“Breaking Gender Stereotypes: Kamala Harris’s Advantage in America’s 2024 Election” | Politics

A man in a baseball cap strides by means of a area of corn. A girl in flannel turns and smiles, a line of vans seen behind her. As piano music swells, an American flag ripples in a mild breeze. This video is pure, uncut Americana. Naturally, it’s a political advert.

Specifically, it’s an advert made by the Lincoln Project, a gaggle of moderates and former Republicans united by a need to topple Donald Trump and assist Kamala Harris. And it’s making one of the apparent appeals to males and masculinity but in the 2024 election.

As the advert nears its crescendo, the deep voice of Sam Elliott, an actor greatest recognized for enjoying grizzled however folksy cowboy sorts, calls for: “What the hell are you waiting for? Because if it’s the woman thing, it’s time to get over that.” He continues: “It’s time to be a man and vote for a woman.”

Masculinity and folks’s views on gender roles could also be extra vital than ever in 2024 – and never simply because Harris is the primary lady of coloration to ever safe a major-party nomination for president. The 2022 overturning of Roe v Wade thrust ladies’s rights to the forefront of the election. Numerous identity-based teams, together with White Dudes for Harris, have gathered to drum up enthusiasm. An excessive gender hole has additionally yawned open among the many youngest US voters: having come of age in the period of #MeToo, gen Z ladies have gotten probably the most progressive and politically energetic cohort ever measured – whereas gen Z males are more and more apathetic to politics and drifting additional to the correct.

Conservatives are overtly utilizing anxiousness round masculinity to win this election, telling males that their issues stem from not being man sufficient. Josh Hawley, the influential Republican senator from Missouri, printed a guide referred to as Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs. The Fox News host Jesse Watters went even additional.

“I don’t see why any man would vote Democrat. It’s not the party of virtue, security. It’s not the party of strength,” Watters stated, shortly after White Dudes for Harris held a name with greater than 190,000 contributors. Watters added: “I heard the scientists say the other day that when a man votes for a woman, he actually transitions into a woman.”

Watters is just not a severe particular person, however Americans’ obsession with masculinity is, to the purpose that it may possibly decide the end result even of presidential elections the place two males are working. (So, most of them.) Americans revere presidents as position fashions, fixating on their standing – actual or perceived – as founding fathers, actual fathers, conflict heroes, and masters of diplomacy and being profitable and dishonest on their wives with out getting caught (or, at the least, with out getting divorced). Because presidents epitomize American notions of manhood, elections reveal what sort of man, what kind and diploma of masculinity, is most revered and deserving of energy.

Trump has turned his marketing campaign right into a pitch for hyper-traditional masculinity. At this 12 months’s Republican nationwide conference, he walked on stage to the James Brown tune It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World and was launched by Dana White, the president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship who was caught slapping his wife on camera. On the marketing campaign path, he has hammed it up with YouTubers and podcasters who've male-centric audiences and dim views of ladies.

With most people and her opponent so preoccupied by masculinity, Harris is just not emphasizing her pioneering nomination. Rather, in order to win a contest that no lady has ever gained, she’s making an attempt to benefit from stereotypes about males, ladies and management – and, once they can’t work in her favor, utilizing them to kneecap Trump as a substitute.

Masculinity, it seems, could be the most partisan challenge in US politics.

Just a few good males

When individuals conjure up the picture of a “good man” or a “real man”, they have a tendency to think about the identical qualities: somebody who's dominant, profitable and difficult – and who's nothing like ladies, in accordance with Theresa Vescio, a psychology professor who research gender, politics and privilege at Penn State.

This mind-set is so pervasive that individuals gender political issues that, objectively, don't have any intercourse. National protection and the financial system are seen as matters that males care about, as a result of males are anticipated to prize being suppliers for and protectors of their households. Healthcare – together with abortion rights – and schooling are seen as ladies’s points, as a result of ladies are speculated to be compassionate caregivers. (In actuality, at the least amongst gen Z, younger ladies care about all of those points greater than younger males do.) Even the political events themselves are gendered: Republicans are related to extra masculine points and traits, Democrats with female ones.

These stereotypes inform American beliefs of the presidency. “What we expect in a good leader is that they’re powerful, high status, top, able to lead. That overlaps substantially with stereotypes of masculinity and men,” Vescio stated. “So when we think about who would be a good leader, stereotypes of men fit and complement. There’s no incongruity.”

They complement each other so seamlessly, in reality, that the position of masculinity in elections was as soon as invisible. We’re so used to seeing males run for workplace, and seeing “gender” solely change into a buzzword when a lady steps into the fray, that we frequently don’t even acknowledge that males have a gender, not to mention that male candidates supply up totally different, competing visions of masculinity.

But they do compete, even in probably the most animalistic methods. For instance, presidential candidates usually tend to succeed once they have one key, historically masculine bodily high quality: top.

The taller candidate is extra more likely to win more votes and be re-elected; they're additionally extra more likely to be seen by specialists as being higher leaders and easily “greater”. This hyperlink between top and presidential choice is so sturdy and so unconscious that when Richard Nixon ran in opposition to John F Kennedy in 1960, voters tended to suppose their chosen candidate was taller. (Kennedy was taller, and he gained.) Ron DeSantis might need been laughed at for reportedly wearing ill-fitting heels when he ran for president, however he would have been proper to fret.

If you’re nonetheless not satisfied, take the 2004 race between George W Bush and John Kerry, which hinged on the candidates’ supposed manhood to a startling diploma. Bush offered himself as a down-home rancher who might have often been “misunderestimated” however who you needed to seize a beer with. Kerry, in the meantime, was a Vietnam fight veteran with a deep understanding of coverage. This introduced an issue for Bush: how might he be “the man’s man” when his opponent was a part of the uber-masculine navy?

“What they did was, they went and they attacked his service record, because that was his greatest political strength,” stated Jackson Katz, writer of the guide Man Enough? Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton and the Politics of Presidential Masculinity. An advocacy group, technically fashioned impartial of Bush, devoted itself to questioning Kerry’s record.

Katz continued of Kerry: “His attitude was like: ‘This is beneath me, to respond to these attacks.’ And it backfired. Because in the masculinity narrative, if you don’t defend your honor that’s being besmirched, you’re emasculated, you’re not strong.”

Kerry, in fact, misplaced.

The architect of the assault to undermine Kerry is now working on Trump’s 2024 campaign, which is trying to run the identical playbook in opposition to Tim Walz. JD Vance, Trump’s working mate, has steered that Walz left the nationwide guard to keep away from serving in the Iraq conflict.

In reality, Walz was in the nationwide guard for twenty-four years and left to run for Congress a number of months earlier than his unit was deployed to Iraq. Walz has defended his record – however Team Trump isn’t sometimes all that apprehensive in regards to the reality.

Masculinity subtext comes textual content

When Trump descended down a golden escalator through the 2016 major, we entered a brand new, way more apparent period of presidential masculinity. During that major, Trump liked to speak about “Little Marco” Rubio, which prompted Rubio to assault Trump for his supposedly undersized arms. There isn't any higher proof that masculinity underscores presidential elections than two candidates subtly accusing each other of getting small penises.

Well, perhaps there may be: Trump, the person who began the dick-measuring contest, gained the one for the White House, too.

The extra individuals imagine that conventional notions of masculinity are good and true, the extra possible they had been to vote for Trump in 2016, when Trump ran in opposition to a lady, and 2020, when Trump didn't, Vescio discovered in a 2021 study. This discovering held true no matter individuals’s celebration, gender, race or degree of schooling. It additionally held true even after Vescio managed for individuals’s belief, or lack thereof, in authorities, undermining the concept Trump’s reputation is because of his populism slightly than his masculine posturing.

When it involves cosplaying masculinity, considered one of Trump’s biggest belongings is his disinterest in actuality. In different phrases: he’s good at making massive, daring, typically unfaithful statements, and folks like that in a person.

“Trump promises, more than anybody else: ‘I’m going to do this.’ Oftentimes, in violation of what the president can actually do,” stated the political scientist Dan Cassino, who research male gender identification at Fairleigh Dickinson University. “But he says he’s going to go in and fix a problem. ‘I’m going to do this on day one. Whatever Congress says doesn’t matter.’ That sort of agentic behavior is perceived as being very, very masculine.”

Republicans, particularly, actually like this sort of habits in a person. This can partially be chalked as much as demographics. Both men and older people, who usually tend to embrace conventional gender roles, are likelier to be Republicans. It may be defined by the character of conservatism itself. Conservatives wish to protect custom.

There’s additionally one other rationalization: sexism.

“As researchers, we differentiate between hostile sexism and benevolent sexism. Hostile sexism is: ‘Women are terrible and it’s OK to beat your wife,’” Cassino stated. “Benevolent sexism is more like: ‘Oh, women are pure and precious, we have to protect them.’ That means keeping them out of things like politics, putting up separate spheres.”

Lilliana Mason, a Johns Hopkins University professor who research partisan identification, measured individuals’s hostile sexism by asking whether or not they agreed with statements like: “Women seek to gain power by getting control over men.” Republicans, she discovered, had been on common about twice as possible as Democrats to point out indicators of hostile sexism.

“The better predictor of being Republican is not gender, but sexism,” Mason stated. “There are a lot of women who hold sexist attitudes and are pro-patriarchy and believe that women shouldn’t be in power.”

I’ve encountered shades of this perspective: in January 2020, I met a lady in her 30s from Louisiana, on the March for Life, the most important annual anti-abortion gathering in the United States. Women, she advised me on the time, shouldn't be president, as a result of they simply can’t be leaders in the identical means as males.

“Women and men are completely different biologically,” she stated. “And so for that reason, I believe that they should have specific jobs for who they are, biologically.”

She deliberate to vote for Trump.

Sexism is greater than a set of views about ladies – it’s a perception system about how women and men ought to work together. (And that women and men are the one two genders.) But as a lot as Trump might profit from the GOP’s sexism, he doesn’t appear all that in gender relations. He has praised and attacked particular person ladies, together with his accuser E Jean Carroll, typically over their appears, however he hardly ever speaks about ladies as a class.

Instead, he has largely delegated that to JD Vance.

In addition to claiming that “traditional masculine traits are now actively suppressed from childhood all the way through adulthood”, Vance has denigrated childfree ladies as “childless cat ladies”, agreed that the aim of the “postmenopausal female” is to assist increase grandchildren, and claimed ladies who prioritize careers over households are on “a path to misery”.

“Vance is very much doing appeals, I think, less about masculinity, more about benevolent sexism,” Cassino stated. “At its edges, it goes into what is called natalism, that the job of women is to reproduce, which is the extreme, extreme end of benevolent sexism.”

This is the Vance innovation on the already masculine Trump ticket: he operationalizes Trump’s static imaginative and prescient of white-man hypermasculinity right into a blueprint for a way genders ought to stay with each other. If Trump and Vance win, that blueprint might be become coverage.

There are indicators that Trump is coming round to Vance’s method – at the least with regards to abortion, considered one of Trump’s greatest electoral weaknesses and a difficulty that has fairly a bit to do with male-female relations.

“I WILL PROTECT WOMEN AT A LEVEL NEVER SEEN BEFORE,” he posted to FactSocial over the weekend. “THEY WILL FINALLY BE HEALTHY, HOPEFUL, SAFE, AND SECURE.”

The female catch-22

When Harris walked out on stage on the Democratic conference to just accept her celebration’s nomination for president, Kelly Dittmar was instantly struck by one factor.

“She didn’t wear white,” stated Dittmar, who, because the director of analysis at Rutgers’ Center for American Women and Politics, makes one thing of a dwelling noting how highly effective ladies current themselves in public.

White is the colour of the suffragettes who fought for ladies’s proper to vote in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; Democratic ladies recurrently don it for the most important rituals of US politics, together with the conference. “Like half the crowd was wearing white,” Dittmar identified.

But not Harris. She wore a navy swimsuit and an identical pussy bow shirt.

It was an unmistakable declaration: Harris didn't wish to give attention to how she has made historical past. In the weeks since, she has stayed true to that stance. When presidential debate moderators introduced up abortion and Donald Trump’s racist lies about her identification, Harris didn’t reply with anecdotes about her expertise as a lady of coloration. Instead, she advised the viewers: “I do believe that the vast majority of us know that we have so much more in common than what separates us.”

If Hillary Clinton stands accused of specializing in her gender an excessive amount of when she ran for president in 2016, Harris is doing every thing she will to keep away from falling into the identical lure. But the braided nature of masculinity, management and politics leaves feminine political candidates in such a bind that even the act of elevating an eyebrow turns into fraught.

During the controversy, Harris didn’t trouble to cover her skepticism at Trump’s boasts, lies and rambling. “If she wants to win, Harris needs to train her face not to respond,” the pollster Frank Luntz posted on X on the time. “It feeds into a female stereotype and, more importantly, risks offending undecided voters.”

It’s not clear what “female stereotype” Luntz – who stated nothing of Trump’s tendency to smirk whereas Harris spoke – was referring to. (The feminine stereotype of getting expressions?) But it's true that “as a female candidate, you have to be feminine, because otherwise you’re not a good woman”, Cassino stated. “But you also have to be masculine, because in the US, we’ve decided that leaders are masculine. So you have to have masculine traits and feminine traits.”

When it involves telegraphing her masculine credentials, Harris has a built-in benefit: she spent years working in legislation enforcement, a area related to toughness, victory and males. In her very first speech because the presumptive Democratic candidate, Harris recalled her time as a prosecutor and California lawyer common.

“In those roles, I took on perpetrators of all kinds,” she stated, utilizing a line that has since change into part of her stump speech. “Predators who abused women. Fraudsters who ripped off consumers. Cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say: I know Donald Trump’s type.” Translation: she is aware of tips on how to dominate the worst of the worst.

“Democrats don’t need Harris to go out and shoot guns in her campaign ad or on the campaign trail,” stated Nichole Bauer, a Louisiana State University professor who research political communication. “But they do need her to display those masculine qualities that we associate with political leaders, and those are really masculine qualities that we don’t always think of as being gendered – like talking about her experience as a vice-president, an attorney general, a senator.”

Last week, Harris sat down with Oprah, who had been surprised to be taught, through the debate, that the vice-president owns a gun. “If somebody breaks into my house, they’re getting shot,” Harris stated. Then she laughed. “Probably should not have said that.”

That alternate encapsulated Harris’s balancing act. She’s obtained a gun and she or he’s not afraid to make use of it, however she’ll chuckle about it. That chuckle, specialists stated, could also be considered one of Harris’s greatest belongings with regards to convincing voters that she is each competent and heat. It helps burnish her declare that she’s a “joyful warrior”, a picture that “creates a distinct persona that I think bridges those gendered expectations”, Dittmar stated. Joy, she continued, “alludes [to] kindness and even empathy, which is more traditionally associated with femininity and women”.

There are only a few true independents in the US voters; all however 3% of self-identified independents lean Democrat or Republican. But that tiny fraction of the inhabitants can determine a detailed election. When judging a candidate, undecided voters are inclined to rely closely on racial and gendered stereotypes, in accordance with Bauer.

“If Harris displays masculinity in a super aggressive way, similar to how Trump and Vance might do it, then she risks falling into this ‘angry Black woman’ stereotype that we’ve been socialized to think of as a negative stereotype, as something incompatible with political leadership,” Bauer stated. “It’s just this really narrow set of behaviors that she has to fit into to try to show her leadership qualities.”

In previous elections, the lads who've tried to take down Trump tried to outman him. Rubio steered he had an even bigger you-know-what; DeSantis offered himself to voters because the grown-up model of Trump; in a 2020 debate, Joe Biden snapped: “Donald, would you just be quiet for a minute?” But working on full-tilt masculinity would by no means work for Harris. Not solely did it not work for many of these males, however as a lady, she can't win a masculinity-off.

Instead, her supporters’ greatest shot at defeating Trump could also be to unman him. That Lincoln Project advert, for instance, framed Trump subsequent to photographs of the lethal Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. Harris, in the meantime, is pictured giving a salute. “The images of Trump in the ad are chaotic. It’s social unrest,” identified Erin Cassese, a University of Delaware political science professor. The advert appears to ask: would an actual man lose management like Trump did?

During the controversy, Harris urged viewers to go to considered one of Trump’s rallies. “He talks about fictional characters like Hannibal Lecter. He will talk about ‘windmills cause cancer’,” she stated. “And what you will also notice is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom.”

Those assaults – the form of assaults that might as soon as have been directed at Biden – additionally undermine Trump’s masculinity. Cassino summarized the message as: “He’s kind of old and confused and weird. This is not a masculine guy.”

‘Toxic’ masculinity

As a lot because the web might prefer to name conventional stereotypes of masculinity “toxic”, they aren't essentially dangerous. Success, hardiness, being a supplier and protector – these can all be good qualities.

The downside, for people, is that stereotypes of masculinity may be so strict and stifling that they're inconceivable for anyone to stay as much as. No one may be in energy always. You is perhaps the boss on the workplace, however while you get dwelling, your teenage youngsters are nonetheless more likely to ignore your instructions.

And, for US society as an entire, clinging to a slender notion of masculinity actually may be poisonous. “It allows for aggression towards groups that aren’t appropriately masculine, which would be different kinds of groups of men that we define as problems, and women,” Vescio stated. “It masks racism and sexism.”

Harris isn’t proper or improper to lean into some masculine stereotypes. After all, if a lady can harness them effectively sufficient to win probably the most masculine workplace in US historical past, then perhaps such attitudes and behaviors gained’t be thought-about “masculine” any extra. Maybe they’re simply ways in which individuals, of all genders, can act. Maybe voters will begin to worth “feminine” traits in leaders, too.

“The only way we can ever stop defining our politics in terms of men versus women is, have so many women run that is just not notable any more,” Cassino stated.

Sending Trump again to the White House might affirm his model of masculinity on a nationwide scale. The extra Trump larps masculinity, the extra Republicans develop to love it; the extra deeply invested they change into in masculinity, the extra polarized the United States might change into. People who assist conventional masculinity additionally tend to show signs of sexism (benevolent and hostile), anti-Black racism, Islamophobia and xenophobia.

But, in Dittmar’s view, voting Harris into workplace might point out that individuals don’t wish to shove ladies right into a separate sphere.

“We’re voting on a lot of things, but among them is that version of leadership and our evaluation of these gendered versions of it,” Dittmar stated. “As well as, even more broadly, our sense of the appropriate roles of women, the ways in which women should be treated by our political leaders.”