On the morning after the election, I walked up the staircase of my school. A preteen was crying into the shoulders of her braces-clad peer. Her friend was rubbing circles on her back.
I continued up the stairs to the lounge, where upperclassmen linger before classes. There I saw two tables: One was filled with my girlfriends, many of them with hollows under their eyes. There was a blanket of despair over the young women in the room. I looked over to the other table of teenage boys and saw Minecraft on their computers. While we were gasping for a breath, it seemed they were breathing freely.
We girls woke up to a country that would rather elect a man found liable for sexual abuse than a woman. Where the kind of man my mother instructs me to cross the street to avoid will be addressed as Mr. President. Where the body I haven’t fully grown into may no longer be under my control. The boys, it seemed to me, just woke up on a Wednesday.
What made my skin burn most wasn’t that over 75 million people voted for Donald Trump. It was that this election didn’t seem to measurably change anything for the boys around me, whether their parents supported Mr. Trump or not. Many of them didn’t seem to share our rage, our fear, our despair. We don’t even share the same future.
I am scared that the Trump administration will take away or restrict birth control and Plan B — the same way they did abortion. I am scared that the boys I know will see in a triumphant, boastful Mr. Trump the epitome of a manly man and model themselves after him. I was 8 years old the first time he was elected. Now I am 16. I am still unable to vote, but I am so much more aware of what I have to lose.
I have seen the ways in which many of the boys in my generation can be different from their fathers. The #MeToo movement went mainstream when they were still wearing Superman pajamas. On Tuesdays in health class, they learn about the dangers of inebriated consent. They don’t pretend to gag when a girl mentions her period or a tampon falls out of her backpack. They don’t find sexist jokes all that funny and don’t often make them in public.
I’ve heard they even use new language in the locker room about getting rejected by a girl, one where no means no and don’t try again. I love and care for many of these boys and have always felt they were on my side. I’m grateful to my school for taking gender equality as seriously as it does trigonometry.
But most of the guys I saw that Wednesday appeared nonchalant. A smiling student shook his friend’s hand and said sarcastically “Good election” in the same hallway where I saw a female teacher clutching a damp tissue.
Why did it seem these boys were so unperturbed? I worried that my guy friends might only care about women until it conflicts with other, more pressing, priorities.
That morning, I spoke with a male classmate. He asked if I was OK. I nearly melted with relief. See, I knew not all guys were ignorant! Then, before I responded, he continued. Why, he wondered, are so many girls crying? I stared. I swallowed that familiar lump. And I had one thought: I pray that my older brother never asks that question. How could my classmate not know why girls in his grade were biting their nails and doing breathing exercises in the bathroom? It seemed like our future was sliding down the sides of our faces, and he asked me why we were crying? I have never felt that disconnected from men. I have never felt more like a girl.
Eight years ago, I was too young to feel the full force of Hillary Clinton’s loss. Now at 16, I’ve had the wind knocked out of me. On that Wednesday, I was flush with anger — but it was diluted by an even stronger feeling: defeat. I saw it in the eyes of women in my subway car that morning. I saw it in the barista at the coffee shop on the corner, the female security guard at my school and in the face of my history teacher.
In a terrible way, I’ve never felt more part of a sisterhood or more certain that pain is shared within that family. I wish the consequences of this moment for young women punctured the apparent indifference of so many men and boys I saw that day. I wish they could breathe in what the women and girls I know have been inhaling since Nov. 5.
I can’t predict how well I’m going to do on an English test tomorrow and I definitely can’t predict the future for me and my fellow young women. For now, all I can do is tell you how I feel.
Naomi Beinart is a 16-year-old girl and a junior in high school. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
