The Trump effect
Sexual assault allegations can often boil down to simply “he said/she said”. But when it comes to Donald Trump, it’s been “he said, she said, she said, she said, she said and she said …” So exclaimed CNN anchor Jake Tapper this week, highlighting the dam burst of testimony from women about the US presidential candidate’s misogynistic past. That this resonates as deeply and widely as it does – despite an earlier slew of high-profile, powerful men called to account for shocking historic sexual assault – is being hailed as a game changer. Far from being jaded or compassion-fatigued by the horrendous crimes of Jimmy Savile, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Rolf Harris and other men of power and wealth, global public opinion is finally hardening against overt misogyny now that someone a couple of percentage points away from leading the free world is also revealed to be an unabashed practitioner of it.
Thanks to Trump, we are at last having a frank and educative conversation about what makes women – and some men – feel victimised and threatened, and indeed about what level of risqué banter contributes to intimidation. Trump’s insouciance about his conduct, and the overwhelming refusal of many of even his Republican allies to excuse it, has sparked conversations between men and women the world over – conversations that till now a great number of women had not felt able to initiate. Demeaned or discomfited by men’s behaviour and talk, women have frequently felt obliged to endure the situation and not make trouble to avoid a sliding scale of risks from being made to feel prissy or humourless to losing their job.
Yet as Listener columnist and Huffington Post Highline executive editor Rachel Morris wrote in this magazine last week, “For the first time I can think of, the US is having an honest and uncomfortable reckoning with misogyny. It’s as if decades upon decades of gross predatory behaviour have culminated in the existence of Donald Trump, human boil, and this election is the lance …”
Indeed, Trump has taken the persistence of misogyny well past debate, in a way recent phenomena such as the Slut Walk movement never quite managed. Then, there was room for confusion as to why on earth some women would want to “slutshame” themselves on social media before someone else could do it. But the outcry over Trump heralds a new era of welcome clarity. He has made it simply binary. There’s been no sense of “PC gone mad” about the outrage at Trump’s 2007 boast that he “advanced” on women “like a bitch” and groped their private
parts, “and they let me!”
The “just locker-room talk” defence, lame as it was for a man then in his late fifties, stood no chance against the procession of women who felt emboldened to come forward and give an account of their experience of Trump. No one seriously argues his was just the normal response of a red-blooded male or an understandable by-product of being rich and famous with women falling at one’s feet. Trump operates by what has been described as a Nietzschean ethic – an ethic of entitlement and dominance in which power and success are worshipped and the weak (including women) are treated with contempt and cruelty. To do what he claimed to do is sociopathic and constitutes criminal assault.
Human consciousness has come a long way in a very short time, considering that for most of our history women have been treated as inferior to and even chattels of men. Given we also retain mostly redundant physiological responses developed for our cave-dwelling origins, when we were both hunter and prey, this tendency toward male dominance has some way to go before we evolve beyond it.
There are constant social stocktakes as we adjust to our changing circumstances – including the recent focus on the unacceptable behaviour of some of those associated with rugby in New Zealand. That is a long-overdue call to account.
But there are grounds now for hoping Trump will one day be added to the official wall chart of the ascent of man; long after the extinction of Homo erectus and Homo neanderthalensis, we finally moved past Homo misogynous.
We are at last having a frank and educative conversation about what makes women feel victimised and threatened.