World markets took a frightful tumble when the US President-Elect turned out to be Donald Trump, something I found temporarily mystifying as you’d think they’d be elated at the prospect of a billionaire business man in the White House, what could possibly go wrong?
However, after months of repulsive orations President-Elect Trump managed a nano second of “statesmanlike” rhetoric, made possible, I believe, by the euphoric release of claiming victory after the mounting excitement of witnessing his electoral college votes accrue to the point of certainty.
Buoyed by this split second of Trumpian civility, the markets rallied. I’m guessing we can expect these wild fluctuations to become a regular thing over the years of Donald’s incumbency, given the man’s well-documented volatility.
All well and good for the markets, but what about the ladies?
Only moments after it became apparent Trump was on the road to victory, a marauding mob of young males in a Sydney University bar began chanting “Grab them by the pussy that’s how we do it.” There have since been many reports on social media of women in the US being intimidated by white males, inspired by Trump’s advice to treat women like shit.
There are hundreds of Trump quotes on women, including lengthy extracts from his interviews with Howard Stern, and they all demonstrate ways in which to treat women like shit.
Trump’s elevation to leader of the western world gives license to men who want to treat women like shit. This attitude was no barrier to him achieving his goal, and it confirms what we’ve long suspected: women are not believed to be as fully human as are white men. We are allowed to do more than we used to be allowed to do but how we are regarded and treated is not an issue important enough for many (including women) to consider when electing a president.
And whatever gains we’ve made, we’ve made because they allowed us to. Let’s not forget that.
(Trump also thought Muslims should be treated like shit, an opinion shared by enough Americans to be of little consequence in the electoral contest. However, I understand his master plan to ban all Muslim immigration has vanished from his website which must feel like a betrayal to Pauline Hanson and George Christensen, but there you go.)
The western world just became a much more dark and difficult habitat for women. It would be my hope that our own government will stand up for us against the new president’s misogyny. And then I look at our government and I see there is absolutely no hope of that.
We have a very long way to go before women are recognised as equal in western culture. We are blocked by the men who are threatened by equality, and who will take the opportunities legitimised for them by Trump to express their fear and hatred in university bars, on the street, in the privacy of their homes, in workplaces, in the world. Such men are unrelievedly ignorant and stupid; overtly and covertly brutal. They’ll be celebrating right now, as their leader prepares to move into the White House.
Trump’s ascension will have a ripple effect in every western country. We have already seen Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull shamefully search for similarities between himself and Donald. We are both business men, he said, and the new president will be pragmatic, as business men always are.
However, a true pragmatist would work to establish equality, because a true pragmatist would instinctively grasp the immense gains awaiting us in equality, rather than the abject losses of discrimination that are currently our established norms.
A true pragmatist would refuse to countenance the incomprehensible loss to society of treating women like shit. But we don’t have true pragmatists in charge. We have the men who treat women like shit.
Fasten your seat belts, ladies, & up your flaps. We’re in for a bumpy ride.
No Place For Sheep 
The Revenge of the Deplorables
Hillary called it and should not have resiled from it. Half of Trump’s supporters are deplorables – racists, sexists, misogynists, bigots, religious nutters, ignoramuses of every stripe and mainly one colour.
The lunatics have taken over the asylum.
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Sticks and stones…
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You’re back from the dead Havana. Feeling emboldened by the election outcome?
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Yes I was pleased with the result. I knew he would win from the moment he announced his candidacy.
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They are human frigging beings. Hating those who hate clearly isn’t working. How about we try other strategies to engage the scum of the Earth?
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Plenty of financially successful pragmatic businessmen treat women like shit. Ego trumps money. Treating women like shit is an ego boost a certain type. That type has no interest in gains to society, in fact if society loses then, relatively speaking, they gain. It has to be said there are plenty of women who happily make up to that type and call themselves clever for it.
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Yes, & this was proved by the number of women who voted for Trump.
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Trump got the majority of the white female vote, interesting and puzzling. I think the Republicans historically get the majority of the white female vote, why the conservatism?
I think the answer would be an all exclusively female Political Party. The numbers would justify it, the split among the male/female population would give it a powerful chance of winning, platform wise it would be a chance to address female specific issues on top of the typical general agenda that would go across party lines and attract enough male support to put it over the line if the female vote can be corralled as one.
The time is ripe.
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Just a thought after hearing the shortest term Prime Minister this country ever had claiming the voters for Trump were conservative voters.
It would seem to me that the Fuck You to the Establishment vote Trump attracted (or perhaps the electorate mindfully exploited and weaponised Trump) was a radical action and not a conservative action. To refute the neo-Liberal, neo-Con agenda for the last thirty years brought about by the Conservative heroes of the likes of Thatcher and Reagan and claim it as a win for Conservatives is an Orwellian re-writing of history.
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I agree it was a radical action. We’re in though the looking glass territory now.
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Trump a conservative? Abbott is wrong, as usual.
This is a miasma of fascist, populist, libertarian and loony barely thought out policies.
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I don’t think the women who voted for Trump have any investment in women’s issues Allthumbs.
I’m just imagining the uproar from Republican males if women tried to set up an exclusive political party. 😦
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I don’t support an exclusively female party because I have difficulty identifying any issues that exclusively affect women. As far as I can see, ‘women’s issues’ such as domestic violence, reproductive rights, equal pay and maternity leave always have at least an indirect effect on men too. They are therefore issues that have ramifications for Australian society and society as a whole benefits when they are addressed.
Maternity leave is a classic example. Commenting on changes to paid maternity leave, Malcolm Turnbull said recently “We are sympathetic, we’re fathers, we’re husbands…. In so far as men can understand these matters, we are absolutely understanding and sympathetic.”
Leaving aside the fact that his comments in and of themselves make a mockery of his claim to be a feminist, does he seriously think that men can’t understand the effect of maternity leave on the family budget? My husband understood very well what it meant – that once I took unpaid maternity leave (all that was on offer in those days), he would have to take on extra shifts to cover all our outgoings.
I suspect any man with a young family would be equally adept at understanding the matter. Perhaps Malcolm is just bad at maths.
And domestic violence is estimated to cost our economy around $22 billion per annum – a cost that the whole of our society must bear.
We don’t need a woman’s only party, what we need is for politicians of all genders to acknowledge that there are benefits for the entire community in resolving these issues, and to commit to work together towards that resolution. It just makes good economic sense.
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Well said, Patagonian
Divisive tactics do not work well, you’d think we’ve learned that by now.
As for Turnbull’s “we are husbands… blah, blah, blah,” merely confirming he feels removed from humanity, as most do when in the top percentile.
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Patagonian, what Australia needs is for men and women to play, study, and to work together….
No more schools for only boys or girls , most jobs ought to be open for both men and women….( if the grave-digging is still done by shovels, then let the men do it)
The less divisions the better. It’s time!
May our next PM ought be female (but not Ms Julie)….
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cross out ‘ought’…
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I agree Helvi. The classic ‘divide and conquer’ has no place in a world that faces the problems that we do. Still, it’s a tactic employed relentlessly by the conservatives because they know it works – while ordinary people are pitted against each other over issues such as same sex marriage, the fox can get in and lay waste to the henhouse.
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Helvi, I think Georgina Downer is being groomed as the next LNP PM.
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Yes, Jennifer, I thought the same, plenty of ABC exposure of late, Q&A, the Drum…like the father, so the daughter…
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Scalzi’s post on the “buy the bundle” theory implicitly addresses this – they’re willing to overlook/able to ignore his faults because they believe in the inspirational message “make america great”. Much as many merkins ignored Obama’s faults (there was apparently a greater-than-margin-of-error percentage who thought he might be Muslim and voted for him anyway… a group I would have expected not to exist).
There are a lot of non-white, non-straight, non-christian merkins right now quaking in their boots. Even more than they were beforehand. Although, really, if they didn’t vote for the slightly lesser evil I do find it hard to be especially sympathetic. At least they had the option of voting… for all that this affects us, we don’t.
http://whatever.scalzi.com/2016/11/10/the-cinemax-theory-of-racism/
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Thanks for the link, Moz.
Trump is a testament to the power of empty rhetoric. He’s like our right wing – promise everything to win, then have absolutely no idea how to deliver after victory.
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There was one comment under a different post that I really struggled with, from a Trump supporter:
———————————-
As life-long republican, but reluctant Trump supporter, I do think the mostly group think of classifying all who supported Trump as one or all of the “ists” and other deplorable attributes is amazingly biased against accepting of the differences that make up our country. I think the popular MSM has been successful in doing a form of brainwashing that so divides us. To be fair, there are those on the far right with extremist views of the left. I would hope that we can all tone down the rhetoric and be more accepting of differences of opinions and views.
———————————-
I replied with a comment about the Overton window and where USA sits on a global left-right axis, but it’s the “we should all tone it down” at the end where my eyebrows reached orbit.
http://whatever.scalzi.com/2016/11/09/early-morning-thoughts-on-the-day-after/#comment-825240
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To me, that comment is exactly the “America can be great again, we can pull together (coloured, queer, female and non-Christian need not apply)” rhetoric that is most problematic about Trump. “we” “together” “all”, “us” just don’t mean the same thing to people like that as a naive reading of the dictionary might suggest.
A friend posted “Ich bin ein Auslander” by Pop Will Eat Itself as a response to Trump. It seems to be popular give that there’s a trump version of the video to go with it. Caution: loud angry music. Some people might find Judy Small singing “You Don’t Speak For Me” more acceptable. Both seem relevant.
(sorry, without a preview option or any idea of what formatting options are allowed I’m not really keen to play games with links)
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Pray allow me to correct that:
It’s also worth noting that trump promised whatever his current audience most wanted to hear. The fact that many of those promises are incompatible is of no interest to him. Like tiny [delib.] abbott, trump’s attitude is “whatever it takes” to get what he wants.
I think it’s called the sucker punch.
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Read interviews with some ppl in dire straits who voted Trump. They’ve already been sucker punched. Double whammy. He’ll do nothing for them.
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Indeed, Jennifer. Unfortunately that’s what sucker punchers do, and trump and abbott are past masters.
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Leonard Cohen (1934-2016) Rest in Peace.
A sad loss.
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Oh, DQ. This is kind of a bad week.
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We have his body of work. His words and songs survive him, and will no doubt survive us.
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I lost all my old LP’s many years ago – the only album from that collection I have replaced with a CD, was Leonard Cohen.
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Next time some male claims women want to take over power from men, I will ask them to explain the support Trump has from white (and probably a few Hispanic) women.
Women aren’t this single amorphous homogeneous group – just like men aren’t.
If there was a conspiracy of most women trying to gain world supremacy, we’d have it by now.
Women for good or ill have stood by men throughout history – that is where they believe they are ‘safer’.
This belief is changing, very slowly. As slowly as it has been to convince men that women are actually human.
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I’m sick of waiting
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It will be a bad time for women, black people especially and native americans, scientists, the enviro, dumbing down and surveillance.
It will be like Tony Abbott on steroids.
One for Loretta Lyn fans,in particular:
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Paul
You are good at talking.
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I have my good points too.
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You are also good at writing, and I keep hinting that another post might be good….
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Thank you for the compliment, too kind.
You did suggest it a while back, but I mentioned my computer had been virused and your email had disappeared after the changes getting the computer running again, so it was impossible to send anything in.
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Well, when you get all that sorted let me know. I had to change Sheep’s email as Outlook collapsed. It’s noplaceforsheep@mail.com
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God knows it is all dutch to me. We shall see what we shall see..
Elsewhere, odd comments these last few here. All of them.
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Patagonian, I meant an exclusively women’s party in terms of membership and administration, staffing, policy development etc. The policy platform itself can be universal.
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Anyone applying to join would have to prove they had a cunt? Trump’s and Abbott’s wives would qualify for two votes.
🙂
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Ohh, the misogyny. Here’s some real misogyny for the terminally confused:
A 20-year-old woman in Indonesia has been publicly caned for standing too close to her boyfriend, becoming the 14th person to be flogged this month in the same province.
The unnamed woman was accused of breaking Islamic Sharia law, which strictly forbids unmarried couples to become intimate, and was flogged in front of a crowd in Banda Aceh province.
She was escorted onto a stage outside a mosque wearing a headdress and was lashed with a cane.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/woman-becomes-latest-person-to-be-caned-for-standing-near-boyfriend-a7388776.html
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*Real misogyny* Havana?
I don’t know where you’re going with that one.
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She means that because Trump doesn’t advocate lashing women with a cane, a la Islamists, he isn’t a real misogynist. An interesting view.
(DQ rolls eyes.)
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Havana is a woman?
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No, but to a few – passive-aggressive “labelling” with the female gender seems to be some form of withering putdown. I try not to cry.
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I’ve called her “she” often before without contradiction. Can we accept anything he/she says at face value? The avatar name strikes me as female, as does the content.
We may need a sex test. 🙂
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My podcast response to Trump winning has a similar message I think to your thought-provoking post, albeit with me playing a parody of a disgusting misogynist character celebrating. It’s no surprise that real people have been doing this without irony, and some have asked where gender politics satire goes from here. For me, it’s trying to point out how incompatible misogyny is with modern society and economic prosperity but it’s still very much a part of human nature for the time being at least. Hopefully there are more than enough hints in my man brain podcast effort that it’s obviously trying to be humorous; but no matter how obvious, some may take it at face value. Anything creative is a gamble. https://youtu.be/4bHulQbw26s
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Thanks Dave, will listen.
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https://wakingup353.wordpress.com Hi all, please read my blog for extra perspectives. Thank you!
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