If men have become addicted to the manosphere, their female counterparts are endlessly distracted by the glamosphere. Whether it’s the Bulgari jewelry count at the Met Ball, Kris Jenner’s fabled facelift, or the pressing question of how Huma Abedin’s Givenchy wedding veil survived a Hamptons downpour ten days ago, women seem to be on their own trip to outer space, where the surface of Mars is one long red carpet.

The Jeff Bezos-Lauren Sánchez (circa $56 million) Venice-sinking nuptials, tying up every tender on the Grand Canal (and 90 private jets expected), is the big beautiful buster bomb of high-net-worth exhibitionism. Now that the 55- year-old bride Sánchez has proved that landing the fourth richest man in the world requires the permanent display of breasts like genetically modified grapefruit and behemoth buttocks bursting from a leopard-print thong bikini, she’s exuberantly and unapologetically shown that the route to power and glory for women hasn't changed since the first Venetian Republic.

Think about it. Most of America’s biggest female fortunes – from Melinda Gates to Laurene Powell Jobs to Miriam Adelson to the first Mrs. Bezos, MacKenzie Scott— happen to derive from their billionaire husbands. The same goes for the power that goes with it. This has to be a yummy thought for the ravishing 49-year-old newlywed Huma Abedin, for decades Hillary Clinton’s devoted gatekeeper and a keen supporter of Democratic causes, who lived through the tabloid humiliation of her sexting ex Anthony Weiner. Her enraptured second husband Alex Soros controls a $25 billion philanthropic foundation. Go for it, Huma.

Credit: Carl Timpone

In a 2023 Vogue cover interview, Lauren Sánchez posed atop the so-called 10,000-year clock, a $42 million+ vanity project built 500 feet below the ground inside a mountain (are we sure no nuclear warheads there?) on Bezos’s 165,000-acre West Texas ranch. Sánchez says of the clock, “It represents thinking about the future.” And yet, as the champagne flows at her fantastical wedding, it’s worth pondering why women of ambition are borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Blah Ambition

Speaking of which, a damp pall has descended on women seeking other routes to power. Blown away by the massive ordnance penetrators that have phallicized our world, female political stars seem to have disappeared off the map. We were promised Mamala and instead we got Mountainhead. And a cadre of influential women, perhaps beaten down by the tyranny of testosterone, seem okay with going along.

Whitmer photo credit: Eric Lee/The New York Times

Why is mighty-voiced Michelle Obama relegating herself to that sappy podcast with her brother? Why are we supposed to admire 44-year-old former New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern, once idolized for her brave gesture of donning a hijab after a 2019 terrorist attack on a Christchurch mosque, for drippily dropping out in January 2023 because she found politics “pretty unrelenting.” Her new memoir is called A Different Kind of Power, which seems to be the choice to not have any. And Gretchen “Big Gretch” Whitmer, who is on the short-list of ’28 presidential candidates? It’s going to take a lot to live down her lame attempt to avoid getting her picture taken with Tyrannosaurus Trump in the Oval Office. She’s now come out from behind the folder, but still…

Meanwhile, somewhere deep in Wyoming, after her 2022 primary wipeout that was payback for her heroism leading the Jan 6 hearings, Liz Cheney’s only constituent is a lone buffalo. She now describes herself on X as “proud rodeo mom, soccer mom, baseball mom, hockey mom, constitutional conservative”—in that order. Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski, who has somehow, for years, gotten away with being considered an independent thinker, now, in a new podcast interview, gives a full-throated waffle at the suggestion of daylight between her and the rest of her insane party. “There is some openness to exploring something different than the status quo,” she said. To the barricades!

It seems we are doomed to be trapped with the uncouth ranting of the likes of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the pert MAGA parroting of WH Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, or the strangely vague utterances of National Intelligence Airhead Tulsi Gabbard, whom Trump has already thrown under the bus for daring to share intelligence that contradicted his winning plotline of imminent Iranian menace. How I miss the backbone and the bravery of the late Cecile Richards who fought until the bitter end for women’s rights, reproductive and otherwise! I salute the tenacious crackle of AOC, the sharp-chinned political cross-examinations of the cucumber-cool CNN anchor Kaitlin Collins (how does she manage not to blink or blanch?), and the bulldog persistence of E. Jean Carroll’s attorney Robbi Kaplan. I burn incense every night to the indomitable goddess Beyonce, bestriding the world stage with those Parthenon thighs and defiantly seizing her country music throne. Her dazzling mini-me daughter, Blue Ivy, will perhaps dance us into a not-going-anywhere tomorrowland. Meanwhile, grab me a gondola.