The Democrats know what a powerful issue this is, driving turnout and bringing in donations. “When abortion is on the ballot, we win,” said Mini Timmaraju, president of the pro-choice organisation NARAL. And yet, Harris has yet to put forth an actionable plan to restore access to abortion across the United States. Her raft of vague promises to do something for women are familiar for Democratic voters — each of their party’s nominees, from Joe Biden to Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama, has promised to protect reproductive rights. The question remains: does the Harris administration have any intention of following through on her pledge to secure those rights?

The appeal of the issue hasn’t escaped Donald Trump, who, has made several contradictory statements about his plan for reproductive rights. Just this week he voiced support for the expansion of access to abortion in his home state of Florida — a statement his campaign was swift to retract and deny. He also said he planned to require insurance companies to cover fertility treatments like IVF in full.

Ever since the Supreme Court’s intention to overturn the Roe v. Wade decision was leaked in 2022, the issue has powerfully motivated voters, even in strongly Republican areas. In Montana, for example, abortion is legal until the 24th week of pregnancy, but the Republican governor and legislature have repeatedly tried and failed to pass laws to ban terminations. In response, a recent push to ensure that abortion rights were safeguarded from such interference was so popular that the petition to get the issue on to November’s ballot received more than twice the number of signatures necessary.

And Montana is only one of nine states currently organising constitutional amendments and initiatives for the autumn election. Kansas — also traditionally Republican — has already passed similar protections, and also did so with surprisingly large margins. It’s not clear if these attempts are enough to drive typically Republican voters to support a Democratic presidential candidate, but the state-level ballot initiatives have caused higher than usual voter turnout. And as polls are spelling out, Democrats, women and younger voters are particularly likely to see abortion as a motivating factor in their vote.

With this in mind, Trump’s sudden change of tune does prompt one question: could these pro-choice voters be a more important voting bloc for him than those on the religious Right who were instrumental in electing him in 2016? Certainly, the reproductive rights platform does seem to be shifting things this election cycle. In Texas, for example, Greg Abbott has seen his disapproval ratings rise since passing restrictions on abortion, and conversely, Marilyn Lands, who campaigned on a strongly pro-choice platform in conservative Alabama, has made headway by running on a strongly pro-choice message.

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Why is this? One explanation is that while elements of the Right have successfully campaigned on the more edgy “family values” matters, against things such as transgender healthcare for children and the teaching of critical race theory in schools, when it addressed more popular issues, such as the availability of IVF and gay marriage, it’s possible they started alarming some of the more moderate voters in their midst. There hasn’t been a major election since the Alabama Supreme Court made its controversial ruling about IVF treatments, so how big an effect this will have on voter turnout and support for political parties is so far speculative.

But equally, if the Democrats were to pick up centrists and undecideds by promising to reverse the damage done to reproductive rights, can they actually be trusted to deliver on their promises, given their past record? The general understanding of American political parties is that the Democrats are good for reproductive freedoms and the Republicans want to bring about some sort of Handmaid’s Tale dystopia. However, if we look past the language politicians use when they’re trying to get elected, and instead at what happens once they achieve office and have the power to pass legislation, we see a slightly different divide.

Since the Eighties, the Christian Right’s stance has evolved from being mostly apolitical to pushing rigid positions on the subject, leaving it hard for a pro-choice Republican politician to now gain any real support in the party. Susan Cullman has spoken recently about how marginalised someone who supports abortion rights can be in the party. More recently, only a handful of Republican governors promised to preserve abortion rights in their states — Maryland, Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire — and all of them were or are leading states that tend to vote Democrat in Presidential elections. If Trump’s Republicans are looking to bring a more moderate position to women’s rights issues, there is a lot of ground yet to cover.

At the same time, however, there is precious little evidence to support the idea that Democrats are devoted to protecting reproductive rights, beyond appointing pro-choice justices to the Supreme Court. Not only have Democratic presidents failed since the Seventies to reinforce abortion rights — they have also failed to push back on legislation that has shut clinics down, dragged their feet in approving the drug regimen once known as RU-486 for administering abortions, and they have not pursued changing the law that forbids federal funds — such as Medicaid coverage — from paying for abortion services.

Over the years, such moves have restricted access to reproductive rights, making them available only to those who can afford them. The party thus seems to be cynically paying lip-service to those women who are voting for them. After the Dobbs decision in 2023, Joe Biden tweeted that “it’s time to restore Roe v. Wade once and for all”. It’s now a year and a half later, and there was no follow-up as to what that might mean, how Democrats might go about it, and of course no actual restoration.

It’s also important to remember that reproductive rights extend to more than simply access to abortion. And nor have these wider issues been addressed by the Democrats. These are things such as the maternal mortality rate — which is rising at an alarming speed and disproportionately affecting black and poor — and the difficulty rural communities face in accessing prenatal health care services. These are all issues that affect the working class, the vulnerable and the marginalised — the Democrats’ former constituency. Yet no one in the party seems interested in discussing them, let alone other hot-button issues such as surrogacy or subsidised childcare.

Instead, on both sides of the political aisle, all the focus is on abortion — but only in rhetoric and not in specific policy. It’s all very well for a presidential candidate to come up with a jaunty slogan like Harris’s “We are not going back”, but the time for pretty speeches and fiery rhetoric is over. What women need is a plan.

The county fair was one of the more exciting events in rural Kansas when I was a kid. I’d go along to see my friends from nearby farms working the livestock shows, trotting out the creatures to which they’d devoted themselves, in the hopes of a blue ribbon and a small cash prize. Look at this great pig we raised!

I’d go along, too, to watch other teenage girls — those few who were managing the fluctuations of puberty well — exhibiting themselves in polyester and rhinestone gowns. They would walk across the stage to show how refined they were; they would wear backless and sleeveless dresses to show their good muscular tone and their skin free from blemishes. Whoever won would go off to one of the three mid-sized cities in the state to represent our county, in the same way the best pig represented its farm. Look at this great lady we raised!

Eventually, they might represent the nation. As a child, I would lie on my grandmother’s floor and watch the enormous national and even international versions of the beauty pageants I’d seen at the county fair. It’s a poor kid’s idea of glamour: if it sparkles it must be expensive. But it was also the external performance of a secret, hidden wish: to be selected, to be deemed special, to be crowned, so you could get the hell out of this rural town and be whisked away to a more beautiful life. And when the Miss USA 2022 pageant line-up was announced, I was secretly rooting for Miss Kansas — the kind of girl you’d see at the Topeka mall not eating at the food court and think: “she’s so pretty, what is she doing here?”

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Miss USA is not to be confused with Miss America. It is far trashier. Their website’s portfolio of contestants has zero biographical information, just photos of the girls clavicle-up, their hair wet and messy like they “just stepped out of your shower”, but with a thick layer of make-up and fake eyelashes. Unlike the Miss America website, which lists out each contestant’s “Social Impact Initiative” and college majors and career goals, Miss USA just has hot, wet girls giving their best trout lips to the camera. And unlike Miss America, which caved to calls to get rid of the swimsuit competition in 2018, Miss USA continues to resist. It knows why you watch pageants.

And so the pageant is accompanied with much soul-searching. Questions swirl: are we celebrating women’s beauty or women’s accomplishments? Is this feminist or anti-feminist? Who is it for? Are we proud of these women or are we setting them up as the punchline to an unwritten joke? Do we want these women to do well or are we hoping one of them will confuse Georgia the state with Georgia the country or refer to Ukrainians as Russians and set off a meme that has vast geopolitical implications?

Since the last iteration of Miss USA, a tragedy has darkened the pageant’s reputation and these questions are more fraught than ever. In January, the radiant 2019 winner, Cheslie Kryst, jumped to her death from a Manhattan apartment block. In life, Kryst was a perfect model of feminine excellence: not only was she beautiful, she had a law degree and an MBA and a side hustle with the celebrity gossip show Extra. She represented a new kind of beauty queen. But the year before she died, she wrote an essay for Allure about the pressure “to hoard accomplishments as fast as possible” in order to compete with her peers. Even when she triumphed, it didn’t feel good: “Why do I work so hard to capture the dreams I’ve been taught by society to want when I continue to find only emptiness?”

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My own disenchantment with pageants was born out of a growing feminist awareness. Naomi Wolf’s very successful (and mostly silly) The Beauty Myth was released just as I hit puberty. I stopped reading it only a few chapters in — I needed a book to help me manage my lack of beauty, not one suggesting that being beautiful is hard, actually — but it had a huge influence. There were suddenly new questions being asked, even in fashion magazines. Shouldn’t girls and women be valued for something other than thin thighs, ample chests, shiny hair, and frantic smiles? Shouldn’t women aspire to do something grander than cash in their sexual capital as fast as possible?

For a while, when protestors outside the Miss America pageant were burning their bras and fighting to redefine what femininity could be, it seemed that, if we pushed hard enough against beauty culture and unfair standards, we could finally eradicate them once and for all. Maybe women wouldn’t be judged first — or solely — by their appearances; maybe ugly girls would get a fighting chance in this world, finally freed from, as Andrea Dworkin put it, “the lengths to which men will go to protect themselves and their society from the contamination by ugly women”.

The pageants heard these criticisms and saw the dropping audience numbers and responded by looking for women who worked with charities, who had medical degrees and cured diseases, who spoke multiple languages, who studied international relations and could explain in 20 seconds or less how to defuse a ticking geopolitical timebomb. But they also still had to appeal to sponsors and advertisers, who still find it useful to collaborate with attractive women and splashy spectacles. So all these competitors also had to have a winning smile and a great pair of tits.

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The attempt to make the beauty pageants more feminist — or to at least prize something other than just beauty — has actually made them more regressive and less politically defensible. This echoes many of the failures of contemporary feminism, which has burdened women with new obligations and expectations without freeing them from any of the old ones. We still have to be perfect mothers and domestic goddesses with nightly ten-step skincare routines — while also finishing our PhDs in biochemistry. Adding new qualifications for our beauty queens wasn’t a sign of defiance against a culture that puts absurd pressure on women — it was a reinforcement of it.

Nowadays, even entry-level jobs can require university degrees; you need a masters to even get the chance to be exploited in our new frantic corporate culture. In this competitive, aspirational environment, women must be girlbosses; we still don’t have the freedom to be mediocre. And looks still give women a leg-up. If you lose focus for a moment, or your hair goes flat, there is a bitch with a can of AquaNet stashed in her purse ready to take your place.

Beauty used to be more of a lottery: an advantage granted, completely unfairly, to a select few. If they had the guts, those few could leverage it to get out of their dusty little towns and ascend to another class. This is the origin story of generations of Hollywood starlets, beauty queens, trophy wives, and models. When I was a kid, I’d see the pageant scouts trawling malls, fairs and high school games, looking for fresh meat. Pageants for girls were a lot like athletics for boys: a performance of gendered excellence that could project you out of a predictable future in failing and depopulating towns and into the possibility of greatness, riches and wealth. Or at least a scholarship that would get you a degree in computer science or hospitality management.

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Mostly, girls from small towns who were told all their lives how exceptionally pretty they are found that, in competition with someone other than farm girls and small-town cheerleaders, their good looks didn’t count for much. Especially next to city girls with access to cosmetic dentistry and professional dermatological care.

But now beauty — like higher education, entry into cultural institutions, and the fancy universities that will set you up for life — is just another thing that can be bought, if you work really hard, or inherit a lot. (Heiresses like the Hadid sisters, not content with inheriting millions from their father’s real estate empire, bought entirely new faces and entry into the modelling world.) More than ever, all the girls competing for Miss USA look vaguely the same, thanks to what looks like fillers, Botox, and facial contouring — all of them have the “Instagram face”.

The homogeneity is ironic, because Miss USA has done a lot of work in the run-up to this year’s pageant to justify its existence by claiming it is diversifying the standards of beauty with racial inclusion. They also claim to be celebrating the grand variety of women’s accomplishments. All the time, though, they have been trying to ignore the spectre of Kryst’s death. That’s pageant culture: preying on women’s insecurities and fears of failure in a precarious economic environment to keep them running on the endless hamster wheel of accomplishment.

Who wins in all this? Not the woman wearing the crown, nor the runners-up on the stage. Perhaps it’s the girls at home — too plain, too ugly and too unshapely to dream of ever making it onto that stage. These girls will raise good pigs or hold an unglamorous local office. They know they’ll never be good enough and so won’t ever have to compensate for some inner lack with external markers of success.

The relief that comes with realising these are father-daughter pairings is short-lived, however, once the girls start to pledge their sexual purity to their fathers, and the men vow before God to shield their daughters from a fallen world. The feeling grows as the men place rings — cheap knock-offs with cubic zirconia and metal that will eventually turn their skin green — on the girls’ fingers.

They are called purity balls, and they emerged from Midwestern Evangelical culture just in time for the George W. Bush administration and the consolidation of Christian political power. If seeing Donald Trump groping at his daughter Ivanka made you gag, a purity ball is bound to make you heave. Grown men slow dancing with teenage girls, their arms wrapped around their waists protectively, promising to remain sexually pure for one another, taking portraits together that could easily be mistaken for prom photos.

The fathers receive rings, too, “symbolising my commitment to protect and shield you from the enemy”, as it’s put in a common version of the pledge. The “enemy” is a vague reference to secular culture, Satan, and boys, a mishmash of influences seeking to sully the virtue of good Christian girls. And it isn’t just an annual dance — it is an industry. True Love Waits was trademarked in 1993, and Evangelicals had made a lot of money from selling purity starter packs, from rings to books to workshops teaching girls how to be saintly young women.

When they emerged in the Nineties, purity balls were a reaction to what the Christians saw as an overly permissive, sexually charged culture. Premarital sex was not only seen as acceptable — it was the norm. Pornography was finding its way into the mainstream with widespread usage of the internet; girls were wearing pants with “juicy” written across the ass; MTV was a nonstop parade of scantily clad women in suggestive poses. (This sexually permissive culture was itself a reaction to the decades of sexual repression and conservative shaming, a time when sodomy was still technically illegal and teens were taught about sex through lectures about abstinence and doom-laden stories of how it will inevitably end in disease, pregnancy, and death. Aged 15, I was given a pamphlet that gave 101 alternatives to having sex: “bake a cake”, “hold hands”, “go on a walk”.)

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Since their peak in the 2000s, spreading to almost every state in America, purity balls have largely died down. But while there might be fewer father/daughter dances and cringe-inducing photo shoots, virginity pledges are back, albeit in a different form and for different reasons. It’s not surprising that the deeply patriarchal ritual of the purity pledge — swearing an oath to your father to obey; he in turn praying to a heavenly father for guidance — didn’t survive waves of vigorous social justice movements over the past few decades. Celibacy culture has instead fused with a secular self-care culture that prizes autonomy and comfort above all. While a decent percentage of the TikTok videos making declarations of virginity are from Christian and Islamic influencers and creators, most are not.

One particular trend on TikTok has involved dancing to The Weeknd’s satirical song “I’m a Virgin”. It was originally created for the animated show American Dad as a way of poking fun of the singer’s playboy image, but for many members of the platform it was taken sincerely. (The lyrics in the videos include “I’m a virgin / never got close enough / cell phone blowin’ up, but I’m waiting / for the right person”, but cut off before getting to things like “inside I’m a 12-year-old boy” or “the power of God in my loins”.) There are still videos being made of men and women of various ages lip syncing to the camera, professing their desire to find the right one.

TikTok is not a great way to get information about anything, in general. The viral videos found under hashtags involving virginity include both diatribes about why the idea of virginity is a myth and the word should be replaced in the lexicon with “sexual debut” and people proclaiming that losing your virginity is so painful for women it is common to develop PTSD from your first sexual act. But TikTok has a well-documented contagion factor, with followers mimicking not just dances but behaviors, politics, language, and even mental disorders that they watch being performed on the platform. While not too long ago someone remaining a virgin past a certain age, say 20 or so, was seen as strange or pathetic, now virginity until marriage is roundly celebrated and normalised on social media.

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Much has been made about the younger generation’s tendency toward prudery. Generation Z, or the Zoomers, have some of the lowest rates of sexual activity in generations. They wait longer to initiate sexual relationships, are more likely to have long stretches of celibacy, and, so far at least, have low rates of partnership. They’ve turned the stereotype of youths being the most transgressive and sexually active demographic on its head.

While they don’t share the justification for the celibacy — whether it’s patriarchal desires to control the female body or God’s commandments about morality — they do overlap with the religious Right in their desire to counter, and sometimes control, the oversexualised mainstream, which many view as harmful rather than liberatory. There is a worrying tendency when it comes to matters of sex to find these strange alliances between the far-Left and the far-Right, such as in the Eighties when several prominent feminists found themselves working alongside Evangelicals in their bid to outlaw pornography. Their reasons were different — the dehumanisation and objectification of women versus an unholy industry built on temptation and sins of the flesh — but their objective was the same.

With the new puritans, the concern tends not to focus on sexual deviancy but instead focuses on the ethics. They came of age when the culture had a libertine surface, awash in the sometimes violent imagery of online pornography, the legitimisation of sex work, and the proliferation of new and very specific sexual identities. But roiling alongside this were noisy and painful conversations about rape culture, sexual predators, and abusive romantic relationships.

So much of the online sexual puritans’ discourse can be understood as thinking out loud as they try to figure out how to be sexually active in a less harmful way. That they don’t seem to understand just how many previous generations have tied themselves up in similar knots to figure this out is just a problem of youth, not ignorance. The strange directions that online consent discourse take can certainly be off-putting. There is a popular idea on social media that movies should not have sex scenes, with people creating various justifications for why this is: from “it is potentially uncomfortable for asexual viewers”, to “asking actors to simulate sex is unethical” and even “we as viewers do not have the consent of the fiction characters to watch them engaging in sexual activity”. The logic was confusing to all who witnessed.

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Philosophical musings about the meaning and value of human sexuality is one thing, and designing hard and fast rules that you expect everyone else to follow is another. Discussions about whether “age gap” relationships are harmful have turned into online harassment of celebrities and public figures who have significantly younger romantic partners. The perennial “should there be kink at Pride parades” conversation can lead to threats against queers from older generations for whom being public and open about their sexuality after decades of repression and shame is still freeing.

As long as these declarations of right and wrong come with condemnation and control, it’s going to be hard to differentiate their notion of “consent” from the Christian idea of “purity”. But this is just another chapter of the long struggle humankind has had with their own sexuality, controlling it, understanding it, sublimating it. For all the handwringing and panic, it’s good to remember that today’s repression will inevitably fuel tomorrow’s liberation.

As DEFUND BPD graffiti took over a prominent billboard on North Avenue, Scott was one of the few candidates who seemed in sync with the activist moment. He questioned the authorities’ over-reliance on police presence as they attempted to curb the violence plaguing the city. What Baltimore needed, he argued, was an expanded social safety net. But the darling of the activist Left would soon find himself at odds with his earliest supporters, as the reality of running a city with a spiking homicide rate became clear.

These tensions between activists and politicians were happening all across the country. Activists had been campaigning to end police violence for years when the death of George Floyd caught the world’s attention: finally, and abruptly, the words “defund the police” and “prison abolition” were appearing on the front page of the New York Times. Local politicians started running on issues such as bail reform. A handful of cities, from Philadelphia to Chicago to Seattle, all announced they were reallocating funds from bloated police budgets to other city services. Approximately $870 million was slashed from police departments nationwide. The idea was that with fewer police there would be more money to spend on the other services people want, which are typically underfunded. This in turn would boost the sense of community and stability — which should create a higher quality of life and theoretically bring down crime rates.

And then the homicide rate started to climb in cities across America. Many other crime statistics remained flat, but opponents to police reforms now had a frame for the backlash. Enthusiasm for slashing police budgets has faded — as has the idea that other services, such as housing, health, and drug rehabilitation programs, should be prioritised.

The debate is now absurdly binary: either you care about police violence, or you care about the homicide rate. Both these issues disproportionately affect the same demographics: economically vulnerable people living in under-serviced neighbourhoods are more likely to experience violence at the hands of both police and non-police. But anyone hoping to be an accepted member of either the Left or the Right must exaggerate one issue and erase the other.

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Baltimore, a city plagued by poverty and violence, is a microcosm of what the defund debate has become. Brandon Scott’s main rival in the hotly contested 2020 mayoral race was former mayor Sheila Dixon. She started in the lead, despite the fact that she’d had to resign after being accused of stealing and using gift cards that had been donated to the city for distribution to needy families. One reason for her popularity, despite her alleged crimes, was her previous ability to bring the homicide rate to its lowest level in decades. Her success was mostly credited to “focused deterrence”, a strategy that includes police presence in high-risk communities and police intervention in the lives of high-risk individuals. Despite being effective and popular, this approach was mostly abandoned in the wake of Freddie Gray’s death, after anti-police sentiment had swept the city (the six officers involved were charged and their trials resulted in a mix of a mistrial, acquittals, and dropped charges; all officers returned to duty).

Still, it was Scott, who was city council president, who won out in the end. For years, he has approached gun violence as a public health crisis — one that requires sustained engagement from services beyond law enforcement. He has discussed the reallocation of resources to give other forms of intervention priority; activists interpreted this as support for the idea of defunding the police. And yet when he released his first city budget for approval, and the police budget remained around the same level as his predecessor’s, he was roundly condemned by critics on social media.

In response, Scott gave an interview in the Baltimore Sun, in which he criticised the “defund the police” slogan and its activists for focusing on the means rather than the ends. “We have to do a better job of explaining to folks what we’re talking about.” The goal should be a city in which every citizen is given the opportunity to flourish, and defunding the police doesn’t in itself achieve this. Moving numbers around on a budget is not policy; it is a symbolic gesture. And it’s a gesture that will only satisfy a small number of activists; a large percentage of residents would prefer the same or more police presence in their neighbourhoods. The majority support police reform over abolition.

Scott still believes in reallocating resources and ending the dependence the city has on police, but, he said in an interview with The Trace, “I need time.” He continued, “I have been consistent that reimagining public safety and the budget would not be overnight work.” But time is not something many activists have been willing to grant him. He has been in office for a year and a half, and has already become a target for those on the far-Left, who often point to this one budgetary marker as a sign of his failings rather than fairly assessing his policies. Scott’s first municipal budget increased funding for police to cover rising healthcare and pension costs. During the Taxpayers’ Night — an open forum for citizens to give feedback about how the city’s funds are being spent — multiple activists waited in line to express their anger and frustration with him. Many said they regretted voting for the young mayor.

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When I moved from Baltimore to Philadelphia last year, I found a similar dynamic, with complicated realities obscured by the binaries, opportunism and bitter rivalries of local politics. Since the summer when 66,000 people marched in support of Black Lives Matter here, Philadelphia has been moving up the list of metropolises with the highest homicide rates in America. In 2019, it was fourteenth; now, it is twelfth. Last year, there were more murders here than in New York and Los Angeles.

Meanwhile, police shootings here have not made national headlines. Earlier this month police officer Edsual Mendoza was charged with murder. He shot 12-year-old Thomas Siderio in March. Between 2013 and 2021, 39 people, 26 of them black, were killed by the police.

Still, only a very small percentage of Philly’s population actually wants a decrease of police presence — including in neighbourhoods where police have killed or brutalised residents. They want services, such as affordable housing and free health clinics and public transportation and better schools, but they also say public safety is a top priority, and see police presence as a part of solving that problem.

Only 44% of Philadelphia residents feel “safe” in their neighbourhoods at night, and the largest percentage of residents who do are white. There is some truth to the criticism that the liberals who support defunding the police often don’t live in the neighbourhoods most afflicted by gun violence and homicides. And it doesn’t help that the most prominent professional activists in this arena, whether part of Black Lives Matter or the Women’s March, make headlines for lucrative book deals and expensive real estate purchases. The people on social media who most frequently and loudly talk about defunding the police often have extensive media bylines in their bios.

The city’s District Attorney, Larry Krasner, is adjacent to this demographic: a white civil rights attorney whose  education from University of Chicago and Stanford has been brought up in a few of the conversations against him I’ve overheard. Krasner was elected in 2017, following widespread protests in Philadelphia against police violence — and the arrest of the previous DA Seth Williams on federal corruption charges. Krasner ran on a platform of ambitious reform, and he has delivered: his office has declined to prosecute low level prostitution or marijuana possession, and it is also implementing the controversial bail reform measures. Requiring cash for bail has for a long time left the poorest people in jail for weeks, months, and, in at least one high profile case, years, awaiting trial for nonviolent crimes. Krasner and other reformist DAs like him have pledged to put an end to this possibility, letting low-level offenders go home to wait for trial.

Krasner’s platform and unapologetic manner have brought him national attention, including an eight-part documentary series on PBS that gives an inside look at the work in his office and the controversies that have sprung from his tactics. Bail reform is an easy target for the Right: if someone with an extensive record commits a heinous act, a conservative will inevitably go on television to demand to know why that person was “on the streets” in the first place and not in prison. Locally, Krasner has been blamed for the increasing homicide rate, by both politicians and members of the police.

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But like Scott in Baltimore, the most serious criticism that Krasner faces comes from his own side, the Left. In the mind of his most prominent critic, Michael Nutter, Krasner is a white saviour, thinking he knows best how to order the world while underserving the black people in neighbourhoods hardest hit by violence. The former mayor, who is black, said in an interview with the Washington Post: “It all goes back to supremacy, paternalism. ‘I’m woke. I’m paying attention. I spend a lot of time with Black people. Some of my best friends…’ All that bullshit.”

Nutter has referred in speeches to young black men as an “endangered species”, threatened by imprisonment, poverty, and violent death. He has long been an advocate for public safety, both before and after his eight years as mayor, and his term saw a significant decline in the Philadelphia homicide rate. Although there is no consensus about why or how that drop happened, but Nutter’s work, like Sheila Dixon’s in Baltimore, has often included a close relationship with the police, including controversial measures such as stop and frisk. As soon as Nutter left office, the white progressive Jim Kenney was elected as mayor and Krasner was elected DA, and those tactics were discontinued. And the homicide rate once again started to rise.

The most recent city budget presented by mayor Kenney significantly increased the funding for “anti-violence” programs, including neighbourhood organisations, after-school and summer programs, and workforce development programs — the same types of programs Defund the Police advocates have argued should take priority over policing. Philadelphia has also been slowly implementing other police-related reforms, such as a citizen oversight committee and the deployment of mental health professionals alongside police for certain emergency calls. Krasner enjoys widespread support from black voters, and his reforms have been largely popular in the city, despite the fact that a small handful of crimes have involved people who had been released on charges awaiting trial. But the effects of his work are not yet visible. The homicide rate for 2022 is already above what had been recorded by the same time last year.

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The reality is that when crime rates go down, it’s hard to pinpoint a specific reason. Everything from neighbourhood development to the removal of lead paint from homes to robust police forces were credited with Philadelphia’s drop in violent crime in the Eighties. Similarly, when the homicide rate increased during the pandemic, many contradictory reasons were given. Gun sales had gone up — but was this cause, effect, or unrelated? Unemployment had gone up, but when it declined again it had no effect on the rate of violent crime. Were the police effectively on “strike”, refusing to engage in the prevention or intervention of dangerous situations because they were concerned about being blamed for bad results? Something similar had happened in Baltimore after the uprising that followed Freddie Gray’s death. But maybe other problems contributed too, such as rising rents or the difficulty of accessing health services during the pandemic.

The lack of clarity has allowed anyone, with any agenda, to speculate publicly about why homicide rates are climbing. For the head of the police union, it’s because the police force is underfunded and under-appreciated by the community. For conservatives, it’s because of broken families and lack of personal responsibility or because authorities are soft on criminals. For liberals, it’s the lack of gun control laws or poverty.

The truth lies somewhere in the middle, just as effective policy lies somewhere between anti-police activism and an unquestioningly pro-police stance. Crime rates aren’t predictable or easy to change, as local leaders across America are discovering. To pretend otherwise is to fail its victims.

It’s true that men are more likely to let abuse and stalking continue longer than women before they seek intervention by the police, and anecdotally the reasons they give are fear of being seen as unmanly or fear of not being taken seriously. (Although, of course, of course, victims of interpersonal violence of any gender have long been frustrated by their attempts to seek justice or assistance.) And it’s also true that men are less likely to be acknowledged as the victims of violence in interpersonal relationships, heterosexual or otherwise.

But the new Men’s Rights Activist, the online version, goes beyond pointing out these troubling structural realities, which stem from all sorts of societal stereotypes about men’s strength, physical and emotional. Instead, he points the finger of blame — publicly doubting accusations against prominent men while escalating every perceived harm done by a woman.

And so, of course, Johnny Depp has become a hero in the eyes of the MRAs. One of the biggest priorities for the movement is to prove that women make false accusations of rape and abuse against men, and that making such an accusation is a way of getting attention, fame, and protection. Depp’s decision to sue ex-wife Amber Heard and the newspaper The Sun for their claims that he abused her has given a platform to their crusade. Many see him as serving this larger cause, proving not only that men can be victims of domestic violence, but also that women make false accusations.

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Amber Heard, in their eyes, is a “witch”. Turning the language of online feminism on its head, the MRAs accuse her of “toxic femininity”. Just as the phrase “toxic masculinity” was created to explain how traditionally gendered behaviour by men — aggressiveness, callousness, sexual transgressions — were actually harmful rather than something that should be nurtured and rewarded, “toxic femininity” suggests that traditionally female sins — playing the victim, lying, crying to manipulate — have been tolerated for too long. Amber Heard, sobbing on the witness stand, represents the red-pilled man’s most cynical fantasies of womanhood.

The first generation of the Men’s Rights Movement grew out of men feeling demonised by feminists, and the same is perhaps true here. In recent years, the discourse around toxic masculinity has been intense — and often pretty meaningless. Depp’s case has become a rallying cry for all the presumed men “suffering” this discourse — the men whose strength, assertiveness, and sexual prowess was now deemed problematic, the Depp trial has been a platform for aggrieved men to hold forth on “toxic femininity”.

The social media edition of the gender wars depends on gross generalisations. On Twitter, hashtags like #MenAreTrash go viral for any variation of betrayal and violation — from rape to not texting back to taking up too much space in public. MRAs have responded by co-opting and reversing the accusations — not only has toxic masculinity become toxic femininity, #MeToo has become #MenToo.

And sometimes this raw display of heteropessimism intersects with celebrity breakups, especially when “toxic femininity” is on display. This is the result of a parasocial “stan” culture, in which the traditional one-sided relationship people have always had with the powerful or the famous gets twisted into a fantastical attachment, where a celebrity becomes both an imaginary friend and a stand-in for their fan’s own identity. The idea is that, if good things happen to this person, those good things are or could possibly happen to me; if this person is vindicated I, too, will be vindicated; and if bad things happen, like a romantic break-up or some other problem, this is proof that my life will suffer similar indignities. Certain figures — Beyonce, Taylor Swift, Elizabeth Warren — have become notorious for their online fanbases, who will harass their exes and their critics on their behalf.

Johnny Depp, meanwhile, has become a stand-in for every man who gaslighted, rejected, or abused; Amber Heard a representation of every woman who has feigned hurt, made false accusations of abuse, or lied and cheated, whether real or imagined. This isn’t Depp against Heard; it is man against woman.

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And it’s worth noting that the case taking up so much media and online attention is not about what Johnny and Amber have actually done to each other, it’s about the stories they’ve told. It is not a criminal trial meant to adjudicate the abuse accusations made by both Depp and Heard against each other over the years. It’s a defamation trial centred around a personal essay Heard published in the Washington Post about abuse she suffered at the hands of an unnamed romantic partner.

That essay landed at the height of the MeToo movement, as accusations against figures such as Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, Brett Kavanaugh and Louis C.K. saw powerful men being sent to trial, investigated in the press, or fired from work. The rhetoric at the time was that it was important to “Believe Women” when they accused men of abuse. Heard got a lot of media attention — which was exactly what she wanted: she’d been asked to write the essay by ACLU to promote the cause of domestic violence, and she in return asked that the essay be published in time to promote her film, Aquaman. What benefited her career harmed his: despite not naming Depp directly in the initial essay, it was widely assumed to be about him, and Depp was, like many men accused of abuse against women, suddenly dropped from projects, most notably the next in the Pirates of the Caribbean series and the Fantastic Beasts series.

This is, I suppose, what some men would call “toxic femininity”. It is an inconvenient reality that famous women can sometimes monetise their personal stories of abuse and survival. Many feminist activists have tried to deny or downplay the professional advantages of victimhood, for fear that misogynists and abusers will use it to downplay accusations. But those denials can often have the opposite effect, creating a backlash effect.

Even as some of Heard’s accusations began to fall apart, many online feminists supported her side of the story and used her essay as a jumping-off point to either talk about the abuse they themselves had suffered or to draw attention to the serious harm done to women in romantic relationships every year. If Heard was seen to be lying or exaggerating, it would be “bad for women,” as if one false accusation by a celebrity calls all accusations women make against their male partners into questions.

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Everyone, in short, is making this case about themselves, and ignoring the obvious fact that these two individuals have obviously both done terrible things to each other. We are, of course, more used to seeing these individuals on our screens as characters, rather than real humans. People are watching the Depp/Heard trial like a film; they’re there to be entertained. And in television shows — including documentaries — victims are predominantly shown as being passive and naïve like in so many Lifetime movies, or sexually stimulated by the violence as in Big Little Lies, or as meek women who are pushed into warrior mode with a need for vengeance like in The Burning Bed and the very many rape revenge horror films. There are many ways to control, dominate, intimidate, and violate in romantic relationships, and it’s often more complicated and messy than your average television show is willing to depict.

On social media, too, one person has to be a clear victim and the other a clear aggressor. But the legal system is ill-equipped to deal with this. It aims to prove one person guilty and the other innocent. Perhaps that binary is inevitable in any public forum. But activists serious about addressing the problem of domestic violence should resist it, not fuel it.

When an anonymous account only takes an extreme position — “all women are deceitful liars” or “most rape accusations are made by women who consented but then experienced regret”, it’s tempting to swing to the other extreme: “actually, women are perfect angels who would never lie”. But while propaganda might be useful in radicalising the people who already support you, it will do nothing to convert your enemies. Trying to turn Amber Heard into a role model will only come back to bite feminists.

If Roe v Wade is overturned, as Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s draft suggests it will be, abortion rights will again be decided on a state-by-state basis. Several states have legislation already waiting for such an opportunity to criminalise procuring, assisting with or providing an abortion. Doctors, patients and assistants would all be subject to heavy penalties and time in prison. Certain states, like Texas and Missouri, even want to make a crime out of crossing state lines to obtain an abortion where it is still legal.

But the demise of Roe v Wade has always been a question of not if but when. Democrats have used the language of abortion rights to attract votes and funds for decades, but they have time and again failed to pursue the legislative action that would codify those rights into law. Even with their majority in the House of Representatives and Senate, and a Democrat in the White House, it seems unlikely that any move will be made in this direction before the midterm elections in November. With abortion rights left in the hands of the courts, it was only a matter of time before the balance of power between Left and Right was reshuffled, and we ended up where we are now.

Which is why, paradoxically, I believe the only hope for reproductive rights in the United States is pro-choice Republicans.

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To which a lot of East Coast Democrats might reply: is there any such thing? But I have seen my home state of Kansas shift from a place fiercely divided by the abortion debate to an unlikely safe haven of reproductive rights for the region — thanks to a handful of Kansas Republicans who have consistently broken with party leadership to keep abortion safe and legal.

It hasn’t been easy. Anti-abortion protestors have long been active Kansas, but in 1991, when I was a young teenager, the newly minted Operation Rescue upped the ante — guided by the slogan: “If you believe abortion is murder, act like it’s murder”. Responding to its organised campaign, Summer of Mercy, thousands of protestors descended on Wichita, Kansas, accusing the city’s most visible abortion doctor George Tiller of being a “baby killer”. They harassed clinic workers, patients, and pro-choice activists. The authorities, meanwhile, were remarkably hands-off. In fact, they were so courteous that the Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry praised the Wichita Police Department in the press.

The protests went on for six weeks, during which they dominated regional media and spread through smaller towns in the area. The animosity, and the rhetoric, escalated. Operation Rescue declared that it was waging a “Holy War” against a group of heathens who were undertaking a “holocaust of the unborn”. At the time, the divide between religion and politics was starting to disappear; Evangelicals swarmed to the Republican party. And during that Summer of Mercy, the Methodist church I attended as a teenager began to preach about the sin of homosexuality, the abomination of abortion, and the Satanic forces in Washington DC. Before that, we may have gotten some light “the man is the head of the household” nonsense, but it was mostly sermons about loving thy neighbour and the Good Samaritan.

When the out-of-state organisers left, the tension did not dissipate. Clinics in the region were subject to physical attacks and vandalism. In 1993 there was an assassination attempt on Dr. Tiller. He was shot five times. Hit only in the arms, he went back to work the next day. But another attempt, in 2009, killed him; the assassin, Scott Roeder, would claim to have been radicalised during the Summer of Mercy.

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These extremists did not represent Kansans, and they did not represent Republicans. But just as Democrats exploit the language of abortion rights, Republican politicians were — and sometimes still are — liable to use the inflammatory “baby killer” language of Operation Rescue to secure votes and donations, in this case from their most extreme religious followers. (If someone shot a doctor or burned down a clinic, these politicians would then distance themselves by professing a belief in non-violent action.)

Unlike Democrats, though, those Republicans have been solidifying their rhetoric with law. The Midwest in particular has, in the last 20 years, introduced more and more restrictions to abortion rights, shutting down clinics with nonsense regulations and shrinking the window of time in which women can pursue terminations of their pregnancies. Oklahoma, just south of Kansas, had 18 abortion clinics in 1982, but that number has dwindled over the years down to three. The decline has mostly been because of nuisance laws that demand unnecessary standards in clinics when it comes to staffing, equipment and physical location. The state has also passed a series of onerous laws regarding the treatment of patients, like requiring information about clients to be entered in an online health registry and requiring patients be falsely informed that the foetus can feel pain during the procedure.

Meanwhile Kansas has, for the most part, held firm. True, the authorities passed a series of laws in the early Nineties requiring parental notification and mandatory 24-hour waiting times between consultation and procedure. But the state legislature did not follow its neighbours in increasing wait times up to 72 hours or passing “heartbeat” laws that outlaw abortion after the sixth or eighth gestational week. Several Kansan Republican legislators have attempted, repeatedly, to bring in such changes. But, despite the fact that Republicans have almost always had a majority in the legislature, these bills frequently die quietly in committee or get shelved until the legislative term expires. And they fail not because of Democratic grandstanding, but largely because pro-choice Republicans use the rules of the legislature wisely.

Clinics in Wichita and the Kansas City suburbs have therefore become regional magnets, providing services for women from Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas and Nebraska faced with increasingly unreasonable obstacles to care. Two years ago, the number of out-of-state women receiving care in Kansas clinics outnumbered the patients from within the state. And, in 2019, the state’s Supreme Court ruled that abortion rights are guaranteed in Kansas’s constitution.

Since that ruling, some state Republican legislators have fought for an amendment, but it has consistently been members of their own party who have blocked this action. In the latest attempt to amend the constitution, four Republicans broke ranks to vote against the measure: 84 votes were needed to put the amendment on the upcoming ballot, and they ultimately only got 80. And while none of them are attending pro-choice rallies wearing Planned Parenthood t-shirts, these Republicans are in line with the voters of Kansas, 86% of whom do not think abortion should be made strictly illegal.

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This reflects the reality in America more broadly. While at most 30% of Americans affiliated with the Republican party would consider themselves to be pro-choice, around 40% believe abortion should be legal in most cases. And so the Republican party is long overdue a reckoning with its own constituency; by pandering to extremists, conspiracy theorists and religious fundamentalists, it has left millions of Americans essentially politically homeless. Any harsh moves to the far-Right on the abortion issue is likely to alienate even more voters, even if it delights the party’s Evangelical fringe. 70% of Texans, for instance, already think the laws restricting abortion access to the first six weeks of pregnancy are too harsh. Only a very small percentage of voters will be satisfied with the further expansion of state control over the private familial and sexual decisions of the citizenry.

If the Republican party were to govern according to the beliefs and wishes of its electorate, it would be consistently against the eradication of abortion rights. Instead, it is letting the radical margins hijack the abortion debate. If it really does seek a “national settlement of the abortion issue”, as Justice Samuel Alito claims to, the Republican party should look to Kansas, which provides a blueprint. The stereotypical pro-choice activist may baulk at the idea that such a conservative state in such a religious region has become a bulwark against the erasure of reproductive rights. But it’s hardly a surprising turn of events: the state has, after all, seen some of the bloodiest results of this political debate.

You can see where they got the idea. Putin is clearly invested in portraying himself as a literal strongman. He’s posed shirtless, riding horses and doing judo on camera; there have been photo shoots with tigers and bears. He’s spent years building an image of strength and daring, both as a person and as a leader. (Meanwhile his new nemesis Zelensky became an overnight heartthrob when Twitter discovered that he appeared on the Ukrainian equivalent of Strictly Come Dancing in a hot pink suit.)

But using the very Western, very modern framework of identity politics to discuss deep-rooted geopolitical tensions is shockingly irresponsible. The Right often condemns such behaviour, accusing the Left of being decadent or frivolous. And they’ve got a point.

Identity politics have become hegemonic; any news story that can be viewed through their lens seems instantly worthier of our attention. A debate about whether a legal decision or a politician’s speech has racist or sexist implications will generally get more traction than whether it contributes to income inequality or environmental degradation. And so its vocabulary has been trotted out to convince people that they need to take the conflict in Ukraine seriously — more seriously, for whatever reason, than the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan or the 3 million people displaced by conflict in Yemen (which only makes headlines when Angelina Jolie gets involved). Accusing Putin of “toxic masculinity” reels in people who support women’s and queer rights, which have been truncated in Russia, in the same way that the hashtag  #ukraineisgeorgefloyd reels in those whose primary concern is racial justice.

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That’s not to say that the concept of “toxic masculinity” is empty. It emerged from feminism as a shorthand for the idea that certain masculine traits once heralded as beneficial — chivalry, strength, competitiveness — could be potentially oppressive, especially when they metastasise into violent behaviour against women and other vulnerable communities. And it can be useful in critiquing what we look for in a national leader — a role that has typically been filled by men. Force and self-assuredness have previously been seen as desirable; asking whether they are “toxic” allows us to see how these qualities can shade toward authoritarianism. It can also help us see that qualities once associated with weakness — eagerness to compromise and maintain peace — are in many ways beneficial.

The focus on identity politics more broadly has also highlighted previously under-examined aspects of authoritarianism, like the fact that it is often disproportionately harmful to women and the LGBT community. When a state turns repressive toward gay rights or reproductive rights — either through restricting access to abortion or by forced sterilisation — it can indicate a dangerous turn. Authoritarian governments often try to control rigid gender roles and demonise “deviant” sexual behaviours.

Still, a focus on identity politics can crowd out other criticisms. And it can also be used to shut down criticisms completely. It is tempting to see a government that ostensibly protects women and other marginalised communities as ethically “good”. But it’s common for governments that have faced accusations of corruption or wrongdoing to fight back with symbolic gestures toward these communities.

The Right-wing Colombian administration, headed by President Iván Duque, has faced a year of street protests for its economic reforms and police brutality. It recently decriminalised abortion up to the 24th week of pregnancy: a huge victory for women’s rights groups. Sarah Schulman has documented the way Israel has used its progressive queer rights policies to shore up its international reputation after it was damaged by its treatment of Palestinians — an act she calls “pinkwashing”.

And Israel, she points out, is hardly the only nation to use identity politics to cloak its less progressive reforms. The United States celebrated gay marriage while conducting drone warfare in Yemen; it called the appointment of Ruth Bader Ginsburg a feminist triumph while passing legislation removing social welfare programmes for mothers and children.

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Part of the problem is that toxic masculinity is squishy language, used to describe everything from war crimes to taking up too much space on the subway. There have been several high-profile cases where a corrupt or otherwise objectionable politician has been attacked for exhibiting toxic masculinity — while his other, arguably worse decisions went unpunished or unacknowledged. The debate over Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court mostly turned on one accusation of sexual wrongdoing decades ago against one woman; but it was his “toxic masculinity” that led many to believe he was not fit for the powerful position he now holds, whether or not he was guilty. This line of argument overtook any other objections one might have about him occupying a seat on the highest court in the land: his participation in the George W. Bush administration’s torture programme, for example.

A similar problem arose with New York state governor Andrew Cuomo, who ultimately had to step down because of allegations of unwanted touching. He maintains that even if his behaviour was inappropriate at times, it was never criminal — further proof of his toxic masculinity, some feminists would argue. But in all of this his role in the New York’s unnecessarily catastrophic pandemic is ignored. Obviously sexual assault and the violation of interpersonal boundaries doesn’t reflect well on a person’s character, but Cuomo was terrible for all the New Yorkers who voted him in, not just the women who worked for him.

But clearly the US is not ready to confront its Covid failures — the confused messaging, the crumbling public health system, the lack of compensation for job loss, the massive fraud that was committed via its Paycheck Protection Program. These things led to unnecessary suffering and death. Similarly, it’s worth wondering whether, had Kavanaugh not been accused of sexual assault, his other transgressions would’ve gone unconfronted. There would have had to be a widespread conversation about the torture and unjust imprisonment of those designated enemies during the war on terror. But the media, the justice system, and politicians of both parties supported these ethical transgressions. And we still can’t seem to close our Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp.

And now that Cuomo is trying to stage a comeback, based on the image of a reformed man (reformed for his misogyny, not for his pandemic policies), we should pay attention to the way “toxic masculinity” can be a gift to the men accused of it, because it downplays their other crimes. As useful as the accusation of “toxic masculinity” can be as a political weapon, it can also have a nasty rebound effect.

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Critics often suggest that identity politics have created brain rot in the West. Lionel Shriver wrote in The Spectator that Putin felt free to invade Ukraine because we’ve gone soft: “Decolonisations, contextualisations, gender-neutralisations … — it’s all a load of onanistic, diversionary crap, and the West having shoved its head up its backside is one reason that Putin feels free to do whatever he likes. We’re not scary, because we’ve made ourselves ridiculous.” Ben Shapiro made a similar accusation on Twitter, blaming Russia’s invasion on “The West” being obsessed with “exploding the gender binary”.

But they, too, are trapped in this conversation about identity politics, even if in an adversarial mode. They can’t stop referring everything, even serious geopolitical matters, back to a battle about pronouns and racial discrimination.

Of course, they’re right to point out that our conversation about Ukraine is blinkered. Like the culture war, this war is framed as a battle between good and evil, and this simplification allows us to ignore the fact that it has roots in centuries-old discussions of territory and autonomy. It’s about the meaning of nationhood, which is not always straightforward.

If we faced that, we’d also be forced face our own hypocrisy, as nations that feel free to violate airspace whenever it suits us. If we weren’t distracting ourselves with condemning the insecurities of one dictator, we might consider that our democratic countries, too, have let economic concerns drive international policy. We have invaded sovereign nations. We have killed civilians.

Or perhaps we’d find another easy answer, to help us ignore awkward questions.

Men are slipping, by just about every marker of measurement. Deaths of despair are on the rise, suicide and homicide rates are up, and more men are delaying marriage and the establishment of a family. Twice as many men have addiction disorders as women. As Missouri Senator Josh Hawley declared at the National Conservatism Conference last month: “American men are working less, getting married in fewer numbers; they’re fathering fewer children. They are suffering more anxiety and depression. They are engaging in more substance abuse.”

According to Hawley, bad things are happening to men because bad things have happened to masculinity. “Can we be surprised that after years of being told they are the problem, that their manhood is the problem, more and more men are withdrawing into the enclave of idleness, and pornography, and video games?” In his mind, it is not stagnant wages that cause men to feel demotivated at work. It’s not crippling student debt that convinces young men to drop out of university. It’s not the legacy of Purdue Pharma’s aggressive marketing of OxyContin fuelling their addictions. Taking his lead, perhaps, from popular masculinity influencers like Jordan Peterson and Stefan Molyneux, Hawley blames men’s problems on the fact that nobody respects manliness anymore. It’s the feminism, stupid.

Josh Hawley’s constituents in Missouri are among those hardest hit by these issues. The state has, for example, a raging meth problem that’s largely overlooked by the mainstream media. Hawley is responsible for many men like those I grew up with. He should be interested in their complex realities. But, like the self-help gurus he emulates, the senator mystifies. He might be able to accurately describe the state of affairs, but he misdirects men on both its roots — vaguely blaming “the liberal left” — and what to do about it. He wants a “a revival of strong and healthy manhood in America”, but isn’t clear about what that actually that means.

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Hawley’s tactics makes sense for the guru — after all, if they were able to solve your problems, you’d have less reason to buy their next book or listen to their next podcast. Some feminist grifters similarly tell women that their problems stem solely from “the patriarchy” or “misogyny” while also shrugging about what exactly to do about it. But this approach is particularly objectionable coming from a politician, especially a United States senator. Hawley is in the position to materially improve the lives of the men he is supposedly so concerned about, but he would rather obfuscate.

Hawley suggests, for example, that men are not marrying because, “The Left is telling America and its men, you’re evil.” But the real issue is class. In surveys of single people, the reasons given for delaying marriage (or partnership, for people whose goal is simply co-habitation) and childbearing are almost always economic. Marriage has become an elite institution, with highest rates among the people who are already best off — the white, the able-bodied, the most educated, the most financially prosperous.

In search of maximum support, Hawley always stays quiet about which “social issues” he’s blaming for the “deconstruction” of the traditional family. But reading between the lines, his finger is pointing at feminism and gay rights. Both criticise the concept of the nuclear family, for the way it makes the rights granted to couples and parents exclusive to those legally married. Hawley’s is a misdirection I recognise. He’s appealing to people like my uncle, who had difficulty finding stable work due to his lack of a formal education. His wife was a nurse, a traditionally underpaid, strenuous job. They blamed feminism for all social ills.

They played Rush Limbaugh almost continually; I remember first hearing the word “feminazi,” as a kid, in their house. They didn’t see feminism as a movement that fought for her rights as a working woman — which, given that by the Nineties the movement’s focus was more on lifestyle than class concerns, was as much feminism’s fault as their own. People in my town saw women and gays demanding the right to organise their own families in the ways they saw fit, and interpreted it as a threat to the integrity of their families.

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In the past that Hawley is harking back to, the man earned a living wage outside the home and the women raised children. You can see why he’s able to blame feminism for the end of an era. Women, the story goes, were radicalised by feminist thinkers who urged them to seek fulfilment through career and financial independence. This flood of new workers, competing with men for jobs, drove wages down — undermining the male breadwinner.

But the truth is, it was the inflation of the Seventies, and the danger of poverty it brought with it, that drove wages down and therefore women to work. Many mothers got jobs out of necessity, not choice, because their partners’ salaries were no longer enough to support a family. Perhaps the men who lost their breadwinner positions felt attacked, but the alternative was usually debt and destitution. And feminism was the result of this change, not its cause: entering the workforce, women found they had to advocate for fair pay and for the removal of obstacles to advancement.

Hawley ignores present-day economic conditions, too. The stresses that families have experienced during the pandemic — from the struggles of balancing working from home with parenting, to difficulties in getting adequate healthcare — don’t get a mention in his speeches. It’s the same tactic conservatives have often used: arguing for traditional family structures — and even incentivising them, through coercions like tax breaks and public condemnation — while refusing to listen to the practical reasons people are unable or unwilling to participate.

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The other institution that used to support masculinity until, according to Hawley, it was subject to “liberal attacks” is the military. In a 2019 speech, he condemned the progressive criticism of American military intervention, saying, “it also regarded America unilateral action as something to be avoided, even a danger,” as if this were a completely misguided belief.

It’s easier for the Right to romanticise the so-called manly virtues instilled by service — discipline, solidarity, and courage — than it is to admit that serving in wars has left thousands of men traumatised. And that many of those men have been abandoned by their governments to deal with that trauma on their own. More than one of my high school classmates has come out of the military only to find himself too damaged to work full time. Their patriotism and sense of duty — fine things, yes — have been manipulated so that they die not for their country, but for oil and capital.

Gays in the military, the feminist critique of male aggression, leftist anxieties about imperialism: all of these have been blamed for the marginalisation of military service as an integral part of the masculine identity. But the truth lies elsewhere. America’s failure to unflaggingly support the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq isn’t a comment on the terrible lack of patriotism in our nation. It’s not a sign that our armed forces are going “soft,” as figures like Representative Dan Crenshaw have suggested in their statements railing against a “woke” military. It’s happened because we’ve seen through propaganda, and have stopped believing that young men should die because the Republican party created illegitimate allegations of atrocity and invaded a nation under false pretences.

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Blaming progressivism for men’s problems, then, is an attempt by the Right to let itself off the hook. But it won’t do much good. Ideas about masculinity change because what helps a person thrive in one era is going to hurt him in another. If women hadn’t entered the workforce, men and their children would have starved; if soldiers continued to be seen as a masculine ideal, there would’ve been continued support for forever wars.

But masculinity influencers are fixated on the past, on “tradition”. While Hawley mostly just waffles on about the old, more sensible ways of doing something, his one proposed real-world solution to the crisis in masculinity was to bring back manufacturing jobs. Every politician since the Eighties has promised and failed to bring back well-paid manufacturing work. Hawley must know it isn’t going to work. Globalisation makes it impossible. The world has moved on. We can’t go backwards, but the political Right has failed to find a way forwards.

And so it fixates on the “manliness” of men, as many politicians have in times of crisis. Hawley speaks like a YouTube influencer, but he’s part of a long tradition that includes everyone from President Roosevelt to, well, Benito Mussolini. The trouble is that, because masculinity is something that is defined and measured by action, there’s always a sense that the men are simply not doing enough. You can always do one more rep at the gym, kill one more enemy on the battlefield, work one more hour before you end your day. No wonder men are feeling overwhelmed.

Men should be allowed to set aside the burden of ruling the world, for the sake of everyone. Instead of fixating on turning men back into some patriarchal stereotype, the Right should be helping them get jobs and quit drugs. When I think of the limited or derailed lives of the men I was raised with, I don’t just want them to regress into the structures and lifestyles that drove their fathers and grandfathers to drink, or hit their kids, or work so much they were never around. I want something better for them.

Pro-life culture was particularly hostile at the time, and many of us felt under siege in our Texas location. We ran drills so we all knew what to do if someone released anthrax in our building. Being hated is often clarifying, and we all believed we were doing good, even if in a sometimes shabby way.

It took a while to notice that the executive director was making six figures; that the administrative offices, unlike the clinic, never had broken chairs; that the clinic in the posh neighbourhood was nice and the clinic on the side of town where white people were a minority was not. Planned Parenthood was forever making headlines for testifying in front of Congress, or getting into a war of words with some hideous Christian fundamentalist who claimed abortion causes breast cancer (it doesn’t!). But it didn’t seem to be lobbying for healthcare expansion, or campaigning for compulsory training in abortion services for medical students. It wasn’t challenging politicians who claim to be pro-choice but only mention it when there’s an opening on the Supreme Court, instead of consistently supporting policies that would help the women who came to us in need.

But as hard as it was working in the hostile environment of Texas, back before people started to have hopes of flipping the red state blue, it also felt historically important. This is where American abortion rights were born, and this is where the greatest threat to those rights now lies. On September 1, the state blocked access to all abortion services for women beyond six weeks of pregnancy. Because most pregnancies are impossible to detect or confirm before the four-week mark, and because many women won’t realise they are pregnant until considerably later than this, the state has effectively blocked abortion access full-stop. The law was immediately challenged, and the Supreme Court has heard arguments, but so far it has not released any ruling. Still, with the way the court is packed at the moment, with a heavily conservative slant, it’s not looking good for supporters of reproductive justice.

It’s poetic, almost, that Texas is erasing a right that originated within it. Sarah Weddington was only 25 when she filed a lawsuit, in 1970, against the Dallas district attorney. She was acting on behalf of a pregnant client who was seeking to obtain an abortion, pseudonymously known as Jane Roe. Before long, Weddington found herself in front of the Supreme Court, making the argument that finally gave American women the legal right to terminate a pregnancy. But the focus of this landmark case, and the way it was handled by the professional feminist community, showed that it was only a matter of time before the pro-choice project came crashing down. Because from the very beginning there existed a gulf — one that I noticed on the frontline of Planned Parenthood — between the empowering rhetoric of the professional activists and the realities of those who found themselves pregnant and vulnerable, caught in the middle of a political battlefield.

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The Planned Parenthood promotional materials always exhibited the bright smiles and shiny hair of healthy young women, confidently making the healthcare choices that were right for them. They aren’t the ones who needed our help. I remember a week of repeated calls from a young man describing his girlfriend’s symptoms over the phone, all of them suggesting pregnancy. “But she’s not pregnant right?” All I could do was say it’s impossible to diagnose pregnancy over the phone and urge him to tell her to come into the clinic. I could hear him telling her, “They say you’re fine,” and I wondered how long he pressured her not to get help — and if, by the time she was “allowed” to take a pregnancy test, it was too late to choose whether or not to end it.

The people who most needed assistance, then, were not the independent and beautiful poster children of a Planned Parenthood ad campaign. They were much more like the woman at the centre of Roe v Wade, whose name was actually Norma McCorvey. She already had two children. Her first became the centre of a custody battle between McCorvey and her own mother; her second was adopted outside the family. When McCorvey realised she was pregnant for a third time, she tried to get an illegal abortion, but she found the clinic had recently been raided by authorities.

Her young, idealistic attorneys immediately recognised the potential McCorvey’s story held. It was the kind of case that could make it all the way to the Supreme Court, due to her already troubled maternal history. But they also knew that this wouldn’t help her individually: if she stayed in the spotlight, McCorvey would have to continue the pregnancy. She made the sacrifice, in the name of women’s rights. But she found that the feminists who championed Jane Roe, a legal persona, had very little time for Norma McCorvey.

In the 2020 documentary AKA Jane Roe, McCorvey talked about how she was sidelined. She wanted to speak at a pro-choice rally, but the organisers were more interested in Gloria Steinem and other more professional, or photogenic, activists. McCorvey was poor, identified as a lesbian, and lacked formal education. Her story wasn’t one of triumph and empowerment; it was one of abuse by men, familial dysfunction, and addiction. She was in desperate need, but she wasn’t a particularly inspirational standard-bearer.

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This same problem plagues the pro-choice movement today. In an attempt to “normalise” abortion, and thereby gain widespread support for reproductive rights, the movement focuses on an appealing minority: attractive, professional, financially stable women “shouting their abortion” on social media. It’s as if once we hear that the cute blonde girl got pregnant through no fault of her own and she really just isn’t ready for motherhood — she can barely take care of herself right now! — then we’ll finally understand that it should be fully legal and accessible. Lindy West, in a viral essay, compared getting an abortion to having a tooth removed, giving the sense that these decisions are easy to make, these services are convenient to access, and the procedure is comfortable to endure.

But pretending that the young, urban, middle-class woman who is choosing ambition over family is representative of those who need abortion services does nothing to help, well, anybody who isn’t that. And providing abortion access on the ground looks quite different from getting paid a couple of hundred dollars to write your personal pregnancy essay for an online magazine. It means dealing with death threats and harassment by protesters at clinics. It means putting your body on the line to escort clients from their cars to the clinic so they don’t have to face the screaming, praying, howling protesters on their own. It means listening to terrible stories sometimes, of people refusing to take responsibility for their own lives. It means seeing a woman coming in for an abortion six months after her last one and helping her anyway. It means letting strangers sleep on your couch because they drove for five hours to get to the clinic and didn’t have money left over for an AirBnB.

While I worked in the education department during the day, at night I often covered shifts for the abortion fund’s hotline, offering financial and logistical counselling for those who were pregnant and urgently needed to figure out how not to be. We talked about applying for credit cards, we compared prices at different clinics, we strategised places to stay if they had to go out of town. It was hard, draining work. Because often they felt compelled to explain how they got into their situation, and many ended up referring to our failings.

They went to Planned Parenthood to get an IUD but were offered no pain relief, and it hurt so badly that they vomited and passed out before the procedure could be completed. Or the clinic required a Pap smear before it would renew their Pill prescription, but when they came for their appointment, they could only wait for an hour before they had to give up and go to work, otherwise they’d be fired. And I listened to all this knowing that Planned Parenthood weren’t model employers. In fact, they have been the focus of multiple labour disputes for underpaying and exploiting their clinicians. The consequences for our institutional failings never affected our CEO, but it left me flat on the floor night after night.

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In a recent essay for Harper’s Bazaar, Sarah Schulman wrote about her experience working with an underground abortion network in Seventies Fascist Spain. As an American, she could enter and leave the country without much notice, making it easier for her to smuggle in illegal contraceptives and other materials needed by the group. The activists were risking imprisonment in order to help one another end pregnancies, creating a kind of solidarity and sense of purpose that’s lacking in the American pro-choice community. Our professional feminists are heavy on the rhetoric and weak on hands-on action. They are focused on institutions, like the Supreme Court or Planned Parenthood, instead of the women who need them most. They have managed to squander support from the majority of the population and allowed our rights and access to fall in disarray. This time, we can’t only point our fingers at the religious Right and the patriarchal stereotype of Texas.

When I had to have an abortion in Germany, I was extremely nervous about the general anaesthesia. I had never gone under before. What would it be like? What if something happened while I was there all alone, in a country where no one knew me? I didn’t speak any German, but as the nurses and doctor moved around me in the room, I managed to squeak out, “I’m scared.” And immediately everyone stopped what they were doing and just put their hands on my arms and legs. They applied just a brief pressure before they returned to their tasks, but it was the most comforting and caring gesture I had ever experienced. I think of it often. Pregnancy is a crisis, and the only moral and compassionate response should be: all hands on.

But this announcement barely made the news outside the state. What was once so shocking has become mundane. An independent commission in France released a report that 200,000 minors have been abused by clergy over the last 70 years; the New York Times piece about it showed up in my social media feeds maybe twice, before disappearing back into the vast sea of suffering that is the daily news.

What I get in my feed instead is advertisements. Ads for documentaries, limited series, and films about the church abuse scandal. For four years, Netflix has been trying to get me to watch The Keepers, a seven-part true crime series about the murder of a nun who may have been killed because she knew a priest was sexually abusing students at their high school. (Like most cold case true crime, the investigation doesn’t solve anything, and the whole thing ends with a shrug and an implied “somebody should do something about this.”) HBO will occasionally check to see if I want to watch Mea Maxima Culpa — about a priest sexually abusing students at a deaf school — or perhaps one of its many other shows about a religious institution ruining the lives of countless people who turned to it for care.

And now we have Robert Greene’s Procession, which has been making the rounds at the festivals and found itself a home on Netflix last week. Inspired by a Kansas City press conference at which men made public their accusations against clergy of the local diocese, Greene contacted the lawyer representing these survivors and asked if they’d be interested in a collaboration. The result is a two-hour hybrid film that mixes documentary footage of these men discussing their experiences with artistic renderings of their most traumatic moments, created with the help of a drama therapist.

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The men, unable to confront their tormentors directly, get another perspective on the incidents that haunt them; they get to control the action and how it’s represented. But each survivor finds himself stuck on a different moment in his suffering. It’s hard for the victims to step inside a cathedral, to smell the triggering aroma of incense, to touch the garments of priests. Still, they’re willing to do it to help another man deal with his trauma. It’s genuinely moving to watch them support one another, defending one another against the occasional insensitivity of the filmmakers, enduring difficult moments.

But as I watched one break down upon arrival at the lakehouse where he was taken by priests to be abused, I found myself wondering: why exactly am I watching this? The show was beautifully shot — and structured to hit the pleasure points of emotional catharsis, outrage at injustice, heartwarming empathy. Still, it shocks me to think how frequently I am being entertained by the stories of the worst and darkest moments of a person’s life.

Especially when these people have so often been utterly failed by the public institutions that ought to protect them. Around 40% of the homicides in the United States aren’t solved by the police, and tens of thousands of people remain missing after disappearing from their lives without a trace. Of course we have a glut of cold case true crime shows. Our justice system regularly imprisons the innocent, so activists turn to filmmakers to adjudicate the injustices in the public sphere. Political actors struggle to get their issues taken seriously — from environmental catastrophe to animal abuse to the disappearance of abortion rights — so commission dramatic documentaries in the hopes of “raising awareness” and forcing action.

For the most part, these shows don’t make anything happen. People have been crediting a Netflix documentary with exonerating two men imprisoned for the assassination of Malcolm X. The hit show Blackfish helped pressure SeaWorld to end its captive breeding program for orcas. But murders remain unsolved, disappearances remain unexplained, our political class refuses to pass meaningful legislation. As I was watching Dopesick on Hulu — about the opioid epidemic and the role the Sackler family played in creating and prolonging it — I got an alert on my phone that the Sacklers had won a deal granting them immunity from lawsuits. Adnan Syed has been the subject of both the blockbuster podcast Serial and an HBO documentary series, but he is still serving a life sentence for a murder there is real doubt he committed. Meanwhile the structural problems that allow these injustices to take place have not been reformed.

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The men featured in Procession don’t have many options in seeking resolution to their suffering. They’re shut out from the justice system — because of the statute of limitations — and estranged from the religious community. Perhaps the only way to get their voices heard is through the entertainment industry. If a man’s story is unique enough, if his suffering interesting enough, and he is charismatic enough, he can act as a representative for all the thousands of victims and survivors. And sometimes that will give him some relief, and maybe it will pressure the Church to push his case forward and offer him a financial settlement, but it doesn’t seem to do much for the collective.

And if you’re not interesting or charismatic or unique? If you didn’t suffer stoically and quietly, but instead self-medicated with opioids or alcohol? If you’re just angry all of the time now, or have found yourself hurting others in the same way you yourself were hurt — if, in short, you wouldn’t be a sympathetic character in a television show? We as an audience have decided you’re not really worthy of our attention, and therefore not worthy of being taken care of.

And so the show reminds me less of those occasional hard-hitting documentaries that do effect change, and more of that other hot Netflix program Queer Eye. Out of all of the people in the country suffering from loneliness, despair and confusion, a select few — who must, it goes without saying, be sympathetic — are chosen to receive aid. They get a makeover, social support, appliances. Their home is redecorated to look just like a (nice) AirBnB property. And all they have to do is tell their story — about how their lives got derailed — to the whole world.

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We have confused paying attention to injustice with actually doing something about it. The stories in Procession are not being told to goad me into action: I’m not called on to lobby my representative to ask them to reform the statute of limitations. The creators may have had the best of intentions: raise awareness, change hearts and minds, make the world a better place. But the sad truth is that we, the audience, are not being edified, we are simply being entertained. Procession is just meant to be something to watch, on my couch, while I shove a cheese sandwich in my mouth, and after it’s over Netflix will suggest that I follow it up with an episode of Seinfeld or perhaps a five part series about an unsolved murder in Spain.

Neal Gabler writes in Life: The Movie (How Entertainment Conquered Reality): “Abhorring dead air, compelled to keep us stimulated lest we switch channels or switch off the set altogether, television took everything on its screen and converted it into entertainment.” If that was true about television, the switch to streaming services is like chasing a Tylenol down with Fentanyl. We are meant never to turn away, and the services know that the more horrifying, the more heartbreaking, the more outrageous the content, the more we are likely to binge on it. And what if, as one show flows into another, as we become more and more informed about an issue, we become less and less likely to do anything about it? We are confident, after all, that the story is “out there”: surely someone, somewhere will do something about it?

The police officer gives her a hard, cold answer: “That’s rape.”

This is a scene in the Emmy-winning I May Destroy You, which last year served to briefly focus the conversation about sexual violence on the underreported crime of “stealthing”. In the UK, where it is set, removing a condom without the consent of your partner is illegal. The same is true in Germany, and one jurisdiction in Australia. Recently, California became the first US state to ban stealthing — or removing, damaging, or otherwise interfering with the integrity of birth control during sexual intercourse. And a few weeks ago, Chile became the latest nation to follow suit.

But the fact that stealthing is a crime doesn’t necessarily help Arabella. She does not press charges, as she no longer has any physical evidence. She is not compensated for her purchase of emergency contraceptive. And the law doesn’t act as an arbiter between herself and the man who harmed her. It does help her in one way — by telling her definitively that her intuition is right: this act was wrong and hurtful and should not have happened. But is that enough?

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When we look to address wrongs — and to expand our understanding of what causes harm — we so often look to the creation of rules, laws and institutional responses, and stop there. The act of criminalising stealthing is meant to announce to perpetrators and victims alike — who, like Arabella, and possibly her own rapist, might not know — that it is classified as rape, and comes with potential consequences. When Chilean deputies put forth the bill, lawyer and politician Gael Yeomans followed up the announcement with, “Yes, gentlemen, that is a sexual assault even if you do not like to hear it.”

All this allows politicians to say: “we are taking this seriously.” But the promise of justice is a difficult one to keep, in practice. The United Kingdom has only had one successful conviction of stealthing. In that particular case, a man removed the condom in the midst of an engagement with a sex worker, continued to have sex with her despite her protests, assaulted her, and left without paying. His overt aggression and violence — he reportedly threatened to murder the judge presiding over the trial — made it easy to find him guilty.

But the overwhelming majority will not find justice within these systems — partly because it’s a crime that can happen without the victim noticing. In Alexandra Brodsky’s survey of people who were victims of stealthing, many of them didn’t realise the condom had been removed or tampered with until after the completion of the sexual act, sometimes not even until the partner had left. This makes it almost impossible to prove it happened.

People have long struggled to prove they have been raped for the very same reason: lack of corroborative evidence or witnesses. But with stealthing, it’s even harder to prove the intention to do harm. Condoms come off and they break. Making a case that the removal or damage wasn’t accidental or inadvertent is harder even than making a case that you said no when your rapist is insisting you said yes.

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The consequences of stealthing are very real, though. Those who spoke with Brodsky report scrambling for health resources after discovering what their partner had done: making appointments for STI tests, procuring PrEP to protect against possible HIV exposure, buying the morning-after pill. Some of these medical interventions have debilitating side effects, like cramps and headaches. Some might not work, meaning more medical interventions.

And all of these services can be difficult, expensive and occasionally impossible to access, depending on the victim’s location and financial situation. Even in cases of forceful rape, hospitals in America are not legally obligated to give victims PrEP or emergency contraception — Catholic hospitals in particular make it difficult to procure any medication that might interfere with a potential pregnancy.

So often, then, when citizens find themselves in crisis, they discover there is a wide gap between what is available and what is accessible, and between what might be useful to them and what they are told they can have. This is reminiscent of the pro-choice politicians who give lip service to “protecting Roe v. Wade,” while doing nothing to make abortion affordable for people with low incomes, or to restore clinics that have been shut down by anti-abortion activists’ nuisance suits, or to decentralise services away from abortion clinics — which are often the targets of harassment and threats of violence.

Sure, abortion is available — if you are lucky enough to live in a city that has a clinic or wealthy enough to travel for it, and of course if you have the funds to pay for the procedure. But it’s not accessible — doctors should be able to offer medical abortifacients directly to patients, or mail them to those in rural environments or in abusive situations.

This state of affairs has become so acceptable to most of the politicians in power that it’s very rarely discussed — even by those who say they care about reproductive justice. The subject is left to Hollywood: trying to access abortion services is so commonly understood as an arduous and complicated process that it’s become the plot of multiple films — Happening, Four Months Three Weeks and Two Days, Never Rarely Sometimes Always, Plan B. In most cases, the primary character is finally able to find the care they need, even if it drains them financially, emotionally and physically.

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The new law in California makes stealthing a civil matter, giving the victim the opportunity to sue for damages in civil court. If the crime led to the transmission of a disease or an unwanted pregnancy, there is at least the chance of compensation, even if that chance is slim. The burden of proof is less heavy in civil courts than in criminal ones, but it’s difficult to imagine scenarios in which the judgement didn’t come down to trusting one person’s word over another’s — which historically hasn’t gone well for victims of sexual assault.

And this might be especially true if there isn’t a tangible result to the stealthing — no infection or pregnancy: if the victim did not accrue costs in the pursuit of health services. Was harm still done? Clearly, yes: trust has been violated, emotional fall out is likely. But when we try to convert that experience into dollars and cents — when trying to define the precise dimensions of the damage done — we reach for clarity and find only more murk.

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In her 1998 essay, “The Secret Sharer: Sex, Race, and Denial in an American Small Town” — recently collected in What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk about MeToo — JoAnn Wypijewski told the story of Nushawn Williams, a young black man who infected multiple women with HIV through unprotected sex, knowing he was positive. The small town of Jamestown, New York, wanted to show it was taking the harm done to these young women seriously — and prevent any more women from being infected. And so, it filed criminal charges against Williams for reckless endangerment and statutory rape (two of his partners were underage).

Many of the townspeople had opinions on the case — about how evil Williams must be, about what was “wrong” with the women and girls who had unprotected sex with him when HIV/AIDS was all over the media. Few paid much attention, however, to what those women and girls might need now that they found themselves infected — or even what could have helped them before their encounters with Williams. There were free condoms available through the health clinic, but they weren’t accessible, because there was so little outreach in the community.

Plenty of politicians contributed to turning this local case into a nationwide scandal — Rudy Giuliani said Williams should be charged with attempted murder — but few showed any interest in expanding medical access or offering childcare services to those low-income women who had had HIV+ babies from William. Everyone got what they wanted out of the situation: the politicians burnishing their reputations, the TV commentators using the AIDS panic to gain attention, and the media who made money by creating a scandal. Everyone except the women most affected.