What A Day - Can the Trump Administration Undo the Sexual Revolution?

Episode Date: December 7, 2024

Trump’s rhetoric glorifies an America where men are in charge and women are subjugated. Rights that many of us took for granted for decades—no fault divorce, access to contraception and abortion��as well as newer rights like access to gender-affirming health care and same sex marriage are now in the crosshairs of an empowered conservative bloc. Project 2025 calls for the government to stop barely short of forcing women back into a state of subservience, gay people back into the closet, and America back to the 1950s. But can the government actually do that? This week on How We Got Here, Erin interviews author and New York Magazine Writer Rebecca Traister to understand how sexual politics will evolve over the next four years.

Even before Donald Trump was re-elected on the heels of a campaign that relied, at least in part, on promises to return America to a time when men were in charge and women were subjugated, it was clear that the relationship between American men and women was, shall we say, strained. Rights many of us had all but taken for granted for generations like no-fault divorce, access to contraception and abortion, as well as newer but still cherished rights like access to gender-affirming health care and same-sex marriage, are now in the crosshairs of an empowered conservative bloc eager to turn this country into a place where there are two tiers of citizenship, married straight guys and everybody else.

Project 2025 calls for the government to stop barely short of forcing women back into a state of subservience, gay people back into the closet, and America back to the 1950s. But can the government actually do that? I'm Erin Ryan, and this is How We Got Here, a series that explores a big question behind the week's headlines and tells a story that answers that question. Folks, Max Fisher is out this week, which means that I have run completely amok. And so we're going to talk about one of the issues that's been on my mind for

the last 15 years or so. The relationship between men and women in this country and the push-pull between female empowerment and male resentment that we're now seeing come to a head. Since the election was called for Donald Trump, people have been scared that the incoming president is going to do what he says he's going to do. Take women and LGBTQ people down a few notches by rolling back their rights. People are taking action to protect themselves. There's been an uptick in vasectomies and permanent sterilization among Americans of

reproductive age. Women are stockpiling emergency contraception and abortion medication. Planned Parenthood has seen a 1200% rise in appointments to get IUDs placed and a public service announcement. If you've got a uterus, it's time to re-up. These puppies last eight years now. And if you get an IUD today, it could very well outlive some of the bozos trying to legislate away your rights.

So to dive into this, I called up author and New York magazine writer at large, Rebecca Traister. Rebecca covers the intersection of gender, politics, and society and is the author of several books, including 2016's All the Single Ladies and 2020's Good and Mad. We started by talking about how policy and sexual politics form a kind of feedback loop that shapes American society as a whole. There are the shifting social patterns and sexual patterns and romantic patterns. And

those are shifting in part thanks to policy changes that were going back like decades to look at the policy changes, right? Like the legalization not only of abortion, but the legalization of birth control first for married people in 1965 and then for single people in 1972. A lot of people don't know those were two separate Supreme Court decisions, which is alarming. You know, changes in like women's ability to have their own credit cards or to vote. There are all these things that happened in our past, some of which are very far back

and some of which are not that far back, that enabled a bunch of social shifts around how women and men could live their romantic, sexual, reproductive, familial lives. And it opened up a whole variety of new paths in the past few decades. Then you have what I see as a political reaction to a lot of those shifts and the sort of pushing back against those new kinds of liberties. And the new kinds of liberties, to be clear, mean marrying later, cohabitating

outside of marriage, certainly marriage equality, having children out of wedlock without it being a massive social stigma. And what you're seeing, what you've seen in the past few years, decades building slowly, but then the results really bearing fruit in the past few years is the political conservative pushback against those kinds of liberties. So most obviously you see the overturn of Roe with the Dobbs decision. You see Republicans coming for no fault divorce in lots of states. You see incursions on birth control. You see the promise of further erosion of the access to those kinds of things,

which really in the grand scheme of American history had only recently been legalized. Just to build off that, these changes have implications beyond how people live their lives. The way we socialize also influences where we want to live, what kind of businesses we frequent, how much money we have to spend, and on what. The timing and size of one's family is the biggest financial decision that many of us will make in our lifetimes. Multiply that by millions, and it's clear that the availability of comprehensive reproductive health care can reshape society. Here's a tiny, but actually huge, example. The pill. Before the pill, women did not have a discreet contraceptive option that they fully controlled. After the pill was made

legal for unmarried women, as Rebecca mentioned, in 1972, women's place in society transformed. In 1970, incoming classes in American law schools were 90% male. Medical schools and dental schools were 95% male. But by 1980, incoming classes in those professional post-grad programs were one-third female. And in the 2023-2024 academic year, women outnumbered men in medical school enrollment. 54% of first-year med students are women. Project 2025, among other things, aims to claw back some of the control that women have over their own bodies, not just by making birth control more difficult for women to access through changes in policy, but also by tarnishing its reputation in the culture. There was actually a clip going around social media a while back featuring a speaker at

conservative think tank, the Heritage Foundation's event, calling for a return to a time when sex was more risky. I mean, for women, obviously. It seems to me that a good place to start would be a feminist movement against the pill and for rewilding sex, returning the danger to sex, returning the intimacy and really the consequentiality to sex. In recent years, conservatives have been almost creepily apoplectic about the so-called dangers of birth control, seeding social media with claims that hormonal birth control can make

people crazy or that it forces people to be attracted to less masculine men and thus, when the time comes to come off birth control and get pregnant, ostensibly produce subpar offspring. Here's Elon Musk parroting some of those falsehoods with Tucker Carlson on a set that looks like it was inspired by purgatory. I think maybe a lot of women are unaware that hormonal birth control causes depression and dramatically increases risk of suicide and changes their preferences on who they want to marry or have kids with. It changes their personality. Not to say this on the box by the way. Caution may change your personality. Yes, the warnings are, has significant cause, significant risk of depression, significant increase in suicide, and will make you want

to go out with people that you don't actually like. That's actually true by the way. I know. My skin will be crawling for the rest of the day. But moving along, I just want to note that everything Musk is claiming here is scientifically false, except for the fact that hormonal birth control can increase your risk of depression by a whopping 1 percent. Which is not surprising because Elon Musk is neither a doctor nor a scientist. He's just a weirdo with darting eyes of somebody who is definitely not using too much ketamine. Dunking on Elon aside, even making it a little bit more difficult for people to access safe

and affordable contraception and abortion would be tantamount to the government putting its thumb on the scale to get at least some women out of grad school and back into the kitchen. But the incoming Trump administration is not just planning on putting its thumb on the scale. It wants to slam its fist down on the scale. Because contraception isn't the only product of social progress that conservatives are targeting. They're going after abortion, like I mentioned. They're going after no-fault divorce, like Rebecca mentioned. They're going after social welfare programs, public schools, trans rights, gay marriage, and anti-discrimination

and equal pay laws. Project 2025, if you look at it holistically, is an attempt to completely realign gender roles in American society so that men can feel tough and important again, which ultimately is probably what MAGA, Make America Great Again, has meant all along. For women, when sex has a high likelihood of resulting in pregnancy because birth control isn't available, terminating a pregnancy is difficult to impossible because abortion is illegal, no paid family leave exists, child care is astronomically expensive, and there are no laws to prevent an employer from refusing to hire you or promote you because you're a woman, it kind of feels like their vision for the

proper role of American women in American society is pretty clear. And also they keep saying it out loud. I think it is you, the women, who have had the most diabolical lies told to you. How many of you are sitting here now about to cross this stage and are thinking about all the promotions and titles you're going to get in your career? Some of you may go on to lead successful careers in the world, but I would venture to guess that the majority of you are most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world. That was Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker speaking at a college commencement

for some reason, giving off the same energy as Liesl's Nazi boyfriend in The Sound of Music. The sudden presence of influencers projecting his so-called tradwife lifestyle is also no coincidence. In order for anti-feminist backlash to truly hold, women have to believe that they're choosing to give up their rights in favor of a softer, simpler life. Wouldn't your life be easier if, rather than getting up every morning to go to a job where you weren't appreciated, you got to spend your days bandying about, making bread from scratch in pristine anthropology maxi dresses while you're adoring toe-headed and perfectly behaved children.

Look on with adoration. Wouldn't it be easier to just stop trying and be cared for? Now, as a mother of two small children, I have to say, anybody who has ever spent time looking after kids knows that motherhood involves a lot more bodily fluids and sweatpants than it does bread kneading and fashion. And if you think your boss is a dick now, you've never been ordered around by a three-year-old transitioning out of their afternoon nap. But I'm not in the target audience for TradWife content. They're going after very young women who don't know any better.

And by the time they learn that stay-at-home parenting is a labor activity and not a leisure activity, they've already double-notted their egg apron. Conservative forces in the U.S. have tried to nudge women backwards before. In the middle of the last century, it was more like a shove when soldiers returned from World War II and a nation of Rosie the Riveters were told, thank you very much for all the hard work, but you can go home and make a pot roast now. Here's Rebecca again. This is the period that is romanticized in the way that a lot of people in power tell America's history. That there was this period of the 1950s and 1960s where like that nuclear family which was in fact entirely modeled by the government. The the median marriage age for women fell

to 20 in 1960 because the government made it so right. So we should all be aware that it is possible for the government made it so, right? So we should all be aware that it is possible for the government to make laws and change policies in a way that forces changes in marriage patterns. As idealized as this era was, women weren't happy. They were being medicated. They were being lobotomized. Go ahead and look up the history of Valium for a really unfun read about how that whole thing played out, there was a lot of despair tucked away in the domestic bliss of mid-century America.

We should also note here that as the white nuclear family was being hailed as a paragon of virtue, that every Caucasian was obligated to participate in or face the social consequences, the government was systematically dismantling the black family, cutting their neighborhoods off from suburbs and commerce districts with freeways, allowing banks to refuse to issue home loans to black borrowers, and forcing black children to attend underfunded and subpar schools. Okay, so let's come back to the present day. In the same vein of valuing some families more than others, Project 2025 also waxes poetic about the need to bring back the so-called traditional marriages

through coercive lawmaking meant to work in tandem with shifts in social expectations. Here's Rebecca again. It's so clear that what the people who want to return to older patterns around hetero coupling, which means early sort of compulsory hetero marriage where men have a disproportionate share of the power both inside the home and outside the home and women bear a disproportionate share of the responsibility for domestic and famil and outside the home. And women bear a disproportionate share of the responsibility for domestic and familial labor and less opportunity to have any kind of economic stability or independence outside of the home, right?

That's what they want. And you can see that in the move against divorce laws. You can see it in the exaltation of guys who've been very violent within their marriages. Look at the Republican convention where you had Hulk Hogan, the ultimate fighting champion, president, both of whom have been accused of domestic violence, where you had Tucker Carlson,

who's been accused of sexual harassment, the entire Trump cabinet, which this is a joke that I've seen elsewhere, it's not my own, but like affirmative action for sex pests. It's, you know. It's like a Mount Olympus kind of. Yes, yes. Like all of them represent different types of like how to be a sexist.

Different versions of did you beat your wife? Did you rape somebody? Did you harass a babysitter? Right? Like this is re-imposition of a very violent kind of male power along with the taking away of the rights of people capable of pregnancy to actually control their own reproductive systems, their own bodies to determine when,, and under what circumstances they might have children. So it's the removal of all these rights from women at the same time that you are imaginatively holding up

incredibly violent forms of masculinity. But the big problem with this push and these schemes and the exaltation of this kind of archetype of scary manly men, they don't work. They don't work. And not only do they not work in the long term, they backfire. I know because I've looked at this history that there are levers they can press that probably can create some shift. I don't think you can put it right back to where it was in 1960, but they can make things inaccessible to people. They can create dependency for women on men.

They can do those kinds of things. But what you're then gonna have is another massive explosion. The entire thing that the contemporary right wing is pushing back against is what happened in the middle of the 20th century, in part because they did this before. So the notion that like they did it it and we had Norman Rockwell periods of everybody sitting around, white people sitting around a turkey dinner or whatever,

and that this was the idealized leave it to beaver fucking family. That worked great until the 1970s when you had women, nobody ever really burned their bras, but that's the thing that so alarms contemporary conservatives. A hard right movement is you had all those people who were repressed by those policies being like, fuck this, we are going to change this country. And you had the eruptions that fundamentally altered the terrain. We have half or more of the population that is really straining against this.

Look at the state referenda on abortion, right? Even in an election year in which Donald Trump won handily, you had seven out of ten and eight counting Florida with 57% of the majority voting against the kinds of restrictions that would enable this kind of reimposition of patriarchal control. You have a majority of this country that is going to kick and scream against the reimposition of patriarchal control. You have a majority of this country that is gonna kick and scream against the reimposition of these norms. Not only do we have an example of this sort of scheme

not working in American history, we have contemporary examples of this scheme leading in other countries to women completely opting out of the system. I've been seeing a lot of content about American women protecting themselves from government attempts to force them into some kind of compulsory Suzy, homemaker, tradwife nightmare talking about adapting the principles of the South Korean 4B movement. To roughly summarize, 4B is a call by fed up young women to say no to dating, having sex with, marrying, or having children with men.

Most of the aforementioned content about an American 4B movement seems, frankly, to be a little bit clickbaity. Like, there's no actual giant sex strike happening in the U.S. There's no 4B movement in the U.S. And the U.S. and South Korea are very different places with different cultural and social histories. And if you've been following international headlines this week, different problems in the political status quo as well. But the reasons that stories about American women saying screw it to screwing our landing right now is that as in South Korea, we're certainly grappling with power struggles over

gender roles. And the implications of that power struggle could extend well beyond sex, dating, other relationships. It could have huge implications for the way our cities look, the way our towns look, the way we socialize, what kind of businesses are available to us. Because those things all happened on the heels of the sexual revolution. People get very jumpy when they imagine a future where women decide en masse that being involved with men at all is simply not worth it. As far as I know, I don't think the Trump administration has any forced marriage policies

on the table yet. But you know, give them time. As inconvenient as the truth might be to the conservative plot to undo the sexual revolution, most government-run attempts to promote procreative heterosexual marriage are actually big wastes of money and time. Though according to Traster, there are some types of pro-marriage programs that actually work. Both the George W. Bush administration and the Obama administration had poured billions of dollars into marriage education programs,

trying to up the rates of marriage. They had not worked. It didn't work. When I wrote all the single ladies, and I note that because I haven't been looking at the research over the past eight years, so I want to date this, there were two programs that I found that had actually worked to either staunch divorce rates or up marriage rates. And they were both welfare and job training programs in communities where accidentally basically the government had continued to give more money and create more economic stability for people and as a result there wasn't even

what they were trying to do, more of those people either got married or stayed married. So the like hard right white patriarchal regime of insisting on marriage is much more likely to backfire. And if people actually cared about family formation, family stability, happiness, which is a lot of what the marriage warriors tend to say they're worried about, the best thing you could do is impose like a ton of new government programs to better support communities and you'd probably see the stabilization of marriage patterns and coupling of, you know, every flavor. It's not lost on me that two of the groups of people most likely to vote for Kamala Harris,

women in their reproductive years and LGBTQ plus Americans are the ones who stand to be most impacted by the rollback of the sexual revolution. The people who voted for Trump, white people between 45 and 65, men, they're not the ones Project 2025 is trying to take down a peg or two. A desire to return to a different time in American history, this fantasy where men went to work and women stayed home and took care of their children while they waited for their husbands, that's not something Trump voters have volunteered themselves for. It's something they've volunteered other people for, based on the fantasy that we can bring back meaning to the lives of young American men by agreeing to cosplay that it's the

1950s again. We're not getting that economy back. And forcing that many women to step back from the workforce to be homemakers would be an unmitigated economic disaster. As Rebecca Traister and other students of history have noted, this won't end well for them. But hey, women not wanting something has not stopped Donald Trump before.

All right, I'm gonna let him play us out. They said, we think it's very inappropriate for you to say, so why, I'm president, I wanna protect the women of our country. They said. They said, why? I'm president. I want to protect the women of our country. They said, sir, I just think it's inappropriate for you to say, pay these guys a lot of money. Can you believe it? They said, well, I'm going to do it whether the women like it or not. I'm going to protect them. I'm going to protect them from migrants coming in. I'm going to protect them. Okay. Okay. I'm just kidding. I'm not going them from migrants coming in. I'm gonna protect them from foreign countries. Okay, okay.

I'm just kidding. I'm not gonna leave you on something that dark. I'm gonna end on something a little bit more upbeat, one of my favorite old songs, Loretta Lynn's The Pill. I'm tired of all your crowing How you and your hands play While holding a couple in my arms And others on the way Alright, we'll be back next week and so will Max. How we got here is written and hosted by me, Max Fisher and Aaron Ryan. Our producer is Emma Illich-Frank.

Evan Sutton mixes and masters the show. Jordan Cantor sound engineers the show. Audio support from Kyle Segland, Charlotte Landis, and Vasiliz Fotopoulos. Production support from Leo Duran, Raven Yamamoto, and Adrian Hill. Thanks for watching!