In the grand theatre of progressive grievance, few acts are as reliably performative as the elite woman decrying the "sexism" that supposedly bars her sisters from power, while perched atop a pedestal of unacknowledged privilege. On November 14, 2025, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Michelle Obama delivered a masterclass in this genre, blaming America's lingering immaturity for Kamala Harris's 2024 electoral drubbing and ruling out her own presidential ambitions with a sigh: "As we saw in this past election, sadly, we ain't ready... You're not ready for a woman. You are not." It's a sentiment echoed across the aisle Down Under by Julia Gillard, Australia's first female prime minister, whose 2012 "misogyny speech" thundered against Tony Abbott's alleged sexism, framing her own precarious hold on power as a casualty of the patriarchal glass ceiling. Both women wielded the narrative like a shield, but neither paused to interrogate the pragmatic contradiction: How does one shatter the ceiling from a position of such insulated elite status, where the shards fall on everyone else?
The Victimhood Olympics: Michelle's Post-Election Lament
Obama's BAM monologue, ostensibly tied to promoting her fashion memoir The Look, pivoted swiftly to politics, citing Harris's loss to Donald Trump as Exhibit A in the case against American manhood. "We've got a lot of growing up to do," she intoned, painting a nation of petulant boys too threatened by female authority to vote for a "strong, Black woman." It's a tidy story, one that absolves the Democratic machine of any role in nominating a candidate whose tenure as VP was marred by record-low approval ratings and a border crisis that even her own party couldn't ignore. But facts, as they so often do, puncture the balloon.
Consider the 2025 Virginia gubernatorial race, a mere fortnight before Obama's remarks. There, Democrat Abigail Spanberger, a white, moderate woman with a CIA background, handily defeated Republican Winsome Earle-Sears, a Jamaican-born Black immigrant, Marine veteran, and state lieutenant governor, to become Virginia's first female governor. Pre-election polls showed Earle-Sears leading among men (51% to Spanberger's 43%), white voters (54% to 33%), and non-college-educated whites (a whopping 71% to 29%), suggesting conservative men were more than willing to back a Black female executive. Who tanked her? Overwhelmingly, Democratic-leaning demographics, including 96% of Black women voting against their own racial and gender mirror image. This wasn't sexism; it was ideology. Voters rejected Earle-Sears not for her chromosomes or complexion, but for her Republican platform, pro-life, pro-Second Amendment, and unapologetically Trump-adjacent.
Obama's diagnosis conveniently ignores such nuances, much like her selective invocation of womanhood. How does one rage against "sexism" while championing the idea that biological sex is a malleable social construct? The Obamas have long platformed gender fluidity, Barack's memoir muses on his evolving "gender identity," and Michelle's podcast has hosted trans activists framing womanhood as an inner essence unbound by biology. Yet here, suddenly, "woman" is a fixed, oppressed category demanding electoral fealty. It's metaphysical gymnastics: Sex is a spectrum when it suits cultural revolution, but an immutable barrier when explaining electoral flops. This isn't principle; it's politics by convenient abstraction, reifying "sexism" as a spectral force while eliding the realpolitik of voter priorities like inflation, crime, and competence.
Gillard's Echo: From Canberra to the Global Grievance Circuit
Flash back to October 9, 2012: Julia Gillard, then Australia's PM, unleashes a 15-minute parliamentary fusillade against Tony Abbott, cataloguing his past gaffes ("women are destroying the joint") and declaring, "I will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man." The speech went viral, hailed by feminists as a sledgehammer to the glass ceiling, but it was laced with the same elite blind spot. Gillard, elevated to power via Labor infighting (she ousted Kevin Rudd in a 2010 coup), framed her scrutiny as uniquely gendered torment:cartoons of her as a witch, a Liberal dinner menu joking about her anatomy. Fair game? No but politics is brutal. But Gillard airbrushed her own ascent, the ruthless backroom deals, the carbon tax flip-flops, the minority government stitched together with independents, recasting policy failures as patriarchal plot.
Her speech dismissed Abbott's hypocrisy (he'd appointed women to cabinet) while ignoring her own: As Workplace Relations Minister, she'd gutted single-mother welfare, a move that disproportionately hit the female poor she now championed. It's the pragmatic contradiction incarnate: Shatter the ceiling, then lecture from the penthouse, forgetting that for most women, the barriers are economic precarity and childcare deserts, not Tony Abbott's bad jokes.
The Elite Contradiction: Power Without Accountability
What unites Obama and Gillard is this: Their "sexism" narratives thrive on a double standard, one that weaponises victimhood while insulating the teller from its costs. Both women ascended through meritocracy; Obama via Princeton, Harvard Law, and Chicago machine politics; Gillard via elite education and party patronage, yet portray themselves as trailblazers hacking through virgin jungle. They are not. Never mind that female leaders abound: Angela Merkel helmed Germany for 16 years and produced a social crisis from mass immigration of military aged men; Jacinda Ardern shook New Zealand with her COVID misadventures, and Giorgia Meloni governs Italy today, doing well. Harris lost not to her ovaries, but to Biden's border fiasco, inflation spikes, and a campaign that couldn't define "joy" without word salads.
This elite solipsism breeds cynicism. When "glass ceiling" rhetoric serves as cover for policy indictments, Obama's healthcare mandates, Gillard's policy disasters, it alienates the very voters it claims to uplift. Republican women like Earle-Sears, Sarah Huckabee Sanders (Arkansas governor), or Kristi Noem (South Dakota) shatter ceilings without the whine, winning on competence and conviction. They don't need to "axe" the public; they engage it.
The real ceiling? It's the one progressives build around their own echo chambers, where elite status is the unexamined privilege. Michelle and Julia take note: Americans, and Australians, aren't immature. They're just tired of being lectured by multimillionaires who mistake their policy wreckage for patriarchy. If you want to talk ceilings, try ones built on results, not resentment. Until then, the view from the top looks a lot like denial.