Julie Marquis is a recovering journalist of four decades who now pays attention to her family. A veteran of the LA Times, KFF News and Reuters, she led teams that won a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service and a Selden Ring for Investigative Reporting.
I came of age in the 1970s in Marin County, just across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco where the women’s movement caught fire.
Initially, I was oblivious. But I had a father who threw baseballs just as hard to me as to my three brothers, and we both saw my exclusion from Little League as a grave injustice. Concluding that being female was a curse, I insisted from age 10 that my family call me Ralph. My mother, already awash in males, refused, limiting our communication for some time.
Ralph mostly disappeared by adolescence. By then, I began to take some comfort in this thing called “women’s lib.” Though too young to know what liberation meant – burning bras? – I was all for getting the same shake in life as boys. And thanks largely to Gloria Steinem and her feminist cohort, I had by my late teens little doubt that I deserved, and would enjoy, rights and opportunities equal to my brothers'.
If I’d known what was coming a half-century later, I might have despaired.
Misogyny is having an ugly resurgence in America. While sexism has ebbed and flowed over the decades, women have seen their rights and status radically deteriorate since President Trump was first elected in 2016. A recent Gallup poll found that 40% of American women between the ages of 15 and 44 would like to move somewhere else permanently if they could. Their top choice: safe and sane Canada. They’re mostly turned off by the U.S. political climate and have lost faith in the country’s institutions.
I don’t believe women are going to emigrate en masse, and there’s no way we’re going back to the gender roles of the 1950s. But I think we are at an inflection point where American men may ultimately have more to lose than women do if misogyny doesn’t migrate to the discard file.
Women’s growing dissatisfaction with retrograde, heavily male leadership, and their rising political engagement and educational attainments threaten the dominance that insecure men desperately seek to maintain.
To sum up the recent assaults on women’s rights and dignity: The Trump administration successfully sought to overturn Roe v. Wade, the decades-old precedent that guaranteed women a constitutional right to an abortion. Women are actually dying as a result. The president and his minions have summarily fired or demoted female leaders who built respectable careers over decades in the federal government, especially the military. They’ve disparaged women by denigrating their physical attractiveness, intelligence or presumed reliance on diversity programs to get ahead.
When the president recently said, “Quiet, piggy” to a female journalist, I wasn’t surprised. Consider the source: a man who bragged about grabbing women by the “pussy,” who has been accused of predatory or inappropriate behavior toward women about two dozen times and was found liable in court for brazen sexual assault in a department store dressing room.
With straight faces, political and thought leaders in the conservative movement have touted wifely submission, urged more baby-making and lamented women’s “woke” impact on the workplace. Vice President JD Vance and popular commentator Tucker Carlson, middle-aged men who sometimes behave like whiny tomcats, refer to their liberal foes as “menopausal.”
Meanwhile, our government has made a dirty word of DEI, or “diversity, equity and inclusion.” The acronym is preferred, I think, because it’s uncomfortable to say these terms outright. Who wants to shout “Down with equity!” “Stamp out inclusion!”? It goes against everything we learned in kindergarten.
Mariel Garza
The misogyny in MAGA isn’t just ridiculous and repugnant – it’s potentially dangerous. It fuels and feeds off the “manosphere,” a hyper-macho online ecosystem, mostly made up of alienated and disenfranchised young men, that has been linked to violence in the real world.
These disgruntled males can start off curious and in search of community but later become radicalized. If you’re young and on social media, you’ve almost certainly heard of the “incels,” involuntary celibates, who see having sex as their right and openly assail females who deny it to them. Many worship at the feet of influencers like Andrew Tate, a self-described misogynist who’s been called the “king of toxic masculinity.” Tate, who describes himself as close to the the Trump family, is fighting charges in Europe of sex trafficking, rape and money laundering. He has nearly 11 million followers on X.
And so, here we are. Some days I read the headlines and wonder what the women’s movement was for. Why should that ambitious girl, the one who threw in her lot with the libbers in 1974, not despair? Why should young women today who eye Canada longingly not decamp?
Primarily, it’s because we need to see this surge in misogyny as just a moment in history – a loathsome, infuriating moment, but one that is almost certain to shift in our favor.
Paul Thornton
Women’s voting power is growing. We have outvoted men in every presidential election since 1980. Of course, women do not vote monolithically or solely based on gender politics – and plenty of females support Trump and MAGA. But we skew Democratic, and younger women even more so. Female voters were key to electing Democratic governors, both women, in the recent gubernatorial victories in Virginia and New Jersey on Nov. 4.
Beyond politics, technology has erased many of the advantages conferred by men’s greater upper body strength and physical bulk, and women have more than demonstrated they can hold their own based on their brains, if not brawn. In fact, they are more educated than ever, outpacing men in college completion across major ethnic and racial groups.
The growing disparity has only added to concerns that young men are falling behind their female peers. That’s a legitimate problem – but men’s struggles can’t be fixed by tearing women down.
I was wrong, back in the ’70s, when I decided being female was a curse. I should tell my daughters what I’ve learned since: The real curse is on men who double down on misogyny as women pass them by.
