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      ‘Be a man and vote for a woman’: Kamala Harris’s unlikely edge in America’s masculinity election

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      A man in a baseball cap strides through a field of corn. A woman in flannel turns and smiles, a line of trucks visible behind her. As piano music swells, an American flag ripples in a gentle breeze. This video is pure, uncut Americana. Naturally, it’s a political ad.Specifically, it’s an ad made by the Lincoln Project, a group of moderates and former Republicans united by a desire to topple Donald Trump and support Kamala Harris. And it’s making one of the most obvious appeals to men and masculinity yet in the 2024 election.As the ad nears its crescendo, the deep voice of Sam Elliott, an actor best known for playing grizzled but folksy cowboy types, demands: “What the hell are you waiting for? Because if it’s the woman thing, it’s time to get over that.” He continues: “It’s time to be a man and vote for a woman.”Masculinity and people’s views on gender roles may be more important than ever in 2024 – and not just because Harris is the first woman of color to ever secure a major-party nomination for president. The 2022 overturning of Roe v Wade thrust women’s rights to the forefront of the election. Numerous identity-based groups, including White Dudes for Harris, have gathered to drum up enthusiasm. An extreme gender gap has also yawned open among the youngest US voters: having come of age in the era of #MeToo, gen Z women are becoming the most progressive and politically active cohort ever measured – while gen Z men are increasingly apathetic to politics and drifting further to the right.Conservatives are openly using anxiety around masculinity to win this election, telling men that their problems stem from not being man enough. Josh Hawley, the influential Republican senator from Missouri, published a book called Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs. The Fox News host Jesse Watters went even further.“I don’t see why any man would vote Democrat. It’s not the party of virtue, security. It’s not the party of strength,” Watters said, shortly after White Dudes for Harris held a call with more than 190,000 participants. Watters added: “I heard the scientists say the other day that when a man votes for a woman, he actually transitions into a woman.”Watters is not a serious person, but Americans’ obsession with masculinity is, to the point that it can determine the outcome even of presidential elections where two men are running. (So, most of them.) Americans revere presidents as role models, fixating on their status – real or perceived – as founding fathers, real fathers, war heroes, and masters of diplomacy and making money and cheating on their wives without getting caught (or, at least, without getting divorced). Because presidents epitomize American notions of manhood, elections reveal what kind of man, what type and degree of masculinity, is most respected and deserving of power.View image in fullscreenTrump has turned his campaign into a pitch for hyper-traditional masculinity. At this year’s Republican national convention, he walked on stage to the James Brown song It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World and was introduced by Dana White, the president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship who was caught slapping his wife on camera. On the campaign trail, he has hammed it up with YouTubers and podcasters who have male-centric audiences and dim views of women.With the general public and her opponent so preoccupied by masculinity, Harris is not emphasizing her pioneering nomination. Rather, in order to win a contest that no woman has ever won, she’s trying to take advantage of stereotypes about men, women and leadership – and, when they can’t work in her favor, using them to kneecap Trump instead.Masculinity, it turns out, may be the most partisan issue in US politics.A few good menWhen people conjure up the image of a “good man” or a “real man”, they tend to imagine the same qualities: someone who is dominant, successful and tough – and who is nothing like women, according to Theresa Vescio, a psychology professor who studies gender, politics and privilege at Penn State.This way of thinking is so pervasive that people gender political matters that, objectively, have no sex. National defense and the economy are seen as topics that men care about, because men are expected to prize being providers for and protectors of their families. Healthcare – including abortion rights – and education are seen as women’s issues, because women are supposed to be compassionate caregivers. (In reality, at least among gen Z, young women care about all of these issues more than young men do.) Even the political parties themselves are gendered: Republicans are associated with more masculine issues and traits, Democrats with feminine ones.These stereotypes inform American ideals of the presidency. “What we expect in a good leader is that they’re powerful, high status, top, able to lead. That overlaps substantially with stereotypes of masculinity and men,” Vescio said. “So when we think about who would be a good leader, stereotypes of men fit and complement. There’s no incongruity.”They complement one another so seamlessly, in fact, that the role of masculinity in elections was once invisible. We’re so used to seeing men run for office, and seeing “gender” only become a buzzword when a woman steps into the fray, that we often don’t even recognize that men have a gender, let alone that male candidates offer up different, competing visions of masculinity.But they do compete, even in the most animalistic ways. For example, presidential candidates are more likely to succeed when they have one key, traditionally masculine physical quality: height.The taller candidate is more likely to win more votes and be re-elected; they are also more likely to be seen by experts as being better leaders and simply “greater”. This link between height and presidential preference is so strong and so subconscious that when Richard Nixon ran against John F Kennedy in 1960, voters tended to think their chosen candidate was taller. (Kennedy was taller, and he won.) Ron DeSantis might have been laughed at for reportedly wearing ill-fitting heels when he ran for president, but he would have been right to worry.If you’re still not convinced, take the 2004 race between George W Bush and John Kerry, which hinged on the candidates’ supposed manhood to a startling degree. Bush sold himself as a down-home rancher who may have occasionally been “misunderestimated” but who you wanted to grab a beer with. Kerry, meanwhile, was a Vietnam combat veteran with a deep understanding of policy. This presented a problem for Bush: how could he be “the man’s man” when his opponent was part of the uber-masculine military?“What they did was, they went and they attacked his service record, because that was his greatest political strength,” said Jackson Katz, author of the book Man Enough? Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton and the Politics of Presidential Masculinity. An advocacy group, technically formed independent of Bush, dedicated itself to questioning Kerry’s record.View image in fullscreenKatz continued of Kerry: “His attitude was like: ‘This is beneath me, to respond to these attacks.’ And it backfired. Because in the masculinity narrative, if you don’t defend your honor that’s being besmirched, you’re emasculated, you’re not strong.”Kerry, of course, lost.The architect of the attack to undermine Kerry is now working on Trump’s 2024 campaign, which is attempting to run the same playbook against Tim Walz. JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, has suggested that Walz left the national guard to avoid serving in the Iraq war.In fact, Walz was in the national guard for 24 years and left to run for Congress several months before his unit was deployed to Iraq. Walz has defended his record – but Team Trump isn’t typically all that worried about the truth.Masculinity subtext comes textWhen Trump descended down a golden escalator during the 2016 primary, we entered a new, far more obvious era of presidential masculinity. During that primary, Trump loved to talk about “Little Marco” Rubio, which prompted Rubio to attack Trump for his supposedly undersized hands. There is no better proof that masculinity underscores presidential elections than two candidates subtly accusing one another of having small penises.Well, maybe there is: Trump, the man who started the dick-measuring contest, won the one for the White House, too.The more people believe that traditional notions of masculinity are good and true, the more likely they were to vote for Trump in 2016, when Trump ran against a woman, and 2020, when Trump did not, Vescio found in a 2021 study. This finding held true regardless of people’s party, gender, race or level of education. It also held true even after Vescio controlled for people’s trust, or lack thereof, in government, undermining the idea that Trump’s popularity is due to his populism rather than his masculine posturing.When it comes to cosplaying masculinity, one of Trump’s greatest assets is his disinterest in reality. In other words: he’s good at making big, bold, often untrue statements, and people like that in a man.“Trump promises, more than anybody else: ‘I’m going to do this.’ Oftentimes, in violation of what the president can actually do,” said the political scientist Dan Cassino, who studies male gender identity at Fairleigh Dickinson University. “But he says he’s going to go in and fix a problem. ‘I’m going to do this on day one. Whatever Congress says doesn’t matter.’ That sort of agentic behavior is perceived as being very, very masculine.”Republicans, especially, really like this kind of behavior in a man. This can partially be chalked up to demographics. Both men and older people, who are more likely to embrace traditional gender roles, are likelier to be Republicans. It can be explained by the nature of conservatism itself. Conservatives want to preserve tradition.View image in fullscreenThere’s also another explanation: sexism.“As researchers, we differentiate between hostile sexism and benevolent sexism. Hostile sexism is: ‘Women are terrible and it’s OK to beat your wife,’” Cassino said. “Benevolent sexism is more like: ‘Oh, women are pure and precious, we have to protect them.’ That means keeping them out of things like politics, putting up separate spheres.”Lilliana Mason, a Johns Hopkins University professor who studies partisan identity, measured people’s hostile sexism by asking whether they agreed with statements like: “Women seek to gain power by getting control over men.” Republicans, she found, were on average about twice as likely as Democrats to show signs of hostile sexism.“The better predictor of being Republican is not gender, but sexism,” Mason said. “There are a lot of women who hold sexist attitudes and are pro-patriarchy and believe that women shouldn’t be in power.”I’ve encountered shades of this attitude: in January 2020, I met a woman in her 30s from Louisiana, at the March for Life, the largest annual anti-abortion gathering in the United States. Women, she told me at the time, should not be president, because they just can’t be leaders in the same way as men.“Women and men are completely different biologically,” she said. “And so for that reason, I believe that they should have specific jobs for who they are, biologically.”She planned to vote for Trump.Sexism is more than a collection of views about women – it’s a belief system about how men and women should interact. (And that men and women are the only two genders.) But as much as Trump may benefit from the GOP’s sexism, he doesn’t seem all that interested in gender relations. He has praised and attacked individual women, including his accuser E Jean Carroll, often over their looks, but he rarely speaks about women as a category.Instead, he has largely delegated that to JD Vance.In addition to claiming that “traditional masculine traits are now actively suppressed from childhood all the way through adulthood”, Vance has denigrated childfree women as “childless cat ladies”, agreed that the purpose of the “postmenopausal female” is to help raise grandchildren, and claimed women who prioritize careers over families are on “a path to misery”.“Vance is very much doing appeals, I think, less about masculinity, more about benevolent sexism,” Cassino said. “At its edges, it goes into what is called natalism, that the job of women is to reproduce, which is the extreme, extreme end of benevolent sexism.”This is the Vance innovation on the already masculine Trump ticket: he operationalizes Trump’s static vision of white-man hypermasculinity into a blueprint for how genders should live with one another. If Trump and Vance win, that blueprint could be turned into policy.View image in fullscreenThere are signs that Trump is coming around to Vance’s approach – at least when it comes to abortion, one of Trump’s biggest electoral weaknesses and an issue that has quite a bit to do with male-female relations.“I WILL PROTECT WOMEN AT A LEVEL NEVER SEEN BEFORE,” he posted to TruthSocial over the weekend. “THEY WILL FINALLY BE HEALTHY, HOPEFUL, SAFE, AND SECURE.”The feminine catch-22When Harris walked out on stage at the Democratic convention to accept her party’s nomination for president, Kelly Dittmar was immediately struck by one thing.“She didn’t wear white,” said Dittmar, who, as the director of research at Rutgers’ Center for American Women and Politics, makes something of a living noting how powerful women present themselves in public.White is the color of the suffragettes who fought for women’s right to vote in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; Democratic women regularly don it for the major rituals of US politics, including the convention. “Like half the crowd was wearing white,” Dittmar pointed out.But not Harris. She wore a navy suit and a matching pussy bow blouse.It was an unmistakable declaration: Harris did not want to focus on how she has made history. In the weeks since, she has stayed true to that stance. When presidential debate moderators brought up abortion and Donald Trump’s racist lies about her identity, Harris didn’t respond with anecdotes about her experience as a woman of color. Instead, she told the audience: “I do believe that the vast majority of us know that we have so much more in common than what separates us.”If Hillary Clinton stands accused of focusing on her gender too much when she ran for president in 2016, Harris is doing everything she can to avoid falling into the same trap. But the braided nature of masculinity, leadership and politics leaves female political candidates in such a bind that even the act of raising an eyebrow becomes fraught.During the debate, Harris didn’t bother to hide her skepticism at Trump’s boasts, lies and rambling. “If she wants to win, Harris needs to train her face not to respond,” the pollster Frank Luntz posted on X at the time. “It feeds into a female stereotype and, more importantly, risks offending undecided voters.”It’s not clear what “female stereotype” Luntz – who said nothing of Trump’s tendency to smirk while Harris spoke – was referring to. (The female stereotype of having expressions?) But it is true that “as a female candidate, you have to be feminine, because otherwise you’re not a good woman”, Cassino said. “But you also have to be masculine, because in the US, we’ve decided that leaders are masculine. So you have to have masculine traits and feminine traits.”When it comes to telegraphing her masculine credentials, Harris has a built-in advantage: she spent years working in law enforcement, a field associated with toughness, victory and men. In her very first speech as the presumptive Democratic candidate, Harris recalled her time as a prosecutor and California attorney general.“In those roles, I took on perpetrators of all kinds,” she said, using a line that has since become a part of her stump speech. “Predators who abused women. Fraudsters who ripped off consumers. Cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say: I know Donald Trump’s type.” Translation: she knows how to dominate the worst of the worst.“Democrats don’t need Harris to go out and shoot guns in her campaign ad or on the campaign trail,” said Nichole Bauer, a Louisiana State University professor who studies political communication. “But they do need her to display those masculine qualities that we associate with political leaders, and those are really masculine qualities that we don’t always think of as being gendered – like talking about her experience as a vice-president, an attorney general, a senator.”Last week, Harris sat down with Oprah, who had been stunned to learn, during the debate, that the vice-president owns a gun. “If somebody breaks into my house, they’re getting shot,” Harris said. Then she laughed. “Probably should not have said that.”That exchange encapsulated Harris’s balancing act. She’s got a gun and she’s not afraid to use it, but she’ll laugh about it. That laugh, experts said, may be one of Harris’s best assets when it comes to convincing voters that she is both competent and warm. It helps burnish her claim that she’s a “joyful warrior”, an image that “creates a distinct persona that I think bridges those gendered expectations”, Dittmar said. Joy, she continued, “alludes [to] kindness and even empathy, which is more traditionally associated with femininity and women”.There are very few true independents in the US electorate; all but 3% of self-identified independents lean Democrat or Republican. But that tiny fraction of the population can decide a close election. When judging a candidate, undecided voters tend to rely heavily on racial and gendered stereotypes, according to Bauer.“If Harris displays masculinity in a super aggressive way, similar to how Trump and Vance might do it, then she risks falling into this ‘angry Black woman’ stereotype that we’ve been socialized to think of as a negative stereotype, as something incompatible with political leadership,” Bauer said. “It’s just this really narrow set of behaviors that she has to fit into to try to show her leadership qualities.”In past elections, the men who have tried to take down Trump attempted to outman him. Rubio suggested he had a bigger you-know-what; DeSantis sold himself to voters as the grown-up version of Trump; in a 2020 debate, Joe Biden snapped: “Donald, would you just be quiet for a minute?” But running on full-tilt masculinity would never work for Harris. Not only did it not work for most of those men, but as a woman, she cannot win a masculinity-off.View image in fullscreenInstead, her supporters’ best shot at defeating Trump may be to unman him. That Lincoln Project ad, for example, framed Trump next to images of the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. Harris, meanwhile, is pictured giving a salute. “The images of Trump in the ad are chaotic. It’s social unrest,” pointed out Erin Cassese, a University of Delaware political science professor. The ad seems to ask: would a real man lose control like Trump did?During the debate, Harris urged viewers to go to one of Trump’s rallies. “He talks about fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter. He will talk about ‘windmills cause cancer’,” she said. “And what you will also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom.”Those attacks – the kind of attacks that could once have been directed at Biden – also undermine Trump’s masculinity. Cassino summarized the message as: “He’s kind of old and confused and weird. This is not a masculine guy.”‘Toxic’ masculinityAs much as the internet may like to call traditional stereotypes of masculinity “toxic”, they are not necessarily bad. Success, hardiness, being a provider and protector – those can all be good qualities.The problem, for individuals, is that stereotypes of masculinity can be so strict and stifling that they are impossible for anybody to live up to. No one can be in power at all times. You might be the boss at the office, but when you get home, your teenage children are still likely to ignore your commands.And, for US society as a whole, clinging to a narrow notion of masculinity really can be toxic. “It allows for aggression towards groups that aren’t appropriately masculine, which would be different kinds of groups of men that we define as problems, and women,” Vescio said. “It masks racism and sexism.”Harris isn’t right or wrong to lean into some masculine stereotypes. After all, if a woman can harness them well enough to win the most masculine office in US history, then maybe such attitudes and behaviors won’t be considered “masculine” any more. Maybe they’re just ways that people, of all genders, can act. Maybe voters will start to value “feminine” traits in leaders, too.View image in fullscreen“The only way we can ever stop defining our politics in terms of men versus women is, have so many women run that is just not notable any more,” Cassino said.Sending Trump back to the White House may affirm his brand of masculinity on a national scale. The more Trump larps masculinity, the more Republicans grow to like it; the more deeply invested they become in masculinity, the more polarized the United States may become. People who support traditional masculinity also tend to show signs of sexism (benevolent and hostile), anti-Black racism, Islamophobia and xenophobia.But, in Dittmar’s view, voting Harris into office may indicate that people don’t want to shove women into a separate sphere.“We’re voting on a lot of things, but among them is that version of leadership and our evaluation of these gendered versions of it,” Dittmar said. “As well as, even more broadly, our sense of the appropriate roles of women, the ways in which women should be treated by our political leaders.” More

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      in Elections

      The Cass Report: Biased or Balanced?

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      More from our inbox:Child Tax Credits Can Save Women’s LivesWake Up, RepublicansRicardo TomásTo the Editor:Re “The Strange Report Fueling the War on Trans Kids,” by Lydia Polgreen (column, Aug. 18):Thank you to Lydia Polgreen for this thoughtful, well-researched piece. She clearly identified the faulty and dangerous unspoken premise of the Cass report and much of the reporting on this topic: that being transgender is socially deviant and harmful, and we should do everything in our collective power to reserve gender-affirming care for those we deem virtuous enough to become “good” members of society.She also pointed out critics’ double standards. Our medical system routinely provides — without controversy — the same gender-affirming medications to cisgender children and adolescents that it provides to trans children and adolescents. The issue is clearly not “concern for children” but the deep-rooted transphobia that this “concern” masks.What if we didn’t think of being trans as being deviant or broken? What if we saw it for what it is: an identity as old as human existence that is as worthy of respect and celebration as any other, especially amid this climate of fear? What if we focused less on creating unnecessary barriers to care and more on protecting the right to self-determination and access to health care that respects each person’s unique needs?Libby Hartle-TyrrellBrooklynTo the Editor:Lydia Polgreen speculates on the legitimacy of the Cass report in what I see as an effort all too common among public figures: to burnish their liberal credentials at the expense of families like mine. They state that pediatric gender transition is too politicized, but blame only the Republicans. But I wish, I beg, that they talk to parents like me.Many of us are liberal, (formerly) Democratic professionals whose kids have been caught up in the left’s politicization of this issue. Our kids — who are smart, but struggle with mental health issues and anxiety — spent too much time online during Covid and self-diagnosed themselves as gender dysphoric. Meanwhile, activists have aggressively pushed an affirm-or-else, one-size-fits-all policy on educators, mental health providers and doctors.This confluence has created a dystopian nightmare for well-educated, thoughtful and compassionate parents who urge caution and question medicalization. People who we used to align with politically are telling our kids that we are transphobic and support their cutting us off. We grieve and watch in horror as our vulnerable kids permanently scar their bodies, reproductive organs and voices.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Kamala Harris Wants You To Retire Your ‘Future Is Female’ Sign

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      When Kamala Harris took the stage in Chicago last week, she spoke of her “trailblazer” mother and her encouraging father — “Don’t let anything stop you.” She told of how the sexual abuse of her best friend led her to become a prosecutor. She encouraged people to imagine abortion rights being restored in a Harris presidency. What she did not do, as she described her “unlikely journey,” was state the obvious — and that silence spoke volumes.As the first Black woman and first South Asian to receive a major party nomination, she was all but expected to talk about her candidacy as a historic first. She could have easily tipped her hat to the galvanizing power of “representation” or referred to the “highest, hardest glass ceiling” that Hillary Clinton had tried so hard to shatter. Some enthusiastic delegates had dressed in suffragist white, but she was not among them. She wore a dark navy suit. That color, too, spoke volumes.We’re only beginning to grapple with the audacity of what Kamala Harris is doing: She’s trying to take identity politics out of presidential politics. Don’t get me wrong, Ms. Harris is savvy enough to know how important identity is in America today. But if identity is in, gender and racial politics are out. As she put it on CNN on Thursday night, when asked during her first interview as the Democratic nominee to respond to Donald Trump’s attacks on her identity: “Same old tired playbook — next question.”She aspires to be the first post-gender POTUS. So many American voters loathe being asked to assess their candidates through the lens of gender and race, and they cringe at the performative nature of identity politics — including, yes, Mrs. Clinton and that ever-present glass ceiling, as well as the argument that her supporters were “voting with their vaginas” if they dared to feel inspired by it.The metaphor may have yielded feel-good empowerment for a while — and lots of clever merch — but we all know the outcome. And how many times can you declare “The future is female,” tattered sign in hand, before it starts to get awkward?Ms. Harris is a woman, and a Black woman, and a woman of Jamaican and South Asian descent, and the first woman to be vice president. But we know all that. Other people can talk about history; she’ll be too busy making it.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Push for Gender Equality in E.U.’s Top Roles Looks Set to Fall Short

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      Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, asked member countries to nominate both men and women for commission roles.The European Union has presented itself as a champion for promoting gender equality, adopting rules requiring companies to increase the number of women on their boards and pushing employers to address the gender pay gap.So when Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, asked recently for member countries to nominate both male and female candidates for leadership positions within the 27-member bloc’s executive arm, it was seen as an attempt to apply that vision to its own halls. The problem is, few have listened.Only five countries — Sweden, Finland, Spain, Portugal and Croatia — have put forward female candidates ahead of a Friday deadline. Seventeen countries have nominated only men for their commissioner posts. (Three countries have yet to submit names.) Each country gets one leadership slot.It’s possible that some countries could still change their nominees ahead of the deadline. But the current slate of nominees suggests that the European Commission’s leadership team will likely be composed mostly of men for the next five years — and analysts said the public snub of Ms. von der Leyen’s request signals her leadership could be weakened.“It’s not a small thing, asking for gender balance and clearly not getting it,” said a senior European official. “It’s not just one, two countries.” Speaking on condition of anonymity because the process was ongoing, the official said that indicated Ms. von der Leyen’s relations with member states would be more difficult.Ms. von der Leyen, a conservative German politician, secured a second five-year term in a vote last month.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Why is alleged predator Bill Clinton still welcome in the Democratic party? | Moira Donegan

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      One of the grim lessons of the #MeToo movement and its long backlash is this: whether someone finds a sexual abuse allegation credible largely depends on their pre-existing opinion of the man accused. When a woman comes forward with an account of a man’s mistreatment of her – be it humiliating boorishness, violent rape or any of the range of degradations and hurts that fall along the wide spectrum between – the listener’s response is fairly predictable. If they hate the accused man, they’ll believe his accuser. If they like him, they’ll say it’s bullshit.This rule holds, I am sorry to say, even for women who identify themselves as feminists. It held for Gloria Steinem, the famed feminist now in her 90s, who in 1998 defended Clinton amid his slew of sex scandals and abuse allegations in the pages of the New York Times, dismissing the allegations against him as trivial and making an unconvincing case that the offense she took at similar allegations against Clarence Thomas was different. It held true, most famously, for Bill Clinton’s wife, the liberal feminist icon Hillary Clinton, who has remained silently beside her husband throughout each of the allegations against him – and retained her feminist credibility despite her loyalty to an allegedly abusive man that I can only describe as canine.People who like Bill Clinton, or who find him convenient for their own goals, have a long history of underplaying the multiple allegations of sexual harassment and violence that he faces from at least four women. They say that Paula Jones, the former Arkansas state employee who sued Bill Clinton for sexual harassment after the then governor brought her to his hotel room, propositioned her and exposed himself, is lying – even though Jones has multiple corroborating witnesses, and even though her story has not changed in more than 30 years.They say that Juanita Broaddrick, the woman who says that Clinton raped her in a hotel room in 1978, when he was Arkansas attorney general, is lying, too – even though Broaddrick, like Jones, told multiple people of Clinton’s attack at the time.They say that Monica Lewinsky, the 22-year-old unpaid intern whom Clinton carried on an affair with in the White House when he was 49 and the most powerful person in the world, technically consented to the sex acts that Clinton asked her to do – an insistence that betrays a startlingly simple-minded and willfully obtuse understanding of sexual ethics.They echo Clinton’s denials of wrongdoing in all these cases, against all these women. That is, at least, what they say when they acknowledge the allegations about Bill Clinton’s conduct at all. Mostly, they ignore them – as Bill Clinton has, as his wife, Hillary Clinton has, and as Bill Clinton’s popular legacy seems to do.Bill Clinton’s supporters ignore his accusers because they can. These women’s dignity, their equality and their right to control their own bodies matter less to them than their esteem for Bill Clinton – less than whether he can deliver a few votes, make a zinger on television or look nice in a suit.On Wednesday night, the third night of the Democratic national convention, the whole party ignored these women when they gave Bill Clinton, a multiply accused alleged sexual harasser and rapist, a rousing welcome at Chicago’s United Center. The former president was given a prime-time speaking spot, trotted out like a prize and applauded like a hero.Are these people not embarrassed? Do they not, at least, take note of the hypocrisy involved? After all, the 2024 election is quickly shaping up to be about gender, with the boorish Trump, creepy, sex-obsessed JD Vance and the radically anti-choice Republican party turning the contest into a referendum on the status of women in American society. Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee who will seek to become the nation’s first female president on election day, has taken on the mantle of the women’s struggle – not only in the symbolism of her candidacy, but in the tenor of her advocacy, in which she has championed the “freedom” of women to control their own bodies and lives.These are noble goals, ones that the Democrats can be proud of pursuing; but they are not commensurate with celebrations of an alleged rapist, with pomp and obsequiousness trotted out for a man who allegedly habitually sexually harassed women who worked for him and carried on an affair with an intern young enough to be his daughter. Sexual abuse, too, is hostile to women’s freedom – the freedom of women to live, work and participate in public without the threat of sexual force. This is a kind of gendered freedom that Bill Clinton has made it abundantly clear that he does not respect.The call for women’s freedom from rape, abuse and harassment has always been the least popular and most politically fraught feminist cause. Abortion has always had more appeal to male voters as a political issue. Misogynist men – in a tradition that extends from the Playboy founder (and alleged rapist) Hugh Hefner to Barstool Sports founder (and alleged perpetrator of sexual assault) Dave Portnoy to former president (and alleged rapist) Bill Clinton – have long supported abortion rights, in part because they understand abortion not as a matter of women’s fundamental freedom and dignity but as a matter of men’s increased sexual access to women and decreased responsibility for the resulting pregnancies.These prurient, sexually entitled misogynists are not all Republicans – rape, and its apologism, have always been bipartisan endeavors – but they are not the kind of voters that Democrats should be courting. A bargain in which women’s right to end a pregnancy is made in exchange for men’s right to rape, harass and abuse women is not an acceptable one. We can do better: we can reach for a version of America in which women are truly free and equal, endowed with all the bodily sovereignty, self-determination and sexual autonomy that men are. That’s not the world that Bill Clinton represents, and it’s not a world that a party that insists on celebrating him can deliver.Bill Clinton has been out of office for nearly three decades. In that time, his once-rosy status as a liberal hero has thankfully dimmed, even if his alleged history of sexual abuse has not played a sufficient role in the reassessment of his reputation. Liberals now rightly look back at Clinton’s crime bill with horror; his devastating cuts to the welfare system were punitive and cruel, hurting women and children the most. He modeled a vision of a conservative Democratic party, one less committed to its principles than in cynically trading them away for a chance at power.His vision of change has failed, and his political project has been revealed as morally bankrupt. It’s not clear that he can even deliver many votes; a large swath of the American electorate is now too young to remember much of his presidency, aside from the sex scandals. It’s time for Democrats to send the old man home. And to tell him to keep his hands to himself.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      in Elections

      How Kamala Harris Is Already Changing the Face of Presidential Power

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      I have not been the biggest fan of Kamala Harris, but to my surprise, the candidate who underwhelmed in 2020 is gone. I have watched all of candidate Harris’s public appearances since becoming the presumptive Democratic nominee for a sense of how she intends to run and possibly govern. The audiences have been vastly different, among them: the annual conclave of Zeta Phi Beta sorority, a National Federation of Teachers convention and the Philadelphia rally where the Harris-Walz ticket made its first official appearance.What I took away: Kamala Harris is a different candidate than we saw four years ago. She is even a different rhetorician than we saw six months ago.Nominee Harris lands her applause lines. The former prosecutor is comfortable going on the attack. Her most consistent message is that Donald Trump wants to send America back to the Dark Ages. Unlike her predecessor, she relishes calling Trump out by name. Even her wacky humor, which has been mocked on social media, suddenly works. She sounds authentic. That’s the holy grail of electoral politics. Every wide-jawed cackle she offers the audience, every twinkle in her eye as she pokes at Trump — it all comes off as someone who is in on the joke. That is hard for any candidate but it is an almost impossible tightrope for a Black female candidate to walk.Authenticity is a mirage. Americans crave the performance of authenticity as a sign that our values are in safe hands — hands just like ours. Of course, people who study this stuff for a living don’t quite agree on what authenticity is. It’s a “you know it when you see it” situation. Political candidates have to negotiate ideas about identity with an audience’s expectations of who should be in power. A tall white guy with a healthy head of hair simply looks presidential.That’s where gender tripped up Hillary Clinton, the first, most viable female candidate for president. Americans were used to looking at her — as first lady, as a congresswoman, as secretary of state and as a national obsession. But for many reasons, a lot of voters (although not a majority of voters) did not think she was authentic enough to be president. She never figured out how to communicate presidential power during her campaign. She couldn’t make the idea of a president look like a woman.Kamala Harris has an even more difficult task: She has to make the presidency look like a Black woman.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Elections

      A Play About J.K. Rowling Stirred Outrage. Until It Opened.

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      The muted reaction to the Edinburgh Fringe show “TERF” suggests that when activists engage with potentially inflammatory art, offense can quickly vanish.There are more than 3,600 shows in this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe and most will struggle to get even a single newspaper review. Yet for months before the festival opened on Friday, one play was the subject of intense global media attention: “TERF,” an 80-minute drama about J.K. Rowling, the “Harry Potter” author, and her views on transgender women.Before anybody had even read the script, a Scottish newspaper called the play, which imagines Rowling debating her views with the stars of the “Harry Potter” movies, a “foul-mouthed” attack on the author. An article in The Daily Telegraph said that “scores of actresses” had turned down the opportunity to play Rowling. And The Daily Mail, a tabloid, reported that the production had encountered trouble securing a venue.On social media and women’s web forums, too, “TERF” stirred outraged discussion.The uproar raised the specter of pro-Rowling protesters outside the show and prompted debate in Edinburgh, the city that Rowling has called home for more than 30 years. But when “TERF” opened last week, it barely provoked a whimper. The only disturbance to a performance on Monday in the ballroom of Edinburgh’s Assembly Rooms came from a group of latecomers using a cellphone flashlight to find their seats. About 55 theatergoers watched the play in silence from the front few rows of the 350-seat capacity venue.The play imagines a showdown in a restaurant between Rowling and the stars of the “Harry Potter” movies.Andy Buchanan/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesGiven the regular disagreements between some feminists and transgender rights supporters, the uproar around “TERF” was not unexpected.But the muted response to the show itself suggests that fewer British people are riled by the debate than the media coverage implies — or at least that when activists engage with potentially inflammatory art, outrage can quickly vanish.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in US Politics

      Young women are the most progressive group in American history. Young men are checked out

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      View image in fullscreenWhen Donald Trump strutted on to the stage at the Republican national convention last month, it was to a raucous cover of James Brown’s It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World. The song credits men with inventing cars, trains, lights, boats, toys and commerce. The message was not subtle. At least, not to Melissa Deckman.“This idea of America needing someone who is a strong masculine figure – I think the Republican campaign this year is doing it even in a more pronounced and overt way than it did in 2016,” said Deckman, CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute. “You have a lot of younger men admiring the strength of Trump – or what they think is strong.”Deckman would know. In her forthcoming book The Politics of Gen Z: How the Youngest Voters Will Shape Our Democracy, she dives into the deep political divides between gen Z women and men and explores how they feel about growing up in the Trump era. Based on interviews with roughly 90 gen Z political activists, numerous focus groups and extensive polling, Deckman has identified what she calls a “historic reverse gender gap”.View image in fullscreenShe has found that gen Z men are becoming more conservative as well as increasingly indifferent to politics, bucking longstanding trends, dating back at least to the 1970s, that saw young people across the board voting liberal and men being generally more involved in politics than women. Meanwhile, gen Z women have not only become the most progressive cohort in US history but are also expected to outpace their male peers across virtually every measure of political involvement, such as donating money, volunteering for campaigns, registering people to vote – and, of course, voting.Young women were outstripping men on political engagement well before Joe Biden stepped aside in favor of Kamala Harris, setting the internet ablaze with memes and teeing up yet another presidential contest between Trump and a woman. Now, with Harris the presumptive Democratic nominee, a generation already riven by a canyon-wide political gender gap is watching a contest between a woman who could become the nation’s first Black and south Asian female president and a man who likes calling women “nasty”.“For me, the question come November is gonna be: to what extent do attitudes about gender influence the vote for Trump?” Deckman asked.Polls indicate that young men’s views on gender, femininity and masculinity are rapidly shifting. In 2022, 49% of gen Z men said that the United States had become “too soft and feminine”, Deckman found. Just a year later, 60% of gen Z men said the same. Deckman found that those who agreed with the statement were far more likely to have voted for Trump in 2016 – even after controlling for political party.No matter their age, women have long voted at higher rates than men – but that is the only political activity where they have consistently exceeded men. Men historically donated more, volunteered with campaigns more and otherwise participated in political life more. This year, Deckman believes young women will surpass young men not only at voting, but in all political activities. Democrats have historically had a firm grip on voters under 30 – a grip they may now be losing. Gen Z men, Deckman noted, have “reverted to the mean of men”: while they’re not necessarily more conservative that most men, they are more conservative than their millennial counterparts.Not all menThese trends are even more pronounced among white gen Z men. If you combine the number of independent gen Z men who lean Republican with those who identify as Republicans, Deckman said, young white men “look very conservative compared to even older white men”. She believes Trump will probably win young white men.In 2020, 49% of white men between the ages of 18 and 29 voted for Biden, according to an analysis of AP VoteCast data by the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement. Meanwhile, 42% voted for Trump.The damage that could do to Harris, however, is mitigated by the fact that white men make up a shrinking segment of gen Z. About half of gen Z is white, making it the most diverse generation in US history. Several polls have suggested that Trump could win among young Black and Latino men – a claim that Deckman eyes with suspicion, especially since Harris has entered the race and the GOP seems unable to stop themselves from making racist comments about her. Some Republicans have started calling Harris the “first DEI president”.Deckman’s surveys have found that gen Z men are less likely than their female counterparts to say that racial equality is important to them, but 45% do believe that it’s important, including 52% of Black gen Z men.“If Donald Trump uses misogynistic, racist language toward Kamala Harris, I think the net effect for young men will be more off-putting than not,” Deckman said. “The end result for him is a net negative. It’s also, of course, wrong.”‘They don’t care’Another mitigating factor could help Harris: young men don’t seem all that interested in politics, period.“They don’t care,” Deckman said. In surveys, “I asked them: what are you passionate about? What issues are critically important to you? There’s like 20% gaps between young men and young women on everything.”In addition to caring more about issues like LGBTQ+ rights and abortion, as might be expected, gen Z women care more about economic issues like inflation, jobs and unemployment, which are typically thought to be more important to men. (LGBTQ+ zoomers also cared equally or more about every issue than straight zoomers.) Even men who agree that the US is too “soft and feminine” don’t feel more motivated to act. Instead, it is Democratic women who reject that notion who tend to get more involved in politics.While young men fall behind women in political engagement, women have, over the last few decades, gone to college and joined the workforce at higher and higher rates. These trends are not unrelated. The more education and money you have, the more likely you are to be invested in politics.Feeling like your rights are under “direct threat” also increases political involvement – and in the age of Trump, #MeToo and the fall of Roe v Wade, plenty of gen Z women feel like their rights are under threat. Gen Z men just don’t feel the same urgency.Surprisingly, there is one area of political involvement where young men and women feel similarly: they are both deeply uninterested in running for office. Women have long been less interested in running for office than men. But as of 2022, Deckman found, only 6% of gen Z men said they definitely planned to run for office, while 4% of gen Z women said the same. Despite women’s political enthusiasm, zoomers as a whole remain unconvinced that joining government is worth it.“Gen Z is far less likely to be confident in the federal government, in the media, in organized religion, in the police, in the criminal justice system,” Deckman said. “This is just endemic to a generation of young people who have grown up in one crisis after another.” More