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Imagine this: at the moment I was writing this introduction, Donald ("grab 'em by the pussy") Trump had appointed just twice as many women to his administration (six out of his 34 choices then) as he had men accused of sexually abusing women in various ways (three). And of course, if you're counting, don't forget Vice President J.D. Vance and his "childless cat ladies" or Trump's biggest, richest buddy, Elon Musk, with his 12 (yes, 12!) children, three wives (or former wives), and a transgender daughter whom he's declared to be "dead" on several occasions. That is certainly anything but a crew who might believe women's bodies are in any way their own.
Once, long ago, in something like another life, I worked as a printer for the New England Free Press, which, in 1970, published a booklet with the title "Women and Their Bodies." The next year, expanded, it would become the famous Our Bodies, Ourselves. But in the age (and he is definitely of a certain age) of You Know Who, as TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon makes clear in her latest piece, women are distinctly not considered their own property -- not in the universe of Donald Trump or, as she points out, far-right pundit and white extremist Nick Fuentes, who was infamously hosted by Trump at Mar-a-Lago and wrote this election-night post on X: "Your body, my choice. Forever."
And that turning of a claim of bodily ownership against women so many decades later catches something grimly essential about this all-too-male Trumpian moment in which, in fact, the fellow about to reenter the White House already stands convicted in civil court of sexually abusing (yes, raping) and defaming a woman.
And with all of that in mind, let Gordon take you into the misogynistic world of the next president of the United States and what it means for women (and the rest of us). Tom
Election Aftermath
Staring Down Misogyny
"I never realized before that men hate us so much." That was the lesson drawn by one of my fellow organizers in Reno, Nevada, the morning after the 2024 general election. She'd turned 21 during the campaign, a three-month marathon she approached as a daily opportunity to learn as much as she could about everything she encountered. "Of course, they hate immigrants, too," she added, "and I'm both."
That morning of November 6th, I sat down with her and four other women to face the election results. The six of us had spent almost every day together over the previous three months, recruiting, training, and deploying volunteers in northern Nevada in the campaign to elect Kamala Harris president and return Jacky Rosen to the Senate. We didn't yet know that we had indeed managed the latter, but it was already clear that the next president would not be Kamala Harris but Donald Trump. This was my fourth electoral outing with UNITE-HERE, the hospitality industry union. It was, however, my first time working directly with the union's partner in Reno, Seed the Vote (STV), a campaign organization whose mission is to "win elections and build our movements."
I'd initially been skeptical that STV, a progressive nonprofit outfit based in the San Francisco Bay Area, would be able to adapt to the union's model: waging effective electoral campaigns while simultaneously training cooks, bartenders, hotel room attendants, and casino staff in the skills they need to build and sustain a fighting union. Would short-term volunteers show the same discipline and dedication I'd admired in union canvassers over the years? Would they go out again the day after they'd rung a doorbell and a voter carrying a shotgun had screamed at them, or sicced dogs on them, or called the police, or shouted racist curses at them, or even later followed them slowly in a pickup truck? As it turned out, most of them would.
Nor, by the way, was it lost on us that morning that all six of us were women. So are most of UNITE-HERE's members and its two top officials, as was the director of the union's campaign in Reno, along with the folks running the data department (something I had done in 2022). A wide variety of concerns brought us to this battle, but all of us knew that as women, along with struggles for a living wage, affordable housing, and access to health care, we were fighting for our lives.
Welcome to Gilead. Enjoy Your Stay.
In Donald Trump we confronted a candidate who'd promised to "protect" women -- "whether the women like it or not." He'd bragged about appointing the Supreme Court justices who'd overturned Roe v. Wade, effectively ending bodily autonomy for millions of women. He'd claimed that handing control of women's bodies over to 50-odd state and territorial governments was what "everybody wanted." I doubt it was the kind of "protection" Jessica Barnica wanted when Texas doctors refused her abortion care in the midst of a miscarriage, causing her to die of sepsis three days later. And it probably wasn't what any of the other women wanted whose horror stories about suffering -- and death -- after the end of Roe were recently recounted in a New York magazine article, "Life after Roe." No, we did not "like" the kind of protection that Donald Trump was offering us at all.
Here was a man whose earlier boasts about sexual assault hadn't kept him out of the White House in 2016. Here was one who claimed that his female opponent in 2024 was born "mentally disabled." There's something wrong with Kamala and I just don't know what it is, but there's something missing and you know what? Everybody knows it." It's hard not to conclude that, to Trump, the "something missing" was a penis.
Penises were certainly on Trump's mind when he reposted a photo of Harris with Hillary Clinton over the caption: "Funny how blowjobs impacted both their careers differently-- That was, in part, an allusion to the right-wing trope that Harris had slept her way to the top, getting her start in politics through a brief relationship with California powerbroker Willie Brown. And Trump was a candidate whose sprint to the electoral finish line was fueled by attacks on some of the most vulnerable women of all -- transgender teenagers.
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