For decades, feminists have tried to stir outrage about how women are routinely groped, belittled, and weight-shamed. Yet Mr. Trump’s words and boasts have shown millions of voters, including people who believe feminism is a dirty word, what women endure every day.
This was supposed to be an election where Hillary Clinton had to convince voters that a woman had the fitness and temperament to be president.
Yet instead of worrying whether a woman is too emotional, impulsive and unqualified for high office, voters have been weighing whether that’s true of the man running to be president.
.. Indeed, Mr. Trump is not just a gift to feminists – he is breathing renewed life into a movement to redefine just what a real man is and ought to be.
.. The Access Hollywood tape induced a stream of defections from high-level Republicans who had not broken with him over the attack on a war hero’s family, the impugning of a judge of Mexican ancestry, or his threats to ban all Muslims from these shores.
.. This has turned out to be an election in which many of the old dog whistle issues about women – working motherhood, single mothers, a woman’s ability to be commander-in-chief, women’s assertiveness and self-confidence – have not seemed to resonate.
.. She did not shy away from defending late-term abortions – often a political minefield.
Donald Trump’s Double Standard on Weight
From the “400-pound” hacker to Alicia Machado, the candidate’s denigration of fat people has a long tradition—but may be a liability.
Spencer Kornhaber: I was struck by how much the topic of weight was part of the debate: There was the 400-pound hacker, Rosie O’Donnell, and Alicia Machado. Why do you think this keeps coming up this election?
Amy Farrell: Trump is definitely a bully, and we know that fat-shaming is the most typical reason a child will be bullied. So he’s picking up on a typical playground tactic. And it’s really connected to our ideas about sex and gender, race, and sexuality. His specialty is to insult, and fat shaming is a rhetorical move that’s far reaching, prevalent, and an easily understood way to degrade people.
.. But there’s much more of an allowance for a man to be fat than there is for a woman.
.. I think that there’s some level of the image of the “fat cat” that Trump is relying on. The fat cat wasn’t necessarily likable, but he was seen as powerful and able. So he gets a bye in that way.
.. [The implication is] that women need to live up to a certain kind of standard, and if one doesn’t they are deserving of insults, threats of violence, of sexual assault, whether symbolic or real. That has been a tactic used for the last 150 years. Cartoons against the suffragists showed them as turning into animals; white suffragists turning into black people, using the presumption that blackness was bad; and them turning into fat people. So he’s just drawing on a long tradition of mocking women if they don’t satisfy a particular kind of standard that is pleasing to him as a powerful white man.
.. Right, and also what was her great crime? It was disagreeing with him. And she’s an outspoken woman who also makes people laugh, which makes her particularly hated. The mockery of him he can’t stand, and so the only response back is to say she’s really like an animal, out of control, ugly, etc.
.. I was reading an interview with anApprentice producer who said that Trump always wanted to keep a fat man on the cast so people could laugh at him.
.. The fat man can be the everyman who everyone can identify with and isn’t threatening. Often he’s a humorous character: easy to mock but maybe quite likable, too.
But that also slides into a man who’s perceived as not being sufficiently masculine. Not being sufficiently strong. Not sufficiently male, really. So I think when he mocks other men for being fat, it’s like the alpha male kicking the other men who aren’t as great of a man as he is.
Fat-Shamer in Chief
I bring all this up because Trump brings it up — constantly. For someone who is fat, short-fingered and strange-looking, he is obsessed with looks. During his decades in the spotlight, he has bullied and shamed women for their weight. And more — he has had people fired, at his golf courses, for not being pretty enough, The Los Angeles Times reported this week.
.. In the days after the most watched political debate in history, Trump didn’t talk about trade policy, war and peace, or health care. Instead, his fetish for the superficial dominated his talking points, trying to fat-shame anew the former Miss Universe, Alicia Machado. Hillary Clinton baited him for calling the young woman “Miss Piggy” and “Miss Housekeeping.” Machado is getting her revenge.
.. This fat-shaming episode by a man who wants to lead the country is deeply resonant because most Americans struggle with their weight. More than two-thirds of adults are overweight or obese.
How Keeping Up Appearances Ruined a Former Dallas Banker
At his plea hearing last month, Mr. Davis said he knew that his actions were “wrong and unlawful” but otherwise shed little light on why he turned to insider trading. But clearly, he needed money, despite his years of bonuses as a highly paid investment banker and his lucrative directors’ fees.
According to the S.E.C.’s complaint, by April 2010 Mr. Davis was in “desperate” financial straits. He owed the I.R.S. $78,000. His brokerage account was heavily margined, and he had run up tens of thousands in credit card debt. He owed $550,000 to one of his investment funds.
.. As Professor Coffee put it, “This is a perfect example of a favor bank, which is exactly how Wall Street works.”
.. In just one month, March 2011, Mr. Davis ran up gambling losses of $200,000 at one Las Vegas casino. He owed $178,000 for the private jet. And he had to cover the $100,000 he had taken from the charity.
.. The government has shed little light on Mr. Davis’s motive, other than that he needed money. The S.E.C. said he did little to adjust his expensive lifestyle after leaving Credit Suisse in 2001. He experienced a sharp drop in his income, went through an expensive divorce soon after and suffered big investment reversals during the 2008 financial crisis.
.. Mr. Davis is hardly alone in trying to maintain the illusion of wealth and prosperity even as his personal finances veered out of control.