Dear John,
How much can change in just one week! With Kamala Harris now the likely Democratic nominee, the landscape of this fall’s elections has been dramatically altered. And with the prospect of our first woman president once again on the table, it’s more important than ever that we pay attention to the role gender plays on the campaign trail.
As contributor Jackson Katz wrote in Ms. this week, this election was always going to be about gender. “Even when two men run against each other, it’s not a ‘battle of the sexes’ between a man and a woman: It’s a contest between two (usually white) men over competing versions of masculinity.”
Katz chastises the mainstream media for neglecting to discuss the role of gender at the Republican National Convention (which he calls a “tightly scripted celebration of Trumpian virility”)—and in the election in general. To understand how we got to a point where our democracy is so imperiled, he points out, you have to understand how we arrived at our current “crisis in masculinity.”
Questions of Kamala Harris’s “electability” are also questions of gender and masculinity. The “persistent doomsday handwringing and headlining from the mainstream news media” around Harris’s electability are deeply frustrating, writes our executive director of partnerships and strategy Jen Weiss-Wolf. And the mainstream media is once again falling short. “Posing women’s leadership writ large as an open and unanswered question—and questioning the electability of a candidate who has made a career of supporting women’s lives and fundamental rights in an election largely defined by these issues—is nothing short of irresponsible journalism,” writes Weiss-Wolf.
If you’re still not convinced that gender and abortion rights are some of the foremost issues in this election, let me point you yet again towards Project 2025—which lists as one of its top goals: “Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children.” We know, of course, what this really means: their goal is to create a world where women are subservient to their husbands, where single mothers and poor mothers have no support in public policy and funding, and where abortion is completely outlawed.
With so much at stake, this fall we must be clear-eyed about what we’re up against. Ms. will be on the ground at the Democratic National Convention next month, reporting on the many side events you won’t see in the nightly broadcasts, and interviewing key newsmakers about the gender gap, young women’s votes, and the issues at stake in this election. Stay tuned!
For Equality,
