Since President Trump started announcing his cabinet picks, I have been trying to write a Very Serious Essay about the Current State of Feminism.
When Pete Hegseth was confirmed, even after so many horrifying details of allegations of sexual assault and harassment, that seemed like an obvious blow to the basic ideals of gender equality. In a marginally just world for women, credible allegations of sexual or domestic violence would prevent a person from being considered for such a vaunted position in the first place.
I started trying to write this essay by gathering data about women’s progress and trying to quantify how it has stalled. Though the vibes seem truly awful, I didn’t want to go by just potentially illusory internet trends or the vile choices of our commander in chief.
Yet it would be disingenuous to ignore how far we have come since the 1970s, when most women didn’t even have access to credit. Women now outnumber men at American colleges and in the college-educated labor force. A higher percentage of Gen Z women say they’re feminists than women of any other generation.
But: Roe is dead. Who knows what might happen with access to contraceptives or abortion medication in the next four years?
We’re in a period of backlash against women’s progress, beyond what is happening in and around the Oval Office. “Surveys from 2024 show that support for traditional gender roles is increasing” among both Republican men and Republican women, according to the political scientists Michael Tesler, John Sides and Colette Marcellin in a guest essay for Times Opinion. They conclude that “any growing gender traditionalism may be a reaction to societal trends and not a cause of these trends.”
Meanwhile, under Hegseth, the Army has deleted content related to women’s achievements. Per reporting from Military.com, a website for U.S. military news, “Kristen Griest, the first woman to graduate from the Army’s grueling Ranger School, has been erased from some of the service’s social media and its publicly accessible media database.”
Etc., etc.
I was all set to continue marshaling my facts and figures like this, citing experts and making some kind of sober-minded balance of the movement. But what is the point of facts and figures or a bulletproof argument when someone like Andrew Tate has more mainstream acceptance than ever before?
The social media manosphere star Tate, a dual citizen of the United States and Britain, was welcomed back to American shores on Feb. 27. He was previously detained in Romania because of an investigation into human trafficking allegations against him and his brother, Tristan. Separately, they were accused of multiple sex crimes in Britain. A Trump special envoy, Richard Grenell, appears to have helped badger the Romanian government into releasing them, though the Romanians denied it. The brothers are staying in Florida.
If you are not familiar with Andrew Tate, the best summary of his hold on millions of young men appeared in a 2023 New York magazine article by Lisa Miller, who is now at The Times. “His fan base lived all over the English-speaking world, and it seemed to defy race, class and religion,” she wrote. She explained his appeal, which reaches far outside conservative circles.
Many boys in their bedrooms found his rude and ruthless evisceration of every sacred liberal value hilarious. Feminism, environmentalism, gluten intolerance, literature, Harry Styles, Lil Nas X — Tate assaulted all of these with pejoratives the boys themselves knew not to use. Outside of school, they took pictures posing like him, their fingers laced together with their index fingers pointed like steeples; they made machete jokes in the group thread and listened to Tate in the gym; in private, they said, “He’s my guy. I love him. He’s so smart; he’s so relevant.” But when girls were around, the boys knew to keep quiet. Girls hate Tate.
I know that not all young men mainline this content or uniformly agree with Tate that for a woman, just by being in a relationship with a man, “the intimate parts of her body belong to him.” And yes, some conservatives have complained about the Tates returning to the United States. James Uthmeier, said on Tuesday that he has opened a criminal investigation into the Tate brothers. adding, “This type of behavior is viewed as atrocious. We’re not going to accept it.”
But people at the highest levels of government appear to be endorsing a worldview not dissimilar to Tate’s. By admitting him into this country in the first place, they are clearly taking his side. For example, Paul Ingrassia, who is Trump’s liaison to the Department of Homeland Security, was once part of a legal team that represented Tate in a defamation lawsuit against his accusers in Florida; has called him “an extraordinary human being,” according to the BBC; and has used gendered slurs against Nikki Haley on social media.
I am the mother of two girls, and I am viscerally upset by this. What keeps me up at night lately is not liberal pearl clutching over words that my kids might hear from people like Tate and the boys who secretly (and not so secretly) love him. My daughters can get over name-calling. What chills me is a sincere fear that they — and all the other girls who have never known politics without Trump — will not be treated as fully human by the men and boys in their lives. And that to get along, more and more women and girls will accept that treatment.
I am most upset by the idea of my daughters dating boys who belittle them in ways big and small and, in the worst case scenario, abuse them. I loathe the idea that, if they are abused, an already dismissive justice system will be an even less reliable ally, especially as Trump will appoint more judges over the next four years.
But it isn’t just in intimate relationships that my daughters might be diminished. We’re in the middle of a societywide hissy fit over anyone who is not a white man having certain jobs, when the truth is that “most senior managers are still white men,” according to an analysis of 13 million jobs from The Wall Street Journal last month. I don’t want my daughters’ achievements and their hard work being brushed aside for any reason, and I want them to have material safety with or without a spouse.
I build my daughters up, and the male role models in their lives show them every day through words and deeds how much they are respected. I see all the sweet boys I know who treat girls well and the good men and women who are raising them. All I can do for now is hold on to that, keep trying to push equality forward in the way I parent my children. I just hope that the pendulum swings back before it’s too late for a whole generation of kids who deserve better.
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Going full Dworkin: I read the radical feminist Andrea Dworkin in college, and I remember thinking that while she made some excellent points, she was too extreme for me and we’d come so far, we didn’t need her in the same way. I picked up her recently rereleased 1983 book, “Right Wing Women,” after Jennifer Szalai reviewed it admiringly in The Times. While some of it is dated, I am finding it shockingly relevant to this moment. I don’t know if I’ve changed or if the world has. I keep highlighting passages, and my favorite so far is:
The problem, simply stated, is that one must believe in the existence of the person in order to recognize the authenticity of her suffering. Neither men nor women believe in the existence of women as significant beings.
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Favorite Oscar looks: I realize it might be jarring to go from stone cold Dworkin to fashion, but listen, I contain multitudes. Chanel won the night for me — I loved the dramatic back of Margaret Qualley’s dress and the delicate pearl straps on Lupita Nyong’o’s.
Feel free to drop me a line about anything here.
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The post Steeling My Daughters Against a New Kind of Misogyny appeared first on New York Times.
