It’s election season in 2016. Of course we are all aware that Trump is a dangerous narcissist, but remember that Clinton is also imperfect. It sometimes is hard to tell which of two candidates is better when neither is ideal. So I made this diagram to explain how Trump could be the choice of so many Americans.
The diagram shows how I imagine America rates men and women from absolute virtue at the top to absolute evil on the bottom. It clearly shows Trump at a slightly more venerable position than Clinton. What other evidence do you need?
Kidding aside, I think that even if there was a scale of virtue like this, the lowest women category exists in the minds of some men only – there is no one actually in that box. This is a depiction of the worst slice of our slut-shaming misogynist culture.
If women didn’t have the vote, Trump would win in a landslide; but even scarier is that millions of women are voting for him – a majority in many states. The only way I can understand that is that millions of women see the world the way the diagram is shown, with women having greater innate sin. If anyone thinks we don’t need feminism any more, consider the internalized misogyny of those millions, and all the forces that are keeping up this social-values map alive in the national consciousness.
Drawing the diagram and writing “slutty” was hard for me to do, and I feel dirty, and exposed to fire from all sides. I’m pushing past that and posting it anyway because I think it is part of the value system in America and it does help explain why the election is going as it is. In fact I think it’s an essential ingredient to understanding what is going on.
I’ve never seen weirder and more massive mental programming than what is going on now. Maybe the scale of the calamity shocks us into mindless compliance somehow. I can’t even find words to express the sadness of the loss of heart, the loss of dialog, sanity, and reason. I feel there is a gigantic shift in perspective happening that is so great that we are no longer even standing on the ground. But that’s just a tiny bit of what I’m feeling about it; I have no way to say more. I pray that others can find words to say the thing more fully, and that the people hurting from the shaming will find ease and vision somehow, to pull ourselves back to grounded reality.
Star Ford 