How Women in Media Missed the Women’s Vote

How Women in Media Missed the Women’s Vote
Women journalists missed why many women voted for Trump. "But the media’s anointed experts on women couldn’t see it. Gender-identity politics requires its practitioners to use the oppression of women as the organizing principle for interpreting the world. All issues can be understood as a version of this Manichean struggle—in the case of the 2016 election, between feminism and misogyny. Relying on a theory from Democratic pollster Celinda Lake, Goldberg argued that women were voting for Trump because they depended on their husbands and did what they were told. Both Lake and Goldberg failed to notice that “glass ceiling,” “harassment,” and even “equal pay” didn’t rank with the main sources of working-class discontent such as jobs, the cost of health-care premiums, and terrorism. Working-class and other Trump-leaning women, much like their male counterparts, are well aware that media elites sneer at them (when they bother thinking about them). So great is their suspicion of their self-appointed betters that instead of being appalled by Trump stories, some assumed that the stories were planted. “I think this is the Clinton campaign,” Karen Diehl the co-owner of a southern Ohio insurance company and sometime Republican activist told me when I asked about the lurid Trump headlines. “The media wants her to win.” In the end, the gender-identity politicos’ assumption that they were speaking for “women” only served to accentuate the class, education, and geographic divide that they already personified. The election’s aftermath does not suggest that they’re interested in reflecting on that divide. Instead of trying to find out why so many women failed to conform to their model of the world, they have burrowed back down into gender theory. Emily Crockett, Vox’s “staff writer on gender,” explained “Why Misogyny Won.” Buzzfeed’s Ann Helen Peterson lamented, “This is How Much America Hates Women.” As for Trump-voting women, they were obviously mindless and self-deluded. The election results reveal “internalized misogyny,” wrote New York’s Rebecca Traister, a phrase repeated on MSNBC by Jess McIntosh, director of communications for Emily’s List."