Essay: Who Will Fix Men?

From Day of Rage: How Trump Supporters Took the U.S. Capitol

First published on November 12, 2024

When Donald Trump won the 2016 U.S. presidential election,  U.S. media and analysts centered the demographic that propelled him to victory (white people, who not coincidentally were the least likely to be hurt by his policies) as the group the rest of us had to coddle, tip toe around, be civil to, not call racist, cajole, and work harder to understand if we wanted them to stop voting for him. 

Now that Trump has won the 2024 election, U.S. media and analysts are centering the demographic that propelled him to victory (men, more of whom voted for him in this election than in 2016, and who not coincidentally are the least likely to be hurt by his policies) as the group the rest of us have to fix if we want them to stop voting for him.

While it is on white people again (71 percent of voters in this election were white and the majority of them voted for Trump), that Donald Trump will return to the White House, increasingly “Men are hurting. Who will fix men?” is becoming the 2024 equivalent of “White people are hurting. Who will fix white people?” of 2016.

The majority if not all the analyses of the U.S. election (particularly in U.S. media) that centers men presents Trump’s victory as an anti-feminist backlash and posits his opponent Vice President Kamala Harris as a feminist candidate. Such analyses ignores the fact that the Biden/Harris administration fund and arm Israel’s genocide in Gaza. 

Yes, Trump and Harris often seemed to be competing over who could be more pro-Israel, but Harris’ refusal to take a stronger position than mere lip service to a ceasefire is a reason that I do not consider her candidacy a feminist one, as I wrote here. 

It is telling that Harris did not say the word “feminist” during her campaign, probably in a bid to not scare men, while Trump was all too happy to use the most vile misogynist rhetoric, boldly and unashamedly. 

Whether you consider Harris a feminist candidate or not, there is no doubt that Trump and the circus around him whipped up a fervour of misogyny, not just against Harris but against women generally, cis and trans, that was breathtaking in its boldness and shamelessness. Add to that a fevered Christian fundamentalism that targeted LGBTQ communities and anyone who didn’t belong in the patriarchal hellscape of President Grab Them by the Pussy and his Vice President Childless Cat Ladies.

All that, and it’s one piece after another of “Men are Hurting! Who Will Fix Men?”

It is telling that Harris did not say the word “feminist” during her campaign, probably in a bid to not scare men, while Trump was all too happy to use the most vile misogynist rhetoric, boldly and unashamedly. 

The majority of men voted for Trump in 2016 (52 percent) and 2024 (55 percent). 

One of the first “fixes” that has emerged since Trump declared victory was the apparent embrace by some women in the U.S. of the Korean radical feminist movement "4B" or the "Four Nos": no dating, no sex, no marriage, and no child bearing. 

In Nick Fuentes’ “Your body, my choice,” world, the Four No’s can seem a radical choice by keeping your body off limits altogether.

The hellscape of Vice President Childless Cat Ladies posits women’s happiness firmly within the confines of a heterosexual marriage that she cannot leave (J.D. Vance wants to end no-fault divorce), where she is financially dependent on her husband (Vance believes working outside the home brings women misery) for whom she pops out one baby after another (the destruction of Roe v Wade and a possible abortion ban will usher in forced births as a national norm). 

It's not men we have to fix. It’s women we have to focus on.

There is no “fixing men” without a reckoning with that power and influence of religion, racism, and misogyny, but it is a reckoning that the U.S. refuses to have.

So, yes, I see the attraction of the Four Nos as four Fuck You’s to Trump, Vance, et al but in Vancelandia, a sex strike affirms rather than protests what misogynists believe: that sex is something that men take and that women give. Women’s pleasure and desire are immaterial in Vancelandia.

I am childfree by choice and no fan of marriage, in any land let alone that of Trump and his circus, but I especially reject sex strikes because they decenter heterosexual women’s desire and turn sex into a reward for men if they “behave.” 

Sex in a country that bans abortion is dangerous for people who can become pregnant. Choosing to carry a pregnancy to term in a country where abortion is banned is dangerous. 

It is also dangerous to think you’re free when you are not, especially when your enemies are winning. 

One of the most stubborn myths that I’ve always found astounding about the U.S. is that people here think they are freer than they actually are. It is a particularly dangerous myth for women. The U.S. is a deeply conservative country that is in denial over the power and influence that Christianity exerts. And that power and influence, along with racism and misogyny  are at the core of the ascendancy of Trump et al.

There is no “fixing men” without a reckoning with that power and influence of religion, racism, and misogyny, but it is a reckoning that the U.S. refuses to have.

Several of the pre- and post-election pieces that I’ve read that effectively ask “Who will fix men?” have positioned Trump’s 2024 campaign as a backlash against feminist gains in the U.S. 

What feminist gains? 

For over 50 years, Christian conservatives in the U.S. fought to destroy abortion rights–a central tenet of feminism–and won. The U.S. does not have the stomach for a long-overdue reckoning with the white supremacist Christian theocracy that has been unabashed in its destruction of Roe v Wade, and abortion rights are not the only rights it is destroying, as the Christian right comes after LGBTQ people too.

One of the most stubborn myths that I’ve always found astounding about the U.S. is that people here think they are freer than they actually are. It is a particularly dangerous myth for women.

The pandemic pushed more women than men–especially Black and women of colour–out of the workforce. Congress is barely 25 percent women. And the right wing are increasingly gutting identity politics by placing women in positions that feminism made possible for them and where they now are cutting feminism at the knees.

And still we hear “Men are hurting! Who will fix them?”

While Trump’s victory is on white people, one of the most alarming facts of the 2024 election is that more Black and men of colour voted for him this time than when he won the first time. Many more. 

Black men: 13 percent (2016) 21 percent (2024)

Latinx men: 32 percent (2016) 55 percent (2024)

All other races: 31 percent (2016) 46 percent (2024)

Source: Edison Research 2024 exit poll via NBC

Source: Edison Research 2016 Exit poll

Clearly, Trump the rapist, racist, “protector of women, whether they like it or not,” appeals to more than just white people, and that is alarming, even if the men of those marginalised groups comprise a minority of voters in the U.S.

Let’s not waste time centering the people least likely to be hurt by another Trump term–men–the way we wasted time by centering white people and their hurt feelings over being called racist for voting for Trump in 2016.

In a paper she delivered at Amherst College in 1980, Audre Lorde called out the bullshit we are being tasked with.

“Whenever the need for some pretense of communication arises, those who profit from our oppression call upon us to share our knowledge with them. In other words, it is the responsibility of the oppressed to teach the oppressors their mistakes,” Lorde said. “Traditionally, in American society, it is the members of oppressed, objectified groups who are expected to stretch out and bridge the gap between the actualities of our lives and the consciousness of our oppressor.”

To expect Black and people of colour to educate white people as to our humanity and to expect women to educate men, helps the “oppressors maintain their position and evade responsibility for their own actions,” Lorde said.

We must resist the “constant drain of energy which might be better used in redefining ourselves and devising realistic scenarios for altering the present and constructing the future.”

This is not the time to mythologise about “feminist gains” when we should instead be clear eyed that the second coming of Trump is a death knell of whatever used to pass for feminism in this country.

Let’s not mince words: anyone who is not a conservative cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied man is fucked in Vancelandia. This is not the time to mythologise about “feminist gains” when we should instead be clear eyed that the second coming of Trump is a death knell of whatever used to pass for feminism in this country.

Trump’s first election in 2016 was a deadly blow to feminism in the U.S. The Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v Wade hammered more nails into its casket. And with his re-election, Trump is now triumphantly standing atop its grave, grabbing his crotch. 

This is not the time to ask who will fix the boys and whatever manchild is fueling their whining about how feminists have hurt them when patriarchy is enabling and protecting men who hurt and kill us for anything from not wanting to give them our number to leaving them because they’re beating us to forcing us to carry a pregnancy we don’t want or which is itself killing us.

This is not the time to ask whose job it is to fix men. It sure as fuck isn’t mine.  

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Mona Eltahawy is a feminist author, commentator and disruptor of patriarchy. Her latest book is an anthology on menopause she edited called Bloody Hell!: Adventures in Menopause from Around the World. Her first book Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution (2015) targeted patriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa and her second The Seven Necessary Sins For Women and Girls (2019) took her disruption worldwide. It is now available in Ireland and the UK. Her commentary has appeared in media around the world and she makes video essays and writes a newsletter as FEMINIST GIANT.

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