Do Trump’s women give you the heebie-jeebies – the likes of Melania, Ivanka, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Kari Lake, Jeanine Pirro, Lauren Boebert, Kristi Noem, Kimberly Guilfoyle, Stormy Daniels? They do me. They strike me as overdone, hyper-feminized, made-up (in both senses), blown up (in the salacious places), submissive without and vindictive within, brittle and perfected as porcelain that shatters if dropped. Bitter behind over-stretched smiles and exaggerated eyelashes. False.
To venture such observations is to invite howls of protest in our gender-frantic epoch. How dare I discern a difference between females and males! Even to think such thoughts brands me an oppressor! Never in memory has society so obsessed about gender while paradoxically insisting it be ignored. Did you catch those images from the Metropolitan Museum’s ballyhooed costume gala? Some over-outfitted dames, shackled by their finery, couldn’t walk on their own. If that isn’t sexism, what is? To make humans mannequins is to deny their humanity, isn’t it, clamping them like exotic birds into pretty cages? Trump’s women strike me as comparably couture-crippled, wrested from their nature. What made them so?
Might revolving in the orbit of a swaggering Lothario who advocates grabbing women “by the pussy” affect learned behavior? What a thought! Trump’s women are the way they are because that’s the way he likes them. He doesn’t want his women to be people, with their complications, but compliant dolls doting on their dyspeptic pasha. That they accept their enslavement doesn’t make them less slaves. In Istanbul one is shocked by the constraints of the old harems. No less shocking these women’s confinement decked out as privilege.
Born wet clay blobs, who isn’t shaped by their milieu? I am in my externals the son my parents had in mind, I can’t help it. My gait, diction, decorum were preset. My dad was as sexist as they come, only scrupulously, even delicately, courteous. I can’t stop cringing at Trump’s pussy comment years after. I suspect that’s my dad in me squirming.
Gender relations are the central human dynamic, the story we can’t stop telling. Every human endures their own adventure, which at the time feels unprecedented and all-important. Who cannot vividly recall losing their virginity when other events from that defining period have vanished?
There’s no one right way for genders to relate. Pontificating preachers notwithstanding, God made us in our variety. There are however wrong ways, which inhibit, injure. My dad’s panicky inability to discuss sex with his son may have proved a gift in disguise, freeing me to dope out this touchy topic on my own.
The best way to be opens the widest path to joy – this I know. Joy is not foolproof, but it errs less than Reason. Our hearts tell us when we get things right.
Trump’s women strike me as joyless. They kill dogs. They vituperate, lie. Their high heels click angrily on the marble floor. Ambition dictates their affections. God gave them bodies to trade for favors. Cross them and they’d scratch your eyes out.
They’ve hardened themselves to compete in a male world. The world-beaters they court like their spunk. If Trump wants to be spanked in his silk pajamas, so what? Whatever it takes.
Is my characterization just? I’ve no idea, I don’t know these ladies, but you get a sense. Watch them in action, their eyes especially. Are they having fun? Are they at home on earth? Can you imagine them laughing merrily, not forced?
Trump desiccates the souls he comes in contact with. The men he humiliates, transforming them into toadies; the women he turns into Lady Macbeth.