Elections as 'Manhood Competitions': Feminist Political Scientists Reckon With Harris' Loss

(lengthy, important, infuriating read)


Elections as ‘Manhood Competitions’: Feminist Political Scientists Reckon With Harris’ Loss
PUBLISHED 12/9/2024 by Jackson Katz



“If candidates can win by effectively feminizing their opponents, what does it mean when a woman enters the race?” Two political scientists make sense of Trump’s win.




Vice President Kamala Harris at her presidential campaign rally in Harrisburg, Pa., on Oct. 30, 2024. (Nathan Morris / NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Ms. contributor Jackson Katz—creator of the 2024 documentary The Man Card: 50 Years of Gender, Power, and the American Presidency—interviewed Dr. Caroline Heldman about the 2024 election.

Dr. Caroline Heldman is a political scientist and chair of the gender, women and sexuality studies program at Occidental College in Los Angeles. She is also president and CEO of Stand With Survivors and a political commentator for Spectrum News and CNN. Heldman earned her Ph.D. from Rutgers University and a certificate in executive leadership from the Harvard Business School. She has published eight books, including Women, Power, and Politics: The Fight for Gender Equality in the United States (Oxford University Press). Her work has been featured in numerous documentaries, including Miss Representation and The Mask You Live In. She co-founded the New Orleans Women’s Shelter, the Lower Ninth Ward Living Museum, End Rape on Campus (EROC) and Faculty Against Rape (FAR) and led the campaign that overturned the time limit on prosecuting rape in California. She is the board president of the TEP Center, the first civil rights museum in New Orleans, and the chair of the board of Alturas Institute, a nonprofit fighting for stronger democracy.

Below, Katz and Heldman—longtime friends and colleagues—discuss the presidential election, the “uphill climb” for women in politics, and how political parties can combat the gender penalty.

Jackson Katz: You’ve been studying gender and the presidency for a long time. Did anything surprise you in this year’s election?

Caroline Heldman: I continue to be surprised at how little campaigns, pollsters, pundits and mainstream political science consider gender in presidential elections, given that it always plays an outsized role in the U.S. While other countries have put women in the top leadership position, mostly through familial replacement and elevation by their party in parliamentary systems, the unique electoral system in the U.S. has served as a barrier to a woman president. As you’ve written, the American presidency is always a contest of competing notions of manhood. The president is branded as the father-protector of the “free world,” so gender always plays a role, even when it’s all male candidates.

Presidential elections as manhood competitions is evidenced by the fact that male candidates weaponize femininity against their male opponents in order to win the office. “Little Marco Rubio.” Hand size discussions at a presidential debate. John Kerry criticized for wind surfing (not manly enough) and allegedly using Botox. Michael Dukakis not being “man enough” to fill the helmet. Al Gore throwing a football on a tarmac next to his campaign plane. Jeb Bush being criticized for his close relationship with his mother. If candidates can win by effectively feminizing their opponents, what does it mean when a woman enters the race? Like any woman seeking a position of leadership that is default male, she starts at a considerable disadvantage. A small group of political scientists have been studying the gender penalty for the presidency for half a century, but despite a deep engagement with theory, history and data, campaign operatives and pollsters have yet to quantitatively measure the presidential gender penalty. For campaign folks who seek to win elections, this oversight is baffling.
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Nick Passano, a cryptocurrency investor, at a rally for Donald Trump, during a campaign stop in Johnstown, Pa., on Aug. 30, 2024. (Roberto Schmidt / AFP via Getty Images)
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Democratic presidential candidates Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.); then-South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg; Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.); President Joe Biden; Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.); and then-Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) ahead of the Democratic presidential debate on Nov. 20, 2019, in Atlanta. (Alex Wong / Getty Images)
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Black women face a unique form of intersectional bias called misogynoir. Trump and his team employed the racist Jezebel stereotype of Black women as sexually voracious on many occasions by suggesting she slept her way to the top. At his Madison Square Garden rally, Trump gave a hearty laugh to a member of the crowd who yelled, “she worked on a corner.” Mind you, the deplorable Jezebel trope was weaponized during American slavery to paint Black women as sexually aggressive and therefore “unrapable.” The Trump camp also routinely called Harris a “DEI hire,” “low-IQ” and “lazy,” tapping into racist and sexist notions of inferiority. These disturbing messages were targeted to young men through unconventional media, like popular manosphere podcasts, and it worked. Trump won 56 percent of male voters ages 18–29. For context, 56 percent of young male voters supported Biden in 2020. According to post-election focus groups, Trump appealed to young men by appearing on ostensibly non-political podcasts of influencers they trust, and being likeable, despite making misogynistic and racist comments. In short, Trump used the freewheeling misogynistic culture of the manosphere to run the most openly sexist campaign we’ve ever seen, and it worked.
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Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton greets people during an event for Vice President Kamala Harris on Nov. 2, 2024 in Tampa. (Joe Raedle / Getty Images)

. . . . .

Heldman: I’m hopeful that, if we recognize and quantify the gender penalty in presidential races, we can elect a woman president in our lifetime. The gender penalty affects Republican and Democratic women, especially affects women of color, and is baked into the way in which we conceive of the presidency. It’s not going away anytime soon, but the path forward is clear as day—data will show us who harbors gender biases pertaining to women’s leadership and the presidency, whether they are conscious of it or not. Once we have a baseline for bias, which of course will vary a bit each election, we can develop a plan to combat it. Electing a woman president is a democratic priority. Our nation has been around for nearly 250 years, and we cannot call ourselves a strong democracy if we systematically exclude 51 percent of the population from holding the highest political office. We need to overcome and eventually eliminate the presidential gender penalty to become a more perfect union.


https://msmagazine.com/2024/12/09/gender-trump-win-harris-lose-men-feminist-women/