Across the country, millions and millions of citizens who supported Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign are no longer walking around in a haze, instead moving toward the light.
Still, there is emotional fallout that needs our attention. Our nerves are frayed; it’s impossible to ignore the stress. It’s a good time to sit quietly, take deep breaths, and feel our bodies.
After nearly a decade of growling and bombast, Donald Trump rode a patriarcha-saurus back into the White House. Why that dinosaur wasn’t winded, exhausted, and ultimately defeated will be studied by historians for a long time. Even as we nurse our psychic wounds, the responsibility of redoubling our efforts to hasten the end of patriarchy is still on us. Dinosaurs just aren’t that smart.
Voters who thought that January 20 would see the nation’s first female president begin work on her “to-do” list, remember well her warning that Trump would be working on an enemy’s list. Perhaps she would have added to her list holding a series of national town halls about patriarchy and manhood, perhaps coordinated by the White House Gender Policy Council. Instead, that office will surely be disbanded immediately after Trump’s inauguration. Nevertheless, it would behoove all of us, regardless of our political views, to listen to the frustrations and fears of disenchanted, underemployed and unemployed men, knowing they’ll discover soon enough that they voted against their own self-interest.
White male supremacy, which Trump ran on, continues to play an outsized role in exacerbating the divide that afflicts our nation. While not widely understood, men, too, are damaged by patriarchy; it diminishes us, undermines our humanity. Trump’s election means that patriarchy’s poisonous objective—to further expand male entitlement, privilege, and power—is getting fresh wind in it sails; most likely, powered by oil.
Going forward, what was accurate before election day is still true: the type of manhood we choose will contribute to determining what kind of a nation we will be: It now looks more like Proud Boys’ country than a land populated by compassionate men; a Handmaid’s Tale world of subjugation rather than a nation of empowered women and girls.
Half the country thought we would be welcoming a First Gentleman, Doug Emhoff, and Vice President-elect Gov. Tim Walz, representing a 21st century expression of manhood, emphasizing compassion, empathy and care. Instead, we got a heaping helping of Trump’s Archie Bunker’s 20th-century masculinity—gripes and grievance.
Too often, men particularly don’t acknowledge how much courage it takes to embody compassion and empathy, and conversely how cowardly it is to rely on meanness and bullying. Yet, those repugnant qualities are holding sway now. It’s on us to find new ways to connect with and mentor young men, bringing into focus a new boyhood, a transformed manhood. Despite facing strong headwinds, we must continue to urge parents, educators, coaches and other mentors to develop and promote programs that nurture young men’s emotional growth and well-being. We can’t afford to rest right now.
Kamala Harris’s candidacy was supposed to be an antidote to Donald Trump’s white male supremacy. She didn’t need to talk about feminism; she embodied it. Perhaps that was the problem. Underplaying her gender, race, and ethnicity didn’t protect her from a continuous onslaught of ugly sexist and racist slurs that contributed to her defeat.
While feminism simply denotes believing in the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes, Trump and his allies viciously demeaned it at every turn. They still do. This is not the moment to invite men to learn what feminism really means; that’s for later.
To bridge our political, cultural, and gender chasm, we’ll need to recognize what the election reflected: patriarchy’s grip and the assault on feminism are two sides of the same coin. While it remains critical to continually acknowledge that racism has its knee on the necks of Black and brown people, if we’re to ever have an honest reckoning in America, we’ll have to admit patriarchy has its other knee on the necks of women. It’s on us now—not on January 20—to make that part of the national conversation.
There’s a lot of work to do. One take-away from the Harris campaign still rings true: “We’re not going back.”
Rob Okun, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is editor emeritus of Voice Male magazine, chronicling the antisexist men’s movement for more than 30 years and is editor of the anthology, Voice Male: The Untold Story of the Profeminist Men’s Movement.
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