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misogyny
Welcome to Gilead. Enjoy Your Stay in Trump 2.0's America
It's a real-life version of the fictionalized republic, where they really do hate women and they’re not afraid to say so.
Dec 02, 2024
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 with UNITE-HERE, the hospitality industry union. It was, however, my first time working directly with the union’s partner in Reno, Seed the Vote (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, 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 to “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 that 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 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.” 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 hadn’t kept him out of the White House in 2016. Here was one who claimed that 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 a 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 on 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 that 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 for 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, where they really do hate us that much and they’re not afraid to say so.
Your Body, My Choice, Forever
Before readers go all “#notallmen” on me, let me stipulate 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 of 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) Nick Fuentes’s election-night post on X: “Your body, my choice. Forever.” Although even the liberal press has 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” influencer Andrew Tate, 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, “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, “Girls and young women are also hearing the line in schools, according to family members, with one mom posting on Facebook that 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 that 55% of male voters went for Donald Trump. That figure includes 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, 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 about grabbing women by the pussy, who has been found liable in a civil suit for the rape and defamation of E. Jean Carroll, who happily allowed vendors at his rallies to sell “Say 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 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 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 lamenting “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 with, 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 from 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 about 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 us.
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 in 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.
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The Disturbing Dawn of the Alt-Right
Aug 25, 2016
I wrote about the Alt-right for Salon today. It's not the same as European ethno-nationalism. It's scarier:
After months of squabbling about whether it's acceptable to use the "F" word (fascism), it seems at long last that we have come to some consensus about what to call Donald Trump's "philosophy": Alt-Right, also known as white nationalism. With the hiring of the former chief of Breitbart Media, ground zero for the Alt-right movement, as Trump's campaign chairman, the interest in it has now gone mainstream. Hillary Clinton made a speech about it later today.
Alt-right white nationalism is an apt term for a campaign that has electrified white supremacists so it makes sense that most people would focus on the racial angle. According to this analysis in the Guardian, the rising right-wing ethno-nationalist movement in Europe is the progenitor of this American version, which adheres to its basic premise but brings its own special brand of deep-fried racism. Both share a belief that the white race is under siege and that "demands for diversity in the workplace, which means fewer white males in particular, forms the foundation for the movement." So it stands to reason that Trump's border wall, Muslim ban, and bellicose appeals for "law and order" (along with his overt misogyny) is a clarion call to this faction.
But while it's obvious that the subtle and not-so-subtle racial messaging are among the primary attractions for Trump voters, they are also responding to an economic appeal, much of which stems from the misconception that because Trump himself is a successful businessman he must know what he's doing. But as Dave Johnson of Campaign for America's Future pointed out, many of the white working-class folk who believe Trump's promises to "bring back jobs" would be surprised to know what he actually means by that:
Trump says the U.S. is not "competitive" with other countries. He has said repeatedly we need to lower American wages, taxes and regulations to the point where we can be "competitive" with Mexico and China. In other words, he is saying that business won't send jobs out of the country if we can make wages low enough here.
His "plan" is to compete by pitting states against each other to lower wages, particularly by encouraging businesses to move to low-wage, anti-union states. Once the layoffs start, workers will be willing to take big pay cuts to keep their jobs. Johnson shows how Trump believes "companies should continue this in a 'rotation' of wage cuts, state to state, until you go 'full-circle,' getting wages low enough across the entire country. Then, the U.S. will be 'competitive' with China and Mexico.
So this white nationalist "populist" economic appeal is less than meets the eye. In that regard Trump is just another "cuck-servative" (you can look it up) who thinks he can fool the rubes into making people like him even richer than they already are. But all that is subsumed in Trump's message of white grievance and American decline.
One of the most important characteristics of this faction is a strong attraction to authoritarianism. This fascinating report at Vox by Amanda Taub tracked studies which show that "more than 65 percent of people who scored highest on the authoritarianism questions were GOP voters and more than 55 percent of surveyed Republicans scored as "high" or "very high" authoritarians."
Authoritarians, we found in our survey, tend to most fear threats that come from abroad, such as ISIS or Russia or Iran. These are threats, the researchers point out, to which people can put a face; a scary terrorist or an Iranian ayatollah
That fear is also something the American alt-right has in common with their European cousins, but I see it having a different effect here. In Europe, the desire truly is for a withdrawal from external obligations and the dismantling of institutions that have blurred national identity and political independence. They are afraid of mass immigration from the Middle East in the age of terrorism and the economic crisis emboldened the usual European suspects. So some observers are tempted to believe that Trump's invocation of the old isolationist slogan "America First" will likewise result in a pull-back of the American global empire. But a closer look at Trump's rhetoric shows that he and his followers have a different worldview.
Look at his slogan: "Make America Great Again." Those four words imply the idea of America dominating the planet as it did after World War II. Of course, it still does, but in Trump's mind, America has become a weak and struggling nation hardly able to keep up with countries like Mexico. He believes other countries are laughing at us and treating us disrespectfully, which has had him seething for over 30 years. Back then it was Japan "cuckolding" America. Today it's China and Mexico, both of which he promises to sanction for failing to properly "respect" America -- with a thinly veiled violent threat backing it up. After all, trade wars have often led to shooting wars.
American nationalism cannot be separated from its status as the world's only superpower. Trump promises to build up the American military to the most massive force in history (of course, it already is) so that "nobody will mess with us ever again." He doesn't say that America should pull back from its security guarantees, merely that it should require other nations to pay more for the protection. He doesn't take nuclear war off the table, one can assume for the reason that it's a cheaper, quicker way to "take care of" problems than these relatively smaller wars we've waged since the world burned in the two epic conflagrations of the 20th century. His nationalism is all about domination not withdrawal.
And that view is shared by the American alt-right. Here's one Breitbart writer making the case:
I'd like an America that makes 7 "Fast & Furious" movies without making concessions to Ayatollah Khamenei. I'd like an America that humiliates the likes of Vladimir Putin, not vice-versa. An America that punches back eight times as hard over a tiny offense. An America that everyone might laugh at but ultimately stop attacking because it can only end poorly for them.
Trump's nationalism is absolutely about ethno-purity, and there's an element of populism as well, although it's clearly a misdirection. But it's largely about wounded national pride,e which has been a potent motivating force on the American right for a long time. There's a reason Trump is now playing the conservative anthem "Proud To Be An American" at his rallies. Good old-fashioned jingoism is the one thing that brings the old right, the new right, and the alt-right together.
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Why Game of Thrones is the Perfect Show for the Modern Age
There is something horribly relatable about George R R Martin’s world of Westeros, whose characters have now become part of public myth.
Apr 29, 2016
By now, it feels as if George R R Martin - the author of Game of Thrones, narrative sadist and ruiner of all things beautiful and good - has been appointed scriptwriter for the news. I am not the first to observe this. Martin is famous for killing off everyone's favourite characters and sending his stories careering into pits of bleak uncertainty just when you thought everything might turn out all right. Since Prince became the latest beloved star to die this year, it has become abundantly clear that life is imitating Game of Thrones, and there's nothing to do but watch the next bit through your fingers and try to avoid spoilers.
The staggeringly popular HBO show based on Martin's books is in its sixth season, and it is wild, glorious trash. I mean that as a compliment. I love this horrible, problematic show more than I can possibly justify, so I've stopped trying. It is hardly a social-justice warrior's dream, given that it seems to be racing against itself to sexually degrade as many female characters as possible in the space of a 45-minute episode.
The argument for the endless misogynist violence is that it has to be shown, not to titillate viewers, absolutely not, but because that sort of thing just happened back in the murky medieval past. This would be a decent excuse if sexual violence were indeed a thing of the past; or, come to that, if Game of Thrones was actually set in the past, instead of in a fictional fantasy world where there are shape-shifters, zombies and dragons.
There is one aspect, however, in which Game of Thrones has a claim to being the most realistic show on television. Despite the wizards, the wights and the way every character manages to maintain perfect hair even when they're being pointlessly tortured to death, there is something horribly relatable about Martin's world of Westeros, whose characters have now become part of public myth. What sets it apart is not the monsters, the nudity or the festering gallons of gratuitous gore, but the overwhelming sense that the plot got run off the rails three books ago and is being steered towards a terrible precipice by a bunch of bickering, power-mad maniacs. This, coincidentally, happens to be the plot of the entire 21st century so far.
Viewers might tune in for what the actor Ian McShane called the "tits and dragons", but they stay for the unremitting horror. Martin gleefully tramples over all the tropes of conventional sword-and-sorcery fiction. There are no noble quests or heroes' journeys. Instead, horrible things happen to good people for no reason. Heroism goes extremely unrewarded. The few times injustice does get punished, it happens by accident. Fair maidens are not saved, protagonists are slaughtered at random, and war is always a stupid idea, even though the surviving cast members are still trying to solve all their problems by waging it.
Most fans of the show have idly wondered which warring noble house they'd want to be born into. Are you brave and upstanding like the Starks, an entitled aristocrat like the Lannisters, or a mad pirate bastard like the Greyjoys? Personally, I like to think that I'd be at home in Dorne, where knife-fighting and aggressive bisexuality are forms of greeting, but the truth is that I'd have been dead for at least two seasons by now and so would you. And not excitingly dead, either. Not beheaded-by-the-king dead, or burned-as-a-blood-sacrifice-to-the-god-of-fire-by-your-own-father dead. Statistically speaking, we'd be peasants. We probably wouldn't even get names. We'd just be eating mud and waiting for the war to be over. You know it's true.
The moral lessons so far are murky but sensible. Dragons are awesome. Men are invariably dreadful. Following religious zealots into battle is a poor life decision. Honour is a made-up concept that will probably get you killed. Most importantly, there are very few truly evil people in the world: instead, there are just stupid people, and scared people, and petty, vindictive people, and sometimes those people get put in charge of armies and nations, and that's when the rest of us are really buggered. That's what Game of Thrones is about.
I'm not even confident of a happy ending. I've made peace with knowing that my favourite characters are unlikely to make it out of the series alive, and even if they do, it won't matter, because a giant army of ice zombies is coming to eat the world.
And that's what makes it brilliant. There are plenty of horrible, sexy things on television, and in these anxious times every novelist worth his advance seems to be turning his hand to grim dystopian fiction. The problem with most dystopias, though, is that they're too predictable. They serve up worlds where, however awful things get, someone is at least in charge. They are comforting for that reason, in the same way as conspiracy theories are comforting. It is less distressing to believe, for instance, that a secret race of lizard people is managing the destiny of the human race than to believe that nobody is managing it at all.
Stories help us rehearse trauma. They help us prepare for it. You sit down to watch terrible things happening to made-up people and you imagine how you'd cope if that were you, or someone you loved, and even if the answer is "not at all" you find yourself feeling a bit better. Right now, the really frightening prospect is that the world is actually being run by vicious idiots with only half a plan between them who are too busy fighting each other to pay attention to the weather, which is about to kill us all.
That, along with the epic theme music, is why I still love Game of Thrones. It feels like aversion therapy for the brutal randomness of modern politics, with a side order of CGI monsters and a lot of shagging. There you go. I hope that's given you all the excuse you need to tune in for season six. I did my best. If you need me, I'll be behind the sofa.
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