The New Yorker:

Both Trump’s and Harris’s campaigns framed the Presidential election as a contest between men and women. Did the results prove them right?

By Jia Tolentino

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.

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