Republicans are ascendant now, and they seem to relish their continued war on women. The battles they wage create everincreasing obstacles for women, but we must also acknowledge that they warp the thinking of men. Young men are especially vulnerable.
Think this is a non-issue? Consider what boys hear in the public forum.
“Your body, my choice. Forever,” Nick Fuentes, White supremacist mega MAGA influencer, posted to X on election night. “Women threatening sex strikes like LOL, as if you have a say” was one response.
J. D. Vance, Vice-President elect, complains that the U.S. is being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too” (https://www. cnn.com/2024/07/27/us/cat-ladyexplained- cec/index.html).
The old childless crone with her witchy black cat is a cartoonish way to demonize women that’s older than the Inquisition. J.D. needs fresher material.
J.D. proposes higher taxes and restricted voting rights for anyone without children. He also declares that the role of non-fertile women is to babysit (https:// www.rawstory.com/vance-higher- tax-rate-childless-americans).
J.D. claims that the childless are not concerned about the future of America. This cannot be true because so many childless people actively support public schools, pay taxes to support children’s health and welfare, and, yes, contribute greatly to the care of other people’s kids.
To say that the childless have no stake in the future of this country is simply rude. And unwarranted. As well as untrue.
President-elect Trump, Vice-President-elect Vance, and their billionaire buddies Elon Musk and Peter Thiel all reject the idea that women have full moral agency and are qualified to make decisions about their own bodies and their lives.
Musk, Trump’s backer, once reposted the theory that a Republic of high-status males is best for decision-making. Thiel, Vance’s backer, once wrote that women’s getting the vote was bad for democracy.
These prominent men say things that signal disgust for females and treat women’s presence outside the home as a threat or an imposition. These men will have outsized influence in the second Trump administration, and their influence will not be lost on our most promising young men.
Is contempt for women really the message we want to send young men? Try to remember how hard it was to be a teenager. Boys becoming men need the mental sturdiness to think for themselves. This is tricky because they are most vulnerable at the very time they must confront peer pressure and cultural pressure.
Cultural pressure on men is especially strong in patriarchal societies. The whole subtext of patriarchy is that men must feel superior to women. In this respect, patriarchy gives men a limiting worldview that puts them in boxes, just different boxes from the ones that women get stuffed into.
Many of the stereotypes of masculinity are harmful, overblown, or downright insulting to men.
We need men who can express their feelings in ways that are not aggressive. Men who have no need to put others down to boost their own position. And society needs men who do not fear or loathe women.
In a fair society, women’s reproductive health would be controlled by the one person living through the experience. The state may have an interest in protecting life, but surely not before that life is viable outside the womb. The restrictions in Roe were a fair balance between the rights of the mother and protection for the fetus.
Roe recognized the woman’s rights as greater than those of the fetus in the first trimester; the second trimester required medical decisions; and abortion in the third trimester was banned except to save the life of the mother. (This account simplifies some details but not the essentials.) Pregnancy, spontane- ous abortion, miscarriage, and life and death for the fetus and/or the mother are all features of delivering life.
These features are not exceptions but part of a continuum. Problem pregnancies rarely present black-and-white decisions at the time doctors need to intervene with medical care. Lawmakers should at least reconsider the message they are sending the young men who listen to them.
Legislators who override the judgement and conscience of women and physicians think altogether too highly of themselves. They should at least acknowledge the lethal arrogance of the message they are sending to young men.