Lashing out at his accusers this afternoon, Donald Trump attacked all the women who say he has groped, kissed or inspected them naked without their consent. He called them “horrible, horrible liars” and vowed to sue the New York Times for reporting their accounts.
Minutes before the Florida rally where Trump declared war on women and the media, Michelle Obama offered a diametrically opposite view of reality and morality at a campaign appearance in New Hampshire. Condemning Trump’s conduct as “intolerable”, she forcefully argued that no woman deserves to be treated this way. The contrast between the two couldn’t have been more dramatic.
“This is not about politics. It’s about basic human decency,” the first lady said, urging her listeners to vote for Hillary Clinton. “It’s about right and wrong. Now is the time for all of us to stand up and say, ‘Enough is enough’.”
Her words echoed the thoughts of millions of women who watched last Sunday’s presidential debate and heard Trump deny he’s ever sexually assaulted women, even though he himself has publicly described having habitually done just that. What Trump didn’t realize was how many of his listeners were thinking about all the times that men had done such things to them.
And in the moment future historians may define as an historic turning point, countless women said to themselves, “Enough.”
By midweek, even before Michelle Obama voiced that thought, the floodgates had opened as a rapidly expanding array of women described various forms of sexual assault they said Trump had inflicted on them – and told their stories, on the record, to the Guardian, the New York Times, Buzzfeed, People magazine, and the Palm Beach Post, among a growing list of publications.
Since Trump thinks the best way to deal with any charges is to counter-attack as viciously as possible, his campaign immediately promised to dredge up more allegations of Bill Clinton’s past sexual misconduct.
But no matter what Bill Clinton has done, he’s not running for president – and nobody has ever accused Hillary Clinton of grabbing the genitals of a stranger or pushing a man up against a wall and shoving her tongue down his mouth. The overwhelming majority of sex crimes are committed by men, and neither Trump nor most of the commentators trying to keep up with the current firestorm seem to understand that that fact alone has transformed this race.
What Trump is now up against is not only his own actions, but the lived experience of every American woman.
Is there a gender empathy gap?
The last couple of decades brought a sea change in women’s sense of empowerment, as well as a new awareness of issues ranging from harassment to sexual consent. And as Bill Cosby and Roger Ailes could attest, women are no longer willing to remain silent about what men have done with impunity in the past.
This week, a man finally acknowledged on national television what many women already understood about the 2016 election. “This is a gender war,” Donny Deutsch announced on MSNBC’s Morning Joe the morning after the second debate. “Women in America are going to stand up and revolt – every woman in American who has ever been held down, oppressed, harassed. And if you’re not seeing that, you’re missing it.”
And yet many men are still missing it.
Following the second debate, a series of national polls revealed a gender split that showed women opposing Trump by increasing margins. If only women voted on election day, Hillary Clinton would win in a landslide with 458 electoral votes to only 80 for Trump, as Nate Silver reported on FiveThirtyEight.com.
As recent days have finally made clear, the 2016 election constitutes a referendum on male entitlement – and a Clinton victory will herald an earthquake that remakes the social landscape as dramatically as it does the national agenda.
On one issue after another, polls reveal the widening divisions between men and women. Announcing the results of a survey measuring public reactions to Trump’s infamous “grab her by the pussy” remarks, ABC’s Rachel Tillman wrote, “There was a stark gender gap, with 62% of women less likely to vote for him while 55% of men say it will make no difference on their vote.”
Such differences should surprise no one, because men lead entirely different lives than women. Over the course of their lifetime, 57% of women report having been touched or grabbed in a sexual way by a stranger in public. Thirty-seven percent of women have had a stranger masturbate in front of them at least once in public.
But strangers pose less of a danger than loved ones; more than a third of female murder victims are killed by their intimate partners. One in five women will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime – most often by someone they are close to. Trump’s first wife accused him of such acts; in a sworn deposition during their divorce, Ivana Trump used the word “rape” to describe forced sex in which her husband pulled out fistfuls of her hair.
Is it any wonder that the segment of the electorate that is routinely victimized views such offenses differently than the segment of the electorate that commits them?
Whether the crime is harassment, domestic violence or murder, the root cause includes an overwhelming sense of male entitlement: “I get to do this to you because I’m the man and you’re a woman.” Such privilege carries an assumption of ownership, as with property rights: experts on domestic violence attest that men are more likely to assault female partners when they feel they’re losing control, as when threatened with a divorce or a restraining order.
And men who fear they’re losing control have fueled the rise of Donald Trump. The gender gap between Trump’s support and Clinton’s is particularly staggering among men who are ill-equipped in comparison with their female peers. An ABC News/Washington Post poll at the end of September showed Trump with an overwhelming 59-point lead among among white men who don’t have college degrees – 76% of whom supported him. In an era when women make up nearly 60% of college and graduate school students, those men are falling further and further behind.
Despite such numbers, any real recognition of their import has been a long time coming. For the last year and a half, as myriad so-called experts struggled to understand the Trump phenomenon, their analyses focused on race, religion, ethnicity, class and income. With notable obtuseness, they resisted the most universal explanation well past the time when it should have been obvious.
Throughout this campaign, Trump’s public persona has constituted a textbook illustration of male domination: gaslighting, threatening and insulting at every turn. he has consistently acted like a vicious bully who will stop at nothing to subordinate his foes. At his first debate with Hillary Clinton, he interrupted her 51 times.
But Trump’s interrupting and shouting over his adversaries during the debates were only an extension of the domineering traits that have long been clear. This week’s news included reports from Miss USA contestants, some as young as 15, that Trump deliberately walked in on them backstage while they were naked. Trump has even bragged about doing so: “I sort of get away with things like that,” he said on The Howard Stern Show in 2005.
As the possessor of a penis, celebrity and a fortune, Trump has never questioned his right to inspect and rank women in terms of his own interest in having sex with them. For decades his objectification of women has remained as consistent as the ugliness of his values; as a self-appointed judge of female worth, he and his beauty pageants and reality shows have perpetuated the misogynistic standards that nullify the value of any woman who is not very young, very thin and conventionally attractive.
And with Trump, the double standards are so extreme it would be laughable if they weren’t so destructive, from his fat-shaming of former Miss Universe Alicia Machado to the gratuitous insult he lobbed at Heidi Klum when he announced, apropos of nothing, that the supermodel was “sadly, no longer a 10”.
Nor did Trump – a chronic philanderer currently married to his third wife, having dumped the previous two after each had borne him children – see anything wrong with attacking Hillary Clinton over her husband’s past infidelity. No matter what awful things men do, it’s always the woman’s fault.
But women are becoming ever less compliant – and female insurrection is particularly upsetting to men who are already anxious about their ability to maintain their authority.
Women have always been penalized for violating conventional gender norms, but no woman has ever had a realistic chance of winning the White House until now – and the backlash against Clinton’s temerity was apparent from the start of her campaign.
As Sandy Garossino wrote in the National Observer, “Until she ran for president, Clinton was the most admired woman in the world … So what the hell happened? The woman ran for president, that’s what. Who does she think she is?”
Clinton’s approval ratings have fluctuated wildly for decades. But the 2016 campaign ratcheted up the stakes to the point where the Republican nominee has promised to jail the female opponent who trounced him in both debates.
The confidence of the mediocre white man
Invoking the popularity of a tote bag that reads, “Lord, Give Me the Confidence of a Mediocre White Man,” Jessica Valenti wrote about how exasperating it is to deal with “a bombastic but woefully under-informed man who is convinced of how much smarter he is than you”. When the article was published in the Guardian, its headline was: Why the mediocre male’s days may be numbered.
Such predictions are, of course, what those men are worried about. In the early days of the modern women’s movement, Gloria Steinem observed humorously that the reason many men oppose equality is that they fear women will treat them the same way they’ve treated women.
Then as now, it’s true that Not All Men behave badly. But the archetype is painfully familiar, as Nicholas Kristof pointed out in a New York Times op-ed column headlined: A 7th grade bully runs for president. Kristof’s litany of characteristic behaviors was withering: “The boasts about not doing homework, the habit of blaming others when things go wrong, the penchant for exaggerating everything into the best ever, the braggadocio to mask insecurity about size of hands or genitals, the biting put-downs of others, the laziness, the self-absorption, the narcissism, the lack of empathy – and the immaturity that reduces a woman to her breasts.”
As Kristof’s list suggests, the less hard-working or accomplished men are, the more threatened they seem by the prospect of having to compete on a level playing field – and the more they resist the prospect of real female empowerment.
Despite growing competition, many men – like Trump in the run-up to the first debate – refuse to compensate by working harder, no matter how poorly they fare. Time-use studies show that even when men don’t have jobs, they do far less housework and childcare than their working wives.
Whether the issue is slacker husbands or discriminatory bosses who perpetuate the inequities of the gender pay gap, some women remain acquiescent to the unfairness of the status quo – but a lot of others are simply fed up. The question is: how many – and are they exasperated enough to head for the polls in droves? And will enough fair-minded men join them to elect the first female president in American history?
The answer depends on how far we’ve come in accepting the idea of women as truly equal human beings who sometimes outdo their male counterparts. Last month Vanity Fair reposted a profile I wrote in 1994, when the then first lady was working on healthcare reform. The article quoted a powerful Capitol Hill insider who compared Mrs Clinton’s performance with that of her husband, the president. “I’ve seen them both make presentations, with dozens of senators at the table, and she’s better than he is,” he said. “And these guys know it. They’ve sat in rooms with her, and they’ve sat in rooms with him. He’s good – he’s very good. She’s just fucking perfect.”
In a globalized world increasingly riven by conflicts of byzantine complexity, Clinton’s hard-earned knowledge and experience constitute her strongest claim to the Oval Office. But her rival – and the male minions who laud him as a “genius” for evading taxes – fail to appreciate even that obvious point.
Is this the president we want for our sons?
As election day approaches, the larger question is how much sense of self-preservation will be manifested by the nation’s adult females.
Will American women – and the men who actually care about their welfare – support the leadership of a man who feels entitled to kiss strangers on the mouth and brag about grabbing crotches, simply because he is rich and famous and male?
Will voters agree that a man should view and rank all women according to their physical attributes and fire those he doesn’t find sexually desirable, because he thinks a woman’s value is measured by her looks?
Will voters approve the double standards of a man who publicly humiliates women for their sexual conduct even as he laughs off his own far more lurid transgressions?
Will the electorate agree that males don’t have to play by the rules – that men don’t need to do what’s best for their families (like refraining from dumping the mothers of their children in tabloid sex scandals) or for the economy (like paying contractors who provided services instead of cheating them) or for their country (like paying taxes)?
The Clinton campaign has been running a commercial featuring some of Trump’s denigrating comments about women, superimposed over pictures of uncertain young girls scrutinizing themselves in the mirror as they struggle to decide whether their bodies define their value in the world. “Is this the president we want for our daughters?” the ad asks.
That leaves out an equally critical question: is this the president we want for our sons?
A vote for Trump is a vote for the continuation of male entitlement – for the arrogance and inequity of unearned privilege, for the acceptance of irresponsibility in personal, familial and civic behaviors, and for the perpetuation of all the hateful biases that oppress women solely because of their gender.
Is this the world we want to keep on living in, or is it finally time for us to demand a better one?
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