The two larger sexes are said to be at war. The results of the presidential election are unlikely to be read any other way: According to initial exit poll data from Pennsylvania, women ages eighteen to twenty-nine gave Kamala Harris forty points, while their male counterparts gave Donald Trump twenty-four points. The conflict that emerges from these numbers, the dark, snarling, multi-headed monster of indifference and contempt, has been building for decades. In America, as in nearly all industrialized democracies, women were more conservative than men; They began shifting leftward in the 1970s, then narrowed the partisan gap in the eighties and became more liberal than American men in the nineties. The simplest explanation for this is the most plausible: Women who gained education, workplace power, and economic independence were moving away from a party that valued hierarchy and closer to a party that valued equality. The story goes that with birth control and safe and legal abortion, women took control of their lives.

In the twenties, women also gained control over culture. A slippery, corporatized feminism—gossip about male tears, Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s rambling heads—was invading the public sphere. The girls were brash, confident, and willing to call out bad boy behavior; It wasn’t right to kiss a girl if he didn’t want her anymore (even if she was a slut!). All this caused a certain group of men to lose control. Over time, their numbers grew and they fermented in corners of the Internet that satisfied feelings of being left behind. Women were graduating from high school and college in higher numbers than men; They were suddenly wanted in places where they had been almost forever unwanted. Nearly a decade ago, a Presidential candidate came along who promised to reverse the changes that were transforming American life toward equality, to put men, white people, white men, back on top. There was war then, too: Trump won despite and because of his boasts about sexually assaulting women; the fact that his wife was hot, silent, and seemingly miserable; Having too many accusers for anyone to keep track of.

Trump did what he promised and passed Roe v. under the Democratic Presidency that ostensibly rebuked him. He established a Supreme Court that overturned the Wade case. At least twenty states have made abortion more or less illegal. IVF is restricted in Alabama; Doctors in states such as Oklahoma, Texas, and Florida have stopped treating women in mortal danger from active miscarriages; A woman with cancer and an unviable pregnancy was told to bleed out in the hospital parking lot until she was sick enough to qualify for care. A thirteen-year-old girl in Mississippi who was raped in her front yard couldn’t afford to travel to Chicago for an abortion, so she became a mother before she even started seventh grade. Democrats optimistically framed the 2024 elections as a referendum on that pain, as were the midterm elections. After Harris entered the race, nearly four in ten women under the age of thirty cited abortion as the top issue for their vote. Abortion was the second most important issue among all Harris voters; The most important thing was “democracy”. The economy was the most important issue for Trump voters. The funny thing is that we claim that we can separate these concepts. Without the right to vote, women cannot be full participants in democracy or the economy.

Both campaigns turned to gender warfare. Trump shifted his focus away from the suburban white women who supported him in 2016 and courted young men, attended UFC matches, bonded with Elon Musk, and joined podcasts recommended by his eighteen-year-old son. He led with an air of absurd aggression, an air of crypto and YouTube testosterone, allowing the policy architecture of real, brutal, gendered subjugation to be easily trailed behind. Trump was one of many GOP candidates who collectively poured tens of millions of dollars into anti-trans political ads, demonstrating their allegiance not to women but to the gender institution itself. Harris went on “Call Daddy,” a podcast in which young women dish about sex and complain about men, and had Julia Roberts narrate an ad about women not having to explain their liberal votes to their conservative husbands. The strategy reflected a reality that results have since revealed: a gendered struggle intensified by young people fighting for a sense of individual agency in a world in which they have not yet begun to live properly. Those Pennsylvania exit polls. Elections in North Carolina, where young female voters preferred Harris by thirty-three points, and young male voters preferred Trump by twenty-three points. The fact that the entire nation has moved more or less to the right, but men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine have moved almost to the right Thirty points to the right since 2020. If the 2016 election illuminated the shocking state of white women’s loyalty, the 2024 election has promptly done the same for young men.

The gender war put forward by politicians revolves around two competing visions of a woman’s life. Both parties think they understand what the other wants. In J.D. Vance and his obnoxious, sarcastic childless cat-woman comments, in Tucker Carlson, and in portraying Kamala Harris as a “Samoan-Malaysian, low-IQ” recruit, the Trumpers believe the left wants women to be freer. Amateurs who swallowed plan B in their youth; cock-crushing, corporate drones in early adulthood; Lonely, angry spinsters approaching forty in a frenzy of egg freezing or castration. (Soon the women’s issue is neutralized by the relative invisibility of the “postmenopausal woman.”) Liberals believe that conservatives want women to spend their youth training to attract, submit, and please men, suppressing all other human forms. potential for someone whose dressing, both literally and emotionally, revolves around self-imprisonment smiling and ass wiping.

The gap between young men and women in this year’s vote is the gap between these two stories. While men fear that women will fall under the spell of independence at the expense of their own centrality, women fear that they will be subjugated to men at the cost of their lives. The difference – and it is always a difference – has to do with will. Men who vote for Trump are afraid of what women might really want; Women who voted for Harris are afraid of what will be done to them against their will. In the imaginary world run by angry lesbian socialist girl bosses, there’s absolutely nothing stopping you from being a twenty-four-year-old barefoot, pregnant housewife if you want to. In a world increasingly moving away from the assumptions governed by far-right Trumpists, women’s happy servitude must be secured by removing their control over their bodies, ideally even by removing them from the public sphere altogether. In a recent video, former Trump aide and Project 2025 adviser John McEntee joked while gleefully eating chili fries: “I think they misunderstood when we said we just wanted vote-by-mail. We meant ‘male,’ male.” Dale Partridge, pastor of an “anti-woke” church and author of the book “The Manhood of Christ,” says it’s always a funny argument given that Jesus bled to death to give new life to so many girls and women. For four years he broadcast the following message: “In a Christian marriage the wife must vote according to her husband’s instructions. He is the head and they are one.”

What surprises me about this so-called conflict between ideas of femininity, both invented by men for political purposes, is its distance from the reality of living as a woman. The conflict that exists between work and parenting, between not having children and raising them—even between wanting power over men and willingly giving them power—is flared not in the gap between a liberal woman and a conservative woman, but in the individual life of each. . Two-thirds of Republican mothers work outside the home; For Democratic mothers, the rate is only three percentage points higher. Democratic women have their first child, on average, at age twenty-five, just one year after Republican women. 86 percent of Democratic parents and 88 percent of Republican parents say parenting is one of the most important parts of their identity. Women on the left want children; women on the right are having abortions.

There are millions of mostly white women (forty-five percent of whom voted for Trump in this election) who find the archetypal conservative vision of motherhood appealing. But the gender gap in the youth vote shows that the fight is changing, as women in the middle of the political spectrum begin to vote according to their real lives post-Roe. The possibility of a national abortion ban is on the horizon. The lawyer behind Senate Bill 8, Texas’ abortion reward law, has worked closely with Trump and recently represented him before the Supreme Court. Project 2025 outlines a plan for formal federal oversight of pregnancy. Many young men, heterosexual men, who wanted women to bear children, voted for this. The struggle is now peer-to-peer between men who advocate reproductive slavery and women who reject it.

Trump’s return to power — his imminent control of the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary, the imminent dissolution of the idea that government would provide any guardrail against corporate power, prison violence and environmental destruction — is the beginning of a political era. This will likely take decades. Most of these will be resolved at a level that the average person is mostly unable to touch. But this particular part (abortion policy, the struggle over who decides when, why and how a person has children, the question of who and what a woman works for) will also be negotiated at home. In her study of marriage, “Parallel Lives,” critic Phyllis Rose argues that “marriage is the primary political experience in which most of us engage as adults.” There’s a reason why both campaigns have adopted different ways of framing their political fights as marital dramas.

For us, God’s heterosexual creation, the realm of privacy is now more politicized than ever. But we find a way out of this foundation. From here, in the arena of flesh and friction, surprise and transcendence—an arena increasingly alien to screen-bound, isolated, radicalized young men and rightly unattractive to their female counterparts—we learn not just when to act. We point our guns at someone else, but when do we try harder to see them or allow them to change us? This is where we finally learn how much we need each other.