Illustration: Pablo Delcan/Source Photographs: Getty Images
What a split screen,” Doug Emhoff said to a crowd at a private fundraiser on the coast of Maine in the last days of July. The Second Gentleman was referring to Donald Trump’s remarks that afternoon to the National Association of Black Journalists in Chicago, where he berated Rachel Scott of ABC News for being “nasty” and suggested that Kamala Harris had only recently “turned Black.” Emhoff appeared gobsmacked by the raw vulgarity. “The contrast could not be clearer,” he said.
Since Joe Biden’s decision to step aside, the loudest contrast in the presidential race has been between the elderly white man at the head of the Republican ticket and the younger Black and Indian American woman on the other side. But a disparity of the intragender variety has also come to the fore: the difference between how the men of the right and the left define masculinity.
On the one hand is the Republican Party’s view of manhood: its furious resentments toward women and their power, its mean obsession with forcing women to be baby-makers. On the other hand is the emergence of a Democratic man newly confident in his equal-to-subsidiary status: happily deferential, unapologetically supportive of women’s rights, committed to partnership.
The new Democratic man is embodied by Harris surrogates like Emhoff, whose first solo public appearance since his wife became the de facto nominee was at a Planned Parenthood in Portland, Maine, and Harris’s vice-presidential pick, Governor Tim Walz, the former National Guardsman and football coach whom the right has taken to calling “Tampon Tim” for passing a law in his home state of Minnesota requiring public schools to stock free menstrual products in all school bathrooms.
This is not to suggest that these Democratic guys represent some perfect specimen of evolved masculinity. But taken as a whole, as male Democrats fall over one another in an effort to elect a woman to the presidency, they are presenting a different definition of masculine strength tied to women’s liberation and full civic participation and all but declaring it a new norm.
That Trump is terrible toward and for women hardly needs repeating. But the Republican convention in July was nevertheless a startling window into just how wholly unconcerned the GOP is about its abysmal reputation. Speakers included Hulk Hogan, the former professional wrestler accused of domestic abuse, and Dana White, the Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO who was once filmed engaging in a physical altercation with his wife. There were right-wing misogynists like Tucker Carlson, who lost his job at Fox News amid sexual-harassment allegations and has called women “extremely primitive and basic,” and Representative Matt Gaetz, who has been accused of having sex with a minor and has called reproductive-rights activists “odious on the inside and out.” Where Harris’s walk-out music is Beyoncé’s “Freedom,” both Trump and running mate J. D. Vance have been using James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World.”
Trump and his buddies’ hoary views of women as either sexualized objects or pigs are almost old hat. What’s new is the way the contemporary right is practically vibrating with the creepier energies of the online manosphere, which tells young men that women have robbed them of their power. It’s the worldview of men like Andrew Tate, who has been arrested for human trafficking and rape and who tweeted in April, “Dear white men you’re fucked. You’re being replaced because none of you have children.” Elon Musk, who is a vocal supporter of Trump’s campaign (and has also been accused of harassment), has echoed this natalist version of the Great Replacement Theory, saying that “birth control and abortion” have put civilization at risk and suggesting that childless people should not be able to vote.
While the ideas that these men espouse have become common currency across the right, they remain somewhat foreign to the political mainstream. That’s why the discourse this summer was dominated by bewildered responses to unearthed remarks by Vance, who has described childless women as “deranged,” “sociopathic,” and “childless cat ladies” and argued that parents should get extra votes. Republicans’ recent obsession with overturning no-fault-divorce laws is also informed by incel culture and online sexist outrage. Vance has bemoaned the fact that people can more easily leave marriages, even violent ones, “like they change their underwear.”
This is not about ensuring that more babies are born. If it were, Republicans would be supporting child tax credits, federal paid-leave legislation, affordable housing, subsidized day-care programs, and maternal-health-care bills. They would not be imperiling IVF treatments. It’s about the domination of women and the reinscription of patriarchal power.
Then, on that split screen, there are the men of the Democratic Party. Emhoff takes care to emphasize, in a way that is new for Democratic men, that reproductive rights is “not just an issue for women,” it’s “an issue for all of us.” In Portland this summer, he described a “post-Dobbsian hellscape” in which “you can’t get a Pap smear; you can’t get basic care.” That’s right: Men in the post-Biden Democratic Party can comfortably say Pap smear.
As Harris weighed the decision of who would be her running mate, it was understood that she would be seeking a white man to balance out the historically disruptive nature of her candidacy, and the nation got a glimpse of an array of guys who seemed eager to serve a female boss. They were masculine in a lot of traditional ways: veterans and astronauts and high-powered lawyers who could talk about guns and fixing cars but also child care and parenthood. This is a version of masculinity that is open and optimistic and appears to really love women. To many of us, this winds up reading as a lot more manly than, for instance, Vance’s half-hearted attempts to defend his mixed-race marriage from white-supremacist criticism.
It is thus poetic that Harris encountered Walz, who as governor had signed a series of expansive protections of abortion and LGBTQ+ rights, at a Planned Parenthood in St. Paul in March, the first visit by any sitting vice-president to a facility that provides abortion care. Walz, 60, looks like a beardless Santa Claus and has the vibe of a neighbor who will fix your lawn mower. His lightning-strike audition for the veep slot was accompanied by photographs online showing him snuggling dogs, cats, and piglets and being embraced by groups of happy children after he signed new child-care-benefit laws. Walz speaks often, including at his first campaign rally with Harris in August, of the IVF struggles he and his wife, Gwen, experienced.
It is invigorating to see Walz’s traditional form of public masculinity — “big dad energy,” as Axios put it — in service of a party that seems finally to be taking women’s rights and liberation as a central moral concern. Just a few decades ago, that stance would have gotten Democrats derisively labeled “the mommy party.”
But this is where Walz’s great rhetorical contribution to the campaign comes in: his use of the word weird to describe the backward, bizarre positions of the opposition. It’s not just that weird is an effective descriptor that drives Republicans up the wall. It’s that it also reflects its inverse: normal. For while the right has been terrifyingly successful at rolling back laws and rights, it seems to be having a tougher time altering what have become new gender norms. When Vance describes child care as “class war against normal people,” it sounds weird. When Fox News’ Jesse Watters suggests that “when a man votes for a woman, he actually transitions into a woman,” it sounds really weird. And when Democratic men speak of women as their partners, friends, colleagues, and bosses, when they make it clear that people need Pap smears and tampons and abortion care, when they show themselves willing to work for a woman to become president, they sound, well, normal.
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