By Heather MacDonald
Sunday, October 09, 2016
Democrats and their media allies, joined by many
Republicans, are calling on Donald Trump to withdraw from the presidential race
after a newly released, decade-old tape of a frat-house-level conversation
between Trump and television host Billy Bush in 2005, in which Trump boasted of
his heavy-handed pursuit of females. Trump describes trying unsuccessfully to
seduce a married woman by taking her furniture shopping, speaking in the
crudest terms. He brags that because he was a star he could “grab [females] by
the pussy” and claims to Bush that he starts kissing beautiful women “like a
magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait.
And when you’re a star, they let you do it.
You can do anything.” Bush eggs
him on: “Whatever you want!” (Bush being
a more admiring confidante than Leporello to Don Giovanni).
The response has been swift and apocalyptic. Hillary
Clinton tweeted: “This is horrific. We cannot allow this man to become
president.” Vice Presidential candidate Tim Kaine told reporters: “It makes me
sick to my stomach.” Slate’s science
editor wrote that “I feel sicker after seeing it than I can remember feeling in
a while.” Another Slate columnist
writes that Trump and Bush “can’t see their female colleagues as anything but
collections of fuckable or unfuckable body parts. They exhibit a complete
disregard for women’s humanity, agency, and internal lives.”
Now why might it be that men regard women as sex objects?
Surely the ravenous purchase by females of stiletto heels, push-up bras,
butt-hugging mini-skirts, plunging necklines, false eyelashes, hair extensions,
breast implants, butt implants, lip implants, and mascara, rouge, and lipstick
to the tune of billions a year has nothing to do with it. Females would never
ever exploit their sexuality to seek attention from men. Bush and Trump,
driving to the set of Days of Our Lives
on a studio bus, comment on the legs of actress Arianne Zucker who is coming to
meet them: “Oh, nice legs, huh?” Trump says. “Your girl’s hot as shit, in the
purple,” Bush says. How surprising that Trump and Bush noticed Zucker’s legs!
As documented in the video, she is wearing a skimpy purple dress, with an
extremely short hem cut on the bias, a low neckline and fully exposed back. She
is in high heels to accentuate her bare legs. The ratio of exposed skin between
Zucker, on the one hand, and Trump and Bush, on the other, is perhaps 100 to
one. But all that bare flesh must simply be because Zucker has a high
metabolism and gets exceedingly warm; she would never want to broadcast her
sexuality to men or have men notice her. The fact that she swishes her hips
when she walks must just be a quirk of anatomy.
When Trump and Bush emerge from the bus, they are the
embodiment of jocular decorum—this too counts against them in the eyes of the
feminist brigades. Writes Slate’s
Susan Matthews: “As if public Donald Trump wasn’t bad enough, this video
reminds us that there’s an aspect of the man that’s even worse than what he
shows to the public. You see it in the transformation Trump and his
conversation partner Billy Bush undergo when they exit the bus and move from
[what they assumed was] a private sphere into a public one. They are still
committing acts of sexual harassment and abusing their power when they ask the
actress who greets them to give each of them a hug. But they’re buttoning
up—they know the tone of the conversation they had on the bus cannot be
repeated in anything close to a public sphere.” Isn’t this a good thing that
Trump in this case at least has obeyed the rules of public behavior? Matthews,
we are to believe, would never say anything in private that she would not
repeat in the public sphere.
If any of these newfound exponents of female modesty felt
any comparable nausea at the blatant display of female sexuality and, dare I
say it, “pussy,” in Beyoncé’s acclaimed rock video “Formation,” say, they kept
it to themselves. Beyoncé and her female chorus line rhythmically thrust their
butts, crotches, and breasts to the camera, while Beyoncé brags of her sexual
prowess:
Paparazzi, catch my fly, and my cocky fresh
I’m so reckless when I rock my Givenchy dress (stylin’)
Oh yeah, baby, oh yeah I, ohhhhh, oh, yes, I like that
I did not come to play with you hoes, haha
I came to slay, bitch
When he fuck me good I take his ass to Red Lobster, cause I slay
If he hit it right, I might take him on a flight on my chopper, cause I
slay
Drop him off at the mall, let him buy some J’s, let him shop up, cause I
slay
I might get your song played on the radio station, cause I slay
Sounds like a sexual quid pro quo, ripe for a harassment
lawsuit. The “Formation” video, which inspired Beyoncé’s Super Bowl halftime
performance in January (to another universal swoon from the entertainment
industry), also shows a very young girl engaging in some precocious twerking, a
grotesque travesty of childhood. No objections to that destruction of the
innocence of childhood from the DNC.
President Obama has singled out Beyoncé for praise, and
the singer is a big Hillary Clinton supporter, to not a word of protest from
Clinton regarding her status as a role model for young girls. Bill Clinton met
with Beyoncé and her husband, rapper Jay Z, in September. If Bill or Hillary
thinks the lyrics of Jay Z’s “Big Pimpin‘” “horrific,” in Hillary’s words, they
are not letting on:
You know I thug em, fuck em, love em, leave em
Cause I don’t fuckin need em
Take em out the hood, keep em lookin good
But I don’t fuckin feed em
First time they fuss I’m breezin
Talkin bout, “What’s the reasons?”
I’m a pimp in every sense of the word, bitch
Better trust than believe em
In the cut where I keep em
til I need a nut, til I need to beat the guts
Then it’s, beep beep and I’m pickin em up
Let em play with the dick in the truck
Many chicks wanna put Jigga fist in cuffs
Divorce him and split his bucks
Just because you got good head, I’m a break bread
so you can be livin it up? Shit I
parts with nothin, y’all be frontin
Me give my heart to a woman?
Not for nothin, never happen.
The Washington Post
primly headlined its scoop on Trump’s bus conversation with Bush: “Trump
recorded having extremely lewd conversation about women in 2005.” The New York Times’ follow-up story also
labelled Trump’s remarks “lewd.” If either of those paper’s critics have ever
objected to such lewdness in popular culture, it has escaped attention. Have
they objected to college campus sex weeks, which routinely invite porn stars to
offer how-to demonstrations on S & M sex? Do they squirm with discomfort
when campus administrators pass out tips on the use of sex toys to achieve
better orgasms? Not on the record, at least.
Other Hillary Clinton supporters have hardly been shy
about exploiting sex to get ahead. Clinton fan Amy Schumer admits: “I have used
sex as a marketing tool and it has worked. I mean, my TV show is called Inside Amy Schumer.” This blushing
Victorian violet explains: “My whole life I found friends that are just like
me, young girls that were just like me, like we were all whores.” During a
lace-clad photo shoot for Marie Claire that of course had nothing to do with projecting sexuality, Schumer joked about her
sexual exploits: “My best friend would describe me as loyal . . . to the
boyfriend I stole from her.” She confesses to a “weakness for orgasms.”
Democratic National Convention star, Hillary fan, and pseudo-campus rape victim
Lena Dunham has not exactly set herself up as a model of sexual prudence,
either, nor has she shrunk from using her promiscuity as a selling point in the
entertainment market.
The sudden onset of Victorian vapors among the liberal
intelligentsia and political class at the revelation of Trump’s locker-room
talk is part and parcel of the Left’s hypocrisy when it comes to feminism and
sexual liberation. A routine objection to Trump is that he makes, in the words
of the New York Times, “gutter
attacks on women.” But why should women be exempt from Trump’s gutter attacks
on anyone he wants to humiliate? Trump’s gratuitous nastiness to men and women
alike, kicking people when they are
down, unfits him to serve as the premier civic role model for the nation’s
children. But the feminists can’t have it both ways: declaring that women
should be equal to men in all things and then still demand a chivalric
deference to female’s delicate sensibilities. Either women are the same as men
or they’re not. It is particularly galling to see the selective resurrection of
Victorian values from the same crowd that has been pushing transgender locker
rooms on the world, in an effort to destroy the last shred of girls’ innate
sexual modesty.
This opportunistic, on-again, off-again appearance of
traditional sexual values characterizes the campus-rape myth as well. Needless
to say, actual sexual assault is both criminal and intolerable. But college
co-eds insist on the prerogative of maximal promiscuity at the same time that
they revert to the role of helpless damsel in distress, when, after drinking
themselves blotto to lower their sexual inhibitions, they regret a boozy
hook-up and declare themselves raped. The logic is always that the male was
responsible for the female’s well-being; the female cannot help drinking
herself to a reckless state. It is for the chivalric male to look out for her.
Following the release of the studio bus tape, Trump said
in his defense that Bill Clinton “has said far worse to me on the golf course.”
That may be the most credible thing that Trump has ever uttered. But both
Republicans and Democrats are fatally compromised in their responses to the
Trump tapes, deliberately released right before the make-or-break second
presidential debate. Republicans, having flogged the Bill Clinton sex scandals
way past any possible point of relevance, are now not well positioned to
dismiss these comments (nor are they trying to), though there is a huge
difference between the reality TV star Trump bragging about his libido on a
studio bus and Bill Clinton exploiting the power of the presidency to seduce a
young intern. But Democrats are the most shameless in their outrage over the
Trump braggadocio, having dismissed Bill Clinton’s White House and
gubernatorial escapades for years, and standing as the party of maximal sexual
liberation, unlike the Republicans. The New York Times rejects the relevance of
Clinton’s predatory White House behavior on the ground that “Mr. Clinton is not
running for president.” But the Times did not find Clinton’s behavior
significant when Clinton was in office, either.
Ideally, no man would ever paw a female or push himself
on her. The default norm of sexual modesty, coupled with the chivalric ideal
that gentlemen should treat females like ladies, used to be the most effective
defense against such high-testosterone behavior. Feminism, however, has
declared both modesty and chivalry sexist, leaving females to improvise a
response to the inevitable excesses of the male sex drive, when they are not
trying to leverage it to their own advantage.
The only good thing to come out of this tacky episode may
be the jettisoning of the ongoing resurrection of the tired Clinton White House
escapades by Trump and his supporters. Otherwise, it stands merely as a
reminder of how enduring the stance of offended female virtue is, even in the
age of crude sexual exhibitionism.
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