OK, so Donald Trump. I read what he said about Carly Fiorina and how he doesn’t think someone who looks like her can get votes. At an instinctive level I know that’s anti-feminist but my husband says it’s not because Trump insults everyone. Who’s right?
— Imaginary Disgruntled Wife
You’re right. Your imaginary husband is wrong. And Donald Trump is a terrible, terrible person. But we all knew that already.
One thing that is absolutely true is that Donald Trump insults everyone. He’s been loser-ing and dummy-ing his way across the slate of GOP presidential hopefuls for months now. It’s actually jaw-droppingly awful, because it’s pretty evident that he insults EVERYONE. He can’t pull it together enough to be polite under any circumstance, which means he would turn a state dinner into a Real Housewives-style table-turning circus. In fact, I could see him calling Netanyahu a “prostitution whore” and that terrifies me.
The tone of Trump’s insults has a decidedly sexist character because he insults the intelligence of men, but the appearance of women. Remember way back in 2006 when he was feuding with Rosie O’Donnell? At one point he started calling Rosie fat and ugly. Now first of all, that was utterly irrelevant to their argument. Second of all, whipping out insults about the way a person looks is a sign of low creativity and is cheap humor, if it’s funny at all. And finally, it presumes some things about the person you’re insulting, namely that the insultee might be attracted to the insulter.
I know that sounds weird, but bear with me. Think about it this way: whom do you want to find you attractive? Your partner or crush, right? Because you want to jump their bones. If that person were to say that they think you’re unattractive, it would be devastating because you have a lot at stake in their opinion of your looks. When a person whose bones you don’t want to jump says you’re unattractive, it doesn’t matter as much. You think, “Meh. Not like I wanted to do the deed with you anyway.”
When Trump says women are ugly, the subtext is that he assumes they want to fuck him and he’s handing out the worst rejection possible by shutting down their deep-seated lust for him. He sees women as either potential sex partners or not. Moreover, that is the only criteria by which he judges them. And THAT is anti-feminist as fuck.
Unfortunately for us, Carly Fiorina appears to have enough dignity and sense of occasion not to respond with, “I don’t care if Trumpy thinks I’m ugly because I wouldn’t fuck him with someone else’s vagina.” I wish she would because someone needs to shut Trump’s ego down and tell him that women are more than their looks, and he needs to stop judging us by whether or not he wants to hop in the sack with us.
Update: Apparently when Trump was talking about Carl Fiorina's face, he wasn't talking about her face. OK. Sounds legit.
