In the weeks leading up to President Biden's withdrawal from the 2024 presidential race, I spent every day counting Kamala Harris out. It wasn't that I believed America wasn't ready for a woman president or that I doubted that she, our current vice president, would be a likely and formidable candidate—the thought of her never entered my mind.

When the president made the extraordinary move to drop out in July to endorse Vice President Harris instead, I had to reckon with the fact that, despite being in my thirties and having cared about women's issues for many years, I was still grappling with some internal misogyny of my own.

I'm a millennial woman who grew up a product of a particular kind of misogyny where women were either exploited or forgotten. We came of age during men's resistance to women's progress. We had to unlearn all that had held us back to find what was going to push us forward by learning from our feminist forebears, our mothers, and from each other. But why should we continue to fear that any time we move some steps ahead, we should fear retribution on the other end? Why is our progress the exception and not the rule?

It's easy to forget that the height of #metoo was during Trump's first year of office.

I'm part of a generation largely shaped by the post-feminist 90s and early 2000s, where feminism had already become an outdated ideal. Though the economy was intense with little inflation and low unemployment, other signs of cultural anxiety, like the Y2K panic, loomed. The Monica Lewinsky scandal and the impeachment of President Bill Clinton left many Americans disillusioned and, in many cases, deeply at odds. The competing ethos of complacency and fear set the tone for the 2000s. It paved a path for a profoundly misogynistic time in a culture where both millennial men and women were indoctrinated into viewing women as things to undress and lampoon.

Aggressive, male-dominant behavior was pervasive by the late 90s, when boys making devil-horn hand gestures had replaced sad fans in Nirvana tee-shirts. The golden era of MTV viewing was watching the music video countdown show Total Request Live (TRL) every afternoon after school, which turned into a battleground between fans and, consequently, the sexes. On one side, there were those cheering on artists like Eminem, who in "My Name Is" contemplated mutilating and impregnating women, and on the other side, where I stood, singing along with Britney Spears as she confessed, "My loneliness is killing me." We watched as bands like Limp Bizkit and Korn were now the faces of a new genre called nu-metal, which emerged as a reaction to mainstream culture and pop conservatism. Its blend of hip-hop and heavy metal sounded more than pissed off; it was hostile. This aggression appealed predominantly to male MTV viewers, angsty for their reasons, and whose music channel had become subsumed to boybands and the girls who loved them. It was an early introduction for me to being shamed and gendered for natural interests (who didn't love a boyband singing about heartache?) and watching men enthusiastically mouth violence against women.

It wasn't that I believed America wasn't ready for a woman president or that I doubted that she, our current vice president, would be a likely and formidable candidate—the thought of her never entered my mind.

Everywhere I looked, another older, pretty girl seemed to be demoralized on screen. The relentless chant at Woodstock '99 was for women to show their breasts. We saw the footage showing young women molested as they were passed around crowd-surfing or simply sitting on the shoulders of a friend. My ten-year-old girlfriends and I fell asleep in one another's living rooms while Girls Gone Wild flashed on our TV screens, showing men touching women and revealing their body parts with smiles plastered across their faces. Movies like American Pie featured the main character watching a girl undress through a hidden camera, and Fight Club centered around masculinity and celebrated violence for violence's sake.

It didn't matter if we were loved right at home; for many of us young girls, it was impossible to distinguish how other women were treated in the world from us. When it was announced that Kamala Harris would be running for president, I worried about the little girls today who can't unhear or unsee the words men will say about women like our vice president.

Donald Trump's campaign flung into overdrive, finding ways to undermine her successes by making accusations that she'd slept her way to the top, called her "retarded," a "bum," a "dumb woman," "pathetic," and questioning her race at every turn. When speaking about Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi during his final campaign rally, Trump described her as an "evil, sick, crazy, b—" mouthing the word into the microphone. He painted a picture to a live audience during an interview with Tucker Carlson of Liz Cheney standing with "nine barrels shooting at her."

Everywhere I looked, another older, pretty girl seemed to be demoralized on screen.

And this wasn't our first brush with Trump's extreme gendered insults. Eight years ago, we listened as he famously called Hillary Clinton a "nasty woman," urged audiences to "lock her up," and watched him loom over her during their second presidential debate. We'd seen him push the envelope and see what he could get away with, and when he won the presidency in 2016, it felt like he was granted full impunity.

It's easy to forget that the height of #metoo was during Trump's first year of office. A man whom everyone had heard boast about grabbing women by their genitals and had been accused by multiple women of sexual assault was the leader of our country at a time when women were finally front and center and being heard. While we had a man at the helm who did respect us, we still found a way to make significant progress. The significance of #metoo and the 2017 women's march was a moment for all people, but millennial women and men in particular, to come together and assess the broken systems of inequality. But today, our "nasty woman" mugs and tee-shirts feel less like cheeky attempts to reclaim our power when they can easily be reimagined to say "monster." Yet, at this moment in 2024, the outcome of this election seems to render much of our progress invisible. On TikTok, users have repurposed the reproductive rights slogan "My body, my choice" as "Your body, my choice." I worry about the generation after me. Research already shows that 61% of Gen Z men do not identify as feminists, and yet, the numbers are split evenly between millennial men and women.

Journalists, pundits, and the like are busy pointing fingers at the party and president. Still, the problem is a broken worldview, one where men can continue to evade accountability, and women are left to bear the brunt of the pain. Even the white women who are being criticized for throwing their support to Trump didn't deserve all of the blame when men showed up in even higher numbers. Think pieces said this was a pendulum swing back from extreme wokeness, that Democrats focused on the wrong issues. But since when was pushing for and supporting progress a more significant impediment than being anti-woman? We must stop searching for the hidden conspiracy and acknowledge that what won is the hatred that has primarily been hiding in plain sight all of the 21st century. And for the women who were once little girls like me, trying to make sense of our place in a culture that trained us to be seen as tolerable, we should instead teach our girls to believe they can be chosen to lead.