I’d initially been skeptical that STV, a progressive nonprofit outfit based in the San Francisco Bay Area, would be able to adapt to the union’s model: waging effective electoral campaigns while simultaneously training cooks, bartenders, hotel room attendants, and casino staff in the skills they need to build and sustain a fighting union. Would short-term volunteers show the same discipline and dedication I’d admired in union canvassers over the years? Would they go out again the day after they’d rung a doorbell and a voter carrying a shotgun had screamed at them, or sicced dogs on them, or called the police, or shouted racist curses at them, or even later followed them slowly in a pickup truck? As it turned out, most of them would.
Nor, by the way, was it lost on us that morning that all six of us were women. So are most of UNITE-HERE’s members and its two top officials, as was the director of the union’s campaign in Reno, along with the folks running the data department (something I had done in 2022). A wide variety of concerns brought us to this battle, but all of us knew that as women, along with struggles for a living wage, affordable housing, and access to health care, we were fighting for our lives.
Welcome to Gilead. Enjoy Your Stay.
In Donald Trump we confronted a candidate who’d promised to “protect” women — “whether the women like it or not.” He’d bragged about appointing the Supreme Court justices who’d overturned Roe v. Wade, effectively ending bodily autonomy for millions of women. He’d claimed that handing control of women’s bodies over to 50-odd state and territorial governments was what “everybody wanted.” I doubt it was the kind of “protection” Jessica Barnica wanted when Texas doctors refused her abortion care in the midst of a miscarriage, causing her to die of sepsis three days later. And it probably wasn’t what any of the other women wanted whose horror stories about suffering — and death — after the end of Roe were recently recounted in a New York magazine article, “Life after Roe.” No, we did not “like” the kind of protection that Donald Trump was offering us at all.
Here was a man whose earlier boasts about sexual assault hadn’t kept him out of the White House in 2016. Here was one who claimed that his female opponent in 2024 was born “mentally disabled.… There’s something wrong with Kamala and I just don’t know what it is, but there’s something missing and you know what? Everybody knows it.” It’s hard not to conclude that, to Trump, the “something missing” was a penis.
Penises were certainly on Trump’s mind when he reposted a photo of Harris with Hillary Clinton over the caption: “Funny how blowjobs impacted both their careers differently…” That was, in part, an allusion to the right-wing trope that Harris had slept her way to the top, getting her start in politics through a brief relationship with California powerbroker Willie Brown. And Trump was a candidate whose sprint to the electoral finish line was fueled by attacks on some of the most vulnerable women of all — transgender teenagers.
He’d chosen as his running mate one J.D. Vance, a man who had complained that the country was being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” In his view, women exist, indeed were created by God, to be little more than vessels and caregivers for children. He cloaked his disdain for women’s actual desires or aspirations in a supposed concern for our happiness, warning that pursuing fulfilling work outside the home, “instead of starting a family and having children” was “actually a path to misery.” He added that the misery of the woman who is not a mother is a danger to the rest of us, because such women “get in positions of power and then they project that misery and [un]happiness on the rest of society.”
Welcome to the Republic of Gilead, where they really do hate us that much and they’re not afraid to say so.
Your Body, My Choice, Forever
Before readers go all “#notallmen” on me, let me stipulate that my brother doesn’t hate me. Nor does his son, my much-loved nephew. Nor did my father, nor my high school or college boyfriends for that matter. None of them hated me then or hate me now. A few of them have, however, held — largely unexamined — beliefs about women’s essential inferiority in one realm or another. And curled within such beliefs like a secret infection lurks a bacillus of contempt.
When that contempt festers, it can poison the blood of a nation, provoking a fever of women hatred like the one that has emerged in this country since Donald Trump’s recent election. Perhaps the first drop of sweat appeared in white supremacist (and erstwhile Trump dinner guest) Nick Fuentes’s election-night post on X: “Your body, my choice. Forever.” Although even the liberal press has treated this dictum as if it referred primarily to reproductive rights, it’s clear that Fuentes and men like him are celebrating Trump’s victory as a referendum on rape.
Within a day, that post had 90 million views. Between Thursday and Friday of that week, as the Institute for Strategic Dialogue reported, online repetitions rose by 4,600%. Nor was Fuentes’s post unique. The Institute also observed that “Manosphere” influencer Andrew Tate, in a post on X on November 7th, stated: “I saw a woman crossing the road today but I just kept my foot down. Right of way? You no longer have rights.”
It seems as if it’s just a short step from thoughts of rape to thoughts of murder in Gilead. And a popular step, too. Tate’s post garnered almost 700,000 views within a couple of hours. A day earlier another Xer, Jon Miller, wrote, “Women threatening sex strikes like LMAO as if you have a say.” (And in case you don’t know, LMAO is “laughing my ass off” in text-speak.) Like Fuentes’s post, this one has received almost 90 million views.
Nor does what happens in the Manosphere stay in the Manosphere. As Vox reports, “Girls and young women are also hearing the line in schools, according to family members, with one mom posting on Facebook that her daughter had heard it three times on campus, and that boys told her to ‘sleep with one eye open tonight.’”
#yesmostmen
Exit polls show that 55% of male voters went for Donald Trump. That figure includes 49% of men aged 18 to 29 and over half of all other men, including 60% of men aged 45 to 64. Had only women voted in this election, Kamala Harris would have won handily. Is it any wonder then that, in addition to invitations to rape, calls for the repeal of the 19th amendment (which in 1920 gave people like me the right to vote) are also trending on social media?
One such call came from John McEntee, who served as Trump’s personal aide and later as the White House director of personnel during his first term. He also worked in personnel in the 2024 Trump campaign and, according to Newsweek, is “reportedly a senior adviser for the Heritage Foundation’s 2025 Presidential Transition Project, a political initiative more commonly known as Project 2025.” In late October he posted a video on X, in which he explained, “So I guess they misunderstood. When we said we wanted mail-only voting, we meant male — ‘M-A-L-E.’” In the video’s caption, McEntee wrote, “The 19th might have to go.”
Yes, a majority of men voted for the candidate who has bragged about grabbing women by the pussy, who has been found liable in a civil suit for the rape and defamation of E. Jean Carroll, who happily allowed vendors at his rallies to sell “Say No to the Hoe” tee shirts, implying — in case you didn’t catch the “joke” — that Kamala Harris is a prostitute. A Google search on the phrase brings up pages of offers for that item, including this one from Etsy.com: “Just Say No to the Ho Campaign Style Shirt [from] Etsy. Magical, Meaningful Items You Can’t Find Anywhere Else. Handmade, Handpicked, and Designed By Humans.” Humans indeed.
The Four Bs
Like my young co-campaigner (for whom it took a second Trump electoral victory to fully grasp the depths of misogyny in this country), I was also in my early twenties when I first allowed myself to face just how much some men hate women. Until then I think I believed that men’s contempt for us was at least partly deserved. I did believe that we really were weaker, less intelligent, less courageous — in general, lesser. Perhaps history recorded the acts of a few exceptional women who excelled in some field or other, but the point was that they were indeed exceptions. The classic British writer Samuel Johnson had expressed this pithily some centuries earlier, when he told his biographer James Boswell, “Sir, a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.”
I attended a small liberal arts college that employed only two female professors. I had a friend whose history professor failed her because, as he explained to her, a woman shouldn’t be occupying a place in college that could have gone to one of her intellectual superiors (i.e., a man). Another friend succumbed to a professor’s sexual demands in return for a passing grade in his course. Others reluctantly slept with the male student gatekeeper at the college library — the price of snagging one of the most coveted work-study jobs on campus. I accepted these as unfortunate, but unremarkable realities. Such things might not be right, but neither could they be changed.
Then came the international explosion of thought and action that was the second wave of feminism. Suddenly, the world flew apart. As Muriel Rukeyser asked in her poem about the German lithographer Käthe Kollwitz,
“What would happen if one woman told the truth about
her life?
The world would split open”
The answer to Rukeyser’s question came in the form of a global movement for women’s liberation and a world — this one — did split open. For me, that movement was as unexpected as a flash flood filling a dry arroyo. Suddenly, so much seemed possible that not long before had been unimaginable. Perhaps most of the world’s women were not, after all, made just to be the bearers of burdens, or indeed of children, but also of hope.
Recognizing women’s full humanity came at a cost, however. It meant also recognizing who wanted to deny us that very humanity.
About a year ago, the Washington Post’s editorial board published an essay lamenting “the collapse of American marriage.”
“A growing number of young women,” its authors wrote, “are discovering that they can’t find suitable male partners.” Why not? They continued:
“As a whole, men are increasingly struggling with, or suffering from, higher unemployment, lower rates of educational attainment, more drug addiction and deaths of despair, and generally less purpose and direction in their lives. But it’s not just that. There’s a growing ideological divide, too. Since Mr. Trump’s election in 2016, the percentage of single women ages 18-30 who identify as liberal has shot up from slightly over 20 percent to 32 percent. Young men have not followed suit. If anything, they have grown more conservative.”
The Post’s prescription: “This mismatch means that someone will need to compromise.” And that “someone” was, of course, young women. I could, in fact, imagine young women compromising if it were differences of taste in music or in food that were dividing them from the men they might otherwise want to marry. However, the problem, according to the Post, is that politics is “becoming more central to people’s identity.” Well yes, when “conservative” views include explicit misogyny, then opposition to those views is indeed central to my identity. What the Post blithely referred to as “ideological” differences are, in fact, differences over the fundamental question of women’s humanity.
So, tell me this: Why should women be asked to compromise over that?
I’ve written elsewhere about the situation of young American men, including the ones missing from the college classrooms where I taught for almost 20 years. I don’t doubt that half a century or more of neoliberal economic policies (embraced by both major parties) have greatly reduced the life chances of many young men. And I don’t doubt that, in blaming women for their misery, men are deceived into looking away from the actual powers that constrain their lives. But that doesn’t make it okay to mistreat, rape, or kill us.
So, in November 2024, I’m not surprised to read that many young, heterosexual American women are embracing a movement that started in South Korea: they are rejecting the 4Bs, four actions which, in the Korean language, begin with the letter B: marrying, having children, dating, and having sex with men. “In the hours and days since it became clear that Donald Trump would be re-elected president of the United States, there’s been a surge of interest in the U.S. for 4B,” according to a CNN report. Ashli Pollard, a 36-year-old in St. Louis, sums it up this way:
“We have pandered and begged for men’s safety and done all the things that we were supposed to, and they still hate us. So if you’re going to hate us, then we’re going to do what we want.”
Reading this reminded me of a saying popular in the heady days of the early women’s liberation movement: “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.”
Just as fish don’t need bicycles, there are some things women don’t need. And men who hate women are one.
