The thing about Donald Trump (or, rather, a thing about Trump -- there were and are a lot of things) is that from the earliest days of his campaign and up to the present day, he made no attempt to hide the fact that, in a knee-jerk way, women aren't full-fledged people to him. Nearly everything the man has ever said communicates this idea implicitly if not explicitly. There are people, and there are women. There are hard-working Americans and women. There are lawyers and there are woman lawyers. There are competent professionals, his peers and rivals in business and in politics, serious minds working on serious problems, and also: women.
Clearly the man knows women are people, in the sense that they are humans. But Trump considers women to be categorically different from men, first and foremost because a woman's primary purpose is to be sexually pleasing to men, and because he also clings to all kinds of classically male-chauvinist beliefs, including the rightness of separate spheres. When these are your operating premises, all kinds of other beliefs spring out like Hydra heads: sexual assault is both inevitable and not really a crime (more of a perk, really); a woman is a failure if she's unattractive, regardless of her other mitigating merits; intelligent or ambitious women are to some degree unnatural and suspect; it's appropriate to hold women and men to different standards. Tellingly, no one needs me to provide links or quotes to back up these statements about Trump, but the proof is there, obviously, in the most egregious sound bites ("Grab 'em by the...", "If Ivanka weren't my daughter...") as well as when he sneered at Hillary's ability to "satisfy America" and when her debate style made her a "nasty woman" and when the former ambassador to Ukraine was "that woman." Word influences deed: Trump had an overwhelmingly [white] male Cabinet and administration, appointed a disproportionately high number of [white] men to federal judgeships, de-prioritized women's healthcare and parity issues to the point of rolling back existing measures.
All of us know men who harbor similar sentiments to some degree, because everyone to date has grown up steeped in cultural messaging that does little to contradict them. Good men make an ongoing, good-faith effort to recognize and overcome sexist biases. But it lingers. We see it in the men who struggle to acknowledge or care about sexism in any form until they become a father of daughters -- and even then, we see it in the fathers singularly obsessed with their daughters' chastity. We see it in the men who have deep, meaningful platonic friendships with women but also style themselves as The Game-style pickup artists in their romantic lives. We see it in the men who haven't yet thought critically about phrases like "locker room talk" or "boys will be boys" or why there's something about a woman that just doesn't seem presidential.
The thing about Trump, of course, is that his sexism -- like other of his most odious moral failings -- is outrageous and cartoonish in a way that startles. One-upping mere philanderers and deniers of the wage gap, here is a man who has openly referred to women as 10s and bitches.
It's no longer interesting, if it ever was, to grouse about how norm-breaking Trump was and continues to be. (He's shameless! He's Teflon! He got away with 5,000 scandals and insults that would've tanked any other politician!) Yet there's an abiding part of me that also deeply loathes the Chapelle-on-SNL-after-election-night response to Trump's mendacity. (Of course he's succeeding! Don't be naive! America's always been terrible. You're foolish to expect better!)
I don't think harboring a bottomless reservoir of cynicism is a good way to go through life, and I'm willing to admit to being profoundly shaken by Trump's blatant belittling of women and how little it mattered to the people who voted for him. It revealed that I'd been misapprehending the world in a very personal way, that, despite all my feminist education and awareness, I'd managed to underestimate the prejudice and chauvinism that still existed around me and the levels that would be tolerated.
If all of this is a reflection on the past, wallowing in feelings that were at their most potent in 2016, then today -- the day the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade -- is a good day to invoke the old Faulkner line that "The past is never dead. It's not even past." The almost surreal sense of dismay I felt at Trump's election hasn't abated so much as changed shape as time has gone on and the consequences of his presidency have emerged and gained permanence. Today, specifically, I'm feeling the weight of witnessing things getting worse. The dismay takes the form of losing things, like lives, that don't need to be at risk.
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