This is What a Congresswoman Looks Like

Close your eyes and think of a congresswoman. 

What do you see? Pantsuits? Pearls? A woman in her late 50s with coiffed hair, and meticulously applied makeup?

Whatever you picture, I’m guessing it’s not a 36-year-old woman in dungarees and a T-shirt, hair tied back in a ponytail, standing in her kitchen using her whole body to act out what happens to your ovaries during an egg retrieval.

And yet, here she is — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Over the past few days, the representative from New York has been posting videos on Instagram documenting the process of freezing her eggs. She talks about injections and follicles and hormones. In one video, she injects herself in a green room, minutes before doing a live segment on ABC. She explains what she’s learning about her own body as she’s going through the process. She admits what she doesn’t know. In another video, standing in a kitchen, she jokes about hosting her own cooking show: “Today we’re making eggs,” she beams, theatrically ripping off a piece of kitchen paper upon which she’s about to place the medications she’ll inject herself with. 

It’s funny and it’s intimate, sure, but above all, it’s so normal for a woman in her mid to late 30s. For a politician, though? It’s definitely not so normal.

Politicians have been trying to “do social media” for years. They dance on TikTok. They eat a hotdog. They make the widget on the factory line and pretend that someone just happened to catch it on camera. They hug the baby. They participate in some vapid social media trend because they’ve been told by an intrepid team of advisers that they need to be “relatable” and “one of us.” Sometimes it works — hello, Zoran Mamdani — but more often than not, the result feels, well, as you might expect it to feel: like an inauthentic and inconsistent comms strategy that’s been focus-grouped to the nth degree.

“Political authenticity is a mix of behaviors,” Andrew Whitehouse, who teaches a class on political communications at Columbia University, told me. “Consistency over time matters, as does relatability to voters.” And, he said, “politicians must also pull back the curtain on their personal lives in real-time.” This combination, Whitehouse concluded, “isn’t something every politician finds easy.”

Perhaps because of her age, Ocasio-Cortez has always been better at the internet than most politicians. She’s also proven that she’s not afraid of pulling back the curtain, as Whitehouse puts it. But these egg-freezing videos feel different, even for her. There is no obvious gimmick and she is not using fertility as a clumsy segue into a policy announcement (even if she does use the opportunity to decry America’s abysmal healthcare system).

It works because she’s simply documenting what is happening to her, and in doing so, she is challenging our idea of what a politician, and particularly a female politician, looks and sounds like. 

For decades, women entering politics were expected to adapt themselves to institutions designed by and for men. And even today, women get away with talking about childcare or education or healthcare, but ultrasounds? Fertility checks? Follicle-stimulating hormones? Anything that even remotely relates to the everyday messy reality of a woman’s body? Get outta here!

Whether it’s intentional or not, there is something politically astute about what Ocasio-Cortez has chosen to do. Ask a woman in her late 30s what she’s worrying about on any given Tuesday and there’s a decent chance the answer might be life and family related. She might be assessing whether she wants children; whether she can afford to have kids at this point in her career; or whether she has met the person she wants to have them with. (News broke this week that Ocasio-Cortez had split from her long-term partner and former fiancé Riley Roberts.)

She might also be worrying that she’s waited too long, or that freezing her eggs might not work. None of these are trivial questions. They’re questions around which many of us organize our entire lives. So yes, they matter. 

There’s something admirable about a politician showing us any part of her life that hasn’t been buffed and polished by a communications team. But fertility comes with an additional risk and burden: For something that occupies so much mental and emotional space for so many of us, we’re still profoundly squeamish about talking about it publicly.

I asked my Persistent colleague Emma Haslett, who’s written a book and hosts a podcast about infertility and IVF, about this. 

“Mostly IVF folk retreat into their own little community and don't say much beyond it,” she said. “And that’s because if you stick your head above the parapet you just get an avalanche of shite. It's the same thing as egg freezing,” she added. “People start saying things like ‘why do people think they have a god-given right to a baby?’”

Ocasio-Cortez has certainly stuck her head above the parapet. There is something profoundly exposing about telling millions of strangers not simply that you are freezing your eggs, but showing them what that actually involves: the drugs, the bloating, the disrupted sleep, the frozen blueberries on your belly to make the pain of the injections more tolerable, the strange new vocabulary you suddenly have to acquire to not only understand what your own anatomy is doing, but also to be able to advocate for yourself in the labyrinthine world of women’s healthcare.

There have been endless discussions about how politicians reach young men: podcasts, YouTube, gaming streams, memes, locker-room language. Entire political strategies have been constructed around meeting men where they already are. Meanwhile, Ocasio-Cortez is on Instagram talking to women about her — and perhaps their — ovaries.

Some will accuse Ocasio-Cortez of being frivolous. But for millennial women, there’s hardly anything less frivolous than fertility. It is tangled up with some of the most defining questions of our generation: marrying later, having children later, establishing careers before families, off-the-charts housing and childcare costs, and that infuriating discovery that while our lives and aspirations have changed, our biology hasn’t.

Ocasio-Cortez understands that because she isn’t merely speaking to that generation. She’s living it. She’s part of it. We are accustomed to politicians trying to persuade us that they understand ordinary life. It is much more powerful when they simply show us that they’re living through it — sleepless nights, bloated bellies, blueberries and all.