Don Lemon’s comments about Nikki Haley were awful, but…

I love Don Lemon. I love Don Lemon happy. I love Don Lemon angry. I really love Don Lemon drunk and getting his ear pierced on live TV. I even, with caveats, love Don Lemon’s turtlenecks. 

I need everyone to back off of Don Lemon. Okay. Okay, so last week the CNN anchor was opining on Nikki Haley’s presidential run. And he made the wildly unfortunate statement that at 51 Haley is not quote in her prime.

DON LEMON: Nikki Haley isn’t in her prime, sorry. A woman is considered to be in her prime in her 20s, 30s, maybe 40s.

I have to say I also love Poppy Harlow who we saw in that clip pushing back on Lemon and rightly because what he said was obviously sexist. 

POPPY HARLOW: Wait

DON LEMON: That’s not according to me

POPPY HARLOW: Prime for what though?

DON LEMON: It depends, it just like “prime,” if you look it up…if you Google “when is a woman in her prime” it will say 20s, 30s and 40s

POPPY HARLOW: 40s, yay, I got it…

DON LEMON: I’m not saying I agree with that so I think she has to be careful about saying politicians aren’t in their prime

POPPY HARLOW: You need a qualifier. Are you talking about in your prime for childbearing or you talking about prime for being president?

DON LEMON: Don’t shoot the messenger…google it…

It reduces a woman’s worth to her childbearing abilities. It’s not cool. I also doubt it’s entirely what he meant. What he meant, I would venture, was that Nikki Haley should not be president. I agree. What Lemon was pointing out, via an admittedly dumb offhand statement, was that Haley’s call for vetting candidates based on their age is not an excellent platform to run on, not to mention being wholly unconstitutional. See, the Constitution would literally have to be amended in order to stop all these geriatric white men from holding office. And I don’t see that happening anytime soon. 

I understand why Lemon’s co-host and a significant number of women across the country felt angered by his remarks. They made me feel bad. What women face from society as they age out of what the heterosexual male gaze considers desirable, is frankly awful. But one of the wonderful things about women, in my opinion, is that they have this stunning ability to shapeshift, to grow new superpowers, while they let old ones that no longer serve them go. 

See, I had children at age 30. I was very energetic, and if I had to do that today, I would die. 

But if someone had asked me to be, say, I don’t know, president around that time, that would also have been an extremely poor idea for honestly all the reasons. What makes a woman a person in their prime is both deeply personal and hugely dependent on the context you’re discussing it with him. 

And again, this is why Lemon’s comment was sexist. The context was Haley’s capacity to run for president, not whether she can rock a thong bikini, which, just saying she can do that, too. So no, I don’t like what Lemon said. But the consequences were flat out ridiculous. He was taken off the air or given a vacation day on Monday, and CNN President Chris Licht released a statement saying that he’ll be undergoing, like, formal training. 

We do a lot of complaining about polarization in this country, how the left and the right should be willing to venture out of their own lanes, and maybe just maybe, choose discussion over blind rejection. 

I love CNN. But I don’t want to network stocked entirely with people who subscribe to my very specific beliefs and express them only in the very specific ways that I approve of. And I certainly don’t want a world in which anchors can’t debate each other out of fear of creating what the 

New York Times referred to as an uproar. Don Lemon should apologize. And he should probably do some soul-searching about what he sees when he looks at a woman over a reproductively ideal age. 

But this public chastisement of him feels deeply performative and embarrassingly unnecessary. There is a difference between dangerous rhetoric and a crappy statement, and we can have a teachable moment without condemning a person’s entire character and threatening their professional future. 

So give the Don Lemon in your life a hug today. Then tell him to stop being a sexist jerk. The end