Trump's Chilling Promise to 'Protect Women' Puts 'Women Not on a Pedestal, but in a Cage'

(lengthy, important, depressing, read)


Trump’s Chilling Promise to ‘Protect Women’ Puts ‘Women Not on a Pedestal, but in a Cage’
PUBLISHED 11/26/2024 by Shoshanna Ehrlich | UPDATED 11/27/2024 at 7:23 A.M. PT
Paternalistic protectionism reinforces male supremacy—as history makes clear.



Susie Wiles with former President Donald Trump after he was declared the winner during an election night watch party at the Palm Beach County Convention Center in West Palm Beach, Florida in the early hours of Wednesday, Nov. 6, 2024. (Jabin Botsford / The Washington Post via Getty Images)

In a late September post on Truth Social, in an apparent attempt to close the gender gap between himself and Vice President Kamala Harris, President-Elect Donald Trump boasted that as president he would “PROTECT WOMEN AT A LEVEL NEVER SEEN BEFORE.” Elaborating, he further crowed at a Pennsylvania rally that as a result of his protective beneficence, “women will be happy, healthy, confident and free” and that we will also magically be freed from the stress of “thinking about abortion.”

Some might read Trump’s sweeping promise to protect women as an outdated, but nonetheless benign expression of gender paternalism, somewhat akin to (albeit on a far grander scale) insisting on paying for meals or holding the car door open—the kind of acts that The Husband’s Club blog characterizes as “great examples of modern chivalry [to] make your lady stand out.” Doubling down, at a September rally in Rocky Mount, N.C., Trump asked, “Is there any woman in the audience that does not seek protection? Please raise your hand.” After a silence, he asked, “Is there any woman in the audience that wants to be protected?” Cheers replaced the silence.

Much has been made, and rightfully so, of Trump’s protectionist hypocrisy. It is hard to take his boast seriously that with him at the helm, women will “no longer be abandoned, lonely or scared. You will no longer be in danger,” given his gender scorecard—which includes accusations of sexual misconduct by close to two dozen women and his infamous Access Hollywood predatory brag, “I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. … I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star … you can do anything … Grab ’em by the pussy.” In typical self-congratulatory prose, his brag that “after 50 years of failure, with nobody coming even close, I was able to kill Roe v. Wade” is yet another entry.

Trump’s back-and forth with women at his rallies may, at first glance, be seen as an act of paternalistic beneficence for our collective best interest. After all, who would not prefer to be “happy, healthy, confident and free” over being “abandoned, lonely, and scared?” But, as history makes clear, paternalistic protectionism reinforces male supremacy. It is premised on the deeply subordinating and essentialist view that women are “weak and incapable of taking care of themselves.” Accordingly, we require protection for own good, with the resulting loss of self-agency and decisional autonomy.

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https://msmagazine.com/2024/11/26/trump-protect-women-abortion/