By Elliott Brack, editor and publisher | It’s taken a while, but finally we see something good coming out of this worrisome, obnoxious and uncouth presidential campaign of 2016. And it’s something we could never have predicted.
It came as a result of one of Donald Trump’s many volcanic eruptions. This time it wasn’t some crude remark from the present-day, but a recording of his views of women in 2005 as revealed in a conversation with Billy Bush. You know the details.
That pronouncement caused a female author, Kelly Oxford, who writes on social media, to become outraged the day after the Trump revelation. She tweeted the following:
“Women, tweet me your first assaults. They aren’t just stats. I’ll go first. Old man on city bus grabs my (genitals) and smiles at me. I’m 12.”
Ms. Oxford told reporters later that when she first posted this, that she did not expect more than a handful of replies. “It was such a personal question. I thought: ‘No one is going to share anything on Twitter.’ ”
Was she wrong! She had posted it at 7:48 p.m. on Friday, October 7. By Saturday morning, she was getting as many as 50 replies per minute. These were not just casual postings, but many first-person accounts of molestations. By Monday afternoon, there had been 27 million postings or visits to her site about her initial tweet, with women often telling their stories for the first time.
By bringing her painful memory to the surface, Mr. Oxford provided a safe space for women all across the country to voice their experiences. She broke the ice on a painful confrontation, and was flooded with messages from women recounting their own nightmares.
Sadly, it shows just how outrageous and crude some men can be, and how many women feel personally shaken by what happened to them, who often kept their feelings under cover, and were ashamed of it, thinking they caused it.
Our nation has long recognized that violence against women by men (and occasionally by women against men) is a problem. Yet little of significance has been done to shake up the country about this, or to recognize how widespread the problem is all across the country and at all levels of society.
But now it is in the forefront, coming virtually out of nowhere to become a major topic of conversation…..all because of Donald Trump’s vast misunderstanding of the role of men and women.
Many women who have experienced these transgressions may not have realized just how widespread this problem has been until now. Perhaps they thought it was a just a one time matter for them, not recognizing how many women have experienced this themselves. So they kept quiet about it, perhaps never telling even their parents, but kept it bottled up inside them.
This recent uproar may have been something of a catharsis for these women, giving them a new understanding that it is not just them, but many women, who experienced this.
So no matter the results of the 2016 presidential contest, we will remember this election cycle as a time when a remark by a presidential candidate had an unintended consequence. It may well shape society evermore in recognizing the problems from the crude behavior of many men that women face many more times than many would have thought.
For that, we can thank Donald Trump.
- Have a comment? Send to: elliott@brack.net
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