions about women’s rights, especially concerning the wage gap.
In 2014, Kelly commented on-air that taking measures to close the gap, indeed, even acknowledging that a wage gap exists at all, runs the risk of “infantilizing” women. (“It’s about five or six cents,” she claimed of the wage gap during this segment, incorrectly.) “You are anti-woman if you question that meme about equal pay,” she insists. Kelly doubles down on this opinion in Vanity Fair’s piece:
“Why can’t there be an acknowledgment that, in some instances, women remove themselves from the workforce for a long time and when they come back of course they’re not going to get exactly equal pay?” she asks. “It’s like some of these things are anathema—if you say them, you get booted out of the feminist club…. Gloria Steinem doesn’t get to kick those other women out of the feminist club, or the female-empowerment club, because she says so!” Sensing herself getting uppity, she laughs and does a sassy snap across her face for emphasis.
“What if it’s a situation where the woman comes in and says something like, I don’t know, ‘Please don’t pay me as much as a man doing the same job — I want to be paid less, and it’s none of your business why?’ Do we deny this woman her right?” Sassy snap.
Megyn Kelly has her heavily publicized, wonderful, sexist-shaming moments, but don’t let the spoonful of sugar cover the taste of all of her potentially dangerous misinformation. (Like remember when she said Santa Claus is white, stressing, “Santa just is white”?)
Don’t settle for Megyn Kelly.
