The Bannon administration has long sought to re-establish "penis power" in the flagging states of America. Back in May 2016, Adele Stan warned us not to under-estimate the "man card". "Surely," we thought, "those Values Voters would be disgusted by the reality of Trump". As it turned out, the Values Voters brought him to power as the rest of us sat on our hands and tried to restrain ourselves from verbal confrontations with privileged female family members.
But reality exists, and we are trying very hard to reestablish it in these days of Bannonite autocracy.
Reality is this: Trump has a problem with women, namely, women that don't consent to his projections of power. As Rebecca Solnit observes, the final debate was disturbing for many of us who've been dealing with the rise in public and private misogynies:
In the ninety-minute debate, Trump lurched around the stage gaslighting, discrediting, constantly interrupting, often to insist that she was lying or just to drown out her words and her voice, sexually shaming (this was the debate in which he tried to find room in his family box for three women who had accused Bill Clinton of sexual harassment or assault), and threatening to throw her in prison.
When a man's ego is the measure of how safe and secure female citizens can feel, national security itself becomes a puerile and penile problem. Hillary's loss was blamed on her elitism and failure to "reach out" to the males whose hatred of females masquerades as a mild Duck Dynasty patriarchy:
The We Must Pay More Attention to the White Working Class analysis said that Clinton lost because she did not pay enough attention to white men since the revived term ‘white working class’ seemed to be a nostalgic reference to industrial workers as they once existed. Those wielding it weren’t interested in the 37 per cent of Americans who aren’t white, or the 51 per cent who are women. I’ve always had the impression –from TV, movies, newspapers, sport, books, my education, my personal life, and my knowledge of who owns most things and holds government office at every level in my country – that white men get a lot of attention already.
From the get-go, Hillary was damned if she did and damned by what she didn't.
Suzanne Moore explains, again, why white evangelical females continue to be complicit in their own humiliation and self-debasement. When you attend a church that consistently prevents females from occupying a position of leadership, Lord knows you need some excuses sharper than stilettos and come-hither pumps:
For power is never simply a possession but an exercise; power is about how we understand ourselves. Feminism seeks to unpick all the tiny ways in which we are bound. Everywhere we look, there are women hating other women for business or pleasure: those who don’t want a female boss; who don’t want positive discrimination; who like strip clubs and porn as much as the boys; who don’t want to worship in churches with female priests; who want to force other women to give birth to children they don’t want; who say FGM is “cultural”; and who get off on body shaming. On and on it goes. How can we be surprised that misogyny is not a male-only attribute?
But it's difficult to address Trump's misogyny problem given a populace of bobble-headed females who crave nothing more than an excuse to stay married to their domestic angry white tyrants. How many women voted for Trump BECAUSE he spoke like their husbands and normalized the sexism that they need to overlook? How much of white middle class Trump female support comes from desperate readers of "Can This Marriage Be Saved?" How many of us secretly hope that those breast implants will make our husbands stop ogling alternate cleavage at football games? How many more women will their bodies (and those of their daughters) for an excuse to stay married to the enemy?
According to election polls, the question has been asked and answered.
