Trump’s One Public Service Was Exposing the Misogyny of the GOP

By Rebecca Traister
October 10, 2016

Trump’s attitudes about women are not different from the attitudes that have been supported by the contemporary Republican Party via their legislative agenda. Many of the very politicians who led the stampede away from Trump this weekend — from House Speaker Paul Ryan and Utah representative Jason Chaffetz to former Republican presidential candidate John McCain and Trump’s running mate, Mike Pence — have dedicated themselves in recent years to shutting down Planned Parenthood, thus preventing women from controlling their own reproduction. The 2012 Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, who said he was “offended (and) dismayed” by the Trump tape, vetoed a Massachusetts bill that would have provided rape victims access to emergency contraception, told college students to hetero-marry early and opposed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. These are politicians who regularly vote against the Paycheck Fairness Act and oppose paid-family-leave legislation and the raising of the minimum wage that would make millions of women more economically stable. Chaffetz voted against the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act in 2013, while Pence, Ryan, and Chaffetz co-sponsored a bill that would have limited the definition of rape to include only “forcible” assaults; Pence signed an Indiana law that requires funerals or cremations for fetuses, tried to ban women from aborting because of fetal genetic abnormalities, suggested that legalizing gay marriage would lead to “societal collapse,” and in 1997 wrote a letter to the Indianapolis Star decrying the harm done to children when mothers go to work and rely on day care.

Which is worse: Threatening to grab someone by the pussy or forcing someone to carry and give birth to a baby that is the result of rape? Which is worse: Popping a Tic Tac in preparation for forced extramarital kissing with a stranger or actively discouraging women’s full participation in the workforce? The answer is: None of these is worse; they are all of a kind. The view of women as yours to control via political power, star power, or simply patriarchal power, is what Republicans — not just Trump, but lots of Republicans — have been doing for years as they work to reduce reproductive-rights access and reinstall women in early marriage and traditional hetero homes where their competitive, independent, threatening power might be better contained.

In other words, the party’s policies are built on the same frame that Trump’s words and personal actions are: a fundamental lack of recognition of women as full human beings. If you doubt it, look no further than the words these guys used in their theatrical disavowals of Trump this weekend. “Women are to be championed and revered,” said Ryan, making women sound like quailing damsels or icy goddesses, but not actual humans. Mitch McConnell expressed his disapproval as “the father of three daughters,” while Pence said in a statement that he was offended “as a husband and a father” and Romney railed that Trump’s comments “demean our wives and daughters.” Here is their apprehension of women: They are discernible as worthy of respect only as extensions of male identity — as wives, daughters, their recognizable subsidiaries. Has none of these men ever had a female colleague or friend on whose behalf they might reasonably be offended? Are they not moved by the treatment of women even with whom they have had no personal interaction?

read more: http://nymag.com/thecut/2016/10/trumps-one-service-was-exposing-the-misogyny-of-the-gop.html