3 weeks ago

This tight race is, in part, about sexist backlash. But feminists can lash back, too | Moira Donegan

There’s one story of the 2024 presidential contest that says that this election is all about men, and their anger. Men, in this account, have gotten a raw deal: the decline of the industrial economy in the years since the postwar boom means that many of the jobs that gave dignity, structure, and steady paychecks to their fathers are now gone, and some men, especially those without college degrees, have fallen into a cycle of desperation and despair, unable to make the kind of living for which they could respect themselves.

This economic argument about men is usually followed by a cultural one: that women aren’t as nice to men as they should be, or maybe not as nice to men as they used to be. On one end of this conversation, there are paeans to male loneliness and discussions of the male suicide rate, quasi-poetic odes to their depths of despair and acute feeling: women just don’t understand what it’s like to be sad the way that men are sad.

On the other end, writers and commentators point to more recent cultural trends that they say have alienated men, making them feel attacked or unnecessary. They point, apparently seriously, to the fact that some young feminists online have used the term “toxic masculinity,” which they say makes men feel bad, bad enough that their feelings are an emergency for the nation. They point to those t-shirts that were popular in 2017 that said, “The Future Is Female.” This, too, is reflective of a great social pathology, a sign that we as a nation have failed men and boys. Why, they plead, can’t the future be male?

Those who worry for the state of men may be right that young men and boys feel this way. They may be right that the men of America are small-minded and narcissistic enough that they can be driven to depression and self-doubt by the sight of a novelty t-shirt that doesn’t defer to them sufficiently. They may be right that women’s modest but real gains over the past decades – their surge into the paid workforce in the decades since the second wave era, their more modest efforts to encourage a more egalitarian realignment of their private heterosexual relationships – have driven men to the brink. They may be right that men, now, feel nothing so much as resentment and anger at women, and are motivated by nothing so strongly as a desire to punish them. That, at least, seems to be the bet that Donald Trump is making.

In the waning days of the election, it seems that the Trump campaign has placed a lot of its hopes in the support of these angry young men, hoping to use misogynist resentment to drive them to the polls. Much has been made of the gender gap in this year’s election, which is especially stark among young voters: polls show Trump winning men under 30 by a comfortable margin and Harris winning women of the same age cohort by an even larger one.

A conventional politician would have tried to narrow this divide, tailoring his message to try and make it more appealing to women voters. Trump has not taken this approach. In the waning days of his campaign, he and his supporters have emphasized their misogynist rancor, anti-woman grievance, and chauvinist policy agenda at every turn.

There was Tucker Carlson, the Trump surrogate and fired Fox News Host, who compared a potential Trump victory in incestuously sexualized terms to a stern father, Trump, “spanking” his disobedient daughter, the Democratic electorate. There is his running mate, JD Vance, who since 2020 has gone on seemingly every rightwing podcast to bemoan the “psychopathic” tendencies of “childless cat ladies.” There are Jesse Watters, the pro-Trump Fox personality, and Charlie Kirk, the founder of the Trumpian youth group Turning Point USA, both of whom have expressed outrage that women might vote differently than their husbands.

Then, of course, there is Trump’s major financial backer, the pro-natalist Elon Musk, who routinely offers to inseminate women in public jabs meant to sexualize and humiliate them, and is reportedly working on setting up a compound in Austin for his 11-plus children and the women who have birthed them. His political action committee, America PAC, recently ran an ad that declared “Kamala Harris is a C-word.” “You heard that right. A big ole C word,” the voiceover says. At the end, the ad winkingly reveals that the word is “communist.”

And then there is Trump himself, the architect of Roe v Wade’s reversal, who famously once bragged that he liked to grab women “by the pussy” and has been accused by more than two dozen women of more or less that. The former president took to the stage at a rally in Wisconsin this week to present himself as a “protector” of women. “I’m going to do it whether the women like it or not,” he said.

All of this is meant to appeal to men. Perhaps it will. But women are listening, too.

For all the anxiety over men’s feelings of inadequacy and insult, their perceived loss of status, and their desire to have their masculinity and domination over women vindicated by a second Trump term, there has been comparatively little attention paid to how women are feeling.

Women, after all, have also lost status: because of Trump, they lost Roe v Wade, the US supreme court precedent that not only granted them control over their own pregnancies but had also long stood as a symbol of women’s formal equality under the law. Now, without it, women are suffering and dying; many more have simply been humiliated, made aware that their government does not see them as equals and adults who can be trusted with control of their own lives.

There is a lot of sympathy, in the political media and among the pundit class, for the ways that men feel that the Second Wave era and its aftermath have hurt them. There is comparatively less sympathy – and a good deal less attention – paid to the way that women feel now that those Second Wave achievements in rights, dignity, and equality are being taken away.

There is no reason to doubt the power and appeal of misogyny: Trump may well be right that resentment and hatred against women will be a winning message among men. But women’s feminist sympathies – their anger, their grievance, their sense of having the American promise yanked away from them – should not be underestimated, either. We may be in an era of profound and trenchant antifeminist backlash. But feminists can lash back, too.