This has been coming for a long time. I actually started a post on Donald Trump and his views on women a few months ago and I got so bogged down in getting it right that my whole blog ground to a halt and I never posted the thing.
So I’m going to try again. I’m going to break it down into smaller parts. I don’t know how often I’ll be posting on this. Maybe I’ll end up getting all my thoughts into one post, but I doubt it.
The video of Donald Trump bragging about his outrageous sexual desire (can’t stop himself from just kissing women) has stayed with me – it is deeply fascinating and disturbing at the same time. There’s something remarkable about listening to a person speak with such candour, and even more so when they are a candidate for president of the United States.
The first thing that I’ve been thinking about that I want to try and express this morning is the nature of the mind that is behind those comments. Donald Trump is an extraordinarily interesting person in the way that he speaks his mind publicly in a way that most people do not. Whether it is ego or narcissism or stupidity, Donald Trump seems to be fairly comfortable saying things that most of us agree are not wise.
Yet, even Donald Trump has never been comfortable saying things like this in public – he must be aware that these sorts of comments are not appropriate for most ears, or we would probably have heard more of them, yet even with this level of understanding he somehow fails to take precaution against speaking these words when his microphone is on. A cautious person might want to confirm that he is not being recorded. A cautious person might choose to save these kinds of comments for a time when there is no microphone at all.
But let’s set aside his comments on the video for a second because Donald Trump wasn’t expecting those comments to go out into the wider world. These are not the sort of words we hear him say at his rallies. There are other things he has said without shame in a more public venue that expose the way Trump thinks in the same way, even if they are not as shocking. After all, it was not a surprise to many people that Trump would espouse the views of a womanizer or that he had contemplated adultery. Our shock was not that Donald Trump revealed something shocking about himself, but that he would say such things in THIS way – it was the degree to which these things are true that shocked us.
So let’s go back to his less shocking words. I’m thinking in particular about the way that Donald is comfortable speaking about his opinions of women and whether he thinks they are beautiful or ugly and putting them out there as if they are fact. Most people don’t do this.
In defending himself against allegations of forcing himself on a reporter at one of his homes, he had this to say, after saying that the woman was a liar, “Believe me, she would not be my first choice, that I can tell you. Man. You don’t know. That would not be my first choice.”
First of all, it seems odd and foolish, that in this kind of precarious situation, a person would make an argument based on the sort of woman he would choose to sexually assault. It is as if Donald is saying, “If I WAS going to sexually assault a woman, it would certainly not be THIS woman. She is too ugly. If I was going to sexually assault a woman, she would be much ‘hotter'”.
Donald is assuming that people will see this woman’s looks as some kind of proof that he CAN’T possibly have sexually assaulted her, and I think that he lets this slip because the way that women look and the way that HE values the way women look seems to be such an underlying assumption in the way that he thinks.
Donald Trump puts great value in the way a woman looks, but not just in the way that she looks but in how that “beautiful” woman makes him feel. I would suggest that when Donald Trump talks about beauty, he is really referring to how a woman makes him respond sexually. A beautiful woman is a woman who turns him on. His standard of beauty is based entirely on his own sexual response, and even more, he is not shy in the way that he tends to think less of the women who do not turn him on – the “fat” women and the “ugly” women.
But what really sets Trump apart here is not that he feels this way, but that he is so transparent and unapologetic about it. Most people who think this way would not be so willing to expose this way of thinking to others. We would hide it and try to say the same things – in certain situations we would talk about beauty in the way we are supposed to – valuing people intrinsically and seeing beauty beyond a very narrow and short-sighted standard.
I think that the horror that has been expressed at the things that Trump has said in this video has given us all an opportunity to think about this kind of thinking and to consider to what degree we value people in this narrow and selfish way.
Let’s not allow Trumps’s bluntness be the villain here. Trump is not worse than us because he got caught – it is very possible that he is not so different from some of us but was just more open about it. It is this way of thinking that is the problem. It is the way of valuing human beings based on what they provide in a sexual feeling. Most of us may have learned how to keep these things quiet, but their prevalence is exposed boldly in our advertising, our pornography, our fashion, our art and the ways that we relate to each other and the ways that we pursue sexual relationships with each other.
I’m not saying we all think like Trump. I’m not saying that we all embrace this kind of thinking in one way or another. I just want each person who reads this to look honestly into your own way of thinking – how different are you really from Donald Trump in the way you think – not just in what you say out loud? Clearly many of us are thinking this way, and I have this crazy idea that maybe this doesn’t have to be the way. Many of us do not think this way. We don’t have to.
Let’s not let our amusement at Trump’s discomfort let us off the hook. Let’s not write off his comments as “locker room talk”. That would accept this way of thinking as okay, when it’s not. We can do better.
