Susan Sarandon told us why she would not vote for Hillary Clinton: “I don’t vote with my vagina.” Nor, it seems, do many women. The howl of pain that accompanied the post-election analysis has often centred on that one disturbing statistic: 53% of white women voted for a man who calls women pigs, has a string of sexual assault claims still outstanding, who will happily turn back women’s rights to contraception and abortion if it suits him. Women beware women.
How could they? It had been widely predicted that it would be women who stopped Trump, who proved he was unacceptable. The majority of black women and a large number of Hispanic women did indeed vote for Clinton. The problem was white women. The phrase that is bandied about is that this is all the fault of “white feminism”. Trump’s victory absolutely exposed and exploited racism, there is no doubt about that. There are two choices here, then: to condemn everyone who voted for Trump as despicable racist scum or to understand why this has happened. Understanding is not the same as “normalising” Trump, but I know condemnation is, at this point, more emotionally satisfying.
Clearly the polls were wrong and, worryingly, what women were telling pollsters was not true. But, early on, some warnings were ignored because they revealed a kind of cognitive dissonance. Back in May, in impeccably liberal Oregon, where Bernie Sanders swept all but one county in the primaries, 27% of women said they would vote for Trump. By then, we could also see the peculiar misogyny of young female Sanders supporters. They did not just think Clinton was a flawed candidate – she was – but akin to Satan. As they were getting Bernie’s face tattooed on to their bodies, they repeatedly told us that Clinton’s gender did not matter. All the guff about a first female president was just guff; for them, Clinton was a robotic corporate shill.
The irrelevancy of gender is a theme that runs through much contemporary discourse. What matters is who will get things done. Yet everyone exists in a climate where men who seek power are real men but women who seek power are innately distrustful and fake.
The Clinton camp spoke of “internalised misogyny”, but this result has seen it externalised, with many using Trump’s victory as yet another stick to beat feminism, a feminism that is white, liberal and always betrays women of colour. The result showed that most people continued to vote on party lines. The question remains, though: why, with Trump openly demeaning women, did so many continue to vote for him? This pivoting on the way people vote against their own self-interest, the powerless voting for the already powerful, cuts right across our politics. What is wrong with the working class? Why will it vote for billionaires? How could any woman think that voting for an openly sexist, racist man was somehow upending the establishment?
It is impossible to be feminist and not be appalled by the complicity of women in their own oppression. But it is impossible to be a woman and not have some knowledge of how this works. If one grows up in a culture in which one’s self-worth is measured primarily by one’s desirability to men, then your energy is consumed into this horizontal competition with other women that can never be totally won. One way to be desirable to men may be to align oneself with their interests in the hope they might protect you. I would wager that every woman who dismissed Trump’s treatment of women as just “the way men are” has also defended a man in her life who has done just the same thing. Trump talks of “cherishing” women. The women he surrounds himself with make it clear how this operates: Ivanka, the daughter, talks publicly of female empowerment while defending a man who sexually fetishises her. Melania, the wife, who was put on a catwalk at age five, once boasted to Howard Stern about how much sex she has with her husband. She is valued for her beauty and her desire to be a housewife, unlike Ivanka’s mother, Ivana. Melania agreed with her husband that Barack Obama should be made to show his birth certificate. She is now being rebranded as “gracious”.
Voters can see this display of surrendered femininity and yet dismiss it as less important than the economy or their hatred of “illegal rapists” (Trump code for all non-whites). Here, in this collision of internalised misogyny and white dominance, is Trump’s appeal. At best we might say some of this is unconscious.
For power is never simply a possession but an exercise; power is about how we understand ourselves. Feminism seeks to unpick all the tiny ways in which we are bound. Everywhere we look, there are women hating other women for business or pleasure: those who don’t want a female boss; who don’t want positive discrimination; who like strip clubs and porn as much as the boys; who don’t want to worship in churches with female priests; who want to force other women to give birth to children they don’t want; who say FGM is “cultural”; and who get off on body shaming. On and on it goes. How can we be surprised that misogyny is not a male-only attribute?
Far from it. As the American satirist HL Mencken defined it, a misogynist is “a man who hates women as much as women hate one another”.
Which is immeasurably.