What Women Really Think of Men [Archive.org URL]

As Ruth Bader Ginsburg, quoting a California judicial opinion, told the Supreme Court in 1971, “the pedestal upon which women have been placed has all too often, upon closer inspection, been revealed as a cage.” When we declare that men will always be brutes and women can only shrug from on high, we engage in what President George W. Bush once called the soft bigotry of low expectations.

Feminists’ critique of male power has long been caricatured as hatred of men. But it is feminists whose fight is motivated by the belief that men can be better, if we can make clear that they, too, benefit from a safer, more equal and more just world. We have little choice but to try — men still control so much, and besides, many of us love them.

Our intimate lives, where we are the most vulnerable and the least rational, are the hardest to reconcile with politics. And the very idea that men and women can and should be equal partners is only a generation or two old. Most of us, even now, are just making it up as we go along.

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If white women of all education levels were more susceptible to Mr. Trump’s nostalgic, macho transactionalism, perhaps it was because they are adjacent to the men who have traditionally enjoyed the most resources and power in society, and who either believe they have lost it or fear losing it.