THere’s a story about the 2024 presidential campaign that says this election is all about men and their anger. In this depiction, men have fared poorly: the decline of the industrial economy in the years since the postwar boom means that many of the jobs that gave their fathers dignity, structure and a stable salary are now gone, and so are some men, especially those without College graduates, have fallen into a cycle of desperation and desperation, unable to earn a living for which they could respect themselves.

This economic argument about men is usually followed by a cultural one: women are no longer as nice to men as they should be, or perhaps not as nice to men as they used to be. At one end of this conversation there are paeans to men’s loneliness and discussions of men’s suicide rates, quasi-poetic odes to their depths of despair and their acute feeling: Women simply don’t understand what it’s like to be as sad as men are sad.

On the other hand, authors and commentators point to recent cultural trends that they say have alienated men and made them feel attacked or unnecessary. You seem to be seriously pointing out that some young feminists online have used the term “toxic masculinity” to make men feel bad, bad enough that their feelings constitute an emergency for the nation. They point to the “The future is female” T-shirts that were popular in 2017. This too reflects a major social pathology, a sign that as a nation we have failed men and boys. Why, they plead, can’t the future be male?

Those who worry about the condition of men may be right that young men and boys feel this way. You may be right that men in America are small-minded and narcissistic enough that the sight of an original t-shirt that doesn’t show them enough respect can drive them into depression and self-doubt. They may be right that women’s modest but real successes in recent decades – their rise into the paid workforce in the decades since the second wave era, their more modest efforts to promote a more egalitarian realignment of their private heterosexual relationships – are men have driven to this the edge. You may be right that men today feel nothing more strongly than resentment and anger toward women, and nothing motivates them more than the desire to punish them. At least that seems to be the bet Donald Trump is making.

In the final days of the election, it appears that Trump’s campaign has placed high hopes on the support of these angry young men, hoping to harness misogynistic sentiments to drive them to the polls. There’s been a lot of talk in this year’s election about the gender gap, which is particularly pronounced among young voters: polls show Trump winning by a significant margin among men under 30, and Harris winning by an even larger margin among women of the same age.

A conventional politician would have tried to narrow this gap and tailor his message to be more attractive to female voters. Trump did not take this approach. In the final days of his campaign, he and his supporters have emphasized their misogynistic resentments, their misogynistic grievances, and their chauvinistic political agenda at every turn.

There was Tucker Carlson, the Trump surrogate and fired Fox News host, who compared a potential Trump victory in incestuously sexualized terms to a stern father, Trump, “beating” his disobedient daughter, the Democratic electorate. There’s his vice president JD Vance, who has complained about the “psychopathic” tendencies of “childless cat ladies” on seemingly every right-wing podcast since 2020. There’s Jesse Watters, the pro-Trump Fox personality, and Charlie Kirk, the founder of the Trump youth group Turning Point USA, who have both expressed outrage that women might vote differently than their husbands.

Then, of course, there is Trump’s biggest donor, the pro-natalist Elon Musk, who regularly offers to inseminate women in public vaccinations to sexualize and humiliate them and is reportedly working to set up a facility in Austin for his 11-year-old to build a woman. plus children and the women who gave birth to them. His political action committee, America PAC, recently ran an ad that said, “Kamala Harris is a C-word.” “You heard that right. “A big ol’ C-word,” says the voiceover. At the end, the ad reveals, with a wink, that the word is “communist.”

And then there’s Trump himself, the author of the Roe-Wade reversal, who once bragged that he liked to grab women “by the pussy” and was more or less accused of doing so by more than two dozen women. The former president took the stage at a rally in Wisconsin this week to portray himself as a “protector” of women. “I’m going to do it whether the women like it or not,” he said.

All of this is meant to appeal to men. Maybe it will be like that. But women listen too.

For all the concerns about men’s feelings of inadequacy and insult, their perceived loss of status, and their desire to have their masculinity and dominance over women confirmed by a second Trump term, comparatively little attention has been paid to women’s feelings.

Finally, women have also lost their status: because of Trump, they lost Roe v Wade, the US Supreme Court precedent that not only gave them control over their own pregnancies, but also long stood as a symbol of women’s formal equality before the Law applied. Without it, women suffer and die. many more were simply humiliated and made aware that their government did not see them as equals and adults who could be trusted with control of their own lives.

There is great sympathy in the political media and among pundits for how many men feel that the Second Wave era and its aftermath have hurt them. Comparatively less sympathy – and far less attention – is given to the way women feel now that Second Wave gains in rights, dignity and equality are being stripped away from them.

There is no reason to doubt the power and appeal of misogyny: Trump may well be right when he says that resentment and hatred of women will be a successful message among men. But women’s feminist sympathies – their anger, their grief, their sense that the American promise has been ripped away from them – should not be underestimated either. We may be in an era of profound and sharp anti-feminist backlash. But feminists can also fight back.