The Manosphere Election

There’s no sugarcoating the results of this election. One datapoint of the terrible is a report from The Trevor Project, a non-profit that offers mental health support to queer and trans folks, that the hotline experienced a 700% increase in calls for help immediately following the election. Seven hundred PERCENT is a tsunami of heartbreak, terror and fear about what comes next.

One of the key realms of support for Trump has been the “manosphere,” the far-right media landscape of podcasters and shit-posters who celebrated the GOP victory by saying things like, “your body, my choice” to women. Reporter Talia Lavin who covers the far right describes this as the “rape culture” election, she writes:

This man has been accused of groping and raping his way through his entire adulthood and into his senescence, and this has largely been treated as a bonus — part of his machismo, something to fold into the kayfabe entertainment value of his candidacy, then his first presidency and now his second. In his first term, this man who has significant jurisdiction over the bodies of women, trans and nonbinary people, set up a court that stripped our bodily autonomy away; in his second term, he will continue to do so at a faster and faster pace. (Longstanding Christian Right ambitions to further erode that autonomy, from banning birth control to ending no-fault divorce, are in the pipeline.) 

All these issues around sexual assault, bodily autonomy for queer and nonbinary folks, and birth control are interwoven. When you start to pull on one of these threads, the whole fabric of white heteropatriarchy begins to unravel.

The thing is, this is a world-historic shift that isn’t going to be stopped by this one election. I know it looks bleak right now, but hear me out.

For most of human history, women’s lives have been constrained by reproduction. One example from my own family history. In doing some genealogical research, I found a female relative just four generations back who married at 19, immediately got pregnant, then had a child almost every year for the rest of her reproductive life, and then she died. That’s what women’s lives were like before reliable birth control like the pill, which was approved by the FDA in 1960 but wasn’t in wide use in the U.S. until the 1970s. It was in 1975 that country singer Loretta Lynn released a hit song, “The Pill.”

The history of the development of the pill is a story of inequality. Puerto Rican women were used, without consent, as test subjects for early versions of the contraceptive pill. Toni Cade Bambara wondered about the intent of the pill in an essay from 1970, “The Pill: Genocide or Liberation?” But despite all this, what many feminist scholars and other observers began to realize was that reliable birth control began to shift women’s marriage and career decisions because it decoupled sex from reproduction. (There’s an excellent documentary about all this here.)

That’s the first world historic shift: decoupling sex from reproduction. This is the first time in history when women could control their reproduction, and it means having and enjoying sex without the fear of pregnancy. Think about the long span of human history and to think that in the span of our existence, this really basic fact has changed. It’s huge. And, it’s large part of what the dudes in the manosphere are upset about. They got some deep messages about what women are supposed to be and do, and we’ve escaped those expectations.

I was on a retreat recently and someone else there walked through the meditation labyrinth, much like the one above. We chatted about her experience of getting to the middle of it and how calming she found it. Having completed it, she felt a conundrum about how to get out of it, and whether or not she needed to walk back out of it the way she’d come in. Then she described an epiphany: “I realized, oh, it’s just a construct,” and she stepped out of it, across the paths set by the stones.

I still laugh when I think of this because it’s such a perfect metaphor for gender and how it’s just a construct that we can step out of, if we want to. The lovely thing about our trans and nonbinary siblings is they have taken the demand for bodily autonomy further and called the whole social construct of gender into question. Of course, there have always been nonbinary, hijra, and two-spirit folks, but the marvelous idea that one’s gender is a choice situated within one’s bodily autonomy is another world historic shift. This, too, is what upsets the dudes of manosphere.

Drew Dixon, the beautiful music producer turned whistleblower who exposed Russell Simmons (“On the Record”) as a [/an alleged/] rapist, said recently that the climate crisis we’re in is a result of “men running the planet as if it’s a frat house.” When she said this, it reminded me of a previous lifetime when I worked as an apartment manager in a small college town in East Texas. The apartment complex was brand new and I surveyed the damage after four football dudes trashed their place, including a fun game they had about how long they could use the toilet without flushing it. That apartment, and the way those guys treated it, is a metaphor for the shit we’re in now, what the anthropologists are calling a global polycrisis.

This manosphere election is a response to, a backlash against, #MeToo and all the ways that people have stood up and resisted white heteropatriarchy. It is a deadly, and deeply cynical, response to calls for bodily autonomy by trans folks and people who need abortions. As for the 52% of white women who (again) voted for Trump, chose the comforting politics of reclaiming whiteness from the destabilizing and discomforting call-outs of “Karens.” As undeniably bleak as what the next four years will be, I still, in spite of everything, am hopeful that collectively we have already changed the world in ways that cannot be undone.

Part of what gives me hope are the girlies over on TikTok who are reinventing radical feminism in this moment. There are a couple of trends I’ve noticed there, one on decentering men seems to be gaining traction (see Jamila Bradley, among lots of others), which is a variation on South Korea’s 4B movement (the 4 b’s stand for: no dating men, no sex with men, no marriage, no children). Queer folks are doing self-defense classes, witches are casting spells against the incoming regime. And, there’s this feminist anthem (All day/ everyday/ therapist, mother, maid/ nymph then a virgin/nurse then a servant) from singer-songwriter Paris Paloma that’s getting sampled all over TikTok. Of course, these trends aren’t the same as an actual social movement, but they do speak to something percolating in the collective consciousness.

When you take the long view of history, it’s easier to see the recent gains we’ve made as truly epochal in scale. To keep those in the midst of a melting planet is going to take everything we’ve got. Do what you can to get ready for the fight ahead. Make some art along the way, cast spells, and fuck shit up.