I was in a Manhattan museum on a recent October weekend when I noticed the Post-It tacked inside the stall in the ladies' room. "Woman to woman," it read, "Remember, your vote is private. Harris/Walz!" The message was one of encouragement, but it made my heart sink. Never in my lifetime have I lived through an election campaign in which this needed to be shared.

But in the devastating aftermath of Trump winning another presidential election, we find ourselves in a reality marked by fear and intimidation so intense it’s little wonder that women have been exchanging secret messages in the few private spaces we have left.

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And the threat of — to use Donald Trump's own favorite word, "retribution" — looms so heavily over us we can only brace for what comes after November 5 or January 20, “whether the women like it or not.” We women have been robbed of what could have been a momentous campaign and a historic victory.

We've normalized weird for so long that it seems impossible to suggest that it didn't have to be this way. Just a scant few election cycles ago, the tenor of political debate featured losers who conceded, voters who didn't storm the Capitol and representatives who didn't try to overturn elections.

In an alternate reality, Harris might have faced a Republican opponent who didn't question her racial identity and routinely mispronounce her first name. She might not have had mainstream pundits accuse her of being "a DEI hire" or of sleeping her way to the top. The fact that she doesn't have biological children might not have been weaponized as a rebuke of her "humbleness." And her opponent's former aide wouldn't be joking about overturning the 19th Amendment.

But civil discourse has been ground down to a useless nub at this point, and a presidential candidate can share crude jokes about his opponent with barely a blip in the news cycle. A candidate who has also been convicted of felonies, who has been found liable by a civil jury of sexual assault. Meanwhile, once reputable newspapers now run by billionaires refused to endorse a competent, coherent woman for president.

Hey, guys — because I guess the last eight years of women's marches and #MeToo didn’t make it clear — how do you think this has made women feel? Women of color? Women who have endured sexual harassment and survived sexual assault? What do you think the lesson we've been gleaning here has been about our........

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