This episode explores the attack against progressive political agendas in the U.S. How have recent actions rolled back hard-won achievements in the realm of gender equity and racial diversity? And why is class relatively underemphasized in the U.S. when it comes examining voter preferences among women? Listen to hear about how reactionary narratives of patriarchy under threat are unfolding, and why increased welfare measures and childcare support are unlikely to lead to the Right’s desired pronatalist birthrates.
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GLOSSARY
Incels (p. 5 in the transcript, 19:50)
Incel is a member of an online subculture of primarily heterosexual men who identify as being unable to have romantic or sexual relationships. This self-described inability to form attachments is often expressed as grievance toward women. Incel subculture has been associated with misogyny, extremism, rape culture, and expressions and acts of violence. Incels are a subset of the “manosphere,” which includes other online communities animated by sexism and hostility toward women, such as pickup artists, Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW), and men’s rights activists. The Southern Poverty Law Center classifies incels as a hate group and identifies them as part of the online male supremacist ecosystem.
The term incel was initially coined by a woman. Known only by her first name, a Canadian woman named Alana began using the term invcel (later shortened to incel) in 1997 to connect with other singles struggling with social awkwardness. She documented her experiences on her personal website, “Alana’s Involuntary Celibacy Project,” which became a forum for people struggling to form romantic relationships. In 2000 Alana stopped participating in the project, and she has since said that she feels uncomfortable with how the term has been hijacked. As incel communities began to establish themselves on the forum-based websites Reddit and 4chan, the term shifted from its initial meaning. By 2010 incel was associated with misogynistic trolling and threats of violence by men’s rights groups operating on fringe right-wing platforms. In 2017 Reddit banned a particularly active subreddit called r/incels for violating Reddit’s rule against content that “encourages, glorifies, incites, or calls for violence or physical harm against an individual or group of people.” source
Me Too movement (p. 7 in the transcript, 26:22)
Me Too movement is an awareness movement around the issue of sexual harassment and sexual abuse of women in the workplace that grew to prominence in 2017 in response to news reports of sexual abuse by American film producer Harvey Weinstein. While the phrase had been in the lexicon for more than a decade, a tweet by American actress Alyssa Milano sparked a social media phenomenon that raised awareness, gave voice to survivors, and led to sweeping cultural and workplace changes. The movement is credited with giving visibility to the scope of sexual violence within the United States and across the world. It is also defined by a push for accountability, including examining power structures in the workplace that had enabled misconduct, and, in some cases, renewed efforts to seek justice for survivors through criminal and civil court systems. In the first year of the movement, numerous prominent men lost their jobs after they were publicly accused of wrongdoing. Since then, the Me Too movement’s legacy has broadened to encompass issues related to gender equity in the workplace and legal reforms to eliminate barriers that had prohibited victims from coming forward. Some U.S. states have since abolished statutes of limitations for reporting sexual crimes and banned nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) that aimed to keep misconduct allegations from the public’s view. The movement has also led to changes in the workplace and society at large through the implementation of greater safeguards and educational tools that aim to change behavior in future generations. source
Shalini Randeria (SR): A warm welcome back in the new year to a new season of Democracy in Question, the podcast series that explores the challenges democracies are facing around the world. I'm Shalini Randeria, Rector and President of Central European University in Vienna and Senior Fellow at the Albert Hirschman Center on Democracy at the Graduate Institute in Geneva.
This is the first episode of Season 10 of Democracy in Question. I'm delighted to welcome once again, Katha Pollitt, an old friend, who as some of you may remember, was my guest in Season 2[i] of the podcast in 2021. Katha is a poet, an essayist, and a columnist at The Nation. She has also published in The New York Times, The London Review of Books and The New Yorker.
She's taught poetry at Princeton and at Barnard College. Katha has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her collections of essays include “Reasonable Creatures: Essays on Women and Feminism”[ii], “Subject to Debate: Sense and Descent on Women, Politics and Culture”[iii], “Virginity or Death! And Other Social and Political Issues of Our Time”[iv], and a collection of personal essays titled “Learning to Drive and Other Life Stories”[v].
Her book, “Pro”, with the subtitle, “Reclaiming Abortion Rights”[vi], 2014, was listed as a notable book of the year by the New York Times, and it remains an important and timely contribution to the debate on reproductive rights and freedom. When Katha was here in Vienna last December, we recorded today's episode right after the two concluding episodes of the previous season, both of which were devoted to addressing the 2024 U.S. elections and President Trump's electoral victory. Its aftermath has sent shockwaves through American society and the whole world due to a daily barrage of divisive executive orders that would have been unthinkable just a couple of months ago. These preposterous presidential decrees are alarming and audacious in their disregard for procedure as much as for the public good.
They've created chaos and uncertainty, targeted immigrants and minorities, but have also mounted a campaign to dismantle many federal government departments and dismiss hundreds and thousands of civil servants, while challenging the very foundations of American democracy. For all its imperfections, it is imperative to defend the ideals, institutions and norms of liberal democracy from an oligarchic, authoritarian coup that seems, however, to enjoy the support of a majority of Americans so far.
So that's one of the themes I'd like to discuss with Katha today. In some ways, the day when Katha and I sat down to record this conversation on what Trumpism means for women's rights seems to have become history. That's not because our discussion of two months ago has been rendered irrelevant, far from it.
Judging by the direction Trumpism has taken, and will most likely continue to do so, everything Katha said in December holds true today, but it may seem like history because of the pace of the destructive changes in American government and foreign policy, which have meanwhile almost eclipsed Katha's and my focus on discussion, care and welfare[LB1].
So today we are picking up from where the previous season concluded the 2024 U.S. presidential election that brings Donald Trump back into office. I begin by asking Katha about the symbolic significance of a second Trump victory against a female opponent within eight years and what it tells us about latent patterns of gender and racial prejudices in American society that he has once again so successfully exploited.
Does this mark a turning point for progressive politics, whether in terms of a reactionary backlash, or on the contrary, of potential popular mobilization around questions of gender and race. How best could feminist politics reorient its tactics and strategies now that Kamala Harris's electoral defeat has also revealed starkly that women should by no means be seen as a unified, homogenous demographic.
We'll also discuss one of the main puzzles of the 2024 electoral campaign, namely, why did abortion not turn out to be a decisive issue, as many had expected to be, turning to the wider context of social, political, cultural and economic shifts within the United States. I'll ask Katha to comment on the alarming resurgence of toxic masculinity and misogyny. Why do so many men feel threatened by the rather modest and incremental advances that have been made in women's rights? And is there a real danger of these hard-won achievements being rolled back. What does the popular support for a presidential candidate, who is a convicted felon, adjudicated sex offender, with outspoken misogynistic views, tell us about widespread male resentment against women's bodily autonomy and equality. And finally, we'll try to unpack the contradictions of the conservative agenda of pronatalism in contemporary America, but not restricted to American society, especially in view of the parallels with similar demographic panics in societies elsewhere, where pronatalism is coupled with welfare measures that are unlikely to prove popular in the Trump White House. Katha, welcome back to the podcast. It's wonderful to have you again as a guest and thank you so much for making time to join me here today in Vienna.
Katha Pollitt (KP): Shalini, thank you so much for having me on the show. I'm really looking forward to our conversation.
SR: Katha, let me start by asking you a question I posed to a previous guest of mine, Stephen Walt, after the U.S. elections in November 2024. For the second time in the last eight years, it's a female presidential candidate who has lost out to Donald Trump, who epitomizes anti-feminist prejudices and resentment.
Interestingly, until 2016, neither of the political parties in the United States had ever nominated a woman to run for the top political position in the country, lagging way behind most of the other Western democracies, but also democracies in the global South, in India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Argentina, Philippines, we've all had successful women leaders.
And even though Hillary Clinton's insistence on breaking the glass ceiling was unsuccessful due to an arcane electoral college system, she won the popular vote. This time around, Kamala Harris lost not only the battleground states, but also the popular vote. So, I'm wondering, whether behind all the talk of her campaign not focusing on economic hardships of ordinary Americans lies the uncomfortable fact that the United States is just not ready to elect a woman as president and especially a woman of color.
Is latent sexism and a patriarchal mindset deeply entrenched in large segments of American society that would explain the electoral outcome?
KP: That's definitely a popular theory, and on dark days, I agree with that. I will say, though, that it's really at the presidential level that we see: “Oh, yeah, we're not going to elect a woman, we're not going to vote for a woman.”
And people don't really say that so much anymore to people who are likely to repeat it. They might say it to their friends. But think that there were some gains for women, even in this election. There were women elected to the Senate. I think that there is a lot of prejudice against women. But there's another thing, which is in those countries you mentioned, often the woman leader is related to a male leader who's dead or gone in some way, for example India with Indira Gandhi; we don't have that so much in America, that kind of dynastic thing, although Hillary was often accused of having that advantage.
So, I think it's really complicated. Also, in a lot of countries, the person who gets to be the prime minister is the leader of the winning party. So, like Margaret Thatcher, she didn't win because people said, oh, great, Margaret Thatcher, they voted for the Tories.
So, I think it's very complicated. But is there prejudice against women? I think there is, and I think prejudice against a woman of color is even greater. Donald Trump made much of this. He said, is she really black? She's black now, but what was she before? And I think that there are probably black voters who didn't feel that she was black enough. Everybody has their own little reason, but all those reasons came together in a disastrous way.
SR: So, Kamala Harris's gender may have ruled her out in the eyes of many male voters in the conservative camp, but she also happens to have Afro-Jamaican as well as South Asian, South Indian ancestry. In a society that's highly polarized by the racial divide, which has historical roots and legacies, as well as by recent resurgence of xenophobia directed at immigrants, Harris probably suffered from an intersectional handicap, both in terms of gender and race, ethnicity compounded. But are we, on the whole, witnessing a reactionary regression on racial and gender equities, that one possible reading of the U.S. political landscape? And could this foreshadow a setback on other progressive causes like, for example, sex education in schools, for women's equality in the workplace on which many successes were achieved during the last 50 years, 60 years, or do you think Trump's victory could spark a radicalization of gender and race politics with a popular momentum which could be akin to the civil rights era?
KP: What an interesting question. I think it can't be good to have the Commander in Chief be an adjudicated rapist, who says things like, I'm going to protect women whether they want it or not. Behind him is a very powerful Christian right. He got a quarter of his votes from them. Including a lot of those white women who voted for him, they were religious in that very conservative way where women are supposed to obey men, and abortion should be a crime and all the rest of it.
So, I can't say that it's going to be good for women. If it had been just him, that would be one thing, but it was a clean sweep of the federal government. And his appointees control the Supreme Court, so I can't see that it's going to be good.
And when you look at the balance of forces, I think that there's going to definitely be a lot of pushback against him. But will that pushback be successful when the country is at the federal level, so firmly in his hands?
SR: How will the regional dynamics play out here? Because in the beginning you also pointed to the fact that a lot of women have been elected as senators, as representatives. Do you see a trend there of an increasing representation of women in public life, or race becoming an issue at levels other than the presidential election?
KP: I think it's too early to tell. And I think there are definitely blue states which are strongly democratic states where there will be a lot of pushback and a lot of protection for women. And that's already happened with the Supreme Court striking down abortion rights many states moved to protect those in their state constitution. For example, New York State just did that. So that's all great. I worry a lot because a lot of power and a lot of money will be flowing from the Trump administration to their favored and a lot of people have a tendency to just go toward the powerful.
I mean, we've seen that before. We saw that in Nazi Germany, that a lot of people who weren't sincere, just like, oh, I better be a Nazi now, that's where my influence will be. That's how I'll get a promotion. That's how I'll be safe. So, I'm very worried.
SR: Trump's, I think, resounding win dealt a blow to the naive idea of women as a homogenous demographic category from the perspective of electoral preferences. So, while many expected Kamala Harris to garner most of the women's votes, this turned out to be wishful thinking. 52 percent of white women who made up 37 percent of the electorate voted for Trump. And incidentally, since 1952, more than half of white women in the U.S. have always voted for a Republican presidential candidate, except in ‘64 and 1996. A staggering 62 percent of white women without college education voted for Trump, while 59 percent of white women college graduates voted for Harris.
Let's take another example. Much has been made of the mass exodus of Hispanic voters from the Democratic camp. 61 percent of Latina women voted for Harris and only 37 percent for Trump, but among Latino men, only 44 percent cast their ballot for Harris. So, what are the implications of this kind of demographic shift in your view, both for inadequate feminist politics that could successfully engage diverse groups of women, who may well entertain antagonistic, also mutually exclusive conceptions of what matters most to them, and for racial politics in the U.S.?
KP: I would say the implications are probably not good in the immediate future. But you know, here's an interesting thing, because of the threat to legal abortion, and let's not forget, reproductive rights in general, the feminist movement in the United States has had to focus more and more on the right to choose. And less and less on other goals of the feminist movement and some of the things that have gotten dropped because they would be very expensive are things like universal childcare which would make an enormous difference to women's lot in America, there are a very large number of women who can't go to work who want to work, mothers of young children. And the reason they can't go to work is there's no childcare where they live. Or it's prohibitively expensive. I mean, you would be staggered to know it costs as much to put your child in daycare as it does to send your child to college. It can cost up to 20,000 dollars.
So, I think that the feminist movement needs to speak more to these large expensive programs that women really need. But the problem is women in America, and it's turning back now with abortion, but basically, they've gotten the things that you can get without the government spending a lot of money on you.
And if it's free, you get it. And if it costs money, you don't get it. So, think that that's been a stumbling block that allows women who could really benefit from daycare, from universal health care, from a school day with after school so that they can go to work, all the rest of it, it costs a lot of money to have a baby in America.
So, think that if those women who voted for Trump were getting those things, they might see it differently. But that's all theory. About why abortion didn't garner a lot more of votes for Kamala, I would say that abortion rights were on the ballot in ten states.
And it won in seven of them. There have been previous votes, let's put it in the state constitution, though they've all been successful. In this case, Florida passed a special law that was used to say you need 60 percent to pass a constitutional amendment, and it got 57 percent.
But basically, a lot of women, in those states where that was on the ballot, they voted for abortion rights, and then they voted for Trump. And I'm sure what they thought was, well, okay, I protected abortion rights, now I can vote for Trump. Because that's off the table now. So that's very short sighted of them, because Trump is not going to be good for women in hundreds of ways.
SR: But as far as thinking about women as a homogenous demographic, do you see a breakdown which should lead us to think differently about the way in which the women's vote went this time?
KP: Maybe so. I think class has always been undertheorized in American politics. if you were just to look at the bookshelf, there are a million books about women and race. There aren't that many about women in class, and this was a big class difference. I mean, we're talking about 53 percent of white women.
If you break it down, you can find plenty of white demographics where women didn’t vote for Trump, but we don't talk about that so much. For example, my favorite little factoid is, okay, 88 or 89 percent of black women voted for Kamala and the same percentage of Jewish women voted for Kamala.
So Jewish women, are just very, very loyal Democrats and loyal feminists. Which is very interesting, because they don't mostly belong to a religion that tells them how to vote, that organizes women in their churches to do this, that has an explicit dogma of women are subject to men, et cetera, et cetera.
So, I think that we do need to parse the election more carefully, both for women and for men. We talk so much about the women's vote. And so little about the men's vote. And I think what's behind that is the idea that there must be some very special reason why women would not vote for a Democrat. But men, you can really understand why they wouldn't vote for a Democrat. But it's actually just as interesting. Why are men Republican?
SR: I think there is lot to be explored here about the threatened masculinity and the kind of reactions of fear, of resentment, of anger that women's newly won rights over the last 50 years have brought about in certain sections of the male population.
I don't think it's just the U.S., but in the U.S. we've seen this coalescing around the election in a very particular way. So, if we think of this overarching ultra conservative return or rearticulation of neo traditionalist patriarchal norms that are also being fed with toxic misogyny and an incel culture of an online manosphere. And that has become increasingly normalized in recent years. Of course, evangelical fundamentalism, the right-wing Christian churches, as you just noted, have contributed to this kind of masculinity. But also, there seems to be, Katha, nostalgia for older men's roles that seems to play a part here because one of the slogans which caught my eye was the one popularized by Nick Fuentes, which said, “your body, my choice”.
And that has become such a rallying cry for so many of these men who want to push back both on gender equality and the right to bodily autonomy. So could you talk about this new turn for submission to hierarchical authority and male domination, which seems to pervade so much of at least one part of the social media.
KP: Well, it's very disturbing. But I have two responses. One is, what a bunch of crybabies men are. They've lost so little power. So much of the power that they've lost, they've given away. I mean, a boy and a girl raised in the same family, she goes to college, he doesn't. Why is that? They go to the same schools their parents probably in certain subtle ways might even prefer the boy but men not going to college is seen as women's problem. Women are too successful. College is now stereotyped female. So, men won't go. I mean, grow up!
I don't see that there's a solution to that as long as men sort of expect everything to go their way just because they're men. And the incels are a very good example of that. I think that it's a very interesting subject for journalists, so they write about it a lot.
But there have even been incels who committed murders of women. I mean, it's not harmless. But their idea is that they should have an A+ girlfriend. The reason they don't have the girlfriend that they want is because of feminism. So, I keep thinking, what woman would say that? A woman would say I don't have a boyfriend. There must be something wrong with me. I don't have a boyfriend. What can I do? How can I change myself? How can I be nicer? How can I be prettier? But the men just say something has gone terribly wrong in society that I don't have the girlfriend that I want. This is insane. This is like, oh, I used to be able to have whatever I want and now I don't.
But of course, men never had whatever they wanted. It's just their illusion that they had that. There were always plenty of men that didn't get the girlfriend they wanted. So, I feel that men really are crybabies about this. I don't feel a lot of sympathy for them. They still get away with a lot.
For example, rape and abuse and sexual harassment and all those things have never gone away. There's been more criticism of them and more saying you have to be against it and yet it still happens. I think that a lot of men do feel they've been deprived of a privilege.
But so what? Yes, okay, to a certain small extent, they've been deprived of privilege. But that's good. They shouldn't have had that privilege in the first place.
SR: But do you think, Katha, to come back to the class question that you mentioned a moment ago when you said there's so little work on the class question in U.S. politics or also gender and class parts together, do you think part of this so called crisis of masculinity has to do with the job market, with deindustrialization, with secure jobs being taken away from men because these jobs have been outsourced and they were traditionally male jobs.
So do you think in a way this crisis of masculinity results from economic shifts in the way in which neoliberal globalization has played out to the disadvantage of an older male working class base which used to vote Democratic.
KP: I would say that the lack of unions has a lot to do with these people not voting Democratic because the unions were a way that the vote was organized.
And one thing which is tendentially related to your question is Republicans have a lot of ways to mobilize their voters and the churches are the big thing. Democrats used to have the unions, but now they don't. Only 10 percent of the American workforce is unionized. It's really gone down a lot.
That's been a great detriment to getting out the vote for Democrats. But I want to say one thing, which is about this loss of male jobs. Okay, so men have lost jobs in certain male dominant fields. Women are still working. There is nothing preventing a man from becoming a nurse, which is a great job and is very well paid or being in the health fields in other ways.
Being a schoolteacher. And they're always saying, yeah, we need more male schoolteachers because this is being dominated by women. Okay, so why don't men do that? It's because those jobs are female typed, and they won't do them. There's this idea of this old masculinity where you're a steelworker, you're a plumber, a carpenter. Those jobs are still there, being a plumber or a carpenter. But I think men really need to rethink what masculinity means, because they're hurting themselves.
SR: So, let me quote a very powerful article you published in The Nation in the summer of 2024. You say: “Trump is the crude, macho bully and playboy with three wives who had sex with a porn star and lots of other women he wasn't married to. He's an adjudicated rapist, a former good friend of Jeffrey Epstein. For Trump, women are sex objects to be bought, consumed and discarded.” Now, of course, Trump's re-election will end most of the legal challenges he was facing, including his responsibility for the January 6 riots on Capitol Hill. These were serious charges that were dealt with by courts against him, but they seem to have had no impact at all on half the electorate.
And that seems to be a truly alarming puzzle. And it does raise questions about the legal and the moral implications of voter preferences. So do most votes cast for Trump reflect in a way, a yearning for a different kind of ethical or a legal order in which sexual offenses which are committed by powerful men against women are just met with impunity? And this despite the MeToo movement.
KP: I think for some people, definitely. They think, oh, this is all exaggerated, this MeToo thing, it didn't really happen. That person's really thinking innocent women just love to complain they're probably getting paid by the feminist movement to do this, all kinds of crazy things.
But I think it's also true that when there's something really important to you that your candidate says, however falsely, he is going to do for you, like lower your taxes and give you a job, then you don't care what the person is really like. And I think our side has been like that historically, and I'll give you an example.
Ted Kennedy let a woman die in his car. The Chappaquiddick, a famous incident. That was some kind of, I don't know what you'd call it legally, but it was certainly a terrible, terrible thing that he did. He could never be president because of that, but he was a beloved senator for many, many years because people just wanted what they wanted from him.
And I think that people wanted what they wanted from Trump, and so they all say, don't like the way he talks. I don't like some of the things he does, but. And that's the way I think a lot of people politicians as their instrument. And what he's really like as a person. They can set to one side if they already want that thing; if they don't want that thing then his personal failings become immensely important and they're of course much more important if the politician is a woman. Because women have to be perfect.
SR: And in that same article you also had some choice words for the newly elected vice president, J.D. Vance, who helps Trump, and you say cover all the bases of misogyny, as you put it. And to quote you here again, you say: “There are two sides of the male supremist coin.” But you added something interesting that you said, whereas for Trump, women are sex objects, for Vance, and I quote you: “They are reproductive objects who need to be shamed and even compelled to fulfill their duties to have lots of babies.”
So, this brings us to the other side of the gender politics of the far right. It's anti-abortion, but it's also strongly pronatalist. And that goes, of course, also hand in hand with a backlash against reproductive rights, but it goes against trans rights or the rights of LGBTQ people.
The background to all of this is a demographic panic about so called ethno-racial contamination, the dissolution of the nation panics about the whites in the U.S. losing the demographic race. And we see that as a core element of what I have called soft authoritarian far right regimes all over the world.
From Erdogan to Orban, we have seen insistent calls for women to bear more children, and also the passing of legislation giving a lot of economic incentives to go along with pronatalism. So, on the one hand, it's about a normative model of heterosexual nuclear families with a rather regressive gender division of labor.also extending into the employment market, as you've just pointed out. But it goes together with strictly policing the boundaries of the nation because it's also about foreigners, immigrants who don't belong, who should not constitute the body politic, and it's also about a welfare oriented pronatalism.
There is a problem of demographic decline in some parts of the world, which is real, but it's then linked with welfare state measures, which are not going to be a favorite tool for many Republicans. So how do you think this internal contradiction between wanting pronatalist policies, but not wanting to pay for them, how is that going to play out in the United States? Because that's where health care for women, childcare will have to be paid for if women are to have larger families.
KP: Well, I think even if women are paid to have larger families, they probably aren't going to have them. Because here's something just shows you how male dominant the government is it never occurs to them what having a child involves, they always think, well, if we give them some money for the first year… But they never think of it holistically. They never think of what having a child really involves and not just for the first couple of years for the whole life of that child.
And that's why women restrict their childbearing. It's not because I don't have a small amount of money, or I need another room for my apartment. I mean, well, it's all those things, but it's more than that. It's the whole way that having a baby affects your life profoundly. And I think there are just things that women would rather do. There are a lot of single mothers that don't get a lot of help and I know women who have gone through a great deal to have a baby under very, inauspicious circumstances but that's because they really want a baby and so I don't think that except maybe along the margins, where somebody really is thinking, oh, if only I had another bedroom, I'd have another child. I don't really think that it's going to be these measures to produce more babies is going to be successful. Now, America's was different in the following way. We have lots of immigrants. So that is a way of getting more workers. But now that we're so xenophobic and racist, we've sort of said, okay, out you go.
And Trump really does sound like a Nazi in some of the things he says. He talks about immigrants as vermin. He talks about the poisoning of the blood. And so, it remains to be seen how many immigrants he'll actually succeed in sending back to wherever.
But it does show that we don't think about this issue in a rational way at all. And I know Vance sometimes talks about, we have to give women, we have to give families more help. But what will that mean in practice when taxes, according to another chapter in the Trump Bible, we have to drastically lower taxes which won't be drastically lowering taxes on low-income people, but on rich people. So, then the government will have less money to do all these things that this other wing of the Republicans say they would like to do.
SR: We're focused at the moment on the U.S. pronatalism, but there are some interesting examples of why pronatalist policies are not working elsewhere in the world, South Korea, for example.
KP: Oh, South Korea. Very interesting. There's this movement in South Korea that is probably not a whole lot of people, but it has a lot of press and it probably has a certain amount of sympathy among people who aren't actually participating.
And it's called the four Bs. B stands for the word no in Korean, and it's no dating, no sex, no marriage, no babies. So that's pretty complete rejection of the program of having more kids. And I think, why would you want to marry a Korean man? They're very sexist. I'm sure there are many, many exceptions, and those are the guys who get married.
But there are tremendous problems with sexual harassment and sexual violence in Korea, and with assumptions about, he's going to be working all the time and you're going to be staying home, or working until you have children, and then you're staying home. I recommend a book called “The Vegetarian”, by Han Kang, who just won the Nobel Prize.
And it's about a marriage that's exactly of this sort, told from the husband's point of view. That his wife just does her own thing. And she becomes a vegetarian, and it completely disorients the entire extended family. Why is she doing this? But it's sort of the only way she has to express herself. So, I recommend this book, but I don't mean to go after South Korea in particular because a lot of places are just like this but in the United States, we're seeing a lot of sympathy for the four B's and a lot of interest in it.
I don't know that a sex strike ever really works, because women want sex too. And you always think your boyfriend's going to be different, or you wouldn't have him. A lot of women are rethinking some of the basic expectations of what heterosexuality involves.
SR: So, thank you very much, Katha, for these insights into U.S. gendered politics. And thanks for being with me today.
KP: Thank you so much for having me, Shalini. It was interesting.
SR: The wide ranging, systematic attack against progressive political agendas over the past month has rolled back many hard-won achievements in the realm of gender equity and racial diversity.
The fact that President Trump and his team seem to enjoy considerable popular legitimacy for mounting this backlash raises questions about the large segments of American voters whose prejudices against a woman presidential candidate, especially a woman of color, determine the outcome of the 2024 election.
Katha acknowledges the grim realities of the present electoral and political landscape in the United States. However, she also expresses cautious hope there will be enough of a pushback against it. She mentions, for example, in this context, the relative success of women who ran for and were also elected to Congress.
Her grave concerns, voiced already in December last year, about the super rich, small power elite flocking to Trump in support of his radically destabilizing policies, in the hope of gaining personal favors and profit from him, have proved to be prophetic. Regarding the prospects of feminism and women's rights, Katha has singled out the relative success of the vote about abortion laws at the state level. She points out that even women who voted for Trump supported their right to choose when it comes to their own bodily autonomy. She also noted that American feminist movements must widen their focus from the right to choose to include themes like welfare measures, and childcare costs, which is especially timely as the elections appear to have been determined above all by perceptions about the state of the economy and the rising cost of living.
Such a shift as Katha has proposed requires an intersectional optic relating gender to class to race and ethnicity, given the considerable differences among women when it comes to voter preferences. We hear a lot these days about the loss of so-called male privileges, a loss which is often amplified and also exaggerated, and which feeds reactionary narratives of masculinity and patriarchy under threat.
But considering large scale societal transformation, such narratives must come under critical scrutiny regarding their tacit assumptions and fantasies about masculinity. Until we are prepared to do so, seeding discontent can be easily channeled through forms of political mobilization such as those that helped Trump regain power.
As far as concentrations of class are concerned, Katha has argued that many people are more than ready and willing to forgive unscrupulous, immoral male politicians who promise to alleviate economic hardships. It remains to be seen how these voters will then react to the total absence so far of any efforts by the Trump administration to redress their economic grievances.
Women voters, she suggests, are more immune to such false promises of short-term material incentives and benefits. The enduring gap between right wing nativist and ethno-nationalist, pronatalist objectives being pursued by many in the Trump camp and the continuing low fertility rates in the United States testify to this skepticism on the part of large numbers of women.
As Katha rightly concludes, women will not have more children. Unless there is a wholesale reform of gender relations, as well as of care structures and welfare measures. Attacking reproductive rights, banning abortion, and raising fears of depopulation and demographic decline isn't going to lead to women bearing more children in the United States or elsewhere.
This was the first episode of season 10. Thank you very much for listening. Join me again in two weeks when I'll discuss the far-reaching consequences of the German federal elections with Steffen Mau, Professor of Sociology at Humboldt University in Berlin. Please go back and listen to any episode you might have missed, including the previous two that have also focused on the American elections to which this episode forms a sequel. And of course, let your friends know about the podcast if you're enjoying it. You can stay in touch with the work of the CEU at www.ceu.edu and the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy at www.graduateinstitute.ch\democracy.
[i] Randeria, S. (Host). (2021, August 11). Why are reproductive rights so contentious in the US and Argentina? (No. 11) [Audio podcast episode]. In Democracy in Question. https://democracy-in-question.simplecast.com/episodes/why-are-reproductive-rights-so-contentious-in-the-us-and-
[ii] Pollitt, K. (1994). Reasonable creatures: Essays on women and feminism. Knopf.
[iii] Pollitt, K. (2001). Subject to debate: Sense and dissent on women, politics, and culture. Random House.
[iv] Pollitt, K. (2006). Virginity or death! And other social and political issues of our time. Random House.
[v] Pollitt, K. (2007). Learning to drive and other life stories. Random House.
[vi] Pollitt, K. (2014). Pro: Reclaiming abortion rights. Picador.