Dana Milbank’s editorial today was an amazing piece about misogyny, written by a man who has a front row seat. He sees the misogyny newly made respectable again by Trump, and the alarming treatment of women — even Senators, even women as powerful as Nancy Pelosi — let alone the tens of millions of anonymous citizens whose lives are now in the hands of a few malicious men in Washington.
I can’t tell you how much it means to me, as a woman, to read this piece, so honest and truthful and also, so sad.
He writes about Katy Tur and Trump’s unwanted kiss, about the tweet featuring a golf ball hitting Hillary Clinton.
Over the weekend, the president of the United States retweeted to his 38 million Twitter followers a video clip doctored to show him driving a golf ball off the tee and between the shoulder blades of Hillary Clinton — “CrookedHillary” in the tweet — knocking the former secretary of state and Democratic presidential nominee to the ground.
Eighty-four thousand people “liked” this violent takedown of Trump’s former opponent.
A woman has been speaker of the House (and proved substantially more effective than the two men who succeeded her), another came within a whisker of the presidency, and others (Republican Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine) wield the decisive votes on health-care and other legislation. But recent events make it feel as if we’re in an earlier time, when a woman’s job in politics was simple: sit down and shut up. This no doubt is the work of a president who, by word and deed, made sexism safe again, giving license to shed “political correctness” and blame troubles on minorities, immigrants and women.
I looked up the demographics. 5% more men voted for Trump than for Romney! And Trump was 100 times less well qualified. He is truly a disgusting, probably insane orange pig yet men lined up to vote for him, probably men who don’t normally vote, who are ill versed in the issues and probably couldn’t find the Ukraine on a map, or discuss health care intelligently, let alone tax policy or city planning or energy.
But they saw a woman in a pantsuit and they hied themselves off to the polls.
Now, we see open hostility to women in Congress as well as in the White House. Of course they create “health care” bills that assault women by their existence. Governors around the country inject themselves into our most private parts, our private lives, and attempt to control us in every way. They close Planned Parenthood clinics and force women to drive hundreds of miles for reproductive health care and abortions which are totally legally and 100% our right.
I think women, powerful women, are resented by women too, the kind of women who depend upon men. I’ve been thinking about the rage at Hillary that found such threatening voice at Trump’s rallies — it can’t be her personally! That much rage and hatred just doesn’t make sense!
No — she’s the scapegoat, the archetype for all women who’ve taken up the challenge to educate ourselves, who’ve persisted in the world despite being slapped down, who have tried to work in the world of men, who haven’t settled for cookie baking and who sometimes have even sought power.
But women like this are now, I think, blamed for the difficulties men have finding jobs. You see the resentment against minority men too, and immigrants, “They are taking our jobs!”
Well, women are too. And I think we’re hated for it, and not just by the men but by the women who rely on them and who prefer the patriarchal system because it was safe.
And now, in Washington, powerful men are trying to stifle our voices.
www.washingtonpost.com/...
Edited with update: I just wanted to thank everybody who’s read and recced this and commented on it! I posted it in the middle of the night because I saw Dana Milbank’s piece and was so moved by it and I was afraid it might just vanish. So when I saw it up here this morning with all the thoughtful responses I cried. You guys are the best.