As the election results trickled in on the night of 5 November and into the next morning, and as Donald Trump gained a larger and larger advantage, a decades-old Germaine Greer quote kept dancing through my head: “Women have very little idea of how much men hate them.”
This is the first US presidential election since the Supreme Court, stacked with conservatives appointed by Trump, ended the era of legal abortion in America. It is the second in which a woman has been at the top of the presidential ticket. It is the third with Trump as the Republican nominee.
In two of those three elections, Trump ran against eminently qualified women. No candidate is perfect, but both Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris were hugely superior to Trump in just about every meaningful way, from temperament to competence to intelligence to decency. And yet voters selected Trump over both of them (though Clinton won the popular vote by a margin of millions).
This election was about a lot of things: inflation, the economy, immigration, a general rejection of the Democratic Party. But it was fundamentally about men and women. There were significant gender gaps that crossed racial lines, and education gaps that showed an enormous cleavage between college-educated women and non-college-educated men. While almost 60 per cent of white female college graduates voted for Harris, according to CNN exit polls, nearly 70 per cent of non-college-educated white men voted for Trump. While more than 60 per cent of Latina women voted for Harris, Latino men broke for Trump, with 54 per cent supporting him. One in five black men voted for Trump, compared with fewer than one in ten black women. As expected, white voters supported Trump, but white men were significantly more likely to do so than white women. Women of reproductive age – those who will potentially be forced to risk their lives and carry pregnancies to term under abortion bans – broke strongly for Harris. The men who are getting those women pregnant? They were much more likely to back the man who proudly set this whole mess into motion.
A uniquely awful man was pitted against an exceptional woman, and he won – again. And this time, he beat a woman who had none of Clinton’s baggage and ran an exceptional campaign. It is hard not to sink into despair when one considers the possibility that no female candidate would have won – that the problem was not this woman, but any woman. And it is harder still when one considers that millions of Americans – a majority but certainly not all of them men – looked at a man responsible for shocking curtailments to women’s most fundamental rights and decided to vote for him anyway.
Part of Trump’s message was that he would be a protector of women; implicit in his pitch was reinstating men to that protector status. The white working-class men who made up Trump’s base in 2016 seemed eager to restore an imagined Great American Past when a white man could expect to support a family on a blue-collar salary and enjoy broad respect, general deference and total identity-group domination of US public life. It’s clear, though, that an even wider spectrum of American men are less interested in a protector-masculinity that requires empathy and responsibility-taking, and more concerned with a dominance-masculinity in which privileges are afforded and few obligations required.
Many Trump voters surely cast their ballots because they believed he would bring better economic prospects. But they did so with the full knowledge that he would also bring far rougher times for women and girls. In 2016 feminists warned that a Trump presidency would mean a Supreme Court that overturned Roe vs Wade. We were right. And in the wake of that disastrous decision, untold numbers of women have had their futures curtailed by forced pregnancies. Thousands have had their health compromised. Some have been forced to remain pregnant after being raped, or after learning that their much-wanted baby would die or suffer. Several women have died. Abortion opponents have made moves to curtail contraception and IVF as well – and although Trump and many other members of the GOP claim to want to preserve or even expand access to both, when Republicans in Congress have had the chance to protect them, they have declined. In 2016 this dystopia remained a hazy and theoretical future.
But that dystopian future is now. There should be no denying what Trump’s first presidency wrought. Instead, millions have chosen to ignore it, or accept it: accepting that women will die because they became pregnant; accepting that girls raped by male family members will simply have to become mothers at their great physical peril; accepting that a woman who gets pregnant must remain so no matter her own wishes or circumstances or imagined future.
There are many difficult things to grapple with in the aftermath of a second Trump win: the fear, the sorrow, the rage. But there is an acute pain that comes with the knowledge that more than half of your country believe women are disposable.
[See also: Trump’s victory is a cataclysm]
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