For the Young Women Who Were Too Young to Vote in 2016

It’s not only your reproductive rights that are at stake in 2024. Listen to Michelle Obama and don’t let that man near the White House again.

That’s Michelle Obama, talking about her reaction to the “Access Hollywood” videos. If you were too young to vote in 2016, you might not have seen her nationally televised speech. It was October 11, 2016, the election was a month away, and in a few days I was going to give a talk at a conference on “Southern Feminism.” My hope was to address and try to bridge the differences that had developed between “baby boomer” and “millennial” feminists.

At the time I gave my talk, bridging that gap had seemed more than possible, as across the political spectrum we were all equally horrified by the recently released video. The mainstream media, whose gender radar was often astonishingly dull during the election, at first presented it as, ho hum, just another “problem” for Trump’s “gender gap.” Just a week before, he’d gotten himself into trouble with comments about Latina beauty queen Alicia Machado, calling her “Miss Piggy” and “an eating machine” after she gained what he called “massive amounts of weight” (actually fifteen pounds) during her tenure as Miss Universe. Defending himself, Trump had explained: “She was the winner and she gained a massive amount of weight, and it was a real problem.” He tweeted that Machado was “disgusting” and accused her of having a sex tape.

Now there was this “Access Hollywood” video. More of the same? The GOP didn’t think so. After all, “family values” was their brand! And now a hot mic had revealed not merely that the newly married Trump had had extramarital affairs—that was a glass house few politicians could stand in—but had boasted that “when you’re a star” you can do anything you want to women. A massive GOP distancing followed. Paul Ryan said he was “sickened” by Trump’s remarks. Mitch McConnell invoked his three daughters and described Trump’s comments as showing an “utter lack of respect for women.” RNC chairman Reince Priebus said “No woman should ever be described in these terms or talked about in this manner. Ever.” Governor Gary Herbert of Utah: “beyond offensive and despicable.” Mitt Romney: “Such vile degradations demean our wives and daughters and corrupt America’s face to the world.” There was GOP talk of reversing the ticket, and putting Pence at the top. Chuck Todd speculated that Trump might not even show up for the next debate.

.

Within days, Hillary’s numbers were climbing to a significant lead. And then Michelle Obama, shaking and on the verge of tears, had us all spellbound and loving her even more than we already did, with her gripping speech.

Brains meet heart meet righteous anger. I’ve never adored her more. I’ve never felt more as though one woman was indeed “speaking truth to power” and doing so to inspire other women (and decent men) to take back our power. We fling that phrase around way too casually. This speech is my personal paradigm.

After Michelle’s speech, things looked so bad for Trump that I was able to end my talk with a sarcastic “thank you” to him.

It’s ironic that the issues that (in an earlier Huffington Post piece) I complained were being ignored in the primary — racism and sexism — have hatched out of the mud of the general in such undisguised, blatant form. It is largely due to Trump’s vile behavior — and the enduring support for Hillary from older African-Americans and feminists of my generation — that Hillary will probably be elected. Such a win, especially if it is a landslide, will be attributed to the far “greater of the two evils” rather than Hillary’s experience, character, or accomplishments. Once again, she won’t have gotten her due. But so be it. I’ll give my thanks to Donald for his first moment of gentlemanly behavior: opening the door to the White House for Hillary Clinton.

We know that didn’t happen, for reasons that I’ve written about in many articles and two books. I’m not going to go over all that in this stack. I’m writing this stack, instead, because I began to wonder, this past week, watching the “hush money”/election interference trial, how many younger women had actually seen the video that shook Michelle to her core. And I wondered, if they hadn’t seen it, how they could be expected to fully comprehend what it communicated about Donald Trump, and why—whatever our positions on other issues—women (and the men who support us) need to keep him out of the White House.

The jury at the trial is only being given a transcript, but here’s the actual video that David Fahrenthold exposed for the world to see:

At the time, the headlines described this as “lewd” or “vulgar” behavior. In commentary about the trial, it figures most significantly as a prelude to the silencing of Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougall. That’s understandable, as the prosecution is focused on Trump and Company’s perception of the danger it constituted. But what’s getting lost is what shook Michelle Obama and so many women to their core. It’s not Trump’s revolting history of gross, intrusive groping, as disgusting as that is. It’s not that Trump had extramarital sex, or even that he bragged about his “conquests.” It’s that he did so with such utter disdain, such contempt, for the women whose “pussies” he grabbed, with their “big, phony tits” and readiness to “do anything” for a star. It was that attitude that sent many women casting early votes for Clinton.

At this point in the 2016 campaign there had been no actual allegations of abuse against Trump. Eventually, as many as twenty women came forward. But for Michelle Obama and for millions of women across the country, Trump’s words themselves felt like an assault. We were astounded when a week later they were seemingly forgotten, as the mass media rushed to cover the latest disclosures about Hillary Clinton’s emails. Even today, in the wake of #MeToo, we’ve become so preoccupied with uninvited contact with women’s bodies, from the mildly uncomfortable to the seriously invasive, that we have lost sight of what really shook Michelle Obama to her core: Donald Trump — a candidate for Presidency of the United States — was a man intoxicated with denigrating women, a man for whom women were not even quite human, let alone equal to men, but toys, trophies, sex-flesh there for the taking, great fun to degrade, to belittle, to “do anything” with.

That kind of man is not really after women’s bodies as avenues to sexual pleasure but as a vehicle to show he is master. There is thus a world of difference between an Al Franken and a Donald Trump, and it’s not just because Franken faked a boob grab while Trump went for vagina-groping. It’s not about a hierarchy of body-parts. It’s about the difference between a man who seems genuinely embarrassed to have crossed a line that he didn’t realize was an offense to the woman involved, and a man who habitually derives pleasure from crossing any and all lines that constitute a woman’s physical and emotional integrity — a man, in fact, who crows about it precisely because he knows what it means: that she may have the body parts, but he’s the one with the power.

Clarence Thomas never touched Anita Hill. Rather, the coin of Thomas’s realm was sex-talk — about pornography, oral sex, group sex, breasts and penis size — and the harassment was motivated, as Hill reports, not by “romantic interest” but by “control and intimidation.” What set him off was the fact that she had refused to submit to his will. He had wanted to date her; she had said no. The imbalance of power was unbearable, and had to be righted. She told him repeatedly that she didn’t want to talk about “those kinds of things,” and she tried to change the subject. But her objections only “urged him on, as though my reaction of feeling ill at ease and vulnerable was what he wanted.”¹

“I moved on her and I failed. I'll admit it.

I did try and fuck her. She was married.

And I moved on her very heavily. In fact, I took her out furniture shopping. She wanted to get some furniture. I said, "I'll show you where they have some nice furniture." I took her out furniture—I moved on her like a bitch. But I couldn't get there. And she was married. Then all of a sudden I see her, she's now got the big phony tits and everything. She's totally changed her look.

Later, referring to Arianne Zucker (whom they were waiting to meet), Trump says:

I better use some Tic Tacs just in case I start kissing her. You know I'm automatically attracted to beautiful—I just start kissing them. It's 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. Grab 'em by the pussy. You can do anything.

Notice how Trump restores the balance of power with the woman he “moved on” and “failed with” by eliciting the admiration of his “bro,” Billy Bush for his crude, casual depersonalization of women, emphasizing his usual mastery of the situation (“When you’re a star, you can do anything with them”) and cutting the woman he “failed with” down to size: “phony big tits and everything.” And what a man! He doesn’t “even wait”; he “just starts.” And “they” let you.

Millions of women, both Democrats and Republicans, could relate to Michelle Obama’s disgust and horror. By late October, we were well on our way to what might have become a bipartisan coalition of female voters against Trump. It seemed at that moment as though, despite the emails, the Clinton Foundation, the GOP hate-mongering, the media’s exaggeration of every “scandal” and Sanders’s splitting of the democratic ranks, Trump was about to be decisively vanquished. The polls were all strongly predicting it. A Clinton victory seemed, for the first time in months, a virtual inevitability.

That didn’t happen. Instead we got a president so unconcerned with the subjectivity of women—with the brains and emotions that animate what for him are just pussies and tits—that he sniggered when one of his nominees for the Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh, was accused by Christine Blasey of sexual assault.

On October 3, 2018, I wrote on Facebook:

I’m 71. Women of my generation have been through decades of struggle against the ubiquity of male power, the undercurrents of misogyny, the hand over the mouth, the foot on the neck, the train that keeps rolling over us (as Alexandra Petri put it so well.) 
I thought we’d seen it all. 
But we hadn’t. 
We’ve never had an American president proudly assume the mantle of, become the mouthpiece for, male rage, brutality, and ignorance.

I thought “grab her by the pussy” was as low as he could go. I was wrong. As Maggie Haberman and Peter Baker report in The New York Times:

“Playing to the crowd of thousands gathered to cheer him on, the president pretended to be Blasey testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee last Thursday. “Thirty-six years ago this happened. I had one beer, right? I had one beer,” said Trump, channeling his version of Blasey. His voice dripping with derision, he then imitated her being questioned at the hearing, followed by her responses about what she could not recall about the alleged attack.

“How did you get home? I don’t remember. How’d you get there? I don’t remember. Where is the place? I don’t remember. How many years ago was it? I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. What neighborhood was it in? I don’t know. Where’s the house? I don’t know. Upstairs, downstairs, where was it? I don’t know,” Trump said, as the crowd applauded. “I don’t know — but I had one beer. That’s the only thing I remember.””

And the crowds of thousands cheered and laughed.

I know that many of you may have been too young to see any of this as it happened, and perhaps—as the media is so fickle and feckless—may not even be aware of it. That’s why I’m writing this post for you.

If you actually believe that a man like this will protect any of our rights—if you actually imagine that he won’t sign off on a nationwide ban on abortion—if you doubt that he won’t allow medieval states to jail women and their doctors for regarding their own bodies as more than walking incubators, if you think he’s got anything but contempt for men who support gender equality, please watch that “Access Hollywood” tape again.

Then listen to Michelle Obama one more time.

More related posts from BordoLines:

Remembering How Close Trump Came to Losing the 2016 Election

Why I Don't Want to See Another Piece with "Porn Star" in The Headline

Interested in reading more from my book on the 2016 election? Let me know and I’ll publish more excerpts. And of course, I’d be delighted if you purchase the book itself!

1. I recall my own experience when I was in graduate school in the mid-1970s, in the days when we didn’t have a word for such things.

It had begun with a professor’s expressing more than professional interest in me over lunch. I wasn’t interested, and I told him so, but I didn’t feel offended or compromised. The situation rapidly changed for me, however, when my professor, having been turned down, began to sprinkle virtually every conversation we had with sexist comments (“Your comprehensive exams were so good I was amazed to see they were written by a woman”) and demeaning references to my personal life (suggesting, for example that I was studying Russian to please my boyfriend). I tolerated all of this. Like Anita Hill, I had learned to expect and endure such sexist comments, and I had been taught, along with many other women of my generation, that being nice to people, trying not to expose their failings or humiliate them, particularly if they were men, was more important than standing up for myself.

Then one day this professor jovially instructed me that it was “time for class, dear” and patted me on my rear end at the open doorway of a classroom full of other students, mostly male. Flushed with shame, I ran down the hall. With economy and precision, he had reduced me, in front of my colleagues, from fellow philosopher-in-training to ... to what? I’m not sure I can say exactly what. Perhaps to a child, perhaps to my “sex,” perhaps to someone so inconsequential that my personal boundaries and integrity were irrelevant. One thing I did know, though, even in those more I times. My professor’s gesture, although it involved physical contact with my body, was not a sexual advance but an attempt — conscious or otherwise — to put me back in my place. To show me once and for all that although it was in my paltry power to turn him down for a date, I was still “less than” him (or the male students witnessing the event.)

Clarence Thomas’s actions, and those of my professor, were neither the actions of men confused about the rules of sexual courting, nor the behavior of sex addicts unable to control their hormones. They were the actions of gender bullies, trying to bring uppity women down to size, to restore a balance of power in which they were on top.