Permission

As ever with a nasty shock, I turn to writing. But 2016 was a shock. This is disbelief. The raping, racist genie is out of the Mar-a-Lago bottle and yet still most Americans chose him over a highly competent, experienced and compassionate woman? Are we kidding ourselves? When are we going to stop being surprised about the way the world sees women? Anyway, some thoughts that no one asked for. Normal WAW service to resume shortly. Sending love on this darkest of days, Mx

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Firstly, an apology to American friends and readers. What could I possibly have to offer right now? I don’t pretend to know about America, however much I love it, however many times I’ve been, however much I study it from afar, often enraged, always beguiled. I don’t pretend to have any insight into a country as wide and diverse and unfathomably big. There is data and experts and academics and historians and podcasts and people on the ground who can do all that. 

I do know about being a woman. I do know about being a woman of a certain age. I have watched a gut-wrenching, almost decade-long timeline of a particular disappointment in American politics: one that has underscored the cruel fact that countless Americans believe women don’t matter. I do know this timeline has run parallel with my own career as a feminist writer, and the hours I’ve spent talking/writing/thinking about women’s lives. I do know that the identity of being a woman can cross borders and the lives of other women can infect the bloodstreams of our own. I do know that I have been watching The Rights of American Women Under Attack, a cruel and sad Hollywood blockbuster, for most of my adult life. 

And that’s why I remember sitting in an office full of women watching Hillary’s concession speech in 2016, tears silently sliding down our cheeks. I remember the rage of the Kavanaugh hearings in 2018; protestors cornering senators in corridors, imploring them not to let men accused of sexual violence be granted a seat of unspeakable power (See Clarence Thomas, See Donald Trump (x2)). I’m still coming to terms with the overturning of Roe v Wade in 2022, which came months after I travelled to Michigan and Pennsylvania and Ohio and Missouri and spoke to women about how high the stakes of it all were. And now today, 6th November, 2024. Another plot on the graph of horror, a nation so powerful and rich we all feel it like it’s just next door. I woke at 5.30am to disbelief. My friend texts just gone six: fuck. Fox then calls PA for Trump. Fuck. Not even close. Fuck. Turn the radio on. Fuck. Dumbfounded, sick-in-the-stomach disbelief. Fuck.

And so what we knew would happen will now happen, but it is still bone-shattering to accept. More women will die preventable deaths due to pregnancy complications, ones which medicine figured out decades ago. More women will be forced to carry unwanted pregnancies that will keep them in violent relationships, economically vulnerable, and trapped in lives they don’t want to be in. Raped children will have to travel thousands of miles for an abortion, or be forced to have a child themselves. Vance will push for a national ban. Pregnancy information will be monitored by the state. IVF will come under greater and greater attack. These are the things we know will happen because women are already dying, and Republican men have told us. And while they have big trouble believing women, women believe men. 

But what about the things we don’t know? The thing that CNN or the BBC or a podcast hosted by ageing white men who make wildly inaccurate predictions won’t talk about? It is the very thing that women feel the most: the permission this grants men. This election victory is a mandate for men to treat women as they wish.

The message is deafening: women’s lives don’t matter. They do not hold value. If women are not afforded agency in their own lives, or even the right to live through pregnancy complications or not be shot by an ex-partner, what are they? 

And if they don’t matter, then, by the embedded laws of the patriarchy, which is having a really fucking good day, men can treat women as they choose. The likes of Vance and Musk, two fucking maniacs crafting this campaign, have bone-chilling ideas of what women should and should not do (ideally be silent reproductive vessels that get out the fucking way). These men are now in charge. They have the same message as they did yesterday, but now they have permission to make their message a reality. And that grants millions of men - especially young ones who spend too much time on the internet - the same permission: to live like women don’t matter. 

If you have known a world, as I have, where male power reigns supreme as it did in the house I grew up in, the success of men like Trump, Vance and Musk is very close to home. Not because of their ideas about an economy hundreds of thousands of miles away, but because you know how total, enveloping and cruel unchecked male power can be. The tears I shed this morning weren’t for American politics, they were for the lives of women.