The territory is marked out in red and blue on two maps by statistician Nate Silver. One map of the US showing what would happen if only women voted, the other if only “dudes” did. The lady vote would have Hillary Clinton ahead in typically safe Republican states such as Alaska, Kansas, Indiana, Missouri, Montana, South Dakota, Arizona, Georgia, South Carolina and Texas. She would get 458 electoral votes, compared with Donald Trump’s 80.
The dude-only map, though, shows that Trump could win every swing state with Clinton just about clinging on to the west coast, parts of the north-east, Illinois and New Mexico. Trump would get 350 electoral votes to Clinton’s 188.
Thankfully, this is not a dude-only election. It is not even a Democrat v Republican election. It is an insurgency by a man (and a movement) who, in promising to reinstate America’s supposedly lost greatness, will destroy the GOP establishment. They deserve it. The sudden abhorrence at Trump’s description of sexual assault as banter is ludicrous. Have they ignored everything he said on women, Mexicans, Muslims and black people? The cowardice of the Republican party meant they would not challenge him for fear of damaging their own prospects. They could not care less if the collateral damage is to poor women or black communities.
For Trump has been a long time coming: he is the embodiment of the backlash against feminism that many of us recognised in the early 90s.
We need to understand how culture and gender intersect with the economy. Votes for Trump might not be deliberately made in the name of a gender war, but that is exactly the battle being fought. Feminism is seen as both triumphant and passé. Both views deem it as unnecessary. This backlash has been drip fed into popular culture.
Its radicalism was stripped away in the mid-90s by the whole Sex and the City vibe. We could have sex and shoes, if we were white and rich. Lads could be sexist pigs again. Porn became ubiquitous and post-feminists embraced it. Women no longer needed feminism, because they needed men for babies and to open jars. For this they had to be appealing before they were 30 and their eggs shrivelled up. Dating became a desperate game and men preferred women who were free. Just not too free. Men wrote books about how to get women into bed that were akin to rape manuals. But worse was to come: men started embracing their manhood, rejecting “cultural Marxism” or political correctness. By the mid-to-late 2000s, this pushback against the gains of feminism was in full flow.
This was implicitly tied to recession. This is something that the likes of Trump and Nigel Farage understand. The right always does. The left, with its eye on class struggle, continues to miss how things play out in terms of gender. The misogyny of a Trump, or his pet tic Farage, does not exist in an economic vacuum.
The net worth of the bottom 60% of US households is about 14% lower than it was 30 years ago. The life expectancy gap between rich and poor in the US is growing. The number of single-parent families has risen rapidly. Michelle Alexander, a law professor, says there are more black men in prison than there were slaves in 1850.
So the US and its men are in pain. So much so that a quarter of white blue-collar workers are unemployed. Many are on prescription painkillers, opiates such as OxyContin. Where there is pain, there is anger. And anger kicks downwards. On to women.
This sense of abandonment felt by blue-collar workers feeds the backlash. Britain is a very different country, but the same sense of neglect is there in former industrial areas.
I remember interviewing miners who “retired undefeated”, as they said, and would not take the new jobs on offer to them. Their women folk did. This inflexibility, combined with real inequality, feeds exactly into a backlash against women and “immigrants”. The fragility of the masculine identity produces this hopeless nostalgia for defined gender roles. Look around. Have women – of every ethnicity – ever had to look so uniform? Long straight hair, pouty lips, big breasts? That’s just the surface; the substance remains lack of equal pay, sexual violence, attacks on abortion rights, and online abuse. As Susan Faludi wrote way back in 1991 the backlash is not coherent, it is more of a countercurrent, an undertow. But it will drag us down
In yoking economic insecurity to the culture war, Trump and his cohorts threaten liberal certainty. His voters may know that his misogyny is a small price to pay for the change he offers; it may, indeed, be a bonus. The running down of the welfare state, after all, has been a war on women. The war on drugs has been a war on women with more and more women in prison. The overt coupling of patriarchy with race privilege and a militarised police force is visible enough proof to make Trump’s assertion that the American Dream is over feel true.
So how come women are rejecting his vision and men are not? What is in it for them? “When power is scarce, a little of it is tempting,” wrote Margaret Atwood in The Handmaid’s Tale. A little power. Trump cannot win without women. The fact he thinks that he can reveals his heart of darkness. It still beats strong.
