If Trump weren't running for President I would have viewed the tape as nothing more than the attitude of one old dinosaur who will hopefully lose some of that sexual energy in the next decade or so. What is disturbing and pulls the curtain back on this issue is that millions of Trump's supporters are saying it doesn't matter, it's okay to elect a President with that kind of attitude. We'll just laugh it off and pretend that all the women coming forward to back up his own bragging words are lying.
That's what's disturbing. Are you sure your kids know better than to think it is open season on women? If so, fine. Some parents have some work to do.
Red:
But he is, and that's what makes this a far bigger issue than it has previously been. It's an issue that should long ago have been resolved, yet like other "isms," it lingers well past its welcome.
Blue:
Yep, that's the other side of the problem. One has to wonder whether they make light of his behavior because they hope to be be able to do the same if they are male, or whether they have a fetish of some sort if they are female.
Pink:
It makes no sense to me why folks will believe Cosby's and Clinton's accusers and not Trump's.
Green:
That folks don't see this as a problem and they thus teach their children as much is why mistreatment and malignant attitudes have persisted as they have.
There is an enormous portion of the left that gives lip service to a principle whenever asked, but refuse to put their money where their mouth is when dealing with real events instead of abstractions.
??? What?
This thread is supposed to be about whether the Trump kerfluffle will reopen the door for further discussion about the apparently wide spread attitude that women are still "open season" and it's okay, it's just boy stuff, locker room talk, etc.
That is what it's intended to be about.
Yes, this will lead to a discussion of misogyny, but it will not be an honest one as long as people insist on framing it according to identity.
To have this discussion honestly, there are a number of cultural elements that one must recognize as real and that one must accept as disrespectful to women.
Presidents as Role Models:
Like it or not, the President sets the tone that defines the character of the nation. Truly all leaders and would-be leaders do, but in the U.S. there is no more senior leader than the President. The President is a role model; therefore whatever the President does becomes a tacit signal of approbation that signals to the rest of the nation that it's okay for us to do it too. Of all the ways in which that manifests itself is in the ways we interact with one another.
A Kiss is all it Takes, but a Good Spanking Doesn't Hurt Either:
That Trump has been documented as having the attitudes that are expressed by using the words he did in that
Access Hollywood tape
and he is running for President
and his supporters are yet willing to discount the impact of what surely seems** literally sexual assault is the problem. That diminishing of the events and attitude is tantamount not only to condoning -- by acquiescence if even not by affirmation -- sexual assault, but also to declaring that women are objects just as they were in what Trump would surely call the "days when America was great." To this day that notion remains firmly -- as evidenced by Trump's bragged-about behavior and his supporters' insouciance toward it -- in the American psyche. We all know image, and the clip below illustrates
the attitude.
Who has not seen any of a hundred or more "classic" movie scenes where the beautiful woman is distraught, fuming and struggling to get away from a man who then grabs her, plants a kiss on her lips and suddenly she's swooning and submitting. That mentality -- the idea that any man's kiss is all it takes to subdue, becalm and satisfy any woman -- is exactly what's expressed in Trump's remark about not even waiting to kiss beautiful women. (Hopefully you can think of a specific movie or scene; my mind's drawing a blank yet I know I've seen a ton of them. Sorry.)
**Note:
I write "seems" only because we weren't there when the events occurred. The fact of human sexual interactions, however, is that generally kissing on the lips by newly acquainted individuals (not one's significant other or close friend(s) who may get a "lip peck" as a greeting), and certainly kissing "with tongue," is a form of foreplay, and the point of foreplay is that it is a precursor to sexual interaction/satisfaction.
For the U.S. to elect a President who espouses the notion that women have so little control of their own emotions and physical desires that kissing them is all it takes for them to submit to the will of a man is preposterous on its own. That we might have a President whom we can see/hear clearly that thinks that way bodes horribly for American women and girls for it gives every testosterone addled boy, teen and man the tacit go ahead to have his way with women regardless of the woman's efforts to rebuff them. Those are the things one must admit to have an honest discussion on this topic.
Getting one's panties in a knot over Trump while simultaneously advocating for Islam is like cursing the tom cat that just peed in your petunias while ignoring the saber-toothed tiger with a toddler's head in its jaws.
What is it with folks on this forum? What has one's view about Islam to do with how American women are seen and treated? Why does the treatment and cultural mores pertaining to how males and females are expected to interact have to be connected to Islam? Are not the same standards applicable to American Muslim women?
I'm amazed you had the nerve to write about having an honest discussion yet you also trivialized the appropriateness of our outrage over the mistreatment of women with your "bigger fish to fry" analogy. Women comprise some 50%+ of the U.S. population, and that makes them every bit a "big fish."
Though I neither support nor oppose Islam, from my read of the Quran, it seems to me that how Islam is portrayed re: women and their roles strikes me as a more a matter of how provincial Islamic radicals behave more so than what The Prophet taught.
Christianity has more than it's own share of passages that promote violence toward women. That we don't much talk about those verses doesn't make them not be there and very much part of Christianity, yet we focus on such verses when we assail Islam and we ignore them in the Christian tradition. But neither Islam nor Christianity is the point. The point is that it'd be far more honest to simply address what is and is not acceptable about how we in the U.S., in our laws and secular practices, treat and view women.
