Misogyny and the GOP

Trump and other right-wing politicians are shamelessly broadcasting their contempt for women. What price will society pay?

A beauty contestant stumbles over her words in a clip reposted online by J.D. Vance, who likened the momentarily inept young woman to Kamala Harris.

About 20 years ago, I took a car ride with a couple old friends, two brothers about my age whom I’d known for most of my life. Our paths seldom crossed anymore, but that weekend I’d been in town and was pleased when the three of us managed to plan a lunch date. By then, we were all in our early-to-mid 30s, and I looked forward to catching up. They’d each spent years in the military, and the older brother was divorced with a small daughter. As we headed out to grab lunch—the oldest brother at the wheel—I felt great. I’d grown up in a tiny family and found myself revisiting a feeling I’d had as a kid, a pleasant sense of having two affable and even protective brothers, an almost familial closeness.

But then, it all went south.

We were stopped at a red light, where a middle-aged woman was taking her time crossing in front of us. The friend driving sighed impatiently.

“Move along, bitch,” he muttered.

“That’s it, sweetheart,” the second friend chimed in, as if urging the woman along. “Move that fat ass.”

I don’t know what I said or even if I said anything, but I do remember being shocked to hear these words slip from my friends’ lips in reference to a woman who was merely crossing the street. I had a strange sense that—as a kind of de facto pass-holder to their inner sanctum—I was bearing witness to how they behaved when other women weren’t watching. I was also disturbed. Who were these men? How had they become so coarse, and how, after all these years, had I missed it?

This low-key hostility toward other women continued through lunch, with my friends using the word bitch several times in relation to an ex or a boss, even the waitress. Later that day, when I was alone, my head was absolutely ringing with the word (and other expletives), and I felt a sad certainty that I’d no longer be jumping at the chance to spend time with them.

I thought of my friends’ casual misogyny last week when I learned about the man in France who’d drugged his wife and invited dozens of men to rape her while she was incapacitated. It was a shocking crime made only more so by the fact that the 72 men were hardly societal outcasts. They were “firefighters, masons, gardeners, prison guards, soldiers and journalists.” So far, authorities have identified only 50 of the 72 men, who altogether committed 92 rapes.

In other words, 72 ordinary, upstanding men from a small French village and its outskirts thought it was okay to rape a woman who’d been so drugged she had no memory of the incidents ever happening.

“They regarded me like a rag doll, like a garbage bag,” the victim, Gisele Pelicot, said in court last week.

I think the story of the men in France and even of my two friends suggests that a disregard for women might be latent in many men, men who might otherwise “present” as decent and kind. After all, humans are wired to band together when feeling threatened, which makes all of us susceptible to the scourges of prejudice. Our patriarchal society structure and cultural norms have for centuries reinforced the perception that men are dominant and that women are “less than”—in terms of physical strength, certainly, but also in terms of grit, intelligence and gravitas. Activating hidden misogynistic strains in others might therefore be easier than you think.

Hard-right members of the GOP may unfortunately be doing just that, perpetuating in the process more than a few cruel stereotypes. In just the past few months, we’ve seen so many displays of abject misogyny, I can only conclude that such hostility is a political strategy. And they aren’t even trying to hide or disavow it. As the Atlantic’s Helen Lewis recently wrote about J.D. Vance: “Most people who feel as he does are polite enough to keep it to themselves.”

Vance seems to believe a woman has little societal value unless she is a wife and mother. His hostility toward no-fault divorce and reproductive rights, his infamous statement about “childless” and “miserable” “cat ladies” and his contention that the “whole purpose of the postmenopausal female” is to raise grandchildren are especially unfortunate. Even female teachers aren’t off-limits: “So many leaders of the left, and I hate to be so personal about this, but they are people without kids trying to brainwash the minds of our children,” Vance said. “Randi Weingarten, who is the head of the most powerful teacher’s union in the country, she doesn’t have a single child.”

Vance recently attempted to skewer Kamala Harris by reposting a “dumb blonde” video of a young woman named Caitlin Upton infamously stumbling over her words as a contestant in the 2007 Miss Teen USA Pageant. (Former president Trump piled on, re-sharing the post and adding, “This is total Fake News from JD. We all know that Kamala isn’t that articulate.”)

Even when informed that the original clip had caused Upton to contemplate suicide, Vance doubled down: “I’m not going to apologize for posting a joke,” he responded. “But I wish the best for Caitlin and hope she’s doing well.”

Setting the tone for all this, of course, is Trump. (On September 19, The conservative Lincoln Project even dedicated an entire spot to the former president’s storied hostility toward women.) But even Trump seemed to top himself last month when he shared on Truth Social a parody music video suggesting that Kamala Harris had “spent her whole damn life down on her knees.” Ten days later, he returned to the theme, re-posting an especially crude comment about Harris and Hillary Clinton. As the New York Times reported:

The post, by another user on Truth Social, was an image of Ms. Harris and Hillary Clinton…The text read: “Funny how blowjobs impacted both their careers differently...” [The] re-post was the second time in 10 days that the former president shared content from his personal account making sexually oriented attacks on Ms. Harris. Though he has a history of making crass insults about his opponents, the re-posts signal Mr. Trump’s willingness to continue to shatter longstanding norms of political speech.”

Heavily doctored photos of Kamala Harris as an escort went viral on social media.

And where Trump goes, the rest of the hard right follows, these days displaying a shocking fearlessness when it comes to using sexuality to demean and degrade Harris. Doctored photos depicting Harris provocatively dressed as an “escort” are still turning up on feeds, despite being proven as fake. Fox News’ Jesse Watters argued that a President Harris would “get paralyzed in the Situation Room while the generals have their way with her” (a comment he later denied was “anything of a sexual nature”). And, in keeping with Trump’s reposts above, many are painting Harris as a craven opportunist who “slept her way to the top”—charges stemming from a brief relationship Harris had in the mid-90s with future San Francisco mayor Willie Brown.

Here, for example, is right-wing columnist Matt Walsh:

And British troll Milo Yiannopoulos:

And former Fox News host Megyn Kelly:

Needless to say, millions of people have seen these posts, spawning comments and shares that are still spreading like wildfire on X, Facebook and TikTok. 

Regardless of how you feel about Harris’s love-life, there is no denying such attacks represent a new low in mainstream political discourse. The far-right is straight-up fomenting misogyny, in real time, telegraphing that it okay to demean and slander women in ways society wouldn’t have tolerated even five years ago. This is unacceptable, and we must continue to call it out.

Also disturbing is the impact such messaging might have on young women, who may lack the critical-thinking skills to process such content, as well as the life experience necessary to provide any kind of social or historical context. When a young woman takes a misogynistic trope at face value, when she believes its ugly messaging, what effect does that have on her own self-esteem? And how does internalizing the patriarchy impact her identity as a female and her understanding of women’s value to society?

Last weekend, I watched a video of a debate between a young man—a Harris supporter—and a young woman voting for Trump. The young man suggested starting with an assessment of character and proceeded to run through a list of the former president’s more egregious shortcomings. When it was the young woman’s turn to speak, she surprised me.

This smart young woman believes that Kamala Harris “slept her way to the top.”

Here is what she said:

“I technically do not think she’s a good person. Speaking of which, if we’re bringing up stuff from the past, we can say she slept with Willie Brown, broke up a family [sic], just to get her job…A woman shouldn’t…just sleep to the top for her job. They should actually work hard for it. I generally don’t think she’s a good representative. There’s plenty of other women out there.”

Megyn Kelly couldn’t have said it any better herself. And to be fair, look, I’m sure a certain degree of cronyism did figure into Harris’s start in politics, just as it figures into the careers of many individuals of all gender identities. But the degree to which this is nefarious or represents a deal-breaking character flaw is, at the very least, debatable. Also, to discuss a complicated relationship in such flagrantly black-and-white terms is to perpetuate the kind of dumbed-down back-and-forth that passes for debate nowadays, conversations that end up educating and persuading precisely no one. But the damage hardly stops there. To swallow and then regurgitate the most salacious spin—in this case, that Harris prostituted herself to be appointed to (checks notes) San Francisco’s Parking and Traffic Commission—is to abet those who shape and sell misogyny not to inform but merely to garner likes, eyeballs and clicks. Such spin is not real news any more than a marshmallow circus peanut is real food. Pity the person who consumes it and thinks they are getting a meal.

What is the far right’s end game? I now believe that the normalization of misogynistic language in our political discourse is meant to acclimate the public to the most disturbing ideas in Project 2025—the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for any incoming conservative government. As Carrie Baker, a women’s studies professor at Smith College told Newsweek, Project 2025 blatantly has it in for women:

Something that nobody is talking about is the fact that there's a lot in Project 2025 about reviving the traditional patriarchal family. It stigmatizes single parenthood, and makes cuts to social support for single parents and children in single-parent families. To incentivize marriage, it punishes people that don't get married. They want to take Title X funding, which is supposed to go towards family planning and contraception, and redirect it towards 'marriage education' and the importance of marriage. And in there, they talk explicitly about biblical marriage.

It also seeks to decimate reproductive rights. According to the National Organization for Women:

Project 2025 specifically homes in on attacking abortion access. It would require states to report statistics on abortion, “abortion survivors,” abortion-related maternal deaths, and abortion demographic information. Furthermore, Project 2025 promotes requiring treatment of “fetuses born alive” after abortion. It would withdraw Medicaid funds for states that require abortion insurance or that discriminate against pro-life health entities or insurers. The outlined policy threatens to reverse the Biden interpretation of EMTALA and affirm the “rights of conscience” for medical providers to deny care to patients.⁴ Under a Republican administration, they would withdraw support for travel to receive abortions and reverse the FDA’s approval of mifepristone, limiting the distribution of abortion pills….This Republican plan would fundamentally alter the state of reproductive healthcare in the United States. Abortion accessibility would vary widely between states but would generally decrease overall. In communities with conservative state governments, abortions would be next to impossible to obtain. In states with legislatures and governors who support the right to reproductive care, access to these crucial services would still be impacted. Individuals who travel across state lines to receive abortion care could be criminalized, alongside healthcare providers, even in states where abortion would remain legal. Project 2025 would aim to make abortion care, and reproductive healthcare in general more inaccessible and more greatly stigmatized. 

If the U.S. is ever subjected to such plans, millions of American women will be harmed irreparably. And just as horribly—thanks to the recent glut of right-wing messaging that normalizes, amplifies, condones and foments misogynistic attitudes—millions more will believe they deserve it.