Paternalistic protectionism reinforces male supremacy—as history makes clear.
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Some might read Trump’s sweeping promise to protect women as an outdated, but nonetheless benign expression of gender paternalism, somewhat akin to (albeit on a far grander scale) insisting on paying for meals or holding the car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.
Trump ‘is happy to employ women in high-powered positions in his companies,’ as this depends upon their remaining ‘loyal and deferential.’
A few examples from prior centuries when women lived under a totalizing regime of gender paternalism underscore the danger of Trump’s protectionist agenda:
From the Supreme Court decision in Bradwell v. Illinois (1872) on why women are unfit to be lawyers:
The civil law, as well as nature herself, has always recognized a wide difference in the respective spheres and destinies of man and woman. Man is, or should be, woman’s protector and defender. The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life.
From William Blackstone, the famed 18th-century English legal commentator on the doctrine of marital unity:
By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband: under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs everything … her baron, her lord.
From a 19th-century state senator’s anti-suffrage argument:
The men are able to run the government and take care of the women. Do women have to vote in order to receive the protection of man? … To man, woman is the dearest creature on earth. … By keeping woman in her exalted position man can be induced to do more for her than he could by having her mix up in affairs that will cause him to lose respect and regard for her. … As long as woman is woman and keeps her place she will get more protection and more consideration than man gets.
Exemplified by the use of terms such as “delicacy,” “dearest creature” and “exalted position,” the exclusionary and subordinating force of paternalistic protectionism was hidden behind a veil of praise for women’s special characteristics. Ripping away this pretense, as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (then legal director of the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project), famously argued in an early sex discrimination case before the Supreme Court, this “gender line … helps to keep women not on a pedestal, but in a cage,” in accordance with patriarchal strictures.
Trump’s blustery boasts likewise serve to position him as the protector of women for their own good, thus earning him our gratitude and loyalty. As he exhorted the Pennsylvania audience, “’I always thought women liked me … but the fake news keeps saying women don’t like me. I don’t believe it. You know why? They like to have strong borders. They like to have safety.’”
Although deeply problematic on its own, Trump went far beyond the egotistical infusion of deeply paternalistic gender norms into the election when he went on to insist that he will protect women “whether [they] like it or not.” This moves us squarely into the realm of coercive misogyny—which philosopher Kate Manne explains is the “‘law enforcement branch of patriarchy,’ a system that functions to police and enforce gendered norms and expectations.”
While having no quarrel with women who “stay in their lane,” misogyny directs its punitive force towards those who fail to do so—such as those who refuse to bow to Trump’s reprised 19th-century dictate that “man is, or should be, woman’s protector and defender.”
Citing examples, such his remark that Megyn Kelly of Fox News had blood coming out of her eyes and her “whatever” after she pressed him on his history of insulting women, Manne writes in the Boston Review that Trump “portrays misogyny because he’s utterly vicious—even by his admittedly dismal standards—to women who challenge him or don’t behave in a deferential manner. I think of him as a paradigmatic misogynist.”
Manne explains that this characterization of Trump as a paradigmatic misogynist is not undercut by the fact he “is happy to employ women in high-powered positions in his companies,” as this depends upon their remaining “loyal and deferential.”
Setting aside the complete illogic of Trump’s magical thinking that with him as president women “will no longer be thinking about abortion,” I want to address how this apparent boast fits with his protectionist messaging, both in its gender paternalist and its misogynistic expressions.
Starting with the former: In 2016, after catching considerable heat for asserting that a woman should be punished for terminating a pregnancy if abortion became illegal, he quickly walked this back and instead repositioned her “as a victim … as is the life in her womb.”
In so doing, Trump aligned himself with the so called ‘pro-woman/pro-life’ antiabortion position, which claims women are incapable of consenting to abortion because “it is so far outside the normal conduct of a mother to implicate herself in the killing of her own child.” Accordingly, she must either have been deceived “into thinking the unborn child does not yet exist,” or persuaded by the abortion provider “to defy her very nature as a mother to protect her child.” She must therefore be directed into motherhood by antiabortion centers and sidewalk counselors outside clinics, so she is protected from a lifetime of debilitating regret and emotional trauma.
The misogynistic power of abortion bans enacted after Roe v. Wade was overturned that are aimed at forced birth “whether the women like it or not” runs beneath the thin veneer of paternalistic concerns about protecting women from abortion trauma. Having boasted about killing Roe and sending the issue of abortion to the states where “everyone wanted it,” Trump gloats it is “beautiful thing to watch” as states enact a patchwork of laws. And while many states have strengthened their commitment to ensuring that abortion remains both legal and accessible, more than 20 have enacted total or strict gestational bans aimed at surveilling and controlling the reproductive decisions of those within their borders.
As women suffer incalculable harms—including death, irreversible injuries, infertility, or being forced to carry a fetus with a lethal anomaly—we are witnessing misogyny do its work as the “law enforcement branch of patriarchy.”
As was true with regard to meriting a spot on the historic gender pedestal, Trump certainly does not think that all women are equally deserving of his beneficence—think those he is planning on forcibly deporting. And when he speaks of the beauty of the rollout of abortion bans, it is with an arrogant disregard for their devastating impact on marginalized communities.
