I am sure you have all heard some of the lewd comments that have recently surfaced from the GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump. If not, here are some of the highlights of the conversation:
- “I moved on her like a b****, but I couldn’t get there. And she was married.”
- “I did try and f*** her. She was married.”
- “Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”
- “Grab them by the p***y. You can do anything.”
These statements were made during a 2005 "hot mic" moment while the GOP nominee was talking with Access Hollywood's Billy Bush. Here is a link to the full video, showing the entire conversation between Trump and Billy Bush on the Access Hollywood bus.
While this is by no means acceptable behavior for a presidential candidate, we can't solely blame Trump. In response to the outrage over these statements, Trump said at Sunday's debate that this was, "locker room talk," and a lot of his followers back him up on this. Many athletes have come out and remarked that they have never talked about sexual assault in the locker room. Grant Hill, former NBA star tweeted “I’ve been in a lot of locker rooms, and what Trump said is not locker room banter.” This may be the case today, but when Donald was growing up this was a socially acceptable way of conducting yourself and as we can see by voter preference, as reported by PEW research center (image below), Trump is doing much better with the older baby boomer generation. So does this explain the acceptance of these comments by his followers as harmless "locker room talk"?
Billy Bush has since been let go from NBC. This may come as a surprise but if you look at his comments in response to Trump, he eggs him on and encourages Trump's vulgar comments about women. Once off the bus, Billy pushes for "Days of Our Lives" actress Arianne Zucker to give Trump a hug after making comments about her being "hot as s***" on the bus. It seems NBC is more strict about the conduct of their host than the American people are about the conduct of thier presidential candidates.
Whether the acceptance of Trump's comments by his devout followers is due to their age or not, this may be indicative of a larger problem in our society. As we have seen by recent events such as Brock Turner's outrageously short sentence for raping a young woman, we do have a culture that normalizes sexual violence from men. This shows that this election may be about not only policy but about where we are headed culturally. Are we going to step back into the rape culture that many millennials imagined to be gone or are we going to show that these comments are not acceptable in today's society?
