For days and weeks to come, there will be endless analyses of how Donald Trump, a convicted criminal who fomented an insurrection and was found civilly liable for sexual assualt, still somehow won another presidential election. There's racism, right-wing propaganda, a failing information environment, and perhaps an American death wish. All those were big factors, but we cannot overlook how much the Trump campaign was built around a pitch to men that he would finally bring women to heel.
Yelling "I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT" on social media is one of the millions of things Trump has done that should have disqualified him, if only on grounds of idiocy, but the underlying sentiment — disobedient women need to be punished — was unmistakable. The result is a nauseating gender gap in exit polling, showing a majority of women in every age group voted for Kamala Harris, yet the vice president could not crack 50% even with the youngest group of men.
If MAGA men are half as strong as Joe Rogan tells them they are, they can toughen up and accept women's rejection.
What is remarkable about Trump and the MAGA movement is how visceral and personal the misogyny is. These aren't the conservatives of old who hid their woman-hatred behind a Bible and condescending talk about "family values." Trump and his allies channel a palpable anger at individual women for having the gall to walk around like full citizens. We see it in Trump's inability to stop defaming E. Jean Carroll, a woman a civil jury found he sexually assaulted in the 90s. We see it in Trump's running mate, Sen. JD Vance, and his obsession with "cat ladies." We see it in the bizarre impregnation fantasies of billionaire Elon Musk and in MAGA influencer Ben Shapiro setting Barbie dolls on fire. In the face of this, there's been a lot of pressure on women to do more to soothe fragile male egos. There are endless articles about the "male loneliness epidemic," which are well-intended but overlook how too many men follow leaders who openly encourage antisocial behavior. We talk endlessly about creating healthy masculinities to compete with the toxic kind but sidestep how women can't actually make men want to be better. Pundits have even flirt with the suggestion that if women just, you know, threw a little more sex in the direction of terrible men, that would calm them down. (Stormy Daniels tried placating Trump with sex, and that didn't work, y'all.)
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I don't know about y'all, but after the majority of men voted to put a screeching sexual predator back into office, I'm feeling like it's time to wind down this era of hand-holding and hair-stroking. Taking inspiration from Taylor Swift, it's time for a new era: one where being a giant sexist........