One of the best things I've read and so many truth bombs from Lindy West at the NY Times on Donald Trump and Billy Bush.
"Mr. Trump is rape culture’s blathering id, and Sunday night Hillary Clinton (who, no doubt, has just as many man-made scars as the rest of us) has to stand next to him on a stage, and remain unflappable as she’s held to an astronomically higher standard, and pretend that he is her equal while his followers persist in howling that sexism is a feminist myth. While Mr. Trump boasts about sexual assault and vows to suppress disobedient media, cable news pundits spend their time taking a protractor to Mrs. Clinton’s smile — a constant, churning, microanalysis of nothing."
Honestly, reading all of these accounts and seeing thousands of women relate stories online really has me checking myself. Me, mr progressive SJW. As a guy, I'm being forced to look in the mirror in alot of ways and I'm not super proud of what's staring back at me. It's one thing to "know" that sexism is a thing. It's another thing entirely to see its brutality and how I may play into it.
"Such has it always been: powerful men sorting women’s bodies into property and trash and “good” guys, average guys, guys you know, guys you love, guys on the “Today” show, going along with it. Snickering. Licking a boot here and there, joining in if they’re feeling especially bitter or transgressive or insecure or far from the cameras that day. Perhaps, at their most noble, staying silent. Never speaking up, because the social cost is too high. It’s easier to leave that for the victims to bear. After all, they’re used to it."
There's alot to unpack here, but this is so necessary and if there's one good thing with "letting Trump be Trump", it's his "honesty" is a searing laser cutting through all the bs we tell ourselves about us and the society we've built. Fuck, reading this stuff makes me feel like shit. But it's so necessary and so true.
"Meanwhile, right-wing lawmakers are scrambling, sanctimonious and pathetic, to distance themselves from their own hideous progeny, clearly hoping to salvage some personal credibility and perhaps even save their party. But here is the thing, the big thing, that Paul D. Ryan and Reince Priebus and Mike Pence and all the spineless Billy Bushes of the world (and plenty of progressive men too, for that matter) don’t understand: Most of you are no better than Mr. Trump; you are just more subtle.
If you have spent your career brutalizing and dehumanizing women legislatively rather than personally, you are no better. If you were happy to overlook months of violent racism, xenophobia, transphobia and Islamophobia from the Trump campaign, but now you’re mad that he used a bad word and tried to sleep with another man’s wife, you are no better. If you have derided and stigmatized identity politics in an effort to keep the marginalized from organizing, you are no better. If you snicker or say nothing while your fellow men behave like Donald Trump, you are no better."
Guys, we have alot of work to do.