Well, it's been more than a year. I vividly recall what it felt like after Election Day last year. I don't want to, but I do. I took a few minutes just now to revisit my first post-election blog post, and can only say it expresses the pain and despair I felt at that point. This says it all, about back then: it took me 12 whole days to write about it.
And now?
My analysis of the general badness of Donald Trump and his cronies, inside and outside of government, hasn't changed a bit. At the time, I doubted that it would. On the other hand, I wasn't sure to what extent the non-Trump majority would sink into despair, as opposed to fighting back. And, needless to say, now we know. The response, from the initial marches around the country on Inaugural weekend, to the current controversy involving the special election for Jeff Session's former U.S. Senate seat for Alabama, has been, in scale and inspiration, inspiring.
And yet, it still leaves me to ask the question that I asked in the earlier post: where to begin?
I could start by talking about the election results from around the country last week. But there's enough to unpack there that I think that subject deserves its own separate post, and I will give it one later. I will say that, in any case, there is an obvious straight line from last year's election results to this year's. Some pundits, over the past year, somehow thought that Trump was so phenomenally talented that he managed to stop the application of Newtonian physics ("for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction) to national politics. No, he isn't, and no, he didn't. That's all I'll say about that for now.
Instead, I want to talk about a much larger story, not only political in nature but highly personal as well. And I believe that there is a straight line from last year's election results to this story. I'm referring to the explosion of media accounts over the past several weeks regarding women (and, in some cases, men) who have come forward and identified themselves as the victims of sexual assault.
It's considered good journalistic form, as well as good civil rights observance, to refer to these stories as accusations until a court says otherwise. I may be wrong in some cases but, frankly, I believe the accusers. Even though many of the incidents reported happened at various points in time that are significantly past, that is not a reason to doubt their veracity. Whether the assaults are violent or not, they can bring about a significant amount of shame and embarrassment, making it easier for the victims to say nothing.
I have to confess that, in this regard, I speak from a small degree of experience; in my 20s, I was (mildly, but physically and rudely) propositioned by men on two occasions. It was uninvited in both instances, but I have talked about it with other people and found myself being asked questions like "What did you do to provoke it?" As if, somehow, mere physical attraction is enough to excuse boorish behavior. Such are the sometimes ambiguous nature of relationships, and the general tendency of people to assume that "it takes two" to make a conflict that, in the absence of significant physical evidence (witnesses, injuries, etc.), people make the assumption that the victim must have somehow "deserved" it. I don't. Nor do I make apologies for that stance.
Indeed, it could be said that, since we have now elected a man who has the credentials of a serial rapist, it could be asked by some why all of these woman have kept silent, until Amber Tamblyn's revelations about James Woods in late September. Since then, the proverbial floodgates have opened, as men and women have come forward to share their painful accounts of mistreatment--and worse. In the process, careers of several of the perpetrators have been effectively destroyed, most notably Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey.
Perhaps the floodgates were just waiting for one person to stand up, effectively for everyone. Perhaps the fear generated by having a known pervert like Donald Trump in the world's most powerful job became so great that, for many, it helped them overcome the fear of exposing people who could merely destroy a career, as opposed to the entire world. Perhaps it was the righteous anger generated by Trump's unearned election, in combination with the fear he generated. In any event, it's hard not to see a straight line from electing a molester to a willingness to expose everyone else who, like Trump, time and again abused a position of trust to gratify his baser desires.
This much is clear: there have been straight and gay victims of sexual abuse. This is not a question of sexual orientation. This is, sadly, a question of gender. With very few exceptions among both the perpetrators and their defenders, this is a problem that stems from the aggressive, narcissistic behavior of men. By and large, they are the perpetrators. And, in one sense, no one should be surprised by this; men are the gatekeepers in our society when it comes to defining sexual behavior for both genders, to the detriment of women not only by victimizing them but also by refusing to allow them to define their own sexual identities. Men are allowed to decide what is "acceptable" sexual behavior from women. And men are allowed to decide whether or not to victimize them.
This must stop. And it will not be complete with the removal of Trump and other professional lechers from positions of power. Men must learn, once and for all, that women are people and not things. If it took Trump's Presidency to serve as the starting point for making that happen, then it may, against all odds, have some redeeming value.
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