Beat By a Girl: The Harris Campaign's Horrible, Hopeful Road Ahead Through the New Misogyny--and How We Got Here From 2016 (Patreon)

(Cross-posted from Substack. This was a paywalled post there, and as usual, if any Patreon member actively asks to see it here, I will cross-post it for you beautiful folk. That codicil is only in place to maintain the Cozy Code here and only bring politics and bad feelings if requested.)

I’m incredibly happy to see people here, there, and everywhere embracing Kamala Harris and rallying to elect a woman of color to the Presidency. Not only that, but by and large resisting the tired old wadded-up wet pants middle-school knee-jerk ha ha what a stupid slut, am I right, fellow excellent gentlemen who definitely aren’t still mad their English teacher was a woman and/or a girl rejected them and taking that out on all of society because I can’t handle my big feelings attacks that this country just instinctively projectile vomits in the direction of any woman who commands even a bit of authority. Especially one using that authority to say something beyond tee hee I make granola shirts from scratch while worshipping my conspicuously absent husband and that’s more than enough identity for me so I DEMAND IT BE ENOUGH FOR YOU now give me money to hear more of me speaking about how women shouldn’t speak!

I’m also….pretty damn surprised. And extremely concerned it isn’t going to last. Because I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the general vibe has gotten really fucking weird when it comes to gender over the last decade. Famous people and regular people and every sentient podcaster mic in between have spent years now happily spilling bilge that would make even the rankest 1950s misogynist blush, right out loud with their own government name attached, and without the courtesy of even so much as a flaccid Al Bundy punchline.

Has the general vibe when it comes to gender always been extremely weird and like unto an ourobouros cooking its own tail to serve to her husband in silent adoration? Of fucking course it has. In some ways we’re only just now speaking about how truly demented the treatment of half this species by the other half has been, for how long, and at what cost. But for a minute there, it wasn’t just completely socially acceptable to talk about women like cattle the way a whole bunch of ALLEGEDLY NORMAL people have gotten super comfy doing. And honestly, it’s been a couple of centuries since it was cool to just get out there and YELL ABOUT WOMBS ALL THE TIME WHAT IN THE MEDIEVAL HALLUCINOGENIC BOSCHIAN BUTTSCAPE OF HELL, YOU GUYS.

Oh no birth rates are down on the Plane of Endless Torment! I wonder why?

I’ve talked about how much I value my little cusp micro-generation before, the cultural transitions being born in 1979 has let me witness first-hand—and this is one of them. Because I remember when it changed. There was a part of my childhood when I distinctly remember the main question adults asked me was how many kids do you want when you grow up? And I remember when it changed to what do you want to BE when you grow up?

A terrifyingly large portion of the population wants to change it back. Maybe they always wanted to change it back. But for awhile, they were at least quiet about it. Now, punishing women for not having children is the stated position of a major party’s Vice Presidential candidate, and he’s not even close to alone, or even the worst peddler of egregiously garbage opinions on how tight to cinch the leash on women being treated as human at all.

And a world where some of the most popular podcasts, politicians, and media content regularly lays out how fundamentally worthless women are and intently discuss methodologies for abusing and exploiting them for the pleasure and profit of men without any real consequences, even social consequences…I have a hard time believing 100 days isn’t plenty of time for America to find a way to justify choosing full fascism over a woman in charge again.

The 2016 election is a huge part of how we got here. And while the relationship might not be obvious, the rise of TERFs and their absolutely unhinged hatred of transwomen is a very real by-product of the steep rise in acceptability a scorchingly radioactive brand misogyny has enjoyed since Hillary Clinton got up there, dared to breathe in the presence of power, and spooked the shit out of everyone who hadn’t already lost their ever-loving minds because a black man got elected twice.

I’ll warn you right now: I’m not even close to interested in re-litigating whether or not Hillary was a good candidate, or a good person, or whether she should have campaigned in Wisconsin, or even uttering the phrase “DNC” as though it’s some massively powerful cabal of sorcerers and not a semi-competent club of former Model UN kids who can only sometimes manage to get anybody elected despite the raw majority of the country agreeing with them on most issues. It simply doesn’t matter anymore, and it’s not where I’m going with this.

I want to talk about how I saw her when I was little.

When I was a child, I adored Hillary. And I was not alone. I was amazed by her. When I was a child, she went on television, the wife of a governor, not even a candidate’s yet, and said she wasn’t interested in spending her life baking cookies. Well, fuck, neither was I! And there she was, stuck in that silent politician’s wife position and saying flat-out she wasn’t going to stay silent.

I named my pet rabbit Hillary. I really and actually did. I was 13 years old and I didn’t just want to be somebody’s wife and somebody’s mother. I wanted to be somebody, all on my own. I wanted to believe I could be. That I’d be allowed to be. That if I was good at something, I wouldn’t be asked to pretend I wasn’t just because I was in a romantic relationship or had a child. And yes, Hillary got eaten by a big mutant possum that lived in our neighborhood and it was extremely traumatic for Tiny Me and yes, maybe that was tragic foreshadowing ALSO NOT THE POINT.

We all know, whatever else we might think of her, that Republicans fucking loathed Hillary Clinton from the second she opened her mouth, and loathed her with this marrow-deep acidic, personal intensity that was always way out of proportion to her actual existence and actions. They hated her for the same reason she amazed me. They hated her because she amazed kids like me and made us look out the front door of the house they wanted us bound to.

And in 2016, she became America’s lottery winner. Not the Powerball. The Lottery. By Shirley Jackson. Where some lucky citizen gets to have their skull caved in by the rest. Every once in awhile, and more and more often as more and more of us get invested in not being just a screeching dick-hydra all the time (also known as “woke” or “political correctness”), America settles on a person or a movie or a book or a trend it’s safe to vent its hatred and disdain on. Sometimes it’s Bean Dad; sometimes it’s Morbius, sometimes it’s Fifty Shades of Being Inexplicably Mad About Romance Novels—and you may think those are joke examples, but they’re really not. In their turns, they have been the Safe Thing to take a huge dump all over without judgment or pushback. It appears to be JD Vance right now, which is both hilarious and rare—conservatives don’t usually care, so it’s less fun to beat on them when you could find a trans author whose soul could be publicly destroyed for no reason. But the Permissible Pile-On Victim has become a regular need for the internet, and boy, did Hillary win that lottery a lot of years in a row.

And in 2016, it was just not even possible to say anything remotely positive about that woman without getting dogpiled from all corners. She became, not just the scapegoat and Lottery winner, but a very visible target for every misogynist stereotype and general bad feeling anyone ever had about their overbearing mother or stern teacher or nagging wife or humorless boss or DMV employee who pissed you off one time or, essentially, any woman who ever made anyone feel a feeling they didn’t want to feel. And Hillary didn’t help really, she looked and sounded too much like every woman no one liked and too long with the media shanking her with a fake smile gave her armor (and a husband) no one trusted.

So Trump, who no one ever thought to trust in the first place, opened his midden-mouth and let all that misogyny fly (and to a lesser but still notable extent, Sanders’ staff and mouthpieces did too, one of whom literally called her a whore at a rally and got mostly shrugs) and was rewarded for it. So was anyone with a YT channel who could slap together a compilation of men screaming at feminists with FACTS and LOGIC. Even people who hated Trump tried to just soldier on and not rise to it, which just…let all that boiling resentment fester and rot on the ground, to be picked up once the election was over and that rewarding of Trump rolled out a red carpet for the worst prejudices of way too many Americans to dance down in style.

The panic over “birth rates” doesn’t help, but it didn’t start this whole trend, it just gave certain kinds of men an excuse to start legislating Gilead in earnest—because they know no one would sign up for their theocratic Stepford LARP unless they were shackled into it.

Here’s the thing—it’s gotten bad. Weird bad. The way so much of TikTok, Twitter, and the interne-at-large have been talking about women has become almost like a fantasy D&D monster with eldritch powers and weaknesses untethered by any relationship to reality. And I doubt I even have to give you examples (but I will), because I’d wager you immediately knew what I was talking about. Incel terminology and terminal thought processes has infested mainstream discourse so pervasively people don’t even recognize that incel boards are where it started.

I’m a historian by training, and to be quite frank, no one has talked about women this way since antiquity. This is clip from a very popular podcast repeating a literally Aristotelian (and toga-on-head stupid) idea that women are purely empty vessels and only sperm begets life. And that’s just the first one I found. That specific idea, you know, one anybody paying even the most cursory attention in any health class that went beyond a fucking apple a day should know is as wrong as a Republican vote tally, and many like it, are all over the place these days. If you think it’s a one-off, go ahead and brace yourself and look at the comments. (Funny how that thought doesn’t change the idea that it’s women’s bodies and sexualities that need to be controlled and not the all-powerful male life-givers…)

These are ancient ideas formed around the agricultural revolution, and the upcoming generations that were supposed to be so liberal and not like the Boomers and save us all are getting them piped directly into their feeds by algorithms no one’s allowed to know. I honestly don’t know many Boomers as extreme as Tate’s little wannabe Fight Club army. And I know they weren’t when they were in their prime in the 90s. JD Vance is thirty-nine years old. He’s a solid Millennial. And he wants to prevent women from traveling between states in case they might get an abortion—good luck with that, American healthcare system that can no longer function without travel nurses! Also, even if the pregnancy will 100% kill her, the new GOP position is ha ha, tough shit, no abortion, just die. So a woman can be raped, prevented from leaving her state (despite free interstate travel and commerce being the core of the entire American construct), and forced to die in agony so a few people to pay less taxes. And that’s a 30-something’s idea of virtue.

We’ve somehow come through the 90s and the 00s and looped right back to pre-scientific method ideas about gender. To men fixating in utter ignorance on women’s total virginity, subservience, enforced “modesty,” extreme youth and thinness, supposed inferiority, and dismissal of any female contribution at all to society, life, the family, anything. The whole notion of a “tradwife,” only this time without husbands being obligated to be traditional providers in any way, has taken hold of younger generations’ minds to a frightening extent—and all those Republicans are right there to tell them it’s their birthright that the evil evil leftists stole from them.

And why not? For most of the adult working generations alive today, either Dad, or Grandad at the outside, because it just wasn’t that long ago, lived in a long-standing cultural structure that nearly guaranteed him a lifelong free housekeeper, cook, broodmare, childcare, secretary, financial manager, therapist, interior decorator, social life creator, family liaison, personal buyer, attentive audience, and sexual partner (that he didn’t have to satisfy if he didn’t feel like it), one who contributed financially far more often than today’s backward-looking rose-tinted glasses suppose, and society was neatly organized to make her leaving him nearly impossible, no matter what kind of person he was or what he did. HOLY SHIT that is an AMAZING deal. Possibly the greatest deal in history. I fully get why so many men want that back. I want that too! Fuck me, we all do! I’ve been writing this essay for days because I lost my childcare for the summer and my kid is hanging off my eyelids by their fingernails every second. I, too, want to just work the hours I would work anyway and come home to a hot meal, a clean house, a happy child, a gorgeous adoring partner to listen to all my woes, plus a cocktail and slippers at the end of the day! Sounds great! Life is hard and there’s way too much to do to get through it and we’re all exhausted!

I don’t struggle even a little to comprehend people—because it’s not at all just young men—turning to these penis-oil charlatans who pretend that the deal was “natural” (spoiler: if you have to enforce it on every level of society and build all these legislative and logistical structures to prevent people choosing any other way to live, it’s not even a little bit natural) didn’t involve confining another living human soul to another’s pleasure and ease, removing her choices, risking her devastation on the altar of his favor, and laughing at the idea of her potential for anything else. These are influencers, and as influencers they cannot and will not be convinced otherwise, not when their entire livelihood depends on preaching the newest and most extreme versions of the brain-jellied idea (and it’s all this idea, polished slightly differently depending on the intended audience):

Men, life is hard and scary and all you have to do to get the deal that makes it all so much easier is to treat women like the shit you wipe off your shoes. That’s how they like it, because they’re not exactly people, at least, not the same way you’re people.

Females: life is hard and scary and all you have to do to be safe from the worst of it is cosplay a version of domesticity and gatling-gun motherhood that somehow involves less freedom and more work than even your grandmothers did, but the magic spell won’t work unless you force all other women to do that, too. After all, you’re not exactly people, at least, not the same way they’re people. Now smile for the fucking ring-light, girl.

Guys, this was not the zeitgeist in 2016. Yeah, edgelords abounded like unto a summer field of putrid smirking goblin shit, but they were the edge. Flat-out publicly and plainly denying the basic humanity of women was not yet big business. Yes, it was starting. Gamergate was in 2014, far more of a bell-tolling than we understood at the time. Ben Shapiro was creepily feminist-hunting at colleges and hooting out the territorial cry of his species debate me, bro. Jordan Peterson had just hit the scene with his radical self-help book A Bunch of Basic Shit Your Mother Tried to Teach You About Eleven Million Times But You Ignored Her Because She’s A Chaos Dragon Like All Icky Cootie-Girls But Now It’s Deep And Awesome. Joe Rogan’s Live Feed from Stupid Hell became the world’s most popular podcast less than a year before Trump was elected. Andrew Tate got kicked off Big Brother for abuse and an open rape investigation because those were things that people didn’t actively celebrate when a conservative dude did them—and immediately parlayed that into the earliest versions of his rape factory network, human trafficking operation, and direct funnel from his ass into the brains of middle school boys everywhere. And even that didn’t really take off until 2018.

This nasty little cold brew of hatred, resentment, fear, and clinging to a world that claimed to offer an easy answer to every goddamned thing—but only if you happened to be white and male and straight and Christian AND crammed yourself into a evil-genius rebranded version of the conservative conformist supremacy, ONLY THIS TIME WITH SWEARING AND CASUAL SEX—that came with Trump. He cleared the way for those things to come off the sidelines and join the major oppression leagues. That rebranding IS what he offered and tons of people the world over (I wish it were just America, that would be easier to understand) found it intoxicating. Jesus couch-fucking Christ I wish he’d just started a stupid podcast like the rest of the kobolds. But that’s what Trump had in his pocketses. A version of square, lame, unfun, unclever, racist, sexist, conformist conservativism that now involved cool shit like drugs and swears and casual sex and gambling and porn stars and never feeling shame. Conservatism never had that before. It came with a certain decorum you were expected to uphold, at least in public. Now you didn’t have to give up the fun sins to get into the rich dipshit club—or at least, pretend you were in. After all, you had the hat, just like them, right?

It was all just getting a head of revolting steam in 2016, and Hillary still lost. Now it’s the air we breathe, and they’ve learned a lot faster than we have—and hey, turns out their morality was always inward-facing to begin with, while the left’s was external. It is right if it is right for me and mine vs it is right if it is right for the greatest number of people, even if they’re nothing like us. People get so angry at Democrats for following the rules and not just chucking the whole system into the chaos bin like authoritarians do, but somebody has to not be authoritarians who wreck up the place.

And then there’s the new hatred of LGBTQ+, a community Harris has always and continues to champion. And while the (comparatively) extraordinarily fast and radical—and wonderful—reimagining of the possibilities of gender we’ve seen in recent years was always going to get a harsh backlash from fascists who freak the fuck out in the absence of top-down hierarchies, of which gender is the first-learned and hardest-shed, I genuinely think that growing crescendo of atavistic misogyny is a large part of why TERFism specifically has exploded the way it has in recent years.

See, most of the biggest voices in that hot rotted slimeball of a “movement” are middle-aged women and up, women who grew up when I did or, more frequently, just before, either second-wave feminists themselves or the daughters of second-wavers. These women definitely did struggle to become somebody all their own, and those struggles were very real, very legitimate, very difficult to overcome. Everything I’ve been talking about, they struggled to escape and rise above, and if I shove my empathy hat on for these genuinely miserable people, I suspect they see the looming possibility of losing it all—and these people who got a lot of praise for operating the machinery of life while being women (and in many cases, for their era, rightly so) have realized there is a gender category right over there they could throw in front of the oncoming train of regressive loathing.

For the first time in their experience, TERFs perceived (please stress this word) another group as the lowest on the gender pole instead of themselves. The ladies got real fucking high on a premium-grade crack previously unavailable to them: being an oppressor on top instead of oppressed underneath. Some of them enjoyed that already on a racial axis, being white and wealthy, but they’d never had a way to see themselves as superior solely because of their genital configuration the way the men they envied and strove to prove themselves to did.

And they cannot stop themselves trying to do rails off the backs of transwomen in hopes that by putting someone under them, they’ll reach high enough to stay dry in the flood. TERFs assign all the negative stereotypes of femininity onto transwomen (deceptive, sneaky, cruel, perverse, oversexed, violent, manipulative, predatory, ugly, unnatural, infertile etc) and reserve the positive stereotypes for themselves (virtuous, caretaking, wise, in need of protection, innocent, beautiful, natural, fertile, blah blah barf) JK Rowling, and a lot of other people who have so much money they don’t ever have to do anything they don’t want to, never posts about anything else anymore—fucking why? Transwomen (and to a lesser extent transmen, but their real passion is always reserved for transwomen) existing don’t affect her in any way. Well…maybe because by deflecting gender-hate onto someone else, they hope to be counted as “one of the good ones” and spared the laser-light surround-sound shitshow the powerful groups that share their wormy opinions want to bring back. It’s not actually the rest of us who can’t define what a woman is, it’s the people who have to pretzel themselves into calling women womb-havers or large-gamete landlords or menstruators, repeating the exact language that reduced them and their mothers to breeding machines in eras past just to exclude somebody because WE HAVE ALL LOST THE FUCKING PLOT AND CAN LITERALLY EVERYONE JUST STOP TALKING ABOUT WOMBS IMMEDIATELY?

God, you awful deep-sea creatures, I’m afraid too. Get a fucking grip. There are no good ones, there’s only the next ones.

Thanks, I hate it here.

So is this a world that’s going to elect Harris? That was my fear when I hid my phone from myself last Sunday. That it had to be Harris or the argument that democracy was at stake would go up in smoke, but that if it was…this country just wouldn’t do it. It would rather burn than let a woman be in charge. That this world hates women so much more than it did when my country took a shit on my childhood hero’s back and draped everyone’s high school bully in ermine. And it hates women of color with a special fury, because this plane of endless torment fucking sucks.

Whatever you think about her, don’t memory hole the fact that two years before that thrice-cursed supervillain golden escalator, Hillary Clinton was the most popular politician in America. That Harris is popular now doesn’t comfort me that much. Three months is probably just enough time for America to remember it really enjoys humiliating women for fun and profit, especially attractive ones, and especially if Trump’s little Nazi D&D lunchroom table of a campaign finds an attack that sticks. They’re calling her a whore already (that Harris is gorgeous makes them so much angrier than Hillary looking and sounding like an average grandmother), and I’m sure the accusations of literal witchcraft are to come because it worked with Hillary before despite that…not being a thing in real life, but while we’re bolting past the medieval era toward the stone age why the fuck not. They’re looking for some lie to tell that will peel off enough of the far left that never liked her and centrists who would totally vote for a woman…just not that woman…or that one, either. I don’t know why, she’s just so unlikeable, don’t you know. She just thinks she’s better than everyone. So entitled.

We’re talking about a country that functionally exploded just because they had to watch a black man be more successful than them on television every night. Even if we pull it off…I fear what they’ll do once they have to watch a black woman on their screens.

So far people don’t seem to be buying the old attacks, but I just don’t have any faith anymore. I remember painting my nails red, white, and blue when I went to vote in 2016 and feeling so fucking stupid for it a few hours later. So naive to ever think it was going to happen when a swaggering foolish rich white man was the other option. America loves swaggering foolish rich white men. Always has. It bends over backwards for them and redefines everything to their tastes. It’s very hard for me to see my way through to a beautiful dawn on November 6th.

But the cynic in me wants to be wrong. I hope I’m wrong. Prove me wrong for once, America. A lot of days, lately, I feel like I was wrong at first and it’s going to happen. She isn’t Hillary. They haven’t trained three generations to bite on sight as punishment. When she laughs, right now, people seem to laugh with her. I feels like somehow the spell is slowly being broken. But feelings aren’t votes. Still. It does. Maybe it could be different this time. Maybe we’ve had enough.

Please let it be different this time.