‘Nobody has more respect for women than I do,’ insisted a man on Sunday, who has called women ‘disgusting’, ‘dog’, ‘pig’, ‘bimbo’, ‘slob’, ‘fat’, ‘ugly’, and a ‘disgusting animal’.
‘I have tremendous respect for women,’ said the man who has sexually objectified his own daughter, accused a news anchor doing her job of having ‘blood coming out of her… wherever’, and pronounced that women should be ‘punished’ if they have an abortion.
‘I’m a gentleman’ claimed the man who laughed in a 2005 tape leaked last week that he had tried to ‘fuck’ a married woman, shortly after getting married himself, saying, ‘I moved on her like a bitch… I’m automatically attracted to beautiful [women]. I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything… Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.’
A man who could be President of the United States this time next month.
I feel sick, do you feel sick? But it’s not really even about this latest revelation. Hearing Donald Trump say those things isn’t actually particularly shocking – a hateful misogynist saying he would happily sexually assault women? – meh. It’s not even surprising that he continues to think that all this and everything he’s done and said about women doesn’t disqualify him from calling himself a ‘gentleman’. But it is pretty shocking that he thinks he can blame his disgusting words on other men.
‘It’s locker room talk,’ he said dismissively, explaining that, ‘You hear these things, they’re said.’ Here is ‘tremendously respectful’ Trump, during the second Presidential debates, casually waving away any blame, because ‘all men’ do it when women aren’t around. ‘We’re men!’ he’s saying, ‘We can’t help grabbing genitals without consent and then laughing about it with other men!
Except that, er, do they? Really? I'm not naïve about what blokes say to each other, and, actually, I think I’ve probably been just as crude around my friends. A lot’s been made of Trump’s use of the word ‘pussy’ but who cares about that, really?
I don’t care that he used that word (although, in his mouth, isn’t it the ickiest thing ever? Don’t you just want to pull out your insides and shove them into your ears until you’re dead?). I don’t care about Trump saying a ‘dirty’ word. What I care about is that he’s talking and laughing about assaulting women. He’s saying that it’s fine for him to grab a woman’s crotch, because he’s rich and famous. It’s all things beyond gross. There's such a huge, crazy difference between talking about sex while women aren’t around, and actually, openly boasting about sexually assaulting them.
I don’t think most men would do that in the locker room or anywhere else.
Certainly, since Sunday, there’s been a huge outpouring of anger from men, who don’t want to be maligned by Trump’s idea of ‘locker room talk’. Professional sportsmen I’ve never heard of are lining up to distance themselves from it. Like footballer Robbie Rogers, who tweeted, ‘I’m offended as an athlete that @realdonaldtrump keeps using this “locker room talk” as an excuse.’ Or NBA players CJ McCollum and Kendall Marshall, who wrote, ‘I haven’t heard that one in any locker rooms’, and, ‘PSA: sexual advances without consent is NOT locker room talk.’ And baseball player Sean Doolittle, who tweeted, ‘As an athlete, I’ve been in locker rooms my entire adult life and uh, that’s not locker room talk.’
My friend, sports journalist Leo Moynihan told me, ‘I’m a sports writer. I’m also a man. So I should be an expert on this ‘locker room talk’. Sure, things are said by men to men – things they wouldn’t want their mums, girlfriends, wives or daughters to hear – that’s human nature. But this is a man running for President. A position that comes with a little bit of responsibility. He is boasting to a younger man about assault. That’s the key here. If he can use his status as a reality TV star as a way of getting his cheap thrills, what the hell would he do as leader of the free world?
Men can be idiots. We’re especially idiotic around other men, and yes, women are talked about. But in my circles, if Trump stood there wearing nothing but a towel (shudder) and boasting of genitals he’s grabbed without consent, he’d be immediately off the team. Let’s hope Americans do the same come November 8th.’