After Donald Trump was elected as our next president on November 8th, some of us ran out to the streets to celebrate. Some of us crawled into our beds and cried (read: me). And, some of us took to Twitter to bash our next First Lady, Melania Trump.
After the New York Post caught the public’s attention to some of the nude photos Melania Trump had taken at 25 years old, liberals and conservatives alike began to use her as ammunition against Donald Trump’s candidacy. Over the course of campaign season, Melania has been subjected to liberal scorn -- websites such as Jezebel have described her as “so studiously proud, vapid, and absent that she resists close analysis.” The Washington Post has gone so far as to call her a “professional pretty person,” whereas many Twitter users have called her a slut, a bimbo, and even a “dumb cunt.” Meanwhile, conservative anti-Trump superPACs have used Melania’s revealing photos in various attack ads. One particular ad featured Melania lying nude on a bed and read “Meet Melania Trump, your next first lady. Or, you could support Ted Cruz…”
So, basically, everyone thinks Melania Trump is nothing but a trophy wife, but that’s actually far from the truth. Melania Trump was a successful fashion model long before she married Donald Trump. She is an entrepreneur, and she speaks five languages: Slovenian, English, French, Serbian, and German. Yet, liberals and conservatives alike think that, as Refinery29 puts it, “she’s little more than a high-cheekboned Eastern European former bottle girl who struck gold in the rich-white-husband lottery, who made her way up in the world simply by opening her legs for a guy with the right amount of $100s in his wallet.”
But, this kind of outlook isn’t just sexist and offensive -- it discourages women from outwardly accepting their own sexuality. By suggesting that a couple of nude photos make her fundamentally unfit to assume the role of First Lady, we buy into this retrograde perspective that a woman can’t serve as a role model if the public has seen her breasts. Just because a woman has accepted her sexuality doesn’t mean that she shouldn’t be taken seriously.
Yes, Melania Trump will definitely be a different First Lady than Michelle Obama, but that’s only because Trump and Obama share different backgrounds, different priorities, and different interests -- Melania’s nude photos do not make her any less of a First Lady than Michelle is. What’s interesting is that Michelle Obama has had to face similar scrutiny over the last 8 years as well. People left and right have called her an ape, and she has been attacked by a disgustingly racist, sexist cartoon that compared her looks to Melania Trump’s. Obama was even shamed for exposing her bare arms in official White House photos -- her arms. Both cases show how the First Lady is wrongly seen as, according to the Huffington Post, “an extension of her husband, rather than as an individual in her own right.” Instead of focusing on their projects and philanthropy, we continue to emphasize their makeup, clothes, and shoes.
Melania does not need to apologize for something she did over 20 years ago for her job, something that 9 out of 10 millennial American women have privately done in their lifetimes according to a 2014 survey by Cosmopolitan magazine. Melania’s photos tell me nothing about who she is, and honestly, what’s the big deal? Let’s not reduce her status down to that of a “thing” rather than of a human being. Why can’t society just leave us women alone?
