07/11/2024
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This is How Much America Still Hates Women
They hate us, and they think we will learn to hate ourselves, too. But they also underestimate us.
Anne Helen Petersen
Nov 6
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Eight years ago, in the blurry early morning hours after Trump won the election, I wrote a piece: This is How Much America Hates Women. It had been the chorus of my thoughts as I watched the results come in: that millions of Americans would rather vote for a chaos muppet in a suit than a capable woman.
In the years since, there have been times where I’ve thought the headline was too bombastic, too overblown, too in line with the caricature of a Resistance Lib. The reality was that millions of Americans did vote for a capable woman — just not enough of them in the handful of states that get to decide the future of our country. Two years after Trump won, we voted in a wave of progressive women, and two years after that, pushed Trump out of office. The tide, I dreamed, was turning — however slowly.
Last night’s election sure did clarify things, didn’t it. Political historian Nicole Hemmer describes elections as “an ongoing conversation about who we are as a country and who we’re going to be.” And the takeaway from that conversation is that we’d still rather have a chaos muppet with a non-existent platform, fascistic dreams, and a vibes-based ideological compass in office than a competent woman, particularly a competent Black woman.
But that’s just the most basic part of the conversation. Listen closely and you’ll understand that we don’t care about women’s bodily autonomy — in fact, we think control of women’s bodies should rest in the hands of the state, and that state should be run by men. We think women’s lives are, ultimately, disposable. We belong subjugated and controlled. Men think this, but women think this too.
This is the adult conversation our children are observing. This is what they will understand about their childhoods: a period when their country clarified whose lives mattered and where power should rest. These truths will be codified in court rulings and legislation that will endure for decades. They will be there in the room every time a woman dies a preventable death or is arrested for crossing state lines to save her own life. This generation will internalize what we have come to understand: that women are worth less. Behave accordingly.
This morning, I woke up the way you wake up after a bad breakup, or a tragedy, or a death. I hadn’t cried, but I felt like I had for hours. Dogs don’t know about how much America hates women, so I still had to walk them. I saw one of the island kids riding his bike to school, a shark helmet over his magenta mohawk, singing to himself as he weaved back and forth across the road. The school bus came up behind him, slowed, and waited patiently as he completed the quarter-mile to school. The morning light was perfect and the air was crisp and I felt a wave of relief pour over me: the world was still beautiful and kind, and four years would pass, as it passed before, and maybe they’d f**k things up so badly that no one would vote for a Republican again in our lifetimes.
But then I kept walking. There was a dead vole in the middle of the street, its guts strewn out, pink and glistening, the dogs pulling towards it. Further down the road, a loose German Shepherd darted into the road, and I knew I had to turn around. A guy I know voted for Trump drove by in his truck, and I felt nauseous at the thought of his eyes on me. The sky clouded over, and now it’s grey and flat and endless. Our world is beautiful and kind, and it is also indifferent and cruel.
On Election Day, Jamelle Bouie made the case that a Trump win would usher in what amounts to a new republic, with conservatives empowered to enact changes on the federal level that would profoundly reimagine our nation. They will attempt to nationalize the abortion ban, eliminate the Department of Education, and stop immigration — and that’s just the beginning.
“Should the United States take this path on Election Day,” Bouie writes, “then we can expect the America we have to fade into the past, to be supplanted by an American Republic that is far more exclusive — and far more resistant to change. A majority of Americans may not want it, they may not even expect it, but they’ll be on the way to living in a United States that treats the “rights revolution” of the 1960s and ’70s, to say nothing of the New Deal, as a legal and political mistake.”
This is our new reality, indifferent and cruel, oppressive and dominating. We can still find kindness and beauty within it, but we must also acknowledge the extent of the damage. This is not 2016. This is worse. It will take generations to reverse the political wreckage that is about to happen, and our primary task, in this moment, feels impossible.
We are weary, and defeated, and furious. We need a f**king moment to mourn. But then — we have to fight. We have to fight even when we’re losing. We have to fight for a future we may never see. We have to protect each other, even when it comes at great personal cost. We have to fight because the alternative is unimaginable.
They feed on our exhaustion. They expect our capitulation. They rely on us behaving like them: willing to ignore or cause others’ suffering to preserve our own power. They hate us, and they think we will learn to hate ourselves, too. But they also underestimate us. We are stubborn and unruly, annoying and persistent, bitter and terrified. And unlike them, we are not animated by fear or cruelty. We are audacious in our faith that a better world is possible. That faith is not rational, and the last eight years has consistently rattled it. But it endures, as it has endured for hundreds of years. We must not be the ones to lose it. ●
If you find this work valuable, if it helped you process, if you really needed to read this today — and you want to keep the paywall off essays like this one — consider subscribing. I don’t know what the future holds but I do know that I’ll be here, writing through it with you.
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© 2024 Anne Helen Petersen
548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104
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