Apropos of the re-election of Donald Trump, The New Yorker magazine ran a series of reactions from various authors. I thought I'd share this:
How America Embraced Gender War
Both Trump’s and Harris’s campaigns framed the Presidential election as a contest between men and women. Did the results prove them right?
By Jia Tolentino
The chasm between young men and women in this year’s vote is the chasm between these two stories. It’s men fearing women’s enthrallment to independence at the expense of their own centrality, and women fearing their subjugation to men at the expense of their lives. The difference—and this is always the difference—is about volition. Men who voted for Trump fear what women might actually want; women who voted for Harris fear what will be done to them against their will. In the imaginary world ruled by angry lesbian socialist girlbosses, there is absolutely nothing to stop you from being a barefoot, pregnant homemaker at twenty-four if you’d like to be one. In the increasingly non-hypothetical world ruled by far-right Trumpists, the blissful servitude of women must be insured by removing their control over their bodies, and ideally, actually, by removing them from the public sphere altogether.
In a recent video, the former Trump aide and Project 2025 adviser John McEntee quipped while cheerfully eating chili-cheese fries, “So I guess they misunderstood when we said we wanted mail-only voting. We meant ‘male,’ m-a-l-e.” Dale Partridge, the pastor of an “anti-woke” church and the author of a book called “The Manliness of Christ”—always a funny argument, given that Jesus famously bled to death to give new life, as many girls and women in conservative states will over the next four years—posted, “In a Christian marriage, a wife should vote according to her husband’s direction. He is the head and they are one.”
www.newyorker.com/magazine/dispatches/how-america-embraced-gender-war