How America Embraced Gender War

The big two genders are said to be at war. The results of the Presidential election can hardly be read otherwise: in preliminary exit-poll data out of Pennsylvania, women aged eighteen to twenty-nine swung forty points for Kamala Harris, while their male counterparts swung twenty-four points for Donald Trump. The conflict—the dark, snarling, many-headed beast of indifference and contempt that emerges from these numbers—has been building for decades. Women in America, as in nearly all industrialized democracies, used to be more conservative than men; in the nineteen-seventies, they began to shift leftward, then closed the partisan gap by the eighties, and during the nineties became firmly more liberal than American men. The simplest explanation for this is the most plausible one: women, acquiring education and workplace power and economic independence, drew closer to a party that valorized equality and away from a party that valorized hierarchy. With birth control, with safe and legal abortion, the story went, women gained control over their lives.

In the twenty-tens, women gained control over culture, too. A slick, corporatized feminism—the mugs about male tears, the Ruth Bader Ginsburg bobbleheads—occupied the public sphere. Girls were brash and confident and eager to call out bad male behavior; it was no longer O.K. to kiss a girl if she didn’t want you to (even if she was slutty!). All of this made a certain cohort of men lose their grip. Over time, their numbers grew, fermenting in corners of the Internet that indulged their feelings of being left behind. Women were graduating from high school and college in greater numbers than men; they were suddenly wanted in places where they had been unwanted almost forever. Around ten years ago came a Presidential candidate who promised to reverse the shifts that had transformed American life toward equality—to put men, white people, white men, back on top. It was war then, too: Trump won despite and because of the fact that he’d bragged about sexually assaulting women; the fact that his wife was hot, silent, and seemingly miserable; the fact that he had so many accusers no one could keep track.

Trump did what he promised, and installed a Supreme Court that overturned Roe v. Wade during the Democratic Presidency that ostensibly rebuked him. At least twenty states made abortion more or less illegal. I.V.F. was restricted in Alabama; doctors in states like Oklahoma, Texas, and Florida stopped treating women in mortal danger because of active miscarriages; a woman with a cancerous and nonviable pregnancy was told to bleed in a hospital parking lot until she was sick enough to qualify for care. A thirteen-year-old girl in Mississippi who’d been raped in her front yard couldn’t afford to get to Chicago for an abortion and thus became a mother before starting the seventh grade. The 2024 election was framed, optimistically, by Democrats, as a referendum on this suffering, as the midterms had been. After Harris entered the race, almost four in ten women under the age of thirty cited abortion as the most important issue to their vote. Abortion was the second most important issue among all Harris voters, the most important being “democracy.” For Trump voters, the economy was the top issue. The funny thing is the pretense that we can separate these concepts. Without the right to choose, women are not full participants in a democracy or an economy.

Both campaigns leaned into the gender war. Trump turned his focus away from the suburban white women who’d supported him in 2016, and he courted young men, attending U.F.C. matches, cozying up to Elon Musk, and going on podcasts recommended by his eighteen-year-old son. He led with vibes of absurdist aggression, a miasma of crypto and YouTube testosterone, allowing the policy architecture of actual, brutal, gender-based subjugation to follow easily behind. Trump was among the many G.O.P. candidates who collectively poured tens of millions into anti-trans political ads, showing his commitment not to women but to the institution of gender itself. Harris went on “Call Her Daddy,” a podcast where young women dish about sex and kvetch about men, and got Julia Roberts to narrate an ad about how wives don’t have to disclose their liberal votes to their conservative husbands. The strategy reflected a reality that has since been unveiled by the results—a gendered battle intensified by young people, who are fighting for a sense of individual purchase on a world they have barely begun to properly live in. Those Pennsylvania exit polls. The ones in North Carolina, where young female voters went for Harris by thirty-three points and young male voters went for Trump by twenty-three. The fact that the entire nation, more or less, is shifting rightward at least a little, but that men aged eighteen to twenty-nine have moved almost thirty points rightward since 2020. If the 2016 election illuminated the shocking state of white women’s loyalties, the 2024 election has instantly done the same for young men.

The gender war, as pitched by politicians, revolves around two competing visions of a woman’s life. Each side thinks it understands what the other wants. The Trumpists—embodied by J. D. Vance and his repulsive, sneering childless-cat-lady comments, by Tucker Carlson and his portrayal of Kamala Harris as a “Samoan-Malaysian, low-I.Q.” diversity hire—believe that the left wants women to be Plan B-gobbling dilettantes in their youth; dick-stomping, corporate drones in early adulthood; lonely, angry spinsters who approach forty in a mania for egg-freezing or emasculation. (Soon afterward, the woman problem becomes neutralized by the relative invisibility of the “postmenopausal female.”) The libs believe that conservatives want women to spend their youth in training to attract, submit to, and please men, suppressing all other forms of human potential for one that revolves around dress-up, smiling self-imprisonment, and wiping asses, both literally and emotionally.

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.”

What baffles me about this supposed contest between ideas of womanhood, both of them invented by men for political purposes, is its distance from the reality of living as a woman. The conflict that exists between work and parenting, between childlessness and child rearing—even between wanting power over men and willingly giving them power over you—this flares not in the gap between a liberal woman and a conservative woman but within each of their individual lives. Two-thirds of Republican mothers work outside the home; the percentage is only three per cent higher for Democratic mothers. Democratic women have their first child at twenty-five, on average, just one year later than Republican women. Eighty-six per cent of Democratic parents and eighty-eight per cent of Republican parents think of parenting as one of the most important parts of their identity. Women on the left want children; women on the right get abortions.

There are many millions of women, mostly white—forty-five per cent of them voted for Trump in this election—who are drawn to the archetypal conservative vision of motherhood. But the gendered gulf in the youth vote suggests that the fight is changing, as women in the middle of the political spectrum begin to vote, post-Roe, on the basis of their actual lives. The possibility of a national abortion ban is looming. The lawyer behind Senate Bill 8, Texas’s abortion-bounty law, is closely allied with Trump and recently represented him before the Supreme Court. Project 2025 outlines a plan for formal federal surveillance of pregnancy. This is what so many young men, straight men who want women to bear their children, voted for. The fight is now peer-to-peer, between men in favor of reproductive servitude and women who refuse.

Trump’s return to power—his imminent control over the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary, the coming dissolution of the very idea of the government providing any sort of guardrail against corporate power, carceral violence, and environmental destruction—is the beginning of a political era that will likely last decades. So much of it will be worked out on a level that the ordinary person mostly cannot touch. But this particular part—the politics of abortion, the struggle of who gets to determine when and why and how a person has a child, the question of who and what a woman works for—will also be negotiated at home. In her study of marriage “Parallel Lives,” the critic Phyllis Rose argues that “marriage is the primary political experience in which most of us engage as adults.” There is a reason that both campaigns have, in different ways, embraced the framing of their political fights as marital dramas.

For those of us whom God made heterosexual, the intimate realm is politicized now more than ever. But it’s from this foundation that we find a way out. It’s from here, in the arena of flesh and friction and surprise and transcendence—an arena that may be increasingly foreign to screen-bound, isolated, radicalized young men, and rightfully unappealing to their female counterparts—that we learn not just when to take up arms against another person but when to try harder to see them, or allow them to change us. It’s here that we learn how badly we need one another, in the end. ♦