Ten(ish) days, ten(ish) links
Last-minute dispatches from "the gender election"
Kamala Harris has downplayed the role of gender her short, spirited bid for the White House. Very few others are doing the same, which is unsurprising given the massive (and growing) ideological gap between women and men. While I finish a couple of columns for other publications, check out this round up of dispatches from what the New York Times has dubbed “the gender election.”
(A few of these links are courtesy of students in the Gender in the Newsroom class I’m teaching this fall. Some of them subscribe to this newsletter, so 👋, gang!)
The GOP and anti-trans rhetoric
🏈 📺 If you’ve watched a football game over the last few weeks, you likely saw a Trump campaign ad that takes two groups our society loves to marginalize — people who are incarcerated and people who identify as trans — and vilify them in an effort to portray Harris as soft on crime and overly woke. The Washington Post has a good overview here that also explains how anti-trans rhetoric is percolating down the ballot.
I have a lot of problems with how the right treats the LGBTQ community, especially the notion that identifying as trans is a newfangled trend. It’s not. History told fully is a balm to hate, so I encourage you to spend a few minutes looking through the Digital Transgender Archive, which is based here at Northeastern. The material it contains is a reminder of the many enduring permutations of the human condition.
♀️ ♂️ 🗳️ Is 2024 really “the gender election?”
Maybe. There are certainly a lot of headline writers who think so. The Times devoted an entire issue of its politics newsletter to the topic, and USA Today went so far as to call it a “gender war.” Only time will tell if this framing is accurate or hyperbolic. It is, however, notable that we’re talking about men as a distinct voting block. This is a welcome departure from past election cycles when the default voter — much like the default politician — was assumed to be white and male.
No matter what happens on Election Day, I hope to see continuing coverage of the very real challenges facing men, although we must remember that improving conditions for one segment of society doesn’t have to come at a cost for others.
😡 About the Washington Post …
For the first time since Jimmy Carter, the Post won’t endorse a candidate in the presidential race after owner Jeff Bezos yanked the paper’s planned Harris endorsement. That’s bullshit. My Northeastern School of Journalism colleague Jill Abramson explains why in this piece for the Boston Globe.
Equally bullshit is that we’re suddenly hearing from a handful of (mostly white and male) super star journalists for whom, as Carrie Brown wrote on X, “the slow erosion of democracy has been mostly a spectator sport. All of a sudden it seems to occur to them that this shit could affect them and their beloved institutions too.”
If you’d like to know more about the history of newspaper presidential endorsements, check out this column from Mental Floss. It’s a little dated, but still has some interesting tidbits.
A lot of people are canceling their Post subscriptions. I get mine for free through Northeastern (the perks of a life as a professional news nerd 🤓), but even if I was paying, I wouldn’t cancel. Doing so would hurt the newsroom, not Bezos. My Prime and Audible subscriptions are, however, another story.