The Most Important Question in 2024
It isn't about the economy, immigration, Gaza, Biden's age or Trump's fascism, crimes, or that he's (!) Donald Trump. The most important question in 2024 is whether you think women are real people.
The paragraph after this one is longer than it should be, but it needs to be. It helps if you have the narrator’s voice from Seabiscuit in your head, but without the foreknowledge that everything works out in the end. Ready? Yeah, me neither, but still. Let’s do this:
They called it the Women’s March on Washington, but the day after Donald Trump was inaugurated there were really 408 marches in the United States along with 168 in 81 other countries. Upwards of 5 million marched in the U.S. that day, more than one in every hundred Americans, mostly women, determined not to be forced backwards in time. Starting that day and over the next four years, women stepped up to run, to vote, and to lead, putting Nancy Pelosi back into the Speaker’s chair and Kamala Harris into the vice presidency, but the latter not before Ruth Bader Ginsberg died. Women lost their footing then, and no amount of marching, whistleblowing or voting could stop Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, or finally Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Women had organized, and they had voted. But after four years of doing everything they possibly could to preserve their own emancipation, after moving forward four years in time they slid back to 1972.
A lot of very smart people are sharing a lot of very smart points about what the grudge match between Joe Biden and Donald Trump1 will turn on: inflation, immigration, and Israel and Gaza. But most of these are guesses by pundits blindly grabbing for handholds on the timeline.
Left often as an unspoken asterisk is the slippery footing women have on the arc of history that lately hasn’t been bending towards progress, Taylor Swift’s economic footprint notwithstanding. It’s not just about abortion but about whether women in America exist not solely as a collection of moral hazards and obligations but as citizens. We know that all men are created equal and independent with inalienable rights, but what about the women? Do they still get life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, too?
Are women even people? The answer depends on who you ask.
Rather, it depends on how you phrase the question, and whom you’re asking. The April 2024 New York Times/Sienna College poll asked this question of registered voters: How much do you think Donald Trump respects women? The choices were a lot, some, not much, not at all, don’t know/refused to answer, and AYFKM. “You’ll never guess what happened next!” cheekily prompted the Times’ Jess Bidgood:
A majority of men — 54 percent — said that Trump respects women either “a lot” or “some.” Just 31 percent of women saw things that way.
To clarify, this is the same Donald Trump now on trial for paying hush money to cover up his affair with adult filmmaker Stormy Daniels, who was “found to have raped E. Jean Carroll,” who said those things about not needing permission to fondle women’s privates, and who said, before backtracking, that women should be prosecuted for terminating pregnancies. Americans can recite these facts more accurately than they can recall the names of the justices of the Supreme Court, and yet a majority of American men—especially the white, less-educated, and central time-zoned ones—think Trump respects women.
Asked why, Republican pollster Whit Ayers offered up some ‘90s airport-book pop psychobabble, saying “The best explanation for that is, men are from Mars, women are from Venus.” No it’s not Whit, and neither is it the best question, which is why it seems perfectly normal to put that question in the poll in the first place. That question is really asking whether it’s acceptable to treat women as if they are disposable toys.2 Or are women people?
On Wednesday the Supreme Court heard a case that could result in banning exemptions to abortion bans to protect the health of the mother even when this conflicts with federal law. The argument before the Court devolved into a real-world, non-hypothetical Trolley Dilemma for women’s internal organs in which hospital lawyers make political decisions that override the medial recommendations of actual doctors.
What it boiled down to was this: Is it acceptable to force women to undergo sepsis, organ failure and loss of fertility before they could have an abortion necessary to save their own lives. Moira Donegan of The Guardian put it more directly:
“What was really at stake was the status of American women, who now have to beg before the courts not to face legally enforced medical negligence that will kill and maim them.”
This is another of those instances in which it’s impossible to literally describe the facts without feeling like you’re indulging in hysterical hyperbole. Perhaps the most maddening aspect of the Supreme Court’s deliberation, much like their gauzy discussion of presidential immunity, is how the conservative justices treated these clear-and-present-danger facts of life in America as hypothetical abstractions. But then again, are women even real people?
After hip-checking life and liberty (namely, the liberty not to be sexually assaulted by Donald Trump), we check in on the last of the triumvirate of inalienable rights, the pursuit of happiness. In this case, the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics is asking American adults 18-29 several questions about gender roles, such as whether men are “too soft these days,” women are too emotional “to lead effectively,” and whether “women are too promiscuous these days.”
Set aside your own personal views on whether sexual promiscuity produces or inhibits happiness.3 As pre-slap Will Smith’s character explained in that one movie, the right we have as Americans is not to be happy but to pursue happiness. As in, I do not have a right to the Orioles not blowing a 9th-inning lead to a clearly inferior Oakland A’s team, but I do have the right to root for this outcome.4
Or more to the point, does Gen Z think that women have the right to pursue sex with multiple partners as they see fit? When it comes to Gen Z, the answer is increasing, Nah, bra.
Hashtag not all Gen Z! And hashtag not all Gen Z men! John Della Volpe, who leads this poll, said judgmental views about women’s use of their sexual agency is determined not by gender but by ideology. And you’ll never guess… Nevermind. You totally will.
Gen Z Republicans and Democrats famously find common cause on a lot of issues—climate change, guns, and college costs among them. In fact, it appears that other than the simple partisan divide, the thing that really divides the largest and most diverse generation in American history is how it perceives womanhood. It’s almost like young men aren’t sold on the fact that young women are people, too, with the same rights and privileges they were born with.
Conflicting views about gender roles aren’t new, of course, and I don’t have a solution to winning over conservatives to the idea that women should have the same rights as men. The arguments have all been made before and proven unpersuasive. Perhaps the only value I can provide here is to offer greater clarity that this argument we’re having is bigger than abortion, and that the only way past this is through.
We just need to beat Republicans up and down the ballot, because we can’t count on their elected representatives or appointed judges coming around to the inalienable truth that women are people, too.
Jason Stanford is a co-author of NYT-best selling Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. His bylines have appeared in the Washington Post, Time, and Texas Monthly, among others. Follow him on Threads at @jasonstanford, or email him at jason31170@gmail.com.
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For my money, not enough brainpower has been devoted to what to call this electoral rematch. The Thrilla of Vanilla? Blunder and Frightening? Mumble in the Bungle?
Honestly, the more I think about this, the more I see why Barbie resonated.
Yes, I know, I know, it all depends how you do it.
They… did not hold onto that lead.