On the morning of the historic Women’s March in protest of the inauguration of Donald Trump, I received a prescient text message from one of the most important women in my life. I call her my big sister, though we aren’t related by blood, and her wisdom and guidance in life and all things political have helped to make me who I am today. She was writing to let me know that she’d just gotten home from sending three busloads of frustrated black women to Austin to participate in Texas’s rendition of the resistance, and that the experience had raised a very pressing question in her mind. From her text:
“This women’s march thing is hot. Propane needs to speak to the significant women’s suffrage march and our misogynistic president not participating. Millions of women are marching in Washington and all over the country and he thumbs his nose. Why do we never hear him discuss his mother, just his f***d up father?”
Apart from the fact that her text revealed much about how I came to develop my fiery worldview, the truth of it all struck me as though Freud himself had hit me over the head with it. Not just the symbolism of women of all ages and creeds marching in resistance to a man who used his degradation and admitted sexual assault of women to propel himself to an electoral college “victory” over the first woman to ever win the popular vote in American history; but the undeniable predictability of the paradox.
Where there is an assault on feminine power, there will inevitably be angry women fighting back, or as Hillary Clinton so famously stated, “women’s rights are human rights, and human rights are women’s rights.” The very fact that an avowed misogynist and sexual predator has been inaugurated despite such vocal objection and concern necessarily engenders a resounding response on behalf of all humanity. And so millions of men and women, boys and girls, marched all across the world for the basic values of life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and freedom from oppression for all. It was so breathtaking that for a brief moment in time it almost made us forget why the protest and resistance movement have even become necessary in the first place. In other words, “why do we never hear him discuss his mother,” and why have we not yet learned to discern that how much a man values women in general is reflected in how much he values the women in his life?
One need look no further than psychoanalytic legend Sigmund Freud, whose works can oddly be used to simultaneously demonstrate and explain misogyny. Suffice it to say that while he was successfully married and surrounded by female colleagues in his field, his views on women and men’s treatment of them showed very little indication that he fully understood or cared about the varied needs and wants of the female psyche. Freud’s analysis is also widely criticized for being far more apt to blame mothers for failures in emotional development, than it is to seek understanding of maternal drives and emotions. In this regard, he is not unlike the GOP-controlled Congress that is 80 percent white and male, but still believes itself to have the insight and diversity of life experience to adequately represent the millions of souls marching in the streets against them.
As such, the Republican party’s first order of business has been a continuance of its assault on reproductive rights. Despite the fact that 7 in 10 Americans support the Roe v. Wade decision and a woman’s right to privacy, we are predictably in store for yet another round of attempts to overrule our reproductive choice and our votes. Yet again we are being demanded to relinquish our lives to the control and will of people who don’t even value us enough as human beings to respect our bodily autonomy. The only major difference now is the man making those demands is not only doing so verbally, but admits to being the type of man who will literally grab a woman’s genitalia whether she consents to it or not. Again, “why do we never hear him discuss his mother” and why isn't her superego effectively imploring him to do better by women and humanity in general?
As a mother of two sons, I would be horrified if either one of them grew up to be a man that brags about sexual assault, let alone became president despite (or because of) doing so. I would be appalled at having raised a man who pays so little mind to the pain, suffering, and death that will result from his termination of health care for 20 million human beings. I would be disgusted at his lack of shame, and incestuous pride in being sexually attracted to his own daughter. As I watched Donald Trump hurl insults at the latest objects of his misogynistic rage, from Megyn Kelly to Alicia Machado, Rosie O’Donnell, and Hillary Clinton, I couldn’t help but ask if his mother would approve, and why the women in his life today haven’t taught him any better. As he thumbs his nose at the millions of women marching in solidarity against him, I also have to wonder how many times the women in his life have ever told him “no.” We’ve gone from a president who dotes on and reveres his wife, daughters, and mother-in-law, to a man who was too self-absorbed on Inauguration day to even assist his spouse in walking up the White House stairs. We’ve transitioned from a loving man and wife to an odd first couple that will be living in separate residences, and has now been captured on camera scowling at each other.
A man who loves a woman deliberately prioritizes the first bill he signs into law as president to be an amendment to the Civil Rights Act to champion equal pay for women. A man who hates a woman is met by millions of women who hate him back at the very outset of his presidency, before he ever signs his first bill. Maybe that's why we never hear him discuss his mother. ...