After the second presidential debate, a male blogger attempted to explain to a male reader why women were upset with Donald Trump, especially his body language as he hovered in the background while Hillary Clinton talked. Trump’s behavior was intimidating, said the blogger, a gesture akin to a sport car driver being crowded off the highway by a truck. I applaud writer’s effort to interpret for another man why women were upset, but he misunderstood the situation. During the debate, Hillary didn’t appear to be intimidated and probably wasn’t. After facing down a world leader like Vladimir Putin, Trump was a paper tiger. But the blogger felt a little mansplaining was necessary to defend feminists who were reacting to Trump.
Courtesy of www.enstarz.com
Males have been busy explaining females for hundreds of years, as if the “weaker sex” were unable to give an account of itself. Sigmund Freud was a “great help” when he concluded women were too frail to endure the ordinary stresses of life and were hysterical by nature. His attempt to mansplain to one half of the world’s population the other was nothing short of an insult. “Gentlemen, if you can’t understand your mothers, wives and daughters, it is because they live in a perpetual state of infancy.” Sadly, he was not alone in this view. The major religions of the world have painted females as weak and much, much worse. (Blog 9/4/14)
Given that history is most often written by men, is it any wonder that Donald Trump is blinded by a sense of masculine entitlement? Competitive to an extreme, he challenges anyone who fails to worship at his alter. But he isn’t the first man to be destabilized when confronted with a competent female. Nor will he the last.
What women reacted to in the second presidential debate wasn’t Trump’s bullying, but the idiotic notion that Hillary could be bullied.
