The Gender War Is Here
8 min read
Throughout 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 Trump’s 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 men’s status and ambitions.
This time around, I wasn’t hopeful. I didn’t 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 Trump’s side, that women should be subservient incubators, passively raising the next generation of men who disdain them. This wish did not pan out. “Your body, my choice. Forever,” the white-supremacist influencer Nick Fuentes, who has dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, posted on X on Election Night. “Women threatening sex strikes like LMAO as if you have a say,” 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 women’s 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, “whether the women like it or not.” The vice president–elect, J. D. Vance, was revealed to have personal disgust for child-free women, whom he had described as “cat ladies” and “sociopathic.” He’d also, on one podcast, affirmed that the entire function “of the postmenopausal female” 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 “C word.” (The ad, which was deleted a few days later, winkingly revealed the C to stand for “Communist.”) And on X, Musk himself reposted a theory that “a Republic of high status males is best for decision making.” The former Fox News host Tucker Carlson excitedly compared Trump’s return to office to a strict father coming home to give his wayward daughter “a vigorous spanking.”
None of this is new, necessarily. But as of this writing, men ages 18 to 29 have swung a staggering 15 points to the right since 2020, according to an Associated Press survey of registered voters. A few years ago, researchers at Penn State found that people’s alignment with the ideals of “hegemonic masculinity”—the celebration of male dominance in society and of stereotypically masculine traits—predicted their support for Trump in the 2016 and 2020 elections. Since then, our cultural environment has been flooded with ever more avatars of dopey machismo: steroid-ingesting, crypto-shilling, energy-drink-chugging bros; YouTubers and podcast hosts and misogynist influencers, all profiting wildly from the juvenile attention economy. The language that the Trump-Vance campaign used was intended to resonate with this audience, even if it sounded asinine to everyone else. (“Tampon Tim,” the right-wing social-media nickname given to Tim Walz for approving a measure that supplies period products to Minnesota public-school students, is an insult only if you’re 8 years old or terrified of women’s bodies.)
But the philosophy of the people soon to be in power isn’t informed just by emotionally stunted Twitch streamers and playground bullies. Peter Thiel, the entrepreneur and conservative power broker who did more than anyone to further Vance’s post-law career and helped fund his bid for Senate, wrote in a 2009 essay that women getting the vote had doomed “capitalist democracy.” Trump’s ally and former aide John McEntee posted on X in October: “Sorry we want MALE only voting. The 19th might have to go.” For all the attention-getting antics of Trump’s extremely online contingent, his brain trust consists mainly of very wealthy, very powerful men who think women’s rights have simply gone too far. Forget the hope for a female president, or the fury at the fact that a charming, hardworking, genuinely inspirational candidate like Harris couldn’t break through all the accreted layers of American prejudice. What is going to happen to women now?
Not all Trump voters embrace misogyny. And preliminary exit polling shows that a sizable minority of American women voted for him this time; in an economy that’s getting more precarious for every successive generation, both men and women may have been swayed by the promise of prosperity. Still, the teased enforcement of outdated gender roles has clearly connected with young men in particular. Among voters ages 18 to 29, the gender gap was striking: about 16 points, according to the AP.
The Trump-Vance administration can’t obligate women to go back to the 1960s, though. It can’t force women out of the workforce. And it can’t mandate that women be subservient to men, sexually, romantically, or professionally. One has to wonder, then, what will become of the men who have been reared on Andrew Tate TikToks and violent gonzo porn devoted to women’s sexual degradation. The gender divide is about to grow into a chasm.
In the U.S., 63 percent of men under 30 are currently single, compared with 34 percent of women in the same age group, according to the Pew Research Center. This suggests that women aren’t the only ones who may ultimately suffer from this coming rupture in American life. So, too, will the men who have been trained to see women as disgusting, untamable, fundamentally inferior to them.
For all Vance and Musk purport to worry about birth rates, I’d argue that they have done more to dissuade women from having children than almost anyone else, by enabling the radicalization and isolation of Gen Z men. For thousands of years, marriage was a necessity for women—a means of financial security and social acceptance. This isn’t true anymore. Many women simply aren’t willing or remotely motivated to attach themselves to men who denigrate them, or to stay in abusive marriages for the sake of their children, as Vance once seemed to suggest that they should.
In my own circle of friends, I see women living contentedly alone rather than settling for men who don’t respect them. I see intelligent, kind, high-achieving friends thriving in their community, spending their own money, appreciating culture, taking care of their own needs and taking care of one another. Within hours of the election result becoming clear, Google searches went up sharply for South Korea’s feminist protest movement “4B”—a social philosophy that advocates for women not to date, marry, have sex with, or have children with men. (South Korea currently has the lowest fertility rate of any country in the world.)
American conservatism has long fetishized motherhood in a way that made it proximate to power—mothers are lionized and even encouraged to seek political office, as long as it’s understood that they’re doing so on behalf of others. Sarah Palin, the first female vice-presidential candidate on a Republican ticket, tried to defang her own ambition by suggesting that she was just a hockey mom who got involved. But the kind of motherhood now being promoted on the right is much more passive, and powerless. It’s the kind modeled by the former Supreme Court clerk Usha Vance, who stands by silently while her husband weakly brushes off his racist fans’ attacks on his family. It’s also exemplified by the tradwives of TikTok and Instagram, who cater to the male gaze with their doe-eyed; paisley-smock-wearing; Kinder, Kirche, Küche performances of submissive domesticity.
The gender dynamics of this moment cannot be a surprise to anyone. Since his arrival in politics, in 2015, Trump has made his thoughts on women abundantly clear. He’s propagated the idea that those of us who don’t flatter or agree with him are not just difficult but “nasty,” using the language of disgust to make women seem contaminated and morally reprehensible. He has shamed women for the way they look, for aging, for having opinions. (Those of us who have public personas online have experienced this sort of treatment too, and have seen it snowball with his encouragement.) None of this is in any way negated by his decision to make a woman his chief of staff, or to nominate women for key positions.
Even before Harris officially became the nominee in 2024, Trump’s allies were attacking her in sexualized terms, subliminally linking female power to the so-called threat of unfettered female sexuality. Early in July, Alec Lace—the host of a podcast dedicated to fatherhood, if you can believe it—referred to Harris on the Fox Business channel as “the original Hawk Tuah girl,” a reference to a viral clip about oral sex. In August, Trump circulated a post on his social-media platform, Truth Social, that insinuated that Harris had performed sexual favors to establish her career in politics. In September, Semafor reported that a shadowy conservative network had been paying influencers to promote sexualized smears of Harris. In October, a billboard in Ohio briefly drew consternation for displaying a mocked-up image of Harris on her hands and knees, about to engage in a sex act. (It was paid for by a towing company.)
The old analytical terms we use to describe sexism in politics aren’t sufficient to deal with this onslaught of repugnant hatred. Michelle Obama was right, in her closing argument of the 2024 campaign, to note that Harris had faced an astonishing double standard: Both the media and Americans more broadly had picked apart her arguments, bearing, and policy details while skating over Trump’s “erratic behavior; his obvious mental decline; his history as a convicted felon, a known slumlord, a predator found liable for sexual abuse.” She also captured the stakes of the election when she said that voters were fundamentally making a choice in 2024 about “our value as women in this world.” On that front, the people have spoken. But women don’t have to play along.
All his life, Trump has ruined people who get close to him. He won’t ruin women, but he will absolutely destroy a generation of men who take his vile messaging to heart. And, to some extent, the damage has already been done.
This article appears in the January 2025 print edition with the headline “The Gender War Is Here.”
