If you have some “benevolent” sexist attitudes, you might endorse positive - but still patronizing - stereotypes of women. You might agree with statements like, “Many women get a kick out of teasing men by seeming sexually available and then refusing male advances,” or “Most women interpret innocent remarks or acts as being sexist.” If you have some “hostile” sexist attitudes, you might mistrust women’s motives and see gender relations as a zero-sum battle between male and female dominance. To understand how sexism played into Trump’s victory, first you have to understand that there are two basic types of sexism - “hostile” and “benevolent” - and how they work together. The theory of sexism that helps explain Trumpism Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images It means that misogyny is alive and well in the United States, and that it probably helped Trump win. It means that for many voters, Trump’s toxic masculinity was a deep part of his appeal. It means that our society only values women under certain narrow conditions. What it does mean is something both subtler and more disturbing. Hostility to women predicted voters’ support for Trump just as strongly as racial resentment, and even more strongly than affinity for authoritarianism.ĭoes this mean that almost half of Americans hate women? Not quite. The more “hostile sexist” attitudes voters held, according to research by political scientists Carly Wayne, Nicholas Valentino, and Marzia Oceno, the more likely they were to vote for Trump. And the role of voters who support authoritarianism can’t be ignored.Īt the same time, the role of hostility toward women hasn’t been discussed nearly enough. His dominance in rural areas suggests a deep anxiety over not just economic security, but the loss of an entire way of life. Trump’s strong support among whites demonstrates how racial resentment played into his victory. America’s out-of-control political polarization means that many people would vote for Trump no matter what he did, just because he had “Republican” next to his name on the ballot. No one factor can fully explain Trump’s victory. They chose a man who has now been accused of sexual assault by 15 women - a man who has promised to sue all of those women in the first 100 days of his presidency - to be the next leader of the free world. A new accusation against Trump from a former Miss Finland, and a newly surfaced video that showed Trump grabbing and kissing a former Miss Universe after humiliating her onstage in front of thousands, barely caused a ripple.Īnd then Americans elected an alleged sexual predator to be their president. Media attention turned back to Hillary Clinton’s emails with a little over a week to go before the election. Trump’s poll numbers plummeted - and kept plummeting after women started coming forward to allege that Trump had sexually assaulted them.īut then, the free fall stopped. Many Republicans withdrew their endorsements in disgust, and those who didn’t faced intense pressure to follow suit. After leaked audio showed Donald Trump bragging in 2005 that he can “grab by the pussy” and kiss them without consent because he’s “a star,” Trump’s campaign seemed done for.
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