When Republican Presidential Nominee Donald J. Trump said the words he used in an old videotape that surfaced Friday (Oct. 7) were essentially locker room talk and that he was sorry if anyone was offended by his talk, I could not help myself but I felt hot tears rise in my eyes.
It was a kind of visceral reaction to this clown’s idiocy I had not expected. Yeah, I had heard his rough words about Rosie O’Donnell, and yes I was aware of his deep-seated fear of the bleeding from the “where ever.”
But listening to the blistering nastiness of the words he was using about women he wanted to fuck simply because they were attractive and in front of him and that gave him the right, not only to desire them but also “when you’re a star, they’ll let you do anything.” What he was saying is, if he was suitably inspired, he would not only tap that, he would fuck it, then piss on it and move on to the next.
I made myself a cup of coffee as the late-breaking news played the video over and over. I realized my hand was shaking as I poured the boiling water over the ground beans. Why was this so upsetting? I wondered.
With my newly made coffee, I went to my computer and opened Twitter, which I knew would be swarming with news, jokes and innuendo about the breaking story. This Republican and that Republican were making statements tooled to distance themselves even further from this flailing orange buffoon. Paul Ryan said he was “sickened” by what he heard today and Reince Priebus said that no woman deserves to be spoken about in such terms.
Yes, guys, you are right, but something you don’t know is any woman who goes out or speaks out in public is thought about or even spoken about in just such terms, every day. And if she is homely, that’s a component to the inner or outer chatter about her. If she is attractive, she can expect the chatter to have an extra measure of praise and shame heaped onto it. If she is old, she can expect her sanity and her ability to comprehend simple things to be questioned. Last of all, her dried out, no-longer-interesting, superfluous “whatever” might even become a part of the conversation depending on how crude the talkers are.
This is every day.
Donald Trump may be sickening, it’s true. But the real sickening part of all of this is that women live in a strange half-world where we are expected to be attractive, yet we are berated for being attractive. If we are not attractive, we are called pigs or worse. If we give you what you want from us, we’re bad and if we don’t give you what you want we’re fucking cunts.
Maybe we find ourselves in the companionship of good men who don’t think of women like this, and that’s wonderful. But we all know guys who are like this. Showing them your tits after being pestered won’t make them leave you alone. Telling these men they will never ever see your tits, ever, is just permission for those same men to punish you at every turn for having a … “whatever.”
And don’t think having a well-grounded opinion is going to save you. You’re hysterical. Calm down. Etc.
After about 30 to 45 minutes after the news broke about “Trump’s locker room talk,” I stopped shaking. I eventually stopped thinking about all the times I had been exposed things like this during my career. The times I unknowingly entered a room still echoing with the words “cunt” and “pussy.” Even during activities that were supposed to be fun but turned into a referendum on a woman having a “whatever.”
Earlier this week I had made a joke about being a man in past lives and how “great it was for people to listen to what you had to say, hang on every word. So imagine how disappointed I was this time around.” The whole room laughed.
M. Elwell Romancito 