Last month a young woman filed a lawsuit against Cornell University, alleging that two years ago the university failed to protect her from being raped by seven men at a fraternity house near the university campus. She also sued the fraternity. The lawsuit has plunged the university into a crisis and invited criticism of the district attorney, Matthew Van Houten, who decided there wasn’t enough evidence to bring criminal charges against the seven men.
At this point we can only guess why neither Cornell nor Van Houten did more in response to the young woman’s allegations. But it seems to me that we’re living through a time when men — including privileged young men at a frat house in an Ivy League university — feel some impunity when it comes to attacking women.
I don’t think it unrelated to such feelings of impunity that the man now occupying the highest office in the land was found in civil court to have sexually molested writer E. Jean Carroll (and whose behavior the presiding judge at that trial described as “rape”). Or that this same man has repeatedly insulted the physical appearance of female journalists, politicians, and public figures. Or that he was caught on a hot microphone boasting about using his fame to forcefully kiss and grope women without consent, stating that being a star allows men to “do anything” and “grab ’em by the pussy.”
When women have spoken out against him, Trump has resorted to smear campaigns, as he did with Carroll, Stormy Daniels, and Hillary Clinton. When women have stood up to him, he has exploded in anger against them, as he did with Megyn Kelly, Rosie O’Donnell, Kamala Harris, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
As Sophie Gilbert wrote in The Atlantic, “The misogyny that Trump embodies and champions is less about loathing than enforcement: underscoring his requirement that women look and behave a certain way, that we comply with his desires and submit to our required social function.”
His administration is the most belligerently misogynistic of any in memory. It has openly equated testosterone levels to strength and courage, conducted a cage match on the White House lawn as part of its celebration of America’s 250th anniversary, fired every senior female official in sight, and accused the Democratic Party of being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies.”
Nor do I think it irrelevant that Trump, JD Vance, and Trump’s erstwhile pal Elon Musk inhabit what’s been termed the “manosphere” — a place where the main events are dominance and submission. The whole point is to humiliate weak men and to subjugate women.
An implicit promise of the 2024 Trump campaign was to restore patriarchy to America. Trump voters were overwhelmingly male.
After Trump’s reelection, sexist and abusive attacks on women — such as “your body, my choice” and “get back to the kitchen” — surged across social media, according to an analysis from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue.
A remarkable number of Trump’s cronies are sexual harassers and predators. Trump was introduced at the Republican National Convention by Dana White, chief executive of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, who was once caught on tape slapping his wife in a nightclub.
JD Vance has claimed men in America are “suppressed” in their masculinity.
Before becoming Trump’s defense secretary, Pete Hegseth paid off a woman who accused him of sexual assault. (Hegseth’s own mother accused him of abusing women, though she later disavowed her words.) And as secretary, Hegseth has championed “high-T” men, demanded that women be removed from front-line combat roles, and blocked promotions of female officers.
Trump’s HHS secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., was accused of sexually harassing his family’s nanny and at one point kept a diary of his conquests, which his wife at the time found.
One of Elon Musk’s companies, SpaceX, reportedly paid $250,000 to a flight attendant who said Musk exposed himself to her. In a lawsuit filed last year, former employees accused him of “treating women as sexual objects to be evaluated on their bra size.”
One of the most pathetic members of the manosphere is Mark Zuckerberg. After kissing Trump’s derriere, the third-richest man in America called for more “masculine energy” because the corporate world was becoming “culturally neutered.” He told Joe Rogan that “having a culture that celebrates the aggression a bit more has its own merits that are really positive.”
The Trump regime celebrated toxic masculinity by smoothing the way for Andrew and Tristan Tate to be extradited from Romania to the United States. The Tate bros had been accused of luring women to Romania and then forcing them to work as pornographic webcam performers. Britain is also investigating the Tate brothers for rape and human trafficking in Britain. (U.S. Marshals arrested the Tate brothers in Miami on July 18, following an extradition request from the United Kingdom.)
Andrew Tate is a big fan of Trump, championing him to his millions of mostly young male followers on social media. “I’m a Trump fan because I’m a man,” Tate has said. “You have to support Trump if you’re a man.”
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Trump’s authoritarian manosphere is organized around a hierarchy topped by heroic male warriors. Winning is all about getting other males to submit to the dominant male. Women are relegated to subservient roles.
Anything that challenges the traditional heroic male roles of protector, provider, and controller of the family is considered a threat to the social order. LGBTQ+ people are believed to weaken the heroic male. Hence, Trump’s executive order declaring that the U.S. government will recognize only a person’s sex assigned at birth, limit the definition of a “male” or “female” to their reproductive cells, and potentially withhold federal funding from programs that acknowledge transgender people or “gender ideology.”
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I don’t want to oversimplify a complex social phenomenon or engage in the same kind of gender stereotypes that the manosphere promotes. Male domination is hardly the only characteristic that unites Trump, Vance, Hegseth, Kennedy Jr., Musk, and the Tech Bros. Misogyny is not unique to authoritarian men.
Nor do I presume to know what happened at the Cornell fraternity house two years ago. But I don’t think it unreasonable to see it related to America’s slide toward a neofascism rooted in deep distrust, bordering on hate, of people who seem weak or feminine — people who were born as, or have become, women.
Robert Bernard Reich is an American professor, author, lawyer, and political commentator. He worked in the administrations of Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, and served as Secretary of Labor from 1993 to 1997 in the cabinet of President Bill Clinton. He was also a member of President Barack Obama's economic transition advisory board. Reich has been the Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley since January 2006. He was formerly a lecturer at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government and a professor of social and economic policy at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management of Brandeis University.
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