6 days ago
Our Regression on Gender Is a Tragedy, Not Just a Political Problem
When Donald Trump stormed into the White House in 2016, horrified Americans debated, almost endlessly, whether the shocking result was an expression of widespread racism (backlash to a Black president resulting in the election of a birther) or economic anxiety (the industrial Midwest especially feeling abandoned by globalization and the China shock). Each was probably a factor, then, and each strand is still present in the Trump coalition, reflected in tariff wars and efforts to redirect civil rights law on behalf of whites. But in 2025, MAGA seems much more distinctively molded by gender politics. Gender backlash is here, and before we think through the implications for partisan politics, we need to recognize it as a phenomena that goes beyond them.
On the surface, the Trump coalition might appear powered by an unapologetic, rakish U.F.C. party-bro energy — think of the glimpses we've gotten of Pete Hegseth's naked torso or the way his confirmation hearings were meme-ified as a hard-ass man, accused of sexual assault, staring down a hectoring panel of hysterical grandmas. Or for that matter, the time when the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, invited her Instagram followers to observe her working out in a sports bra. And there may not be a more representative clip about the vibe shift of 2024 than the comedian and podcaster Andrew Schulz explaining his supposed defection from the Democrats by explaining that he liked the dudes that have sex — using a crude term for female anatomy — and say whatever they want.
Of course, in the aftermath of Dobbs, Republicans have pushed further to limit reproductive rights, state by state, and a bill recently introduced in Congress could ban online pornography outright. With a case threatening sites like Pornhub pending at the Supreme Court, 17 states have already instituted pre-emptive blackouts of the site. Questions have risen as to whether the White House intervened to lift travel restrictions on Andrew Tate, who faces rape and human-trafficking charges in Britain and a trafficking and money laundering investigation in Romania. More recently Trump didn't rule out a pardon for Sean Combs.
'It's so odd how there are internal contradictions that are explained by 'powerful men get to do whatever they want with impunity,' is there a word for this,' the writer Irin Carmon noted sarcastically in December. In case you missed her meaning: 'It's called patriarchy.'
It's not just in policy or party leadership where you see the shift. In 2022, fewer than 30 percent of Republican men believed the proposition that 'women should return to their traditional roles in society,' according to the Views of the Electorate Research Survey assessed by a group of political scientists writing for The Times. Two years later, that number was 48 percent. Republican women underwent a similar surge — from 23 percent in 2022 to 37 percent in 2024. And over the past few years, Democrats, too, have been trending in the wrong direction, though those shifts have been smaller.
Today, the political scientists note, 79 percent of Republican men and 67 percent of Republican women say they believe American society has gotten too 'soft and feminine,' with 43 percent of the country overall agreeing. (In 2023, the number got as high as 48 percent.) According to Pew, the share of Republicans who say American society has gotten too accepting of men taking on traditionally female roles — like nurses, presumably, or schoolteachers — has grown by 40 percent since 2017.
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