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ELECTION AFTERMATH  
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Rebecca Gordon
December 1, 2024
Tom Dispatch [[link removed]]

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_ Staring Down Misogyny _

Customers at McSorley’s Old Ale House jeer at Lucy Komisar, who was
among the first women to drink at the pub after the city passed a new
anti-discrimination law. Prior to this, McSorley’s, which opened in
1854, had not admitted women (August 10, 1970)., Barton Silverman/The
New York Times

 

“I never realized before that men hate us so much.” That was the
lesson drawn by one of my fellow organizers in Reno, Nevada, the
morning after the 2024 general election. She’d turned 21 during the
campaign, a three-month marathon she approached as a daily opportunity
to learn as much as she could about everything she encountered. “Of
course, they hate immigrants, too,” she added, “and I’m both.”

That morning of November 6th, I sat down with her and four other women
to face the election results. The six of us had spent almost every day
together over the previous three months, recruiting, training, and
deploying volunteers in northern Nevada in the campaign to elect
Kamala Harris president and return Jacky Rosen to the Senate. We
didn’t yet know that we had indeed managed the latter, but it was
already clear that the next president would not be Kamala Harris but
Donald Trump. This was my fourth electoral outing
[[link removed]] with UNITE-HERE
[[link removed]], the hospitality industry union. It was,
however, my first time working directly with the union’s partner in
Reno, Seed the Vote [[link removed]] (STV), a campaign
organization whose mission is to “win elections and build our
movements.”

I’d initially been skeptical that STV, a progressive nonprofit
outfit based in the San Francisco Bay Area, would be able to adapt to
the union’s model: waging effective electoral campaigns while
simultaneously training cooks, bartenders, hotel room attendants, and
casino staff in the skills they need to build and sustain a fighting
union. Would short-term volunteers show the same discipline and
dedication I’d admired in union canvassers over the years? Would
they go out again the day after they’d rung a doorbell and a voter
carrying a shotgun had screamed at them, or sicced dogs on them, or
called the police, or shouted racist curses at them, or even later
followed them slowly in a pickup truck? As it turned out, most of them
would.

Nor, by the way, was it lost on us that morning that all six of us
were women. So are most of UNITE-HERE’s members and its two top
officials [[link removed]], as was the
director of the union’s campaign in Reno, along with the folks
running the data department (something I had done in 2022). A wide
variety of concerns brought us to this battle, but all of us knew that
as women, along with struggles for a living wage, affordable housing,
and access to health care, we were fighting for our lives.

WELCOME TO GILEAD. ENJOY YOUR STAY.

In Donald Trump we confronted a candidate who’d promised
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“protect” women — “whether the women like it or not.” He’d
bragged about appointing the Supreme Court justices who’d
overturned _Roe v. Wade, _effectively ending bodily autonomy for
millions of women. He’d claimed
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handing control of women’s bodies over to 50-odd state and
territorial governments was what “everybody wanted.” I doubt it
was the kind of “protection” Jessica Barnica wanted when Texas
doctors refused her abortion care
[[link removed]] in
the midst of a miscarriage, causing her to die of sepsis three days
later. And it probably wasn’t what any of the other women wanted
whose horror stories about suffering — and death — after the end
of _Roe _were recently recounted in a _New York _magazine article,
“Life after Roe
[[link removed]].”
No, we did not “like” the kind of protection that Donald Trump was
offering us at all.

Here was a man whose earlier boasts about sexual assault
[[link removed]] hadn’t
kept him out of the White House in 2016. Here was one who claimed
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his female opponent in 2024 was born “mentally disabled.…
There’s something wrong with Kamala and I just don’t know what it
is, but there’s something missing and you know what? Everybody knows
it.” It’s hard not to conclude that, to Trump, the “something
missing” was a penis.

Penises were certainly on Trump’s mind when he reposted
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photo of Harris with Hillary Clinton over the caption: “Funny how
blowjobs impacted both their careers differently…” That was, in
part, an allusion to the right-wing trope that Harris had slept her
way to the top, getting her start in politics through a brief
relationship with California powerbroker Willie Brown. And Trump was a
candidate whose sprint to the electoral finish line was fueled by
attacks
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some of the most vulnerable women of all — transgender teenagers.

He’d chosen as his running mate one J.D. Vance, a man who
had complained
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the country was being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who
are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made
and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” In
his view, women exist, indeed were created by God, to be little more
than vessels and caregivers for children. He cloaked his disdain
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women’s actual desires or aspirations in a supposed concern for our
happiness, warning that pursuing fulfilling work outside the home,
“instead of starting a family and having children” was “actually
a path to misery.” He added that the misery of the woman who is not
a mother is a danger to the rest of us, because such women “get in
positions of power and then they project that misery and [un]happiness
on the rest of society.”

Welcome to the Republic of Gilead
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really do hate us that much and they’re not afraid to say so.

YOUR BODY, MY CHOICE, FOREVER

Before readers go all “#notallmen
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that my brother doesn’t hate me. Nor does his son, my much-loved
nephew. Nor did my father, nor my high school or college boyfriends
for that matter. None of them hated me then or hate me now. A few of
them have, however, held — largely unexamined — beliefs about
women’s essential inferiority in one realm or another. And curled
within such beliefs like a secret infection lurks a bacillus of
contempt.

When that contempt festers, it can poison the blood
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a nation, provoking a fever of women hatred like the one that has
emerged in this country since Donald Trump’s recent election.
Perhaps the first drop of sweat appeared in white supremacist
(and erstwhile Trump dinner guest
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Nick Fuentes’s election-night post on X: “Your body, my choice.
Forever.” Although even the liberal press
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treated this dictum as if it referred primarily to reproductive
rights, it’s clear that Fuentes and men like him are celebrating
Trump’s victory as a referendum on rape.

Within a day, that post had 90 million views. Between Thursday and
Friday of that week, as the Institute for Strategic Dialogue reported,
online repetitions rose by 4,600%. Nor was Fuentes’s post unique.
The Institute also observed that “Manosphere
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in a post on X on November 7th, stated: “I saw a woman crossing the
road today but I just kept my foot down. Right of way? You no longer
have rights.”

It seems as if it’s just a short step from thoughts of rape to
thoughts of murder in Gilead. And a popular step, too. Tate’s post
garnered almost 700,000 views within a couple of hours. A day earlier
another Xer, Jon Miller, wrote
[[link removed]], “Women
threatening sex strikes like LMAO as if you have a say.” (And in
case you don’t know, LMAO is “laughing my ass off” in
text-speak.) Like Fuentes’s post, this one has received almost 90
million views.

Nor does what happens in the Manosphere stay in the Manosphere. As
Vox reports
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“Girls and young women are also hearing the line in schools,
according to family members, with one mom posting on Facebook
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her daughter had heard it three times on campus, and that boys told
her to ‘sleep with one eye open tonight.’”

#YESMOSTMEN

Exit polls show
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55% of male voters went for Donald Trump. That figure includes
[[link removed]] 49%
of men aged 18 to 29 and over half of all other men, including 60% of
men aged 45 to 64. Had only women voted in this election, Kamala
Harris would have won handily. Is it any wonder then that, in addition
to invitations to rape, calls for the repeal of the 19th amendment
(which in 1920 gave people like me the right to vote) are also
trending on social media?

One such call came from John McEntee
[[link removed]],
who served as Trump’s personal aide and later as the White House
director of personnel during his first term. He also worked in
personnel in the 2024 Trump campaign and, according
to _Newsweek, _is “reportedly a senior adviser for the Heritage
Foundation’s 2025 Presidential Transition Project, a political
initiative more commonly known as Project 2025.” In late October he
posted a video on X, in which he explained, “So I guess they
misunderstood. When we said we wanted mail-only voting, we meant male
— ‘M-A-L-E.’” In the video’s caption, McEntee wrote, “The
19th might have to go.”

Yes, a majority of men voted for the candidate who has bragged
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grabbing women by the pussy, who has been found liable
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a civil suit for the rape and defamation of E. Jean Carroll, who
happily allowed vendors at his rallies to sell
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No to the Hoe” tee shirts, implying — in case you didn’t catch
the “joke” — that Kamala Harris is a prostitute. A Google search
on the phrase brings up pages of offers for that item, including this
one from Etsy.com: “Just Say No to the Ho Campaign Style Shirt
[from] Etsy. Magical, Meaningful Items You Can’t Find Anywhere Else.
Handmade, Handpicked, and Designed By Humans.” Humans indeed.

THE FOUR BS

Like my young co-campaigner (for whom it took a second Trump electoral
victory to fully grasp the depths of misogyny in this country), I was
also in my early twenties when I first allowed myself to face just how
much some men hate women. Until then I think I believed that men’s
contempt for us was at least partly deserved. I did believe that we
really were weaker, less intelligent, less courageous — in general,
lesser. Perhaps history recorded the acts of a few exceptional women
who excelled in some field or other, but the point was that they were
indeed exceptions. The classic British writer Samuel Johnson had
expressed this pithily some centuries earlier, when he told
[[link removed]] his biographer James
Boswell, “Sir, a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on
his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it
done at all.”

I attended a small liberal arts college that employed only two female
professors. I had a friend whose history professor failed her because,
as he explained to her, a woman shouldn’t be occupying a place in
college that could have gone to one of her intellectual superiors
(i.e., a man). Another friend succumbed to a professor’s sexual
demands in return for a passing grade in his course. Others
reluctantly slept with the male student gatekeeper at the college
library — the price of snagging one of the most coveted work-study
jobs on campus. I accepted these as unfortunate, but unremarkable
realities. Such things might not be right, but neither could they be
changed.

Then came the international explosion of thought and action that was
the second wave of feminism. Suddenly, the world flew apart. As Muriel
Rukeyser asked
[[link removed]] in her
poem about the German lithographer Käthe Kollwitz,

“What would happen if one woman told the truth about

        her life?

 The world would split open”

The answer to Rukeyser’s question came in the form of a global
movement for women’s liberation and a world — this one — did
split open. For me, that movement was as unexpected as a flash flood
filling a dry arroyo. Suddenly, so much seemed possible that not long
before had been unimaginable. Perhaps most of the world’s women were
not, after all, made just to be the bearers of burdens, or indeed of
children, but also of hope.

Recognizing women’s full humanity came at a cost, however. It meant
also recognizing who wanted to deny us that very humanity.

About a year ago, the _Washington_ _Post’s_ editorial
board published an essay
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“the collapse of American marriage.”

“A growing number of young women,” its authors wrote, “are
discovering that they can’t find suitable male partners.” Why not?
They continued:

“As a whole, men are increasingly struggling
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or suffering from, higher unemployment, lower rates of educational
attainment, more drug addiction and deaths of despair, and generally
less purpose and direction in their lives. But it’s not just that.
There’s a growing ideological divide, too. Since Mr. Trump’s
election in 2016, the percentage of single women ages 18-30 who
identify as liberal has shot up
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slightly over 20 percent to 32 percent. Young men have not followed
suit. If anything, they have grown more conservative.”

The _Post’s _prescription: “This mismatch means
that _someone_ will need to compromise.” And that “someone”
was, of course, young women. I could, in fact, imagine young women
compromising if it were differences of taste in music or in food that
were dividing them from the men they might otherwise want to marry.
However, the problem, according to the _Post_, is that politics is
“becoming more central to people’s identity.” Well yes, when
“conservative” views include explicit misogyny, then opposition to
those views is indeed central to my identity. What
the _Post_ blithely referred to as “ideological” differences
are, in fact, differences over the fundamental question of women’s
humanity.

So, tell me this: Why should women be asked to compromise over that?

I’ve written elsewhere
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the situation of young American men, including the ones missing from
the college classrooms where I taught for almost 20 years. I don’t
doubt that half a century or more of neoliberal economic policies
(embraced by both major parties) have greatly reduced the life chances
of many young men. And I don’t doubt that, in blaming women for
their misery, men are deceived into looking away from the actual
powers that constrain their lives. But that doesn’t make it okay to
mistreat, rape, or kill
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So, in November 2024, I’m not surprised to read that many young,
heterosexual American women are embracing a movement that started in
South Korea: they are rejecting the 4Bs, four actions which, in the
Korean language, begin with the letter _B:_ marrying, having
children, dating, and having sex with men. “In the hours and days
since it became clear that Donald Trump would be re-elected president
of the United States, there’s been a surge of interest
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the U.S. for 4B,” according to a CNN report. Ashli Pollard, a
36-year-old in St. Louis, sums it up this way:

“We have pandered and begged for men’s safety and done all the
things that we were supposed to, and they still hate us. So if
you’re going to hate us, then we’re going to do what we want.”

Reading this reminded me of a saying popular in the heady days of the
early women’s liberation movement: “A woman without a man is like
a fish without a bicycle.”

Just as fish don’t need bicycles, there are some things women
don’t need. And men who hate women are one.

_Rebecca Gordon, a TomDispatch regular
[[link removed]],
taught for many years in the philosophy department at the University
of San Francisco. Now, semi-retired from teaching, she continues to be
an activist in her faculty union. She is the author of Mainstreaming
Torture
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and American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for
Post-9/11 War Crimes
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_Copyright 2024 Rebecca Gordon. Cross-posted with permission. May not
be reprinted without permission from TomDispatch
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