Usually, I get political wisdom from Rahm Emanuel, not his brother Ari. But a quote from Ari, the Hollywood macher, to Puck’s Matthew Belloni about the gender chasm in 2024 caught my eye.
“This election is gonna come down to probably 120,000 votes,” Ari said. “You probably have 60 per cent of the male vote for Trump, and the female vote is 60-40 for Kamala. It’s a jump ball. We’re gonna find out who wants this more – men or women.”
Are we back to the days of Mars versus Venus? Or did we never leave?
It is the ultimate battle of the sexes in the most visceral of elections. Who will prevail? The women, especially young women, who are appalled at the cartoonish macho posturing and benighted stances of Donald Trump and his entourage? Or the men, including many young men, union men, Latino and Black men, who are drawn to Trump’s swaggering, bullying and insulting, seeing him as the reeling-backward antidote to shrinking male primacy.
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Drilling into the primal yearnings of men and women – their priorities, identities, anger and frustration – makes this election even more fraught. When I wrote a book about gender in 2005, I assumed that a couple of decades later, we’d all be living peacefully on the same planet. But no Cassandra, I. The sexual revolution intensified our muddle, leaving women in a tangle of dependence and independence in the 21st century. The more we imitated men, the more we realised how different we were.
Progress zigzags. But it was dispiriting to see the fierce backlash to Geraldine Ferraro, Anita Hill and Hillary Clinton’s co-presidency and candidacy.
In Kamala Harris’s case, the backlash was evident even before the election. Surveys reflect the same doubts about a woman in the White House that I saw covering Ferraro in 1984. Many men – and many women – still wonder if women are too emotional to deal with world leaders and lead the military.
Other countries overcame this stereotypical thinking about female leaders, but there is still a thick strain of it in America.
Harris is running way behind where Joe Biden was in 2020 with both white and Black men. It would sting if Black men sunk the chance for the first Black woman to become president, just as enough white women spurned Clinton in 2016 to tip the balance.
It is sad that women had to be stripped of their basic right to control their bodies – and to be threatened with the loss of life-saving medical care – for Kamala to even have a chance to get the votes of enough women to offset losing the votes of so many men.
Trump is running a hypermasculine campaign – with Chief Bro Elon Musk bizarrely bouncing up and down – that is breathtakingly offensive to women. Trump is exploiting the crisis among Gen Z men, a crisis driven by loneliness, Covid isolation, economic insecurity, a lack of purpose and a feeling that the modern world seems more accommodating to young women.
Charlie Kirk, a conservative activist, told Vanity Fair that straight, white, Christian males were tired of being painted as colonisers, noting, “They want to be part of a political movement that doesn’t hate them.”
Trump is a renowned predator and groper who has been found liable for sexual abuse. But he has the gall to cast Kamala as “retarded,” “lazy as hell” and a “bitch” and ask, “Does she drink? Is she on drugs?”
At a Trump rally in Georgia on Wednesday, Tucker Carlson gave a rant that became an instant classic of perversion.
In a shrill tone, he spun out a metaphor in which America is like a house where the children are misbehaving. The toddler is smearing faeces on the wall; a 14-year-old is lighting a joint at the breakfast table.
“There has to be a point at which Dad comes home,” Carlson said ominously, to raucous applause. “Yeah, that’s right. Dad comes home, and he’s pissed!”
He’s most pissed at the 15-year-old daughter, who has flipped off her parents and stormed to her room. Playing the dad, Carlson intoned, “You’ve been a bad girl. You’ve been a bad little girl. And you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now.”
When Trump came out, some screamed, “Daddy’s home!” and “Daddy Don!”
Somehow, Carlson was even creepier and more retrogressive than JD Vance, with his denunciations of “childless cat ladies” and his dissing of postmenopausal women.
Trump is phallocentric – always a sign of insecurity. At a rally in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, he rhapsodised about Arnold Palmer’s anatomy.
“This is a guy that was all man,” Trump said, adding, “When he took showers with the other pros, they came out of there, they said, ‘Oh, my God, that’s unbelievable.’”
Barack Obama punctured the Maga macho myth at a rally with Harris on Thursday. Putting down people was not “real strength”, he said. Real strength is standing up for those who can’t stand up for themselves. “That’s what we should want in our daughters and our sons,” Obama said. “And that’s what I want to see in the president of the United States of America.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.