Everything I Never Dreamed by Ruth M. Glenn

Author:Ruth M. Glenn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2022-10-04T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 14 Why We Do What We Do

Two steps forward and one back. And on the bad days, one step forward and two back. After eight years of an administration led by a president and vice president who took violence against women seriously and were leading in the direction of progress, the 2016 presidential election knocked the wind out of us. A man who had bragged on tape that he had sexually assaulted women swept into office.

It wasn’t just the tape, of course. By then we knew multiple women had made allegations of assault and harassment against Donald Trump, including his first wife, Ivana, who accused him of rape in a divorce deposition in the 1980s. (She later changed “rape” to “violated,” and Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen, apparently unaware that marital rape laws had existed in all fifty states for more than twenty years, said that Trump couldn’t have raped Ivana because “by the very definition, you can’t rape your spouse.”) We knew that as the owner of the Miss USA and Miss Teen USA pageants, Trump would walk into the young women’s dressing rooms unannounced. He had described this perk himself to Howard Stern: “And I’m allowed to go in because I’m the owner of the pageant…. They’re standing there with no clothes. And you see these incredible-looking women. And so I sort of get away with things like that.” In a New York magazine profile many years before, Trump had been quoted as saying about women, “You have to treat ’em like s***.” A Guardian columnist looking at many of Trump’s utterances over the years suggested he was conducting a “masterclass in rape culture,” doing his bit for the normalization of sexual violence in society.

Just days after the release of that tape, when you might have thought Trump would present a contrite face, he doubled down instead. When Hillary Clinton was speaking at the next presidential debate, Trump followed her around the stage, staring at her, making faces. The media used words like “prowl” and “stalk” to describe what he was doing. Hillary said it made her skin crawl. A telling coda to the night was the way Hillary second-guessed her reaction, asking herself (and us) if she should have called him out in the middle of the debate rather than keeping her cool, engaging with the issues, carrying on: “Maybe I have overlearned the lesson of staying calm, biting my tongue… smiling all the while.”

Not every misogynist is an abuser. But they inhabit the same spectrum. Chelsea Clinton called misogyny a “gateway drug” to worse. I’m not saying that everyone who voted for Trump did so because he was a misogynist. I’m saying that the fact that he was one, and wore it proudly—it was part of his brand—didn’t bother people enough to not vote for him. His election proved that misogyny was fine; it wouldn’t hurt your chances for a good job. One of the ways that children and adolescents develop beliefs about the appropriateness, or not, of behaviors is by noticing which actions are rewarded and which are denounced or punished.

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