âThe Trump-Vance ticket seemed to outright reject ideas of womenâs autonomy and equality. Theirs was a campaign of terminally online masculinity, largely designed for men, expressed in brutish terms of violence, strength, and power.â
hroughout 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 Trumpâs 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 menâs status and ambitions.
This time around, I wasnât hopeful. I didnât let myself entertain any quixotic notions about what having a woman in the most powerful position in the world might mean for our status and sense of self. I simply wished for voters to reject the idea, pushed so fervently by those on Trumpâs side, that women should be subservient incubators, passively raising the next generation of men who disdain them. This wish did not pan out. âYour body, my choice. Forever,â the white-supremacist influencer Nick Fuentes, who has dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, posted on X on Election Night. âWomen threatening sex strikes like LMAO as if you have a say,â the right-wing troll Jon Miller wrote on the same site.
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 womenâs autonomy and equality. Theirs was a campaign of terminally online masculinity, largely designed for men, expressed in brutish terms of violence, strength, and power. Trump insisted, in one late campaign appearance, that he would be a protector of women, âwhether the women like it or not.â The vice presidentâelect, J. D. Vance, was revealed to have personal disgust for child-free women, whom he had described as âcat ladiesâ and âsociopathic.â Heâd also, on one podcast, affirmed that the entire function âof the postmenopausal femaleâ was caring for grandchildren. The super PAC founded by Elon Musk, who has shown great enthusiasm for personally inseminating women, released an ad referring to Kamala Harris as a âC word.â (The ad, which was deleted a few days later, winkingly revealed the C to stand for âCommunist.â) And on X, Musk himself reposted a theory that âa Republic of high status males is best for decision making.â The former Fox News host Tucker Carlson excitedly compared Trumpâs return to office to a strict father coming home to give his wayward daughter âa vigorous spanking...â