(A News and Sentinel Op-Ed - Photo Illustration - MetroCreativeConnection)

A must-read essay written recently for The Guardian newspaper by Adrienne Matei titled “From Nazi Germany to Trump’s America: Why Strongmen Rely on Women at Home” offers an important analysis of what is referred to as the “womanosphere” or the “femosphere.” Matei describes the digital phenomenon as follows:

“A counterpart to the ‘manosphere,’ an influential online sphere redolent with misogyny, the womanosphere is an informal web of online creators who rally around normative femininity. Its idea of womanhood is informed by anti-queerness, white supremacy, fundamentalist Christianity and traditional maternalism. It also maps on to the extreme, discriminatory agenda of Project 2025, which aims to roll back historical victories of the women’s movement such as workplace equality, education and healthcare.”

“In the womanosphere,” Matei continues, “the home is a woman’s place: good, normal women want to stay there. This digital movement reflects what feminist media scholar Dr. Jilly Boyce Kay calls ‘reactionary feminism,’ an anti-progressive backlash that argues ‘commitment, affection and protection’ are women’s ‘evolutionarily determined interests,’ with little room for nuance.”

Matei concludes the piece by saying “In place of freedom, equality, power and choice, the Trump regime offers women flattery and a duplicitously simplistic worldview that denies their agency. While women are crucial to the MAGA project, some of its supporters have begun to realize that traditional life is not just a halcyon fantasy of the past, but a harbinger of a forlorn future. Life on the patriarchal homestead may not turn out as rosy as advertised.”

Trump and RFK Jr’s latest nonsensical claims about Tylenol being a probable cause of autism when taken by pregnant women (autism spectrum disorder first hit medical literature as early as 1911, while Tylenol did not hit shelves until 1955, and there has been no causal link established in the peer-reviewed scientific literature between pregnant women taking Tylenol and children being born autistic) are just more patriarchal, misogynistic tropes.

Guardian columnist Moira Donegan, in a recent piece titled “Trump’s Absurd Tylenol Claims Heighten the Suffering of Pregnant Women in the U.S.,” writes that at Trump’s recent mind-numbingly idiotic press conference on Tylenol and autism (painful viewing indeed for anyone capable of embarrassment), “…Trump advised pregnant women simply to endure their suffering. ‘A mother will have to tough it out,’ he told them. Readers will forgive me if I posit that perhaps pregnant women in the U.S. are already suffering enough.”

Donegan elaborates on the current suffering of pregnant women in this country with the following:

“Six justices of the supreme court, three of them appointed by Trump himself, ruled in 2022 that they no longer have the federally protected right to terminate their pregnancies. The laws that have gone into effect since have cost several pregnant women their lives, as laws prohibit medical interventions that could easily save them and allow them to die painful, premature and needless deaths. Other women have had their corpses desecrated for the sake of Trump’s anti-choice agenda, as hospitals and lawmakers use them as incubators against their will. Others are being forced to wait for care while they bleed and develop sepsis, risking their organs and their lives. The Trump administration has cut off Medicaid funding to some of the largest providers of sexual and reproductive healthcare, meaning many of the clinics that pregnant women rely on will now have to close. With doctors who provide gynecological and obstetric care fleeing states with strict abortion bans, many pregnant women in the U.S. do not have access to competent medical care at all. As a result, more babies are being born sick, and more of them are dying. Women from states such as Florida report being forced to carry fetuses that have no chance of surviving and then being forced to watch those infants suffer and die in the moments after birth. As Kennedy continues with his search for the causes of autism, his eugenic project will inevitably extract more and more coercion and violence on the bodies of pregnant women. Today’s fearmongering about Tylenol is only the beginning.”

My mother’s generation fought hard and won many gains against a paternalistic, chauvinist world where women’s bodily autonomy and personal sovereignty were constantly sacrificed on altars to male ego and insecurity. My daughter’s generation is witnessing the systematic dismantling of those gains by old men hellbent on a return to a time when a “woman’s place” was barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen and her opinions were her husband’s.

I recognize my enormous privilege as a white, cisgender and heterosexual male. I will never stop using that privilege to be a voice for women and others whose voices are so often suppressed. I grew up adoring strong female characters like Dorothy Zbornak on The Golden Girls and Julia Sugarbaker on Designing Women and I know I’m not needed to fight women’s battles for them, but if you’re looking for validation of your toxic masculinity you won’t find it by looking my way.

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Eric Engle is a resident of Parkersburg.