Every Woman Adores a Fascist
Women did not save us from Donald Trump. Is it because downdeep they bought into the myth of the strongman who will be their protector?
In moments of darkness, the inner English major comes out in me. It happened on Tuesday night at around 10 pm when it became apparent that Donald Trump was winning the presidency. Between disgust and exhaustion, fragments of Sylvia Plath’s poem, “Daddy,” drifted into my head:
Every woman adores a Fascist, The boot in the face, the brute Brute heart of a brute like you.
Plath was lashing out at her father who died when she was a young girl. But to me, she was describing the sick, collective psyche of America at this hour. Though we all know that Trump is an absolutely abhorrent human being, America is thirsty for a strongman—the bullying brute who’s both abuser and protector. As it turns out, we have daddy issues.
Make no mistake, the subtext of Trump’s campaign has always been the glorification of patriarchy—the Big Daddy who will take care of business. And a central tenet of that message is that women must fall in line or be forcibly put in their place. Rather than soft sell that message, Trump and his surrogates amped it up loudly and obnoxiously in the final days of the election.
Speaking in Wisconsin on Halloween, Trump told the crowd that he was going to “protect” women, “whether the women like it or not,” adding, "I’m going to protect them from migrants coming in, I’m gonna protect them from foreign countries that want to hit us with missiles and lots of other things.”
Former Fox News commentator and testicle tanning enthusiast Tucker Carlson was more graphic on what this kind of protective regime would entail. At a Georgia rally, he likened a re-elected Trump to an omni-potent father who returns home after a long journey to punish his naughty teenage daughter: “He’s not vengeful. He loves his children, disobedient as they may be,” Carlson said. “When dad gets home, you know what he says? ‘You’ve been a bad girl. You’ve been a bad little girl, and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now.’”
On so many levels, both Trump and Carlson’s statements are repugnant, offensive, and simply creepy. And there’s a whiff of rape glorification too, the notion that women must be subdued, “spanked,” and coerced for their own good. And yes, it’s on brand that Trump, a convicted sexual assaulter, should be the avatar of this garbage.
There were many, many more examples of female degradation during the campaign—the suggestion that Kamala Harris slept her way to the top, JD Vance’s single cat lady nonsense, and the general exhortation that real men vote for Trump—but who has the bandwith to recount them now? The point is that it was all part of the marketing of hyper-masculinity, a package that makes putting women in their place a centerpiece. And you know what? America ate it up.
We certainly know the bros did. According to exit polls by AP VoteCast, Trump beat Harris by 14 points among male voters in the 45+ age group and 6 points in the under 45 age group. What’s more, Trump increased his share of the young male minority vote, capturing 24% of the male Black vote and 47% of the male Latino vote.
While I’m not saying that all male Trump voters cheered the toxic hyper-masculinity rhetoric, they didn’t seem repelled by it either. In fact, a 2021 study finds that a predictor of Trump supporters was their adherence to “hegemonic masculinity,” a belief system that idealizes stereotypically male traits and promotes male dominance over women and other groups considered to be “feminine.” But even if some reject that gospel, few spoke up. They went along, normalizing the denigration of women, apparently unconcerned how it demeans their own daughters, sisters, and wives. (Perhaps they prefer their wives subservient.)
And the women? Well, here’s where I think it gets really twisted and depressing. While it’s true that there’s a notable gender gap, particularly among young voters (exit polls showed that young men voted for Trump over Harris 56% to 42%, while young women voted for Harris over Trump 58% to 40%), the gap ended up not being what it was cracked up to be. Though a majority of white college-educated women voted for Harris, the bottom line is that Joe Biden got more of the female vote in 2020 than Harris in 2024. That tsunami of female support for one of our own, the sister who stands for reproductive rights and gender equality, simply did not materialize. Instead, it fizzled. Or maybe it was never there.
And so I return to Big Bad Daddy. I can’t help but wonder if Trump’s self-designation as the protector of women resonates with many American women on some level. Did he strike a chord when he told a crowd in North Carolina days before the election, “Women have to be protected when they are home in suburbia . . . When you're home in your house alone and you have this monster that got out of prison, he's got six charges of murdering six different people, I think you'd rather have Trump”?
It’s hard for me to believe that women can fall for that crap, but I am not a white suburban woman, so what do I know? Clearly, some female voters embraced it, eager to believe in the myth of the strongman, that daddy figure who would "protect" them against the monsters lurking behind the trimmed boxwoods.
“I want protection. I mean, we all do, right?,” a female Trump supporter from Virginia told the AP. “We don’t want to feel like we’re not protected. It’s that scary feeling. So for me, it makes me feel really good to have someone protect me and a man protect me.” She said she couldn’t fathom why women would vote for Harris, adding, “I love the alpha male. I grew up with a dad that was an alpha male.”
Sylvia Plath understood the strange longing for male authority, the way it pulls us in despite ourselves. “Every woman adores a Fascist” speaks an uneasy truth about our masochistic attraction to power—male power—the kind that demands submission and absolute loyalty, as if the restoration of gender hierarchy would bring order in a shaky world. The self-designated strongman won not because he represented an agent of change but the opposite: something regressive, primitive, and ancient.
If Trump’s victory showed us anything, it was that this brute heart beats just as strongly in a nation as it does in the brute who would lead it. It was a reminder, too, that sometimes, the boot in the face feels like home.
Contact: chen.vivia@gmail.com
Twitter (X): ViviaChen
Related posts on women and the election:
Sarah Huckabee Sanders and the Smugness of Mommies
Kamala Harris and the Curse of Perfectionism
Usha Defends JD and Trump—and It’s Not Convincing
Sadly, I think the strain of sexism in America is distinct. For whatever reason, we have a big hangup about women leaders. Even Mexico has a female leader now--along with Italy, Taiwan, etc. Maybe American men are more insecure?
Love the analysis and use of Plath’s “Daddy.” Let’s rally round the last line where she says “Daddy you bastard, I’m through.”