From Locker Room to Oval Office: A Reactionary Memoir

Admittedly, I hadn’t been following the 2016 election that closely, at least not closely as I could have, but bits and pieces about either candidate would still inevitably seep into my peripheral awareness via friends, work or my Facebook feed. I didn’t have a strong sense of what Hillary Clinton was really about but it was inarguable that she had decidedly more political experience than the zero experience Donald Trump had, which I believed, on a basic level, made her more qualified for the job.

Still, I was by no means a raging fan of hers. I also didn’t feel inclined to support Trump. Even though I could see the appeal of getting somebody completely outside of the corrupt and confusing political milieu of Washington to run the show and “shake things up,” I didn’t care for his attitude and personality: I found him to be too arrogant, defensive and childish to realistically be trusted with running a country. But then, one October morning while listening to the radio, I heard about the release of The Washington Post video, the one from the tour bus detailing the verbatim atrocities from Trump’s now infamous “locker room talk” conversation, and I swelled with sudden, vivid and undeniable conviction over who I supported.

I used to run a girls’ dormitory in a therapeutic boarding school: sixteen girls ages 15-19, many of whom had experienced sexual, verbal and emotional abuse by the hands of various boys and men in their lives. For two years, I cared for them and listened as they cried, sharing stories ranging from uncomfortable to heart-wrenching.

One fifteen-year-old from California told tales of how she was repeatedly raped by an abusive boyfriend who threatened to kill her if she left or “lied” to her friends about what was going on. She confided about how he would tell her, “it’s your job,” while he raped her as way of excusing himself. Another girl from Virginia shared how she believed her body image issues took root back when she was just 12 years old and her religiously devout and stern father would force she and her sisters line up at the front door before leaving for school so that he could inspect what they were wearing, to make sure they weren’t “dressed like sluts.” Yet another story of a girl hailing from Chicago whose best friend attempted to rape her one night while they were drunk, then tried to deny it the next day, adamantly insisting to all their mutual friends, “please, she’s not pretty enough.”

Those girls I cared for and will never forget were molested by brothers and fathers; abused by friends and boyfriends; and called sluts, whores, and skanks by boys at school, and often worse by other girls, even though some of them were still virgins. So many painful vignettes depicting times when they were objectified, mistreated, undervalued, trivialized.

Later, as I watched the Post video and read the transcript, a choking familiarity washed over me. I knew that kind of talk, I recognized that flavor of spirit. From the Post:

“And when you’re a star, they let you do it,” Trump says. “You can do anything.” “Whatever you want,” says another voice, apparently Bush’s. “Grab them by the pussy,” Trump says. “You can do anything.”

Trump may not have been directly responsible for things my students went through, but when he displayed that kind of regard for women, he was condoning and bragging about sexual assault, blatantly stating that he believed he could do anything he wanted to a woman’s body just because he’s famous. That behavior and attitude modeled from an authority figure can have widespread, lasting consequences and should not be dismissed as trivial talk. That attitude can trickle down, coloring the minds of men and boys, women and girls, normalizing the appalling and criminal behavior, and sending the message that it’s okay to touch a woman without her permission if the man can justify it to himself or his peers. It took little imagination to see reflections of that belief woven throughout my girls’ histories of abuse, making it decidedly and irrefutably apparent to me, what a danger a role model such as Donald Trump would be for the youth of our country.