“Nobody Has More Respect for Women Than I Do”.
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In the third and final presidential debate, Republican candidate Donald Trump repeated a statement that he made in one prior debate and on Twitter in response to accusations that he has sexually assaulted women and bragged about doing so: “Nobody has more respect for women than I do.”
I started my career in the violence against women movement as a psycho-educational group facilitator at a batterer intervention program in 1996. My job was to teach men to respect women. I did this on a weekly basis, for two hours per week, in a meeting room at a probation and parole department with cohorts of men who spent six months in our program. At any given class session, there were typically about 8 to 15 men in the room, including my co-facilitator. I was the only woman in the room. Part of my job was to be a lightening rod for their misogyny. Simply by being present, and having the authority to challenge them, I brought out their disrespect for women. The idea was that once their disrespect was on display, other men would confront them about it, and they would change.
What I learned from my days as an intervention counselor is that when you are trying to teach a man who hates women to respect them, it’s best to take both a short-term and a long-term approach. In the short-term, the goal is to have them examine how they interact with women who threaten their control. Even the worst misogynist may have one or two women that he puts on a pedestal, like his daughter or mother, but typically the women that he says he worships will be those with little capacity to challenge his authority. Putting a woman on a pedestal is actually another form of not viewing her as an equal, so these are also problematic relationships.
Intimate partners, even when living in fear of the other, always have the power to stop loving. To a controlling person, that represents a threat to his total domination. Female co-workers or supervisors may also have authority in the workplace, which will inevitably rankle a misogynist. Therefore, asking the man who hates women to examine closely his interactions with a present or recent intimate partner, or female boss, will probably be most fruitful for encouraging change.
Here are the key aspects of interactions that demonstrate a lack of respect: using physical or sexual violence; being coercive, threatening, or intimidating; minimizing, denying, or refusing to take responsibility for harm inflicted; attempting to humiliate or undermine the other person’s sense of self through guilt, shame, or blame; emotional manipulation including making the other person feel isolated, implying that there is something wrong with their mental health, or failing to follow through on promises; and consciously or unconsciously taking advantage of societal privileges such as being male, white, able-bodied, wealthy, or heterosexual.
In the case of Donald Trump, or any man who doesn’t respect women, a useful exercise is to take stock of how often he engages in these six disrespectful behaviors. Putting aside the question of whether Trump perpetrated physical violence against his ex-wife, Ivana, as she alleged in a divorce deposition, or whether he perpetrated sexual violence against any of the 10 women who have publicly accused him of it, we might ask how often in recent weeks we have seen him threaten harm to women who challenge him—such as the female New York Times reporter who telephoned him for comments on a story, whom Trump called “a disgusting human being.” In the past month, Trump has attempted to humiliate women who might threaten his power, such as the former Miss Universe contestant who revealed that he treated her poorly when he was in charge of the pageant. He has dismissed and defended his objectification of women innumerable times and interrupted Clinton incessantly during each of the three debates, even calling her “such a nasty woman” at the end of the third meeting. No matter how many women Trump has promoted in his business dealings, his interaction style belies his fundamental disrespect for women.
The other aspect of assessing whether one has respect for women is taking an inventory of their public positions on policy decisions that affect women and influence gender equality on a macro level. These include: pay equity and equal access to all forms of employment (e.g. jobs in the military, or as firefighters, police officers, etc.); legal access to safe and affordable abortions; access to high-quality and affordable child care; maternity and paternity leave policies; affordable health care; laws that criminalize intimate partner abuse, stalking, sexual assault, and human trafficking; restrictions on advertising and other media that sexually objectify men and women, and encourage people to evaluate others’ worth based on their appearance; elimination of policies that further the oppression of people of color, people with disabilities, people with addictions, non-permanent residents, people living in poverty, people with criminal records, people with non-heterosexual sexual orientations, and people with gender identities other than cis-male or cis-female; and policies that reduce the murder of women (also called femicide), which includes restrictions on access to firearms.
Tallying Trump’s scorecard on the above-listed nine topics puts him well out of range of respecting women. Taken together, his interactional style and political positions demonstrate a clear, pervasive pattern of what we would have called, in my batterer intervention group, abuse. His lack of accountability for his aggression against women constitutes the highest form of disrespect.
Just as I once served as a lightening rod for men’s misogyny in batterer intervention groups, Hillary Clinton has been a perfect conduit for bringing to light Trump’s deep-seated disrespect for women. His insistent claim that “nobody has more respect for women than I do” has been laid bare in the presidential debates, his rallies, and his tweets, and can now be seen for what it is: preposterous, disingenuous, and dangerous.
Emily Rothman is an associate professor of community health sciences.
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