Steve Almond was doing a reading last week, and during the q and a afterwards a guy delivered an aria of rage about Hillary Clinton.

I thought about this guy as I watched a video clip of Attorney General Jeff Sessions speaking to a group of young conservatives on Tuesday. The high schoolers spontaneously start chanting “Lock her up” and Sessions — our nation’s top law enforcement official — repeats their words and chuckles fondly.

As you may remember, “Lock her up” was the central rallying cry at the Republican National Convention. Forget policy proposals aimed at helping working Americans, or hopeful slogans. Instead, the most salient message from one of our two major political parties was simply that the opposing candidate should be imprisoned.

At the time, I figured this chant was a way of unifying the party behind a divisive candidate, one who barely understood the precepts of traditional conservatism and who had few real policy positions.

Ah the luxury of being a man. I never figured that. I figured it was classic unhinged misogyny. Textbook. Unmistakable.

But as I listened Tuesday to the bellowing of those mostly male teenagers, something finally clicked in my mind: “Lock her up” isn’t really a political rallying cry. It’s an attempt to criminalize female ambition and autonomy.

Why yes, of course it is.

Mind you, I have the advantage of years of watching unhinged misogyny spraying itself all over Twitter and Facebook and blogs and other bits of the internet. I’ve had many thousands of lessons on the theme of “Enraged Hatred of Women Has Not Gone Away.”

I can hear now much more clearly, in this despotic chant, the desire to create a culture in which men have legal dominion over women and girls.

Sometimes this desire is overt. Women and girl migrants who come to America fleeing danger? Lock them up. Women who want to exercise their reproductive rights? Lock them up. Woman who dare to speak about sexual harassment and abuse? Well, if we can’t lock them up, we can at least shut them up.

And for an extra added bonus there’s the endless war on “TERFs.”

As the mid-term elections approach, you can be sure we’ll be seeing more Republican rallies, and hearing crowds roar “Lock her up.”

This speaks to the moral and intellectual poverty of the modern GOP, of course. But it also speaks to a vicious misogyny that extends far beyond an election. The “her” has become universal at this point.

If you’re a woman in America, they’re talking to you. They’re talking about locking you up.

I know. We know.