Suzanne Harrington: A Trump supporter faces the facts — in the world Trump's helped create
Suzanne Harrington: "There is a collective intake of breath — the woman in front of me inhales so sharply I wonder if she might turn inside out — followed by a moment of total hush. A pin drops." Pic: Andrew Dunsmore.
In a room above a pub, an academic and a journalist, both men, are presenting a talk about the manosphere. It’s grimly fascinating, like peeping through a keyhole into a place you’ve heard of but would never, ever want to visit. Afterwards, there’s a Q&A.
One woman is worried about her teenage sons being drawn to high-profile online women-haters, who peddle an almost comically tragic version of masculinity while sucking cash from gullible young men — like her sons.
She’s not sure what to do.
Another audience member admits to having explored that world as a younger man, before coming to realise it’s basically a small number of terrible men profiting from a large number of inadequate men by making them feel bad about themselves.
Much like the beauty industry has been doing to women for all eternity, someone deadpans, except with vastly more hate.
The ex-manosphere dabbler quickly adds that he isn’t an incel, that the woman sitting next to him is his girlfriend. He puts his arm around her, and there’s a ripple of gentle laughter — with him, not at him.
A woman takes the mic to ask a final question. She’s American, returning to the airport after a brief visit, too early for her flight. She’s dressed expensively.
Amid a slightly scruffy left-leaning audience in a town where you could happily identify as a non-binary polyamorous unicorn and be celebrated for it, she seems almost apologetic as she asks her question: Wouldn’t everyone be better off, men and women, if we returned to traditional gender roles?
#MeToo did men a terrible disservice, she says. Women just want to be provided for and taken care of. Men should provide for women, and women should stop exhausting themselves with careers. Wouldn’t this be the answer?
There is a collective intake of breath — the woman in front of me inhales so sharply I wonder if she might turn inside out — followed by a moment of total hush. A pin drops.
The American has outed herself as a Trump-voting tradwife in a roomful of feminist lefties of varying genders.
Without missing a beat, the academic responds kindly and reasonably. It’s not gender which is messing things up, he says, it’s the fact that all the money is being sucked upwards away from the many, and into the private accounts of the few.
Manufactured culture wars serve as a handy distraction from the fact that a tiny percentage of billionaires have created a system designed to continuously enrich themselves — he puts it far more eloquently than that, but I’m paraphrasing.
The journalist who has been exploring the manosphere adds that women don’t need to be infantilised and provided for, but need proper pay, proper childcare, proper opportunities — just as men don’t need toxic masculinity piled on top of them.
The American woman looks a bit scared, like she’s found a platoon of reds under her bed. She eyes the door. The academic reassures her.
!Thank you for your question. You’re in a safe space here,” he adds, with a twinkle in his eye, but he’s serious. Because she is.
As we file out, I make eye contact with her, and we smile at each other. She has a lovely smile. I try not to judge her — can she help being brainwashed?
Later that evening, an ultra-bigoted Trump activist is shot dead at a US university gathering.
This is the violent, racist, money-mad, fascist society to which that woman is returning. I feel sorry for her. I feel sorry for all Americans, even the Trump ones.
