He spouts off against the elites, then stuffs his administration with billionaires, several from the very banks he vilified. He rails about big government, then pulls a big-government move with Carrier, the air-conditioner manufacturer.
.. He claims (against all evidence) to respect women, then recruits a labor secretary who once defended the pulchritudinous ads for his fast-food chain by saying: “I like beautiful women eating burgers in bikinis. I think it’s very American.”
.. He wants the whole world to see how many important people hanker to work for him. So they show the world, posing for pictures with him and fanning out on TV to proclaim their ardor and aptitude.
.. Mitt Romney .. he appealed to the president-elect in part because he was “a camera-ready option to represent the country around the globe.”
What Women Really Think of Men
As Ruth Bader Ginsburg, quoting a California judicial opinion, told the Supreme Court in 1971, “the pedestal upon which women have been placed has all too often, upon closer inspection, been revealed as a cage.”
When we declare that men will always be brutes and women can only shrug from on high, we engage in what President George W. Bush once called the soft bigotry of low expectations.
.. Feminists’ critique of male power has long been caricatured as hatred of men. But it is feminists whose fight is motivated by the belief that men can be better, if we can make clear that they, too, benefit from a safer, more equal and more just world.
.. In 1996, Gloria Steinem offered a theory about why so many people hated Hillary Clinton: “She and the president are presenting, at a very high, visible level, a new paradigm of a male-female relationship. And that is very much resented.”
.. In 2005, months into his third marriage, Mr. Trump acknowledged that in some quarters, marriage had changed. “There’s a lot of women out there that demand that the husband act like the wife, and you know, there’s a lot of husbands that listen to that,” he said in a radio interview. Mr. Trump, he made clear, was not one of those husbands. “I mean, I won’t do anything to take care of them,” he said of his future offspring. “I’ll supply funds and she’ll take care of the kids. It’s not like I’m gonna be walking the kids down Central Park.”
.. People without a college degree, from whom the president-elect saw strong support, were in a 2013 Pew survey nearly twice as likely as the college-educated to say it was better for a marriage if a husband made more money than the wife.
Unfortunately for those ideals, this is the demographic for whom the gender pay gap has narrowed most.
.. “Here comes Hillary, and she’s a strong woman and it makes a lot of men mad, and it makes a lot of women uncomfortable, and they want to keep peace in their homes.”
Trump’s Fake News
Indeed, confusion is such a predictable result that we might describe it as Trump’s purpose.
But why would the President-elect deliberately confuse us?
Perhaps what we see in Trump is the full flowering of an attitude of cynical nihilism, which some say is part of the zeitgeist of our time in the decadent West. Within this worldview, there is no such thing as truth or facts; there are only personalities, subjectivities, endless spin. Megan Garber’s fine essay, “The Image in the Age of Pseudo-Reality,” illustrates this point of view with her comparison of Donald Trump with P.T. Barnum.
.. “An African-American laborer realizes that he has much more in common with a ‘white male’ laborer than with a privileged liberal smugly reasoning about the need for political correctness. A single mother fighting for survival understands how alien are the interests and the views of a feminist who distributes multimillion gender related grants among her friends and clients.”
How the Quad Went Coed
Fifty years ago, same-sex schooling in higher education had ended for many public colleges and universities in the United States and Britain, but it remained the norm at most elite universities in the Northeast—the Ivy League schools of Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth and Harvard and comparable private women colleges such as Vassar, Smith and Wellesley. Cambridge and Oxford, too, had resisted coeducation.
.. Ms. Malkiel convincingly argues that it took the tidal wave of social movements in that decade—student free speech, war opposition, civil rights, sexual freedom and women’s liberation—to disrupt the northeastern elites’ complacency. Change came, but it came kicking and screaming, and not from any sense of fairness or feminist impulse. It was pragmatic: Scrupulously monitored application trends made it clear that, as the 1960s progressed, the best of the boys were going where the girls were.
.. She describes how various alternative arrangements were considered (such as moving Vassar to New Haven and Sarah Lawrence to Princeton!) and discarded.
.. “What is all this nonsense about admitting women to Princeton? A good old-fashioned whore-house would be considerably more efficient and much, much cheaper,” wrote one anonymous alumnus to the Princeton Alumni Weekly in 1968.
.. Most participants in the Ivy League debates over whether to admit women students looked at the question of coeducation solely from the male students’ point of view
.. Dartmouth boys, for example, rated their female classmates’ looks from one to 10 with placards in the dining hall. Signs hanging on campus declared, “Better Dead Than Coed.” The college anthem, “Men of Dartmouth,” remained unchanged until 1988.