Man for the field and woman for the hearth,
Man for the sword and for the needle she,
Man with the head and woman with the heart,
Man to command and woman to obey,
All else confusion. — Alfred Lord Tennyson, from “The Princess”
Trump’s current legal aid, former New York Mayor Rudy Guiliani, has taken Tennyson’s binary dictum literally when he engaged in the cynical lawyering tactic of blaming the victim by representing Stormy Daniels in misogynistic terms that have become so common within this administration.
Speaking at a conference in Israel, his defamation of Daniels sank to swampy depths:
“I respect all human beings. I even have to respect criminals,” he stated to a reporter’s question. “But I’m sorry, I don’t respect a porn star the way I respect a career women or a women of substance or a woman who has great respect for herself as a women and as a person and isn’t going to sell her body for sexual exploitation.”
Guiliani then made a face of disgust when he talked about Ms. Daniels appearance.
“So, Stormy, you want to bring a case, let me cross-examine you,” he added in response to her lawsuit charging defamation against the President.
Apparently, however, Guiliani doesn’t seem to have respect for woman on any career path. He annulled his first marriage to his second cousin. During his second marriage he dated a woman on the side who would become his third wife. His second wife found out that Guiliani was filing for divorce only by watching him make the announcement at a televised press conference. He eventually separated from and divorced his third wife as well.
Though Guiliani and Trump do not respect porn stars, the President certainly “respects” the fruits of their labors.
MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski asserted that Trump’s “biggest complaint was that he’s not allowed to watch porn in the White House,” citing “someone who spoke” to the President about his impressions of life in the White House.
In a 2017 tweet, Trump referred to Brzezinski as “low I.Q. Crazy Mika.” He also claimed in a tweet that Brzezinski showed up at a New Year’s Eve party at his Mar-a-Lago estate “bleeding from a bad facelift.”
Trump called Rosie O’Donnell “a fat pig”; attacked Megan Kelly by saying that “blood was coming out of her eyes, blood was coming out of her…whatever”; branded former Miss Universe, Alicia Machado, “Miss Piggy” and “The Housekeeper” because she was Latina; virtually admitted to sexually assaulting women because of his celebrity on an Access Hollywood tape.
These statements and actions regarding women must be understood within a patriarchal system of male domination in which men feel entitled to define and represent women and girls as they choose to disempower and thereby control them. While these statements themselves are very saddening, they are not particularly surprising, for they retain the ancient-era consistency of conservative patriarchal dogma.
Combined with pronouncements opposing women’s reproductive freedoms and according to Trump, the punishment of women who choose to have abortions, obstruction to contraception, antagonism to the attainment of women in high positions of authority, they correspond perfectly with monotheistic patriarchal fundamental attempts to control women’s bodies to control their minds.
Throughout history, examples abound of male domination over the rights and lives of women and girls.
Men denied women the vote until women fought hard and demanded the rights of political enfranchisement, though women in some countries today still are restricted from voting; strictly enforced gender-based social roles mandated without choice that women’s only option was to remain in the home to undertake cleaning and childcare duties.
Women were and continue to be by far the primary target of harassment, abuse, physical assault, and rape by men; women were and remain locked out of many professions; rules once required that women teachers relinquish their jobs after marriage; in fact, the institution of marriage itself was structured on a foundation of male domination with men serving as the so-called “head of the household” and taking on sole ownership of all property thereby restricting these rights from women.
Some people refer to our current times as a “post-Feminist” era, where sexism and male privilege no longer impose major social barriers. They are referring to “Feminism,” which can be defined as the cultural, political, economic, and civil rights movement for the advancement of equality and equity between the sexes.
This recalls a cleaver and insightful bumper sticker produced by the National Association for Women: “I’ll be Post-Feminist in the Post-Patriarchy.” Unfortunately, however, the patriarchy is still alive and fully functioning.
Abolitionist and early feminist Sojourner Truth, cut through the patriarchal fog in 1851 with her vision and wit:
“…Then that little man in black there, he says women can’t have as much rights as men, ’cause Christ wasn’t a woman! Where did your Christ come from? Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him.”
Rudy Guiliani’s misogynist representations of Stormy Daniels defames all women and must be challenged with force & resolution. He must go!
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