Thanks a bunch, America. You’ve left no room for doubt that, yet again, your presidential preference is for anybody but a woman. Yup, even if the man is a galumphing sexual predator who boasts about assaulting women and has vowed to “protect” women “whether the women like it or not”. Yup, even if the woman is cleverer, younger, more energetic, more articulate and comfortable enough in her own skin not to plaster it with orange tan. The manosphere rules, OK. Nothing changes. Not really. Not ever.
In the post-Roe v Wade age of JD Vance’s “cat ladies”, as it became clear that voters had shown Kamala Harris the exit door marked Hillary Clinton, political analysts pored over a cornucopia of reasons why Donald Trump has been elected to the White House for a second term. It was the economy. It was immigration. It was the price of groceries. It was fear of war (seriously!) and anger about Joe Biden’s pathetic response to Israel’s mass-murdering in Gaza, with nary a mention that it was President Trump who emboldened Binyamin Netanyahu by relocating the US embassy to Jerusalem. In the midst of the postmortem, Andrew Tate, purveyor of violently misogynistic bilge, tweeted: “I’m moving back to America.” Fortunately, he can’t. The former kick boxer is awaiting trial in Romania on charges of rape and people-trafficking.
Just imagine you were a woman trying to flee the Taliban’s Afghanistan and picking a country in which to seek refuge. Would you stick your pin in the USA as the safest harbour on Earth? I would think twice, at least. I would think about Josseli Barnica, a Texan mother who died after a hospital failed to intervene in her miscarriage because of the state’s abortion ban. I would think about Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller, who both died in Georgia from attempted home medical abortions because they were terrified they would be jailed if they sought help. And I would think about the millions of Texans and Georgians who still went out and voted for the anti-choice Trump.
I would think of Madison Square Garden where only one woman – a lawyer for the candidate – addressed Trump’s last-blast rally while some of the 17 men who speechified and were applauded – among them a wrestler, a shock-jock, a reality-denier and a politician who derides single women – variously implied that Harris was a prostitute with “pimp handlers” and called Clinton “a sick son of a bitch”. I would think of the hands on the nuclear levers in the White House that sexually abused writer E Jean Carroll in a Bergdorf Goodman changing room and funnelled shut-up money to porn actress Stormy Daniels. I would think of the president-elect’s victory speech eulogising a parade of men including Vance, the mixed martial-arts supremo Dana White, LIV golfer Bryson DeChambeau and Elon Musk, owner of the world’s biggest vomitorium of untruths.
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The Taliban may have recreated the Dark Ages in Afghanistan but America is crawling back in the same direction. Massaging fragile masculinity is the impetus that makes both countries tick. In the US, it is manifested in the opinion of Trump-loyalist and podcaster Joe Rogan that women’s purpose in life is to obtain a male “provider”. Now this Brotherhood of Male Chauvinist Proselytisers has its mascot-in-chief re-ensconced in the Oval Office. Denigrating women is Trump’s calling card. A tiny selection from his lexicon of insults includes “bird brain” (Nikki Haley), “horse face” (Stormy Daniels), “sadly, she’s no longer a 10″ (Heidi Klum), “bimbo” (Megyn Kelly), “I fully understand why her former husband left her for a man” (Arianna Huffington), “a big fat pig” (Rosie O’Donnell). On Clinton, he said: “If [she] can’t satisfy her husband, what makes her think she can satisfy America?” On Harris, he said, unintentionally laughably: “I’m better looking than [her].” In Trump’s America, women are docile Stepford wives at the disposal of men who are terrified of losing control over them. That’s why the Trump camp was incensed by Julia Roberts’s commercial for Harris’s campaign reminding women that their men need never know how they voted in the ballot box. Unfortunately, not all misogynists are men. Many women too are brainwashed into thinking they really are the weaker sex. Self-immolation is a fact of history.
During the election campaign, the so-called “liberal” broadcast media in the US prattled about the gender gap between Harris-supporting women and Trump-supporting men. This, they said, could swing the result for Harris to become what some inexplicably described as “the first black woman president”. America elected its first black president 16 years ago. It has never elected a woman president. It was as if, by their constant invocation of the superfluous adjective in relation to Harris, even woke media types could not bring themselves to enunciate the vista of a woman president, without qualifiers. Unsurprisingly, the gender gap transmogrified into the gender trap.
A procession of flawed men has paraded into the White House and yet voters still demand that a woman candidate must be without fault. As CNN’s political commentator Van Jones put it in the context of Trump-versus-Harris, he got to be lawless while she had to be flawless. It is galling to hear post-election commentators blame Harris for being a bad candidate, just as they did with Clinton. As if anybody could look bad beside Trump, who beat both women to become president but lost to a man. How ironic that the legacies of those men, Bill Clinton and Biden, damaged the women’s campaigns.
What the Trump victory teaches this country is the imperative to be vigilant. For Ireland is having its own race to the bottom, much of it predicated on the desire to subordinate women. Whether it’s the religious right, the anti-abortion, pro-woman-in the-home lobby or racist agitators purporting to “protect our women” from the clutches of immigrants whom they despicably brand as “rapists”, there is an ultraconservative yearning to return to the misty-eyed olden times when men were the hunters-gatherers and women showed them their gratitude.
Well, this woman is not going back there. And, for now, she has no wish to step on the soil of the USA either. Why venture where you’re not wanted?