Was This Election A Gender War?

Commentator

Dear Friends,

I am continuing my whistlestop tour of post-election think pieces.

Best,

Sam

WAS THIS ELECTION A GENDER WAR?

My firm conviction, throughout this race, is that it would primarily be remembered as the boys v. girls election. That’s not really the narrative now — but really only because Trump won by such a wide margin that there are other factors to look at.

But, at a deep level, I do think that that largely is what this election was about. I don’t usually agree with Jia Tolentino, but the way she phrases this — although in stark terms — seems basically accurate.

Tolentino writes:

The gender war, as pitched by politicians, revolves around two competing visions of a woman’s life. Each side thinks it understands what the other wants. The Trumpists—embodied by J. D. Vance and his repulsive, sneering childless-cat-lady comments, by Tucker Carlson and his portrayal of Kamala Harris as a “Samoan Malaysian, low-I.Q.” diversity hire—believe that the left wants women to be Plan B-gobbling dilettantes in their youth; dick-stomping corporate drones in early adulthood; lonely, angry spinsters who approach forty in a mania for egg-freezing or emasculation. (Soon afterward, the woman problem becomes neutralized by the relative invisibility of the “postmenopausal female.”) The libs believe that conservatives want women to spend their youth in training to attract, submit to, and please men, suppressing all other forms of human potential for one that revolves around dress-up, smiling self-imprisonment, and wiping asses, both literally and emotionally.

The chasm between young men and women in this year’s vote is the chasm between these two stories.

A milder way of putting this is that feminism was on the ballot.

That kind of corporatized feminism no longer is an adjunct to liberalism. For many voters, it is liberalism. And, as the Harris campaign played out, that was the only thing the Democrats were able to offer — that Harris was an historic candidate, that she would be the first female president, etc, but also that the Dems were the party of reproductive rights.

For many women, especially younger women, that’s enough to overcome any other political misgivings. A New York Times article, building off a Gallup survey, contended that young women over the past decade have taken a sharp turn to the left, and, even if the election results were a little more ambiguous, I suspect that that finding is basically right. Meanwhile, the Republicans are moving in the other direction, securing a 12-point edge among men and flipping young men Republican. That cohort will be the core of the Republicans’ majority and — unless something dramatic happens — will be for a long time to come. It’s not just men who reject feminism, though. The number of women who stuck with Trump should not be understood as being supportive of the elimination of abortion or as voting along class lines at the expense of gender. What it is, I strongly suspect, is that many of these female voters felt that corporatized feminism didn’t speak for them; that, in Tolentino’s terms, the ‘story’ it had about what a woman’s life is supposed to be was inadequate.

Something very significant is happening here, but let’s try to not deal with it in exaggerated terms. Those are supplied for us by a pair of articles in The Atlantic and The New York Times. In The Atlantic, Olga Khazan interviews “six researchers who study gender and politics” and they tell her that “sexism was a small but significant factor that worked against Harris.” The numbers here are a bit questionable. It’s based on survey data from 2017 that 13% of Americans say they are “angry or upset about the idea of a woman serving as president.” At a wild guess, most of those voters would have been in the Trump camp anyway. And it’s hard to believe that — with female heads of state elected all over the world — Americans are somehow uniquely misogynist. Meanwhile, in The New York Times, Elizabeth Spiers contends that Trump’s appeal rested on “a regressive idea of masculinity in which power over women is a birthright.” Not to restrict herself to accusations of sexism, Spiers wanders into racism as well, arguing: “That this appealed in particular to white men was not a coincidence — it intersects with other types of entitlement, including the idea that white people are superior to other races and more qualified to hold positions of power.” But, again, simple logic should rein us in here. These incurably racist demographics voted for Obama — twice — and have voted for plenty of congresswomen, senators, and governors. Gender did matter in this election, but let’s not pretend that the Trump Republicans are running on trying to institute The Handmaid’s Tale.

What they are largely running on, though, is a critique of feminism. That critique is circulating across different parts of the public sphere in things like the tradwife movement, in Louise Perry’s critique of the sexual revolution, in Lillian Fishman and

Marilyn Simon

’s embrace of the aesthetics of submission, in the sexual asymmetry that plays out in Lana Del Rey’s music, etc. None of that is explicitly in the 2024 election results, but it is somehow in the background. More explicitly, disputes between feminists and trans rights activists — which had seemed like a somewhat intramural issue on the Left — surfaced in Republican attack ads during the election, with Republicans using trans issues as a way of counterattacking Democrats’ advantages with women voters.

The way to parse the election from the point of view of gender, then, is that the election results exposed the limits of corporatized feminism and they also exposed the limits of the binary narratives about women’s lives, as depicted by Tolentino. It’s not true that the only choices for women are the childless-cat-lady-feminist archetype and the submissive tradwife archetype. As Lana Del Rey puts it, “Anything women do is cool.” The premise with this election, from the Democratic perspective, was that it would mark the ascendance of feminism. The result shows that gender is a much more complicated subject than that.