Somehow, Donald Trump’s promise to hire “the best people” has led to the hiring of a man with a deep, pseudo-scientific interest in “semen-exposed women,” Media Matters reports. Maybe the best thing that can be said about Robert W. Patterson’s place in the Trump administration is that he’s not overseeing health initiatives. Instead, he’s the Social Security Administration’s acting associate commissioner in the Office of Strategic and Digital Communications.
Patterson is a longtime conservative commentator and Republican operative/wannabe politician. During his time editing a journal on The Family in America, he held forth on women’s roles (get married, have kids, stay home with the kids), and touted a study “suggesting condom use robs a woman of ‘remarkable’ chemicals found in semen that have been shown to elevate mood and self-esteem” and claiming “that ‘semen-exposed women’ perform better on concentration and cognitive tasks.”
But again, women should take their exposure to magical semen and use their expanded cognitive function at home with the kids, while remaining married and dependent on their husbands no matter what. Patterson ranted against “a child-support system that virtually guarantees divorcing mothers and their children an income stream without requiring those women, who initiate two-thirds of marital disruptions, to demonstrate any wrongdoing on the part of the father” in a 2011 Washington Examiner op-ed which also described affirmative action as a “policy monstrosity” that “has facilitated the movement of mothers out of the home economy and into the market economy, undermining the family as an economic unit, marriage as a lifelong partnership, and the well-being of children.” And to think, some of them even managed all of that without “remarkable” semen exposure.