I didn’t watch the debate but I was forced to endure a couple of clips after, when I was trying to read an actual book, and Matt was wandering around on Twitter. I say a couple but I mean three–the one of Carly Fiorina ravaging planned parenthood, the one of Carly Fiorina indicating we all perfectly well understood Trump about her face, and the one of Trump calling her beautiful. I expect he was trying be gallant, kind, as it were, after being a veritable ass. The way a man, when he has discovered himself to have said something unacceptable, covers himself with apology and shame. It was the Usual Expression of the man of this era, the hang dog apology for the offense of having existed at all in the first place.
I think that has been the appeal of Trump, on some primal level, even though no one would say it, because it is definitely a micro, if not also a macro, aggression. That he was human. That he didn’t apologize for his existence as a man, as commanded of him by his culture. Until Wednesday night. In that leaning forward, that insistent pleading, “she is a beautiful woman”, I think he joined the appropriate rank of the gendered male, the place of subordinate apology. And if I were a betting lady, I would put my money down for that single moment being the beginning of his gentle and inevitable decline.
I say this having also studied for fifteen or so seconds the line up of all the candidates on the stage. A sea of suits, of men, the angle of the camera coming up from their shoes so it looks like they are rising up out of the glare of light. And on the very end, the single woman in blue, angular, powerful, determined. I get it, I understand, women are equal. They have ascended the heights. They have broken all the barriers. And you can hear the sniffling of the women, but rather, in this case, the subhuman men, trailing off behind them.
It is for this single reason that I refuse utterly to be an egalitarian. It’s not that it doesn’t present as a lovely idea–men and women are perfectly equal. Neither party can tell the other what to do. We will respect each other. We will equally divide the housekeeping and both go out to work. We will strew the house with gender neutral toys to reinforce this necessary ideal–We Are All Equal. But gradually you can see the man’s spirit chaffing against his lot as he runs the vacuum and gives honor to all, but is never given any himself, except when he does extra housework. He is allowed to speak if he does it very quietly and no one can hear him. And the woman spreads out all over the house and the yard and the office in her moral and ontological superiority, trying to cover the ground she has won, shoring up each victory with an impenetrable army of Always Taking Offense.
Are women human? You betcha. Are men? Not any more. And Trump? Sorry man, you tried it out but it didn’t fly.
Thing is, someone has to take the lowest place. Someone has to give honor, or no honor will ever be given. When the entire culture decides the men will not be human, you end up with pajama boy. When the entire culture decides women will not be human, you end up with Boko Haram. And ugliness pervades the landscape on all sides. What if, though, what if women in the west, who have ascended to that great height of crushing the enemy under the heel, could turn around and see that the enemy was not her own husband, but rather the actual enemy of a man who violates his own humanity by actually violating the women around him? I’m talking about Islamic jihad here, not being told you are a pleasure to look at. And then, having scraped your own husband’s shattered humanity off the floor, you could say, “what would you like?” “What kind of person are you really?” “Let me run the vacuum for a change.”
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