Member-only story
Women Have Been Sounding the Alarm About Radicalized American Masculinity…and Now It’s Here
MAGA’s definition of manhood is just a rebranded abusive boyfriend — and this one has the power to destroy an entire country
It’s happening. Everything we’ve been talking about for the last ten or fifteen years.
If we’re being honest, we’d have to admit that women have been talking about this for a lot longer than that. But we’ve gotten louder in recent years. So loud, you could hear #MeToo echo endlessly across the universe in 2017, twenty years after activist Tarana Burke first coined the phrase.
We’ve been talking about toxic expressions of masculinity, about rape culture, about the horrifying normalization of violence against women. Thanks to the internet, our voices have become louder, our reach wider.
And also thanks to the internet, men have gained easier access to us in largely unregulated cyberspaces, where their abuse and exploitation easily outpaces the dissemination of our stories, our experiences, and our warnings.
Yes, warnings. Warnings about how violent our culture is, how deeply men have been conditioned to dehumanize women, how terrifyingly easy it is for men to turn one romantic or sexual…
