Giving Ms. Daniels her due

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Mr. Trump has built his image on gold-plated decadence and acts of dominance and degradation; in a sexist society, money and power continue to be the blunt masculine equivalents of the more enigmatic female sex appeal (which itself is largely measured and rewarded by men). There’s little cost to men flaunting their wealth as extravagantly as Mr. Trump has.

But for women, there is a significant cost to advertising sexual availability and expecting dollars be handed directly over. Women who monetize their attractiveness through conventional acting or modeling, like Mr. Trump’s wives, may be seen as less deserving of their resources than a man who was, like Mr. Trump, born rich, but they are generally in the clear. Younger, beautiful women who marry rich men might be princesses (“beautiful women, classy women,” per Mr. Giuliani), trophy wives or gold-diggers (“the calculating woman who refuses to sign the prenuptial agreement because she is expecting to take advantage of the poor, unsuspecting sucker she’s got in her grasp,” as Mr. Trump put it in “Trump: The Art of the Comeback”).

Women who have affairs with married men, whether those women are Ms. Daniels or Mr. Trump’s second wife, are held more culpable as seductresses than the men who, like Mr. Trump and Mr. Giuliani, actually broke their vows. But it’s women who cross the line from looking sexy for pay to having sex for pay, like Ms. Daniels, who face the most judgment. The men who pay for it, or pay to watch it, are generally unremarkable.

We are far from transcending the pervasive assumption that a woman’s sexual decisions are decisive of her character and her integrity. In many swaths of the country, Ms. Daniels continues to be written off as a pole-dancing Hester Prynne — a woman not to be trusted.

But the country is also watching her dogged refusal to be quiet and her unflagging insistence that she isn’t the one who should be embarrassed. We’re seeing a woman who refuses to wear either a scarlet letter or a superwoman cape, and she stands in sharp contrast to a self-aggrandizing president who may face serious consequences once this all unspools. The potential triumph of a deeply imperfect woman over a powerful man won’t exactly break a glass ceiling. But it could put a little crack in a stereotype just as tough to shatter.

read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/24/opinion/sunday/stormy-daniels-michael-cohen-feminist-hero.html