The public meltdown of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign begs several obvious questions, writes Liz Conor. Like, wtf?
Where’s a Pussy Riot when you need one. Hapless women of the Free World, dreading Trump as their Leader, have heard his best-worst misogyny-blat yet. Incensed and already incited by Robert de Niro’s seething threat that he would like to punch Donald Trump in the face, a new craze of Brazilian-waxings in the shape of a boxing glove has swept America.
This andropausal valedictorian of Julien Blanc’s Real Social Dynamics (training for Pick-Up Artists) has truly surpassed himself – flubbed on by some Bush clan frogspawn making a cameo as that new Republican superhero, Backslap Boofhead.
What is that fop toupee? Is it a fake tan blister drooping over his eyes or a cantaloupe soufflé? Maybe such a reptilian mind needs pink bat insulation to keep his brain from freezing over, only he has the good taste to dye it tangerine. Maybe he needs a little nest of spun sunbeam caressing his frontal lobes to anoint himself Sun King and keep his self-orbiting bearings.
What’s next in his grab-bag tour of campaign mishandling? The man is so inept, if you watch the clip, he can’t disembark the bus. ‘Down below’ Billy Bush has to prompt as TrumpaHump stands imperiously behind the vacuum-sealed door, peering ominously at Arianne Zucker, his little flippers momentarily lost for something to grab, like, you know, the door handle.
He’d just wound up blathering on about moving ‘heavily’ on a married ‘bitch’ by, hilariously, taking her furniture shopping, like he was going to bed her up in the sprawling mattress floor in an only-in-America primal scene.
What’s next? How about a quick sortie to Tokyo where, like his love child Blanc, he grabs women by the head pushing them into his crotch? Don’t forget at the height of Blanc’s reign as King of Misogyny in late 2014, before Trump’s unceremonious coup, Blanc uttered the uncannily similar statement about his Tokyo triumph: ‘If you’re a White Male, you can do what you want’.
For Trump it’s fame and money that gets you what you want, namely women ‘letting’. For entire nations of men in history this unfettered access to women and girls’ bodies has been enshrined in regimes of slavery, colonialism, servitude, military defeat and most recently childhood and sex tourism.
They are Sexual Overlords and their sense of entitlement consolidates their power as men as notably as it is under threat on multiple fronts – most symbolically by a woman presidential candidate (warmonger notwithstanding).
We should wonder why Blanc didn’t use his notoriety as a sexual overlord to run for President. He would have appealed to the same constituency. Note: we can think very carefully about the misdirected class rage of the discarded workers of the Midwest, at the same time as we despise Trump’s gratuitous overlaying of that righteous abandonment with the most toxic sexism, not to mention racism.
As the Land of the Free Billionaire and the Home of the Brave Women presides over the sunset of it garish, discursive bruises we have to gape at Trump’s gimcrack masculinity where bearing a penis renders all the world a sexual boondoggle.
What can he be compensating for, at his age, we might speculate. They don’t list myopia, xenophobia, parochialism, flabby policy formulation, the ‘genius’ of tax avoidance or daughter-lust among the side effects of Viagra overdose.
As the Republicans abandon Trump in this unprecedented biblical exodus from their own monster-making party machine, what’s Giuliani’s excuse from up in his Manhattan Penthouse? What does pussy-grabbing have to do with this now frenzied defense of white male privilege?
These political alliances are forged precisely against the inherent subversion of Clinton’s upending of men’s ‘natural’ political order. The most explicit expression of that political presumptiveness is the possession of sexual property and that God-given prior right of sexual mastery, which is, as we so graphically heard on the bus-tape, a fraternity. Very particular women are appointed wives who, through monogamy, guarantee the inheritance of property. They are reserved as exclusive. All the rest are whores, passed around between the political fraternity as trophies.
Sex is a key site of subordination. Consent is as inconvenient to men like Donald Trump as the feminist invention of foreplay. What Trump and his entourage were guffawing about was essentially property and the necessary civil subordination of women to maintaining their property rights.
Trump’s Tower couldn’t be more explicitly phallic if he shrouded the upperfloors in glistening, supplicant lips.
Women’s consent becomes an obstacle to the sexual contract in which men’s property rights over their bodies, variously expressed, secures their civil and political mastery. Don’t be a weak Permission Boy says Blanc, who goaded his army of terrifyingly trained ‘panty-peelers’.
Men need to break through that ‘LMR – Last Minute Resistance’ by ‘asserting dominance, opening women with a command/challenge’ and ‘panty-dropping masculinity’.
Trump has none of this delicacy, bypassing any considerations of consent by going straight for the grab. As Presidential candidate he makes blindingly clear the relation between sexual mastery and political domination.
Lest we forget we had our own bloviator of gender relations to make such targeted gaffes. In March 2002, Tony Abbott said, “I think there does need to be give and take on both sides, and this idea that sex is kind of a woman’s right to absolutely withhold, just as the idea that sex is a man’s right to demand I think are both, they both need to be moderated, so to speak.”
As Blanc explains, “You gotta know what techniques are going to push past her resistance.” ‘You gotta have a plan’.
For men like Donald the obvious plan to assert his sexual will was to run for President. The question now is whether the women of America will consent to this President Predator.
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