Monday, May 16, 2016

I Can’t Believe This!

The big story this Monday is a NYT article about Donald Trump’s past relations with women:  many accusations, few kudos.
I can hardly believe that in the year 2016, sex having been the main topic in ads, television shows, movies and songs for more than fifty years, America’s so-called newspaper of record pins its anti-Trump campaign on remarks he has made about women’s bodies.
Rating female bodies on a scale of one to ten has probably been going on since that fateful bite of the apple.  In the early fifties, I was married to an upper class (former military) Frenchman who in that respect was no different from the boys I had dated as a freshman in Philly’s high school for high achievers - or the Donald.  As for the bathing suit episode, heavens to Betsey, in 1963, Fidel Castro took a bath towel out in his little house on the beach at Santa Maria, then left me to shower. 
Trump’s crime, after inviting a model to choose a bathing suit, was to proudly showed off her figure to the other guests. Isn’t that what ‘Miss’ pageants are all about? Have pool parties suddenly become the standard for decorum? 
I have my own reasons for worrying about Donald Trump becoming president, but as a woman who wrote the only book that foresaw the reunification of Europe AND the dissolution of the Soviet Union, yet was advised by a so-called ‘progressive’ French publisher, to rather write about my life, I identify with those women who thank Trump for giving them high responsibilities in a man’s world.
Hello, America, sex and entertainment go together, but so do sex and politics: history is full of ‘great’ leaders who were known to be unfaithful, and it’s only America’s Puritan tradition that limits public exposure. Energetic people, broadly speaking, tend to have energetic sex lives. And in the country that literally invented the public worship of women’s bodies, (using and misusing women’s bodies to sell stuff), isn’t it a bit hypocritical to base what should be a story about ‘issues’ on a man’s love of beautiful women, who only retroactively reveal their discomfort?

If the New York Times wants to discourage American’s from voting for Trump, knowing that its foreign policy experts can only simplistically claim his speech is riddled with contradictions, they can call on me.  

1 comment:

  1. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete