Like many Americans today, I am angry.

Unlike many Americans, I’m trying not to be, but it’s hard.

This election looked cut-and-try. On the one hand, you had a candidate who was part of a successful presidential administration. No one knew a whole lot about them, but their record spoke for itself. On the other side, you had a distillation of all the worst qualities of Americans. A racist, a xenophobe, a bigot, a misogynist. And none of that is hyperbole. You can find him proudly attesting to all of that. He’s a felon, and a sexual predator. He’s an angry, crowing, thin-skinned bully, a sad emasculated man who’s overweight, slurs his speech, rambles through bizarre screeds laced with language that would make Adolph Hitler blush.

Normally, maybe you could look at all that and say “Well, he could still do a great job as president.” But we tried that already. Four disastrous years actively hurting Americans who don’t look and make money like he does. Vast tax cuts for the wealthy, leaving working-class Americans openly asking “If the economy is going so well, why does it feel like I’m not making ends meet?” Since, you know, the strength of the stock market doesn’t directly benefit you unless you own stock. Which your typical blue-collar worker does not.

He loudly supported racist groups like the Proud Boys, called a group including a man who ran down a young woman “Very fine people”. He falsified government records to inflate his inauguration crowd size. And after botching the handling of the COVID pandemic as horribly as any nation could have, he failed to be re-elected.

What followed was a literal attempted coup, in which he refused to concede, repeatedly lied, conspired with cronies including the founder of My Pillow (for some reason). He considered invoking the Insurrection Act to stay in power indefinitely, and when he couldn’t get his way, he incited an angry mob, and watched gleeful as they stormed our nation’s capitol.

And that candidate, the one who did all of that, won a second term. Look, there’s been a lot of talk as to why and how this happened. The economy is doing well right now, but many Americans just refuse to believe that. Crime remains at decades-long lows, though many Americans refuse to believe that. Illegal border crossings are at their lowest point in years, which again Americans refuse to believe. But here’s the thing: when a recent survey asked likely Trump voters how they could vote for a man who’d not only tried to circumvent the democratic process, but also said he’d do it again, this was their most common response:

“Well, he’s lying about that.”

In a nation where any lie was once considered disqualifying for a politician, millions of Americans claimed they were willing to vote for a despicable human being because well, they hoped he was lying about a lot of the things he said. They were willing to vote for a man who’d failed miserably at every turn of his life, who’s only gotten this far because he’s the world’s foremost beneficiary of privilege. They cast their vote for a man where they had to decide which of his many lies they were willing to believe, and which were meant for the other side.

None of that makes sense. Not one word of it. All the talk of living in a “Post-Facts World” is malarkey. A frail, immature excuse. There’s a much, much simpler explanation here. One that explains why Barack Obama was a two-term president, and both female candidates we’ve had with a major party have lost. Americans voted against Kamala Harris for one, overriding reason:

Because she’s a woman.

Now if you’re a Trump voter reading this, and you take offense to that, that’s fine. You can keep lying. Lie all you want. But the rest of us need to face reality. The simple fact is that sexism is deeply-engrained in our society. More deeply than bigotry. More deeply even than racism. Because so far, three Democratic politicians have run against one of the world’s few truly worthless human beings. Only one of them won. What makes him so different from the rest? Besides his far advanced age, lack of acuity, lack of personality, and general blandness, I can think of only one thing.

I was not raised in a patriarchy. My parents were a team. They both worked. They traded off being the breadwinner of the family, traded off being the chief parent based solely on who happened to be working closer to home. I can only assume that is why, throughout my life, I have never simply assumed I was superior to a woman. Because I didn’t see that. My mom was, and is, tough as nails. My beloved partner is right there with her, having spent years as a single mother and raised two kids. Our daughter was watching this election closely.

I feel like I should apologize to her. To both of them. Because I’ll admit, I refused to believe misogyny was this entrenched in American society. But look at what happened here. Americans went incredibly far out of their way to rationalize voting for a narcissistic psychopath. Donald Trump showed everyone exactly what and who he is, and promised to make life a living hell for anyone who doesn’t look and make money exactly the way he does. And millions of Americans looked at themselves in the mirror, and lied and lied until they thought they could believe it.

They lied because they didn’t want to face the real reason for their support for Trump. Because we’ve at least come far enough as a society for people to realize it’s wrong to think that way. But not, it seems, far enough for them to stop thinking it. Better a convicted felon than a woman. Better a con-man than a woman. Better a sexual predator, a slanderer, a racist and a bigot, than a woman. Better a rat, a worm, the dead corpse of a man.

Anyone but a woman. Anything. Anywhere. An animal. Excrement. Filth. Any of it.

I try very, very hard to avoid politics on my platform. I do this for many reasons, but foremost among them is that my writing is for everyone. I want every reader, even those who might disagree with me politically (hell, especially them) to read my work, and consider a brighter future. But this hits too close to home, and led to a personal revelation I’m still shaking from.

If you’re reading this, and you voted for Trump, I’m sure this made you angry. But I promise you, you’re nowhere near as angry as you will be two years from now. When all the recent economic gains you’ve made are ripped away. When your job is taken away by your rich boss who got a huge tax cut to do it. When you lose your house and can’t buy a new one. And when that happens, you will have no one but yourself to blame. Now I know you’ll blame literally everyone else; Biden, Kamala, Hillary, might as well go back to Mondale and FDR. But as your life and your nation crumble around you, just remember:

It could be worse. Your president could be a woman. – MK