Taylor Swift Doesn’t Need Your Help

But Millions of American Women Do.

I’m taking a break this week from weighing in on the political crisis of the moment. As many have pointed out, intramural fighting about whether President Biden is the best possible candidate to run against Donald Trump is draining attention away from the many profound issues at stake in this election.

One issue getting lost in the scrum is the centrality of the backlash against women and girls to the entire MAGA movement. Male fragility is the core of the Trumpist movement. All the other stuff - isolationist foreign policy, alliances with Putin, border hysteria, obeisance to Wall Street demands for low taxes and deregulation - are secondary to this essential and very emotional motivator for MAGA men.

The election of Trump in 2016 was first and foremost a slap in the face to American women. It was more than a signal, it was the Fort Sumter of the real war on women, not the political slogan War on Women. It was the actual first serious shot fired at the gains of second wave feminism, chiefly economic independence from men, thanks to control over our bodily autonomy.

The birth control pill and access to safe and legal abortion were a profound shift in relations between men and women. For the first time in recorded history, really, women with access to those medical innovations have been able to say, sure, I’ll have sex with you, but I won’t have your baby. 

That simple shift led to other advances for women and girls, chiefly access to education, and ultimately economic independence.

But wresting away just that portion of power put a certain type of man on the back foot. Marriage to an oaf is no longer a requirement for basic female survival. 

Clearly, as we now know, this shift disordered the fragile emotional and psychological makeup of untold numbers of men who feel entitled to female subservience. If you doubt this, I refer you to the rise of toxic evil clowns like Andrew Tate, and the ravings of the trio I call the Bobblehead Dolls, chickenhawk incel-adjacent pontificators Ben Shapiro, Jack Posobiec and Charlie Kirk who regularly embarrass themselves claiming to know that young American women are unhappy because they’re single and childless. 

These twits have gotten quite rich playing to the incel crowd, and have spawned countless copycats in the media who one-up each other promoting a vision of American womanhood that Emily Dickinson would have recognized. 

The latest entrant in the clickbait game was an essay arguing that Taylor Swift’s singlehood at the ripe old age of 34 is “a bad role model” for girls. (Cue the “honey I forgot to have kids” cartoon.) The essay was penned by a self-described male “researcher and essayist” who specializes in “psychology and social relations.” He linked to an article (on a Nigerian news site!)  for “research” finding that women “feel more emotional pain than men” during breakups, to bolster his argument that Tay-Tay’s serial monogamy is really, really bad for girls. 

I won’t name him or the publication here, as it’s clear the ridiculous article was published for one purpose - to provoke Swifties and attract online ad revenue. Predictably it succeeded by hash tagging the greatest living global female popstar, and inspiring a lot of pass-around and feminist condemnation. 

Delicate, incel-adjacent, profiteering wackadoodles like that writer, and the Bobblehead Dolls and their legion of followers are abetted by powerful Silicon Valley machers like “pronatalist” serial father Elon Musk (who Xitters regularly about the alleged dangers of the birth control pill) and Peter Thiel who, while gay, is apparently in league with breeding males by creating tech to track ovulation cycles, and bankrolling faux women’s health websites that foment distrust in hormonal birth control. 

Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 was written by such men and their female auxiliary. It is a 900 page Trumpist document, a policy blueprint for a high tech misogynist dystopia in which women in the wealthiest, most technologically advanced country on the planet will be forcibly returned to reliance on male protectors, and to their supposedly natural role as homemakers and care-givers. 

In his opening to the notorious document, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, a flinty-eyed Catholic extremist, states that marriage, and the intact nuclear family (with dad at the head of the table) are the centerpiece of true American society. “Our Constitution grants each of us the liberty to do not what we want, but what we ought,” he writes in the foreword. “This pursuit of the good life is found primarily in family—marriage, children, Thanksgiving dinners, and the like.” 

The theme is repeated throughout the 900 pages, but especially in sections on education and health and human services. One of the proposals would give deadbeat dads, rather than single moms, child care assistance money, to try to force the couple back together. It would deprive 48 million American women of access to free contraceptive care under Obamacare. The Project’s contributors plan to demolish all access to basic reproductive health care for women and girls, and to attack the breakdown of the gender binary that along with female autonomy so threatens toxic male supremacy in the private and public realm. No-fault divorce would even be on the legal chopping block.

If you’d like to see what the ultimate extremist dream for women and girls among this crowd looks like, I suggest opening this New York Times article about hard-core righties moving with their families to conservative-only enclaves around the country. The story is accompanied by a photograph of one of the daughters of these families, wearing a pinafore and tights, sitting in a chair doing needlework – a living model of 19th Century girlhood. 

Trump’s signature achievement as President was packing the Supreme Court with enough anti-choice religious fanatics to overturn a half-century of legal abortion in America. This has led to swaths of the country teetering on the verge of becoming ob-gyn deserts. It has opened the door to a new level of assaults on women’s bodily autonomy, including outlawing medical abortion pills and contraception. 

Trash literature like the Taylor Swift article urging girls to settle down and find husbands are markers of how far into the mainstream the misogynist freakout over female independence has penetrated. 

Taylor Swift doesn’t need our defense - she’ll be just fine. But hundreds of thousands of women and girls trapped in abortion-banning red states do. For these women and girls, an unwanted pregnancy verges on experiencing mortal combat. 

I’m heading down to Texas soon to write about the situation there. I recently learned that funds for helping thousands of patients weekly get themselves to out of state clinics many hours and tanks of gas from their homes are suddenly drying up. It has been two years since Dobbs and northern-state donor attention has turned away from these victims of anti-choice extremism and toward the election. 

Meanwhile, the tens of thousands of women and girls who try medical abortion at home with mailed pills in Texas and other red states are without aftercare, terrified of going to hospitals or emergency rooms because of possible legal repercussions. Those who do go, risk being refused care by doctors and nurses afraid of the same laws.

I wrote recently that we are now living in the worst of times for modern American women and girls. I reiterate that. The November elections will determine whether that trend continues. 

Next week, at the Republican National Convention, Trump plans to be introduced by the president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship. The UFC is the umbrella organization that presents ultra-violent, bloody, mixed martial arts cage matches in which contestants are routinely left with broken bones, the cracking of which is audible to the frothing, mostly male audiences. The doughy Republican nominee’s choice of introductory speaker, likely accompanied by the Rocky theme, is calculated to give viewers in the stadium and at home a surge of ambient testosterone.

Against this backdrop of a furious war over women’s proper role in politics, workplace and society, we have the fact that President Biden’s likely successor, should he step down as a nominee, or have to leave office for health reasons, is a woman. Democrats were the first party to put a female in the White House as veep. Whatever happens in the coming weeks, one hopes the party can take pride in that fact and double down on support for women, needed now more than ever.