On Women, Backlash, and Possibility

And that thing we’re not really talking about

Photo by Colin Lloyd on Unsplash

We’re not talking about it that much. I mean, there’s a hat for sale in the campaign merch store. And it’s not like it’s hard to tell. Kamala Harris talks about her background all the time, how it has prepared her for the role of President, about how it connects her to the concerns of a majority of Americans. We’ve talked about the role of Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff, and what he’d do with a future role as First Gentleman. But still, Hillary Clinton spent Election Night in the Javits Center, underneath a literal glass ceiling. We’re more wary this time around. And yet, it’s there. I can feel it in the back of my heart, in that little storm tossed sea where hope rises whether I want it to or not. 

There’s a chance that this year we’ll elect our first woman president. 

Representation isn’t everything, of course. There is no woman that could run for President from this Republican party that I would vote for, because Republican policies these days are broadly heinous, and specifically detrimental to women’s financial, political, and social equality. But it does mean something that Kamala Harris would be the first woman, the first Black woman, and the first Asian-American president, that she would be bringing her blended family, and her immigrant parents, and her middle class roots with her to the White House. It matters that kids of all genders and backgrounds would see Kamala Harris in one of the most powerful positions in the world, that they would grow up in a country that can put someone like her in the White House. And after almost a decade of Donald Trump, a court adjudicated rapist who incites racist violence just by breathing and who surrounds himself with some of the most effective racist, misogynist fear mongers in politics, it would also be incredibly cathartic. 

In a lot of ways it feels like we’ve gone backwards in the past few years. The Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to an abortion after 50 years of settled law. Republicans are talking about overturning the right to IVF, birth control, gay marriage, and no-fault divorce in the same fashion. The right has spent the last several years inciting hate and violence against trans people couched in an attempt to “protect women” from inequality in sports and the false specter of malevolent men using trans disguises to attack women in bathrooms. But not only has this done nothing to protect women, it's done extraordinary harm to trans women and trans people writ large who already face violence, discrimination, and barriers to care. 

In fact much of the backlash against feminism has come under the guise of protecting women. In an essay in Lyz Lenz substack, Men Yell at Me, Moira Donegan writes about the book Backlash by Susan Faludi. “In the book, Faludi traces the political and media narratives that emerged in the wake of the Second Wave to cast feminism as a dominant, oppressive force. The gist of those narratives was that all the feminist battles had been won, and that now women were worse off for it: less happy, less romantically satisfied, burdened by work instead of being taken care of by husbands. If anything, the argument went, feminism was bad for women.”

Donegan goes on to write: “If that story sounds familiar, that’s because it’s still being told, repackaged as a new insight in a think piece or clickbait column nearly every day.” 

Feminism, per the backlash and J.D. Vance, has turned us all into humorless, childless cat ladies, drains on society, with no purpose and no stake in our country’s political future. Because of the malice of feminism, we are not fulfilling our God-ordained roles as wives and mothers, and the role and/or consequence of most Republican policies is to try to force us back into those roles. Get rid of no-fault divorce to lock women into unequal and/or abusive partnerships. Get rid of birth control and abortion rights to force into motherhood. Get rid of gay marriage to enforce heterosexual partnerships and strict gender roles. In the very worst of the man-o-sphere, you will see tweets where men take a snapshot of the gender gap in polling showing women’s support for Harris and say something like “the 19th amendment was a mistake.” 

Buried in the crosstabs of some recent polling, (as identified by Jon Lovett in this episode of Pod Save America) there’s a statistic that while most people don’t believe Trump will be good for women, as many as 85% of people believe that he would be good for men - even while that same group believes that Trump would be bad for the middle class, bad for unions, etc. There’s something in this, Lovett argues, that suggests that a candidate that is bad for women must necessarily be good for men. Trump is a symptom of a larger cultural movement that teaches young men that they are the victims of feminism, that the problems they have in school and with jobs and getting dates are because women have more social, political, and economic power. 

Trump built his political image on a nostalgia for the past when marriage was between a man and a woman, where the woman stayed home and raised the kids and did what her husband told her to, and couldn’t have a credit card or get an abortion, where she could be fired because she was pregnant or because she got married or because she was a woman at all. A past when men were empowered by a compulsory heterosexual, cisgendered system where gender roles were rigid and women were submissive. Of course the past is not that simple, and we wouldn’t have the rights we have today if women were as submissive as suggested in Trump’s previously great America. But that’s immaterial to the allure of his nostalgic appeal, which allows him to go to young men who feel disempowered and disenfranchised by modern society and identify a villain. It’s not an economic and political system that favors the rich that is making you feel this way, nor is it an unevenly distributed democracy that creates a government not fully representative of its constituents' needs and desires. It’s women. 

Most of the solutions put forth to address this are not put forth in good faith. Women should marry conservative men. Women should lower their standards. And as previously noted, Republicans’ solutions mostly involve retreating back into that gauzy nostalgic past. We’ll all be happier if women stop worrying about jobs and politics and their own bodies and just let men take care of all of it.   

Electing Kamala Harris president isn’t going to fix all of this. But it will show that we can overcome it, that as a society we are ready for change and that this backlash is the death throes of the old order rather than its resurgence. Because the fact that these political battles seem to obscure is that women are people, and the goal of every movement has been to codify that as law. When men suggest that the 19th amendment was a mistake, it’s because they think it was a gift they bestowed upon us, not a right to an equal stake in our political future long denied. When Republicans want to take away our right to abortion, it's because they don’t believe our bodies or our futures belong to us. 

But Kamala Harris is a person, with a distinct laugh and a blended family and a love of cooking. She’s a fully realized, fully embodied human being who has fought to get where she is today. She knows what it feels like to fight for success in a world where your humanity is constantly in question, where your right to self-determination seems like a matter of debate. 

I want to see Kamala Harris elected president for a lot of reasons. I believe we are best able to fight the climate crisis with her in office. We are best able to fight for abortion rights, and queer rights, and an economy where we can all thrive with Harris in office. The overhaul of our judicial system that Biden began by nominating a diverse slate of judges will continue with her as president. She’s much more likely to preserve and expand our democracy by signing laws that protect voting rights, using the power of the federal government to enforce voting rights, and ensure the peaceful transfer of power. And while she is not where I want her to be on using our immense leverage with Israel to get a ceasefire, I know that she is infinitely more persuadable on this issue than Trump, whose transactional foreign policy in the Middle East made this situation infinitely worse, and who has surrounded himself with racist Islamaphobes who think Netanyahu has the right idea in wiping Palestine off the map. 

But I also want to see Kamala Harris as president because I do want to see a woman in our highest office - to see a woman bring that full experience to the halls of power, to see a woman in charge of not just her future, but shaping the course of history for all of us, vindicates all of our humanity. And it’s a reminder to the rest of us, men and women and Republicans alike, that try though you might to deny it, women have an equal and inherent and inviolable stake in the future and we’re not giving it up for anything. 

As I think about Harris’s election, I can’t find the giddy gleam of triumph I felt in the lead up to the election in 2016. Instead what I found is vicious vindication, a kind of feral sense of victory. 

This isn’t right, this isn’t fair, this is hurting us, this is killing us, we are scared. Even saying that summons backlash. Someone on Trump’s campaign posted a video scoffing at the idea that women were bleeding out in parking lots, wondering where these mythical women were. Ten thousand came forward. Ten thousand. We tell our stories and we’re called liars. We tell our stories and we’re doing it for attention, for fame, for money. We give our opinions and the richest man in the world says nevermind all that, let me put a baby in you. They are teaching their boys that we are naught but dates, but wombs, but comforts, but sex, but mothers, but angels, but sluts, but homemakers. And they claim that our anger fuels them, but they don’t know that all they get are our scraps, the dying sparks flung out when the flames get too high. 

They are teaching their boys to make us small. We’re teaching each other to be president. 

This Week, Save Democracy By….

Sign up to phone bank or canvass. You can find high impact volunteer events here. You can sign up for Vote Save America, or you can just scroll past the yellow box and you’ll see three options: Knock Doors Near You, Phone Bank for Kamala, Phone Bank for Down Ballot Democrats. Each shift will have training that will give you talking points, information about the tech you’ll be using, and will have organizers who you can ask questions and get support from. If you have any questions at all, just leave them in the comments!

You can also check out more ways to volunteer in this guide I made, organized by how much or little you’d like to talk to people.