If you thought the gender divide was bad before, you haven’t seen anything yet. Donald Trump’s win this week, bolstered by online shitposters and billionaire misogynists, has shifted something fundamental in young women. And while we’ll see plenty of ink spilled in election post-mortems about the online radicalization of young white men—as there should be—it would be a mistake to miss the story of how this election is doing something similar to their female counterparts.
Over the last two days, I’ve watched as young women’s TikToks and social media posts went from inconsolable shock to pure, hot rage. I saw in real time as those in their teens and 20s—some of whom voted for the first time—realized the depths of their country’s disdain for them.
For those of us in middle age or older, there wasn’t anything revelatory about the election; we’ve lived that betrayal for years. But to understand for the first time that America would rather elect a rapist than a woman is soul-crushing. Even worse: Realizing just how many men voted for Trump not in spite of his sexual predation—but because of it.
As difficult as that epiphany is to bear, it did not take long for this younger generation of women to respond with a resounding fuck that and fuck you. Notably, their anger isn’t at the world at large, but pointedly focused:
“If men thought I was mean to them before this, then they really aren’t gonna like me now.”
“Switching teams from annoying feminist to evil misandrist after the election.”
“Get ready for me to become the most unbearable woman you’ll ever meet.”
And then there’s this: In the hours after Trump was elected, Google search term interest in the ‘4B movement’ spiked—that’s a South Korean feminist term for women who swear off sex, marriage and childbirth with men.
The Republican War on Women is Straight Out of the Authoritarian Playbook. In an authoritarian state, women are as much the enemies of the strongman as the press, prosecutors, and the opposition. We can correlate the appeal of strongmen to moments when men feel their status is threatened due to changes in gender roles and distributions of economic and social power.
Control over female bodies in the name of population growth is a throughline of authoritarianism, as are persecutions of LGBTQ+ individuals. Anti-colonial leaders such as Mobutu Sese Seko and Idi Amin were just as misogynist and homophobic as their racist imperialist peers. And autocratic bans on abortion span the political spectrum, as the awful outcomes of such policies in Communist despot Nicolae Ceausescu’s Romania show.
In Europe and America, the century-long focus of the far right on demographic emergencies supposedly created by declines of White births and upticks in non-White immigration have created support for controls on female bodies. These controls are predicated on negating the personhood of women and consigning them to roles as vessels of population growth.
For men to preserve their “natural” right to dominate, and White Christian civilization to continue, women must be deprived of reproductive rights and demeaned, disciplined, and criminalized if they resist.This larger frame of authoritarian gender politics is key for understanding the assaults on abortion rights that are making news today, as in the new ban on abortion in Arizona that has no exceptions for rape or incest. Misogyny can be expressed as a desire to distress and shame women who seek to exercise reproductive rights. That’s why in Viktor Orban’s Hungary, where abortion rights have been increasingly restricted, a 2022 law requires a woman seeking an abortion to listen to the heartbeat of her fetus.
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