It’s a truism that female candidates for high office face obstacles that men don’t. Less acknowledged is that women face different obstacles each from the other. Individually and generationallyudbet, women confront their own particular impossible dilemmas.
Hillary Clinton’s dilemma was how to be forceful without coming off as fatally unfeminine, of seeming like a male impostor by virtue of being ambitious. Kamala Harris’s quandary is different. She’s not having to bat down accusations that her ambition makes her unwomanly, in part because she chose not to make breaking the glass ceiling a theme of her campaign. Her particular Achilles’ heel — pointed out by her opponent, who, whatever his manifest unfitness for the job, does have a talent for identifying and exploiting vulnerabilities — is contained in the word “protection.”
That’s the insinuation behind so many of the attacks on Ms. Harris’s presidential quest: How’s she going to protect voters who, knocked around by everything from contagion to inflation to war, feel unsafe and insecure? As much as the Harris campaign promotes “joy,” the national mood radiates fear — of exposure, threat, bodily harm. How’s a woman supposed to protect us from that? Protection is an area of American culture that is resolutely gendered. The problematic dynamics that traditionally govern protection of home and hearth also govern our politics, an arena in which, historically, women have been granted neither protector nor protected status.
In the public sphere, as in the personal, he who would dominate offers to protect. Forty-seven years ago, the feminist philosopher Susan Rae Peterson identified the syndrome of the “male protection racket,” asking, “Since the state fails them in its protective function, to whom can women turn for protection?” She explained that “women make agreements with husbands or fathers (in return for fidelity or chastity, respectively) to secure protection. From whom do these men protect women? From other men, it turns out.” She continued: “There is a striking parallel between this situation and tactics used by crime syndicates who sell protection as a racket. The buyer who refuses to buy the protective services of an agency because he needs no protection finds out soon that because he refuses to buy it, he very definitely needs protection. Women are in the same position.”
Or as Mae West putatively said: “Every man I meet wants to protect me. I can’t figure out what from.”
Donald Trump has it figured out. “Sadly, women are poorer than they were four years ago,” he told a Pennsylvania rally in late September. Also: “less healthy,” “less safe on the streets” and “more stressed and depressed and unhappy.” In a part of his speech aimed explicitly at female voters, he added, “I will fix all of that and fast, and at long last this nation, and national nightmare, will end.” Women, he promised, “will no longer be abandoned, lonely or scared. You will no longer be in danger.” Why? “You will be protected, and I will be your protector.”
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