While listening to an NPR Radio Rookies report several months ago on why men catcall to women on the streets, I had a lightbulb moment about all that "Hillary for prison!" chanting at Trump rallies.
The young reporter on NPR wondered if catcalls could legitimately be seen as an attempt to impress women, but Stony Brook University sociologist Michael Kimmel shut that down quickly. Catcalls, he said, were more of a warning to women to get back in their place:
… because we've always thought that the street is not a woman's place. It's a man's place. So it's not about making women feel good or wanted or desired. It's about making them feel, you know—feeling uncomfortable being in our space.
Right, I thought. "Lock her up!" wasn't just driven by hatred for Hillary. It was a signal to all women that she had crossed the line in seeking the highest office in the land, not to mention any office at all. "You're outta line, lady, and now we're gonna jail you!"
The explanations of what decided the election seem to fall into roughly one of three categories: racism, sexism, or economic disenfranchisement. I tend to believe it was a combination of all three, where racism funneled some votes toward Trump, sexism dissuaded certain voters from voting for Clinton, and perhaps some voters wanted to voice discontent and had the luxury of ignoring all of Trump's truly ugly and hostile comments toward women and people of color.
While I've seen a lot of post-election discussion of the racial biases that drove Trump's win and how Democrats should reach out to disaffected white voters, I haven't seen as much discussion of the misogyny directed at Hillary. But this week I was once again smacked in the face with the double standard for the two candidates by the Pew Research graph below showing that voters gave Trump the lowest grades for his conduct on the campaign trail of any winning presidential candidate in nearly 30 years.
Pew writes:
For the first time in Pew Research Center post-election surveys, voters give the losing candidate higher grades than the winner. About four-in-ten (43%) give Clinton an A or B, which is [...] 13 percentage points higher than Trump’s (30%).
So the female candidate gets better grades but loses to the foul-mouthed guy with a total lack of integrity and experience but a rich daddy.
That same guy then turned around this week and declared himself the decider of whether the woman who dared to challenge him would be put on trial. Technically, he doesn't even have that authority, but let's not get bogged down in the details of limitations on executive power. No, he said, she had been through enough. How benevolent.
Trump's supporters expressed immediate outrage at his failure to charge Clinton for her transgression. "BROKEN PROMISE," screamed a headline in Breitbart News, one of Trump's staunchest media allies during the election. Meanwhile, Fox News tried to salvage the moment with a headline emphasizing the prospect was still at hand: "Trump says he won’t take Clinton investigations off the table." In essence, “Don't worry fellas, she's still a criminal and Trump could lower the boom at any moment.”
This election, American voters elected a con man, a swindler, a bluster bag who articulated a twisted set of mores and a horrific vision for our country. In fact, that Pew graph effectively shows voters knew exactly what they were doing and did it anyway.
The inescapable message was that a candidate being overtly racist, sexist, and downright ignorant and unqualified was forgivable and even laudable as long as he wasn't a she.
Any Trump voter who is now surprised by what they get from his administration—whether it be in the form of horrors they didn't take seriously or broken promises they had counted on—will be getting exactly what they asked for and deserve.
Kerry Eleveld is the author of “Don’t Tell Me To Wait: How the fight for gay rights changed America and transformed Obama’s presidency.”