They have every right to speak up
Oddly enough, the women who reported that Trump sexually assaulted them haven’t since then decided it was all a big fuss about nothing. They still wonder why the hell he was elected (sort of elected) anyway.
It was “heartbreaking” for women to go public with their claims against President Trump last year, only to see him ascend to the Oval Office, said Samantha Holvey, a former Miss USA contestant who in October 2016 said Trump inappropriately inspected pageant participants.
“I put myself out there for the entire world, and nobody cared,” Holvey said Monday on NBC’s “Megyn Kelly Today” show.
Not nobody – but for sure not enough to stop the pinchy-hand vulgarian.
During the television appearance and a news conference, Holvey sat alongside Jessica Leeds, a New York woman who said Trump groped her on a plane, and Rachel Crooks, who said he kissed her on the lips at Trump Tower, to renew their allegations against the president.
The women also called for Congress to investigate these allegations amid the dramatic shift happening nationwide in response to charges of sexual misconduct against men from Hollywood to Capitol Hill. Claims have erupted across industry after industry, against lawmakers and movie stars alike, as the country has shown a sudden, newfound willingness to take such accusations seriously.
I’d like to point out that some of us – feminists, mostly – took them seriously all along.
A day before the women spoke, Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said that women who have accused Trump “should be heard.”
Haley’s comments were a sharp break from the White House’s position, and they were particularly notable coming from one of the most high-profile women serving in Trump’s administration.
“They should be heard, and they should be dealt with,” Haley said when asked on CBS’s “Face the Nation” about the allegations other women have made against Trump. “And I think we heard from them before the election. And I think any woman who has felt violated or felt mistreated in any way, they have every right to speak up.”
Sarah Huckabee Sanders, on the other hand, simply repeated the White House assertion that they’re all lying.
If his name was Bill Clinton, they would be heard, and amplified. None of the Republicans justified Clinton’s bad behavior. They went out and searched for more women to accuse him. But, he was a Democrat, and that meant he had to go. He had to be put down with extreme prejudice. The fact that it didn’t work didn’t stop them from spending gazillions of taxpayer dollars on their chase…and maybe preventing the actual truth from coming out, and keeping some women from speaking out because of the circus. Who knows?
This (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/11/cat-person) has apparently gone viral, so I’m sure it’ll come to your attention soon enough without my pointing to it (and I’m sure you’ll have something to say about it that I’ll find interesting), but I think it’s oddly topical to segue into from this. Really, it’s the reaction that a bunch of straight men are having to this short story that makes it topical to this post: they seem to, collectively, feel offended that a woman (the author, whom they assume to fully inhabit the point of view of the female narrator of the story [which, implicitly, is a bad assumption to make about fiction AND ALSO, explicitly according to the author herself, isn’t the case]) feels “victimized” (this seems to be projection, as neither the narrator nor the author make this claim) by “perfectly reasonable behavior” (as judged by a lot of these offended straight men, who express both sympathy and empathy for the character) of a man.
Ok, that was a horrible sentence I just produced, but I can’t think of a better way to put it. Basically, there’s appears to be this collective chagrined “what’s the big deal?” shrug in the zeitgeist in response to being shown what “perfectly reasonable behavior” (again, apparently, to a large number of men) looks like when you are a woman on the receiving end of it. In the story, that behavior happens to be a bunch of texting followed by a date. Here, the behavior is what Trump described as what they let you do if you are a star — and he does seem to sincerely believe that he is permitted to (i.e. entitled to) do all of the things he describes doing, because he’s a “star” — so it IS “perfectly normal behavior” to him, and, clearly, a whole bunch of men, both in Congress and elsewhere. Both audiences are explicitly objecting to the “speaking up” being done by women.
https://www.facebook.com/144310995587370/photos/a.271728576178944.71555.144310995587370/1747092398642547/?type=3&theater
I read that New Yorker story.
What is it I’m supposed to be all bent out of shape over?
Women, Ben. Women.
Maybe I need to read it again?
Anna Y #2
Interesting story, thanks for pointing it out. Perceptive take on dating, sex, and gender roles.
As for those defensive male readers: English really needs a word for “amused and annoyed, but not surprised” (hell, the guy’s not even unsympathetic, despite his shitty tweetery at the end.)
–Who (narrator) is a self-conscious twenty-year-old girl. Yeah. Always a naive assumption, but in this case, it’s a fucking ridiculous one.
Wish I could make the snowflakes objecting to it understand that they will likely never, ever, read as much “misandry” in their precious lives as any well-read woman has by the time she’s thirty. Whiners.
(Bet they didn’t even notice the narrator’s reflexive worry that she might end up being murdered. Bet it never occurred to them that that sort of thought does sometimes pass through the minds of women alone for the first time with men they don’t know well.)
@Anna Y I was honestly surprised by how much I related to that story.