Hillary Clinton’s instant-classic “Mirrors” ad:
features girls looking into the mirror while listening to a few of Trump’s misogynist insults. The memorable tag line: “Is this the president we want for our daughters?” asks a profound question. I would hope every mother and father of daughters would reject any candidate whose pattern of behavior reveals a violent contempt for women and girls. Upon watching the ad, as the father of a male child, another thought immediately came to mind: “Is this the president we want for our sons?”
Trump is championing a retrograde toxic masculinity, racial animus, religious intolerance, and pugnacious bellicosity that is the opposite of the kind, caring, and respectful men I hope we’re trying to teach our sons to be. I'm almost as concerned about the horrific messages that Trump is sending to boys about men's right to attack women's appearances and treat women like discardable trophies as I am about the demeaning messages of enforced inferiority he's sending to girls.
Because more examples seem to be emitted every day, because it's hard to keep track, and because the sheer quantity and cumulative impact of the examples is shocking in and of itself, I'll post links here to compilations of some of the most racist www.huffingtonpost.com/... and sexist www.telegraph.co.uk/... statements by Donald Trump.
I’ve facilitated groups confronting men who batter, and Trump’s pathological refusal to take responsibility for his own racist, misogynist, sizeist, and ableist statements, and repeatedly lying about them (see www.politifact.com/...), reminds me of men who desperately deny any responsibility for their own violent, abusive, and controlling behavior, even as their partners’ black eyes swell painfully shut. Even after he’s been confronted about how much pain his statements have caused (to the Khan family, for example), he’s doubled down (most recently against former Miss Universe, Ms. Machado), acted as if he’s the aggrieved party (how dare anyone question his right to perpetrate hate?), and, full of pseudo-righteous entitlement, renewed his bullying attacks again.
Given Trump’s misogyny, as Melissa Deckman put it in a lede to an article in the Washington Post, www.washingtonpost.com/...“Why on Earth, many people are asking, would any woman vote for Donald Trump?” It’s another good question. But I want to ask a corollary question. Why on earth would any man vote for Trump? Trump’s nostalgic appeal to make 1950s-style white supremacism and misogynist masculinity great again has seemed to strike a chord with too many of those of us who are white men, and supplies part of the answer. (For Trump’s answer to the question, when was America great, see www.cnn.com/… (in summary: Trump said it was at the turn of the 20th century, and in the 1950s. For some of his supporter’s answers, see www.youtube.com/...).
According to Arlie Hochschild's new book, Strangers in Their Own Land (books.google.com/... ), part of Trump's appeal to too many men is his promise to make “men 'great again.'” According to a Pew Research Poll (www.pewresearch.org/...) back in July, 59% of white men (as compared with 42% of white women, 30% of Hispanic men, and only 7% of African-American men) said they planned to vote for Trump. And though some outlets have rightly reported that this phenomenon is more pronounced among less educated white men, a profound (18 point) gender gap persists across educational attainment lines: 49% of college-educated white men said they’d vote for Trump (42% for Clinton), as compared with 31% of college-educated white women.
A majority of those of us who are white men seem to be conforming to the stereotype of us as bigots. Trump is demanding that we vote for bigotry, and too many of us seem too ready to follow in goose-step. If we don’t like being characterized as insensitive racists and sexists, we need to start confronting our own and other white men’s prejudices and privileges. As a white man, I believe I have a special responsibility to call on white men to confound the social conditioning that taught many of us to expect unearned status. As a secular Jewish man, I have a responsibility to denounce the Trump campaign’s anti-Muslim scare-mongering attacks on the First Amendment. We need to reject all appeals to bigotry. Maybe we need to start some new organizations (supplementing existing pro-feminist organizations like HeForShe, the National Organization for Men Against Sexism, Men Can Stop Rape, and the White Ribbon Campaign). Male parents might create “Dads Denouncing Denigration.” Men as a whole might start “Men Decrying Misogynist Messages.”
And younger white male voters are starting to lead the way. The Pew Poll found that, among men aged 18-34, 40% support Trump (51% Clinton)*, compared to 57% of men aged 50-64 (37% Clinton). For older white men, it’s time for us to learn from many people of color, from women in general and from our daughters, and from our sons, that, as Martin Luther King said: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Any white man who believes in racial justice, gender justice, justice for our daughters, justice for our sons, or indeed, in justice for all, cannot, in good conscience, support the hate-filled campaign of Donald Trump.
There's been a lot of talk about mobilizing the women's vote against Trump's sexism. That's vitally important. Yet just as it’s white people's job to challenge racism, it's men's ethical responsibility to challenge sexism. After all, it's the privileged-status groups who created and continue to sustain the problems of oppression. So, let's challenge all the men we know to care enough about all the women, girls, and boys in our lives, to take their humanity, their opportunities, their ethics, and their futures, equally seriously. We owe it to all our daughters, and all our sons, to reject Trump's racist misogyny.
*There is still a 15 point gender gap in support for Trump between 18-34 year old women and men (in other words, only 25% of younger women support Trump).