IThe previous administration of Donald Trump taught us something: it is that women’s bodies don’t matter. The autonomy of these bodies, and the frequent injustices and abuses inflicted on them, are of little concern to a far-right misogynistic government that is, unbelievably for some, back in power after an all-too-brief period of reprieve, if not change. Women’s bodies also mean little to the people who voted for Donald Trump.
Shortly after Trump was elected in 2016, I saw Regina Spektor play at the Royal Festival Hall. She sat down at a piano and sang her song Ballad of a politician. “A man in a room shakes hands with other men,” it opens: “This is how it happens / Our carefully laid plans.” The almost physical weight of grief in Spektor’s performance, and that of the women in the audience, is something I have never forgotten.
Women around the world today are experiencing the visceral, second-hand body horror of another Trump administration, and that is nothing compared to the all-too-real sense of danger that many American women will be experiencing as I write this. We hold fear, tension and trauma in our bodies, and while that’s the kind of idea that strongmen like Trump and their followers would chuckle at, it’s well documented that, to quote psychiatrist and author Bessel van der Kolk: the body keeps score. It is an unmitigated tragedy that even more American women are facing the prospect of their reproductive rights being further restricted.
This body horror will be felt by the many others on Trump’s hit list of undesirables: immigrants, gays and transgender people, people with disabilities, protesters. Anyone who is capable of empathy. But in the context of the attack on reproductive rights, and being a woman myself, it is women I am writing about today.
I’m thinking of three women in particular. Candi Miller died in bed at home with her three-year-old daughter next to her, after being too afraid to seek medical help due to Georgia’s abortion ban. She had both a son and a daughter. Amber Nicole Thurmanalso in Georgia, died after taking abortion pills at home and waiting 20 hours of agony for the dilation and curettage procedure that would have saved her life. She had a six-year-old son. And Josseli Barnica, who died when she was 17 weeks pregnant after doctors in Texas delayed treating her miscarriage for 40 hours. She had a young daughter. There are many more women, children, and their families who have suffered deeply from the Republican-led rollback of women’s reproductive rights.
The outcome of these elections is not surprising. After last time I didn’t believe it American misogyny might be overstated; why should it have to choose one? The hatred all too clearly runs deep. Increasingly, its currents run separately into the mainstream: on podcasts, in the ‘manosphere’ and on our online news feeds.
Kamala Harris’ announcement that she was running for president coincided with my social media algorithms bombarding me with Christian “tradwife” content about the importance of serving and obeying your husband, and not working outside the home. This alternate reality is not a side of America that many Europeans had seen. You may be vaguely aware that the country was historically founded by religious fundamentalists deemed too extreme for European sensibilities, but there’s something about seeing how unhinged and retrograde the content is that really makes the ideological divide clear. Of course, many people in the US are just as shocked by the rise of these types of ideas, not to mention the way they intersect with online misogyny and white supremacy, but their prevalence is less surprising because they have been exposed to them. to some extent their entire lives.
At the same time, the “childless cat lady” discourse dominated the political debate, as if things didn’t feel medieval enough. After researching and writing a book, The year of the catwhich is partly about childless cat ladies – and where the sexist myths about them come from – I found just as predictable as the “burn the witchrhetoric deployed against Hillary Clinton. It’s easy to laugh at the ridiculous idea that women who haven’t given birth are bitter, angry harpies with no stake in the country they live in, and even easier to turn that into a clever “Cat Ladies for Kamala” campaign, but this fear of childless women is an old, old form of misogyny. That it was deployed, especially in the context of the global panic over birth rates, did not bode well.
And of course, there were even more allegations of rape and sexual assault to add to the pile – which barely seemed to make a dent in the election debate, despite the alleged involvement of convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Many of us wonder what exactly Trump should do with a woman who would be considered sufficiently outrageous to prevent his return to power. If women didn’t matter in 2016, we seem to matter even less in 2024.
There’s good news for American women to hold on to: Missouri and Arizona are voting to expand abortion rights, and Colorado, New York, Maryland, Montana and Nevada are all taking steps to protect them. Yet misogyny can be contagious: in Europe, governments must take steps to protect our own laws (Labor must urgently decriminalize abortion here in Britain after the legislation was overturned earlier this year).
I know I’m not the only one who says that I have never experienced such a deep physical revulsion as I did during the Trump years, whenever that man tweeted or appeared on television. When Trump was last in office, I had never been pregnant or given birth. However, I was a survivor of the attack and found the “grab them by the pussy” rhetoric and treatment of Christine Blasey Ford particularly sickening. You don’t have to have been attacked or raped to feel that disgust, just like you don’t have to have an IUD inserted to empathize with all the women who suddenly rushed to get theirs. You don’t have to have had an abortion, been pregnant or given birth to understand the trauma of being forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term.
The body keeps score and that feeling of horror is back.