At Stake in This Election: Manhood and Womanhood

This election cycle has been a bit of an odd one. There are plenty of important policy issues that could define it — the border, taxation, inflation, or foreign aid, for example — but none of them (despite how much Americans care about some of them) have risen to the fore.

Instead, Americans — particularly young Americans — are having an identity crisis about a far more fundamental issue: sex. (No, this isn’t about to become a discussion of the marital act. I’m using that word in its more antiquated sense to refer to the binary biological human types.) (READ MORE: Is This Right? Is America Now R+7?)

The crisis is so palpable that the Free Press called sex the defining issue of the election, and in the context of this election, we’re being asked to choose role models.

When Tim Walz joined the Democratic ticket, liberal journalists and campaign strategists were convinced that he would be the silver bullet they needed to win the male vote. “Any liberal Democrat whose resume includes football coach, military veteran and sharp-shooting hunter is a challenge to MAGA mythology,” Francis Wilkinson wrote recently. Wilkinson might have been on to something if Walz could hold a gun comfortably and hadn’t lied about the details of his military service record.

Democrats would like Tim Walz and Doug Emhoff to represent the new American man — a man who can dabble in sports and hunting but isn’t afraid to let the woman in his life run the show (or the country). It’s the American man radical feminists have always wanted. I can’t speak as a young man, but I can imagine it’s an uninspiring model. As a young woman, I can tell you it’s certainly an unattractive model.

Of course, I’m not the first person to make note of all this, and I’m hardly the first person to say that it doesn’t seem to be working all that well. (Nate Hochman wrote a fantastic article for our latest magazine on the growing conservative cohort of young men, so definitely check that out!) Unfortunately, it might just be working well enough in this particular election. (READ MORE: Why I’m Voting for Donald Trump)

According to a recent Harvard Youth poll, voters under 30 favor Kamala Harris by a 2-to-1 ratio. Another poll has young women in that age group favoring her by a 3-to-1 ratio. What many of us conservative commentators haven’t really talked about is the fact that the Democratic war on women, particularly young women, is working quite well.

To be fair to the Trump campaign (which has barely even tried to reverse the trend), Democrats have won the votes of young women for quite some time now. But, it seems that women in general are particularly energized this year by the fact that Kamala Harris (a woman) is running for president and is extraordinarily vocal about “women’s rights” (especially women’s so-called “right” to kill unborn children).

The Democrats’ new American man, with his feminine-flavored masculinity, may not be superbly effective, but their vision of the American woman as a girl-boss certainly is. Kamala Harris, having employed her feminine wiles to achieve power in California and then, perhaps by accident, having been propelled first to the vice presidency, and then to the presidential campaign stage, is the role model young women are being urged to support. (READ MORE: Krugman Tries to Denigrate Trump, Stumbles, and Flips Out)

Because young women, by and large, haven’t discovered via experience that traditional forms of femininity are far more rewarding than the pant-suit feminine model they’ve been taught to try and emulate, Kamala Harris is (and this may come as a shock to the readers of this magazine) an attractive and even inspiring role model.

Instead of making the election about policy and politics, Harris and Walz are playing to the identity crisis many young Americans are in the midst of. They’re forcing us to make a decision about what it means to be a man or a woman in our society.

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