Misogyny Comes Roaring Back

When all else is stripped away, the 2024 election was a choice between morality and immorality and between misogyny and respecting women and other non-white heterosexual citizens.  Now, many who voted for Trump are being confronted by family and friends who now see them in a different, negative light because they had a choice and selected the immoral conman and sexual predator. They can try to dress up their motivations for voting for Trump, but when the BS and disingenuousness is stripped away, what they chose is clear and, in my view, they need to drop the pretense that they are decent and moral individuals. With two daughters and three granddaughters I am particularly disturbed by the misogyny and anti-woman mindset Trump and those among the political right are ushering back into the White House and the halls of government.  Under this mindset, women are subordinate, are for use at the whims of men, ideally never voice opinions and are barefoot and pregnant in the home. It is the antithesis of what I want for my daughters and granddaughters and sadly many younger men have jumped on the misogyny bandwagon.  A piece at The Atlantic looks at what is being ushered in:

Throughout American political history, two capable, qualified, experienced women have run for president on a major-party ticket. Both have lost to Donald Trump, perhaps the most famous misogynist ever to reach the highest office. But in 2024, what was even more alarming than in 2016 was how Trump’s campaign seemed to be promoting a version of the country in which men dominate public life, while women are mostly confined to the home, deprived of a voice, and neutralized as a threat to men’s status and ambitions.

This time around, I wasn’t hopeful. . . . . I simply wished for voters to reject the idea, pushed so fervently by those on Trump’s side, that women should be subservient incubators, passively raising the next generation of men who disdain them. This wish did not pan out. “Your body, my choice. Forever,” the white-supremacist influencer Nick Fuentes, who has dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, posted on X on Election Night.

For Trump, eliminating the constitutional right to an abortion was apparently only the beginning. Bolstered by that definitive Supreme Court win and flanked by a hateful entourage intent on imposing its archaic vision of gender politics on the nation, the Trump-Vance ticket seemed to outright reject ideas of women’s autonomy and equality.

The vice president–elect, J. D. Vance, was revealed to have personal disgust for child-free women, whom he had described as “cat ladies” and “sociopathic.” He’d also, on one podcast, affirmed that the entire function “of the postmenopausal female” was caring for grandchildren. . . . . on X, Musk himself reposted a theory that “a Republic of high status males is best for decision making.” The former Fox News host Tucker Carlson excitedly compared Trump’s return to office to a strict father coming home to give his wayward daughter “a vigorous spanking.”

None of this is new, necessarily. But as of this writing, men ages 18 to 29 have swung a staggering 15 points to the right since 2020, according to an Associated Press survey of registered voters. A few years ago, researchers at Penn State found that people’s alignment with the ideals of “hegemonic masculinity”—the celebration of male dominance in society and of stereotypically masculine traits—predicted their support for Trump in the 2016 and 2020 elections.

But the philosophy of the people soon to be in power isn’t informed just by emotionally stunted Twitch streamers and playground bullies. Peter Thiel, the entrepreneur and conservative power broker who did more than anyone to further Vance’s post-law career and helped fund his bid for Senate, wrote in a 2009 essay that women getting the vote had doomed “capitalist democracy.” Trump’s ally and former aide John McEntee posted on X in October: “Sorry we want MALE only voting. The 19th might have to go.” For all the attention-getting antics of Trump’s extremely online contingent, his brain trust consists mainly of very wealthy, very powerful men who think women’s rights have simply gone too far. . . . . What is going to happen to women now?

Not all Trump voters embrace misogyny. And preliminary exit polling shows that a sizable minority of American women voted for him this time; in an economy that’s getting more precarious for every successive generation, both men and women may have been swayed by the promise of prosperity. Still, the teased enforcement of outdated gender roles has clearly connected with young men in particular.

The Trump-Vance administration can’t obligate women to go back to the 1960s, though. It can’t force women out of the workforce. And it can’t mandate that women be subservient to men, sexually, romantically, or professionally. One has to wonder, then, what will become of the men who have been reared on Andrew Tate TikToks and violent gonzo porn devoted to women’s sexual degradation. The gender divide is about to grow into a chasm.

For all Vance and Musk  purport to worry about birth rates, I’d argue that they have done more to dissuade women from having children than almost anyone else, by enabling the radicalization and isolation of Gen Z men. For thousands of years, marriage was a necessity for women—a means of financial security and social acceptance. This isn’t true anymore. Many women simply aren’t willing or remotely motivated to attach themselves to men who denigrate them, or to stay in abusive marriages for the sake of their children, as Vance once seemed to suggest that they should.

In my own circle of friends, I see women living contentedly alone rather than settling for men who don’t respect them. I see intelligent, kind, high-achieving friends thriving in their community, spending their own money, appreciating culture, taking care of their own needs and taking care of one another.

The gender dynamics of this moment cannot be a surprise to anyone. Since his arrival in politics, in 2015, Trump has made his thoughts on women abundantly clear. He’s propagated the idea that those of us who don’t flatter or agree with him are not just difficult but “nasty,” using the language of disgust to make women seem contaminated and morally reprehensible. He has shamed women for the way they look, for aging, for having opinions.

The old analytical terms we use to describe sexism in politics aren’t sufficient to deal with this onslaught of repugnant hatred. Michelle Obama was right, in her closing argument of the 2024 campaign, to note that Harris had faced an astonishing double standard: Both the media and Americans more broadly had picked apart her arguments, bearing, and policy details while skating over Trump’s “erratic behavior; his obvious mental decline; his history as a convicted felon, a known slumlord, a predator found liable for sexual abuse.” She also captured the stakes of the election when she said that voters were fundamentally making a choice in 2024 about “our value as women in this world.”

All his life, Trump has ruined people who get close to him. He won’t ruin women, but he will absolutely destroy a generation of men who take his vile messaging to heart. And, to some extent, the damage has already been done.