A 15-year-old girl asked Hillary Clinton a question about body image at a Pennsylvania town hall event on Tuesday, saying “I see with my own eyes the damage Donald Trump does when he talks about women and how they look” and asking how Clinton would combat that damage. In her answer, Clinton turned Trump’s attacks on former Miss Universe Alicia Machado into a reason for women and girls to disregard insults to their own looks:
“My opponent insulted Miss Universe!” she said, to laughs. “How do you get more acclaimed than that? But it wasn’t good enough.”
She went on.
“We can’t take any of this seriously anymore,” she said, her voice building. “We need to laugh at it. We need to refute it. We need to ignore it. And we need to stand up to it.”
If Miss Universe isn’t hot enough then the girl next door can mope about the fact she’ll never be hot enough—or she can realize the game is rigged, in essence. Heidi Klum made a similar point in humorous fashion last year when Trump said she was “no longer a 10.”
“We’re not all going to end up being Miss Universe, I hate to tell you,” [Clinton] continued, wrapping up. “So let’s be the best we can be. Let’s be proud of who we are.”
Let’s also be very clear that insulting women—their looks, their stamina, or anything else—is all part of Trump’s crude dominance game. He’s saying he, Donald Trump, hair and orange skin and all, gets to judge all of us. We are all beneath him, suitable only for his disdain or for the privilege of maybe, in our dreams, being called as hot as his daughter Ivanka. And that should be viewed in the same light we view his Muslim ban or his Mexican wall or his reverence for Vladimir Putin. It’s disturbing. It’s scary. It should be a warning about a direction we do not want our country to head. But it should also be seen as delegitimizing.
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