For Many Women, Trump’s ‘Locker Room Talk’ Brings Memories of Abuse
It was the author Kelly Oxford, a social media powerhouse, who got things started on Friday night.
“Women: tweet me your first assaults,” she wrote on Twitter at 7:48 p.m. “They aren’t just stats. I’ll
go first: Old man on city bus grabs my ‘pussy’ and smiles at me, I’m 12.”
When
she first posted the message, Ms. Oxford said in an interview later,
she did not expect more than a handful of replies. “It was such a
personal question,” she said. “I thought, ‘No one is going to share
anything on Twitter.’”
Yet
by Saturday morning, she was getting as many as 50 responses per
minute: often-explicit, first-person accounts of molestation. A hashtag
had materialized: “#notokay.” The Twitter posts continued to pour in
through the weekend. And by Monday afternoon, nearly 27 million people
had responded or visited Ms. Oxford’s Twitter page.
As swiftly as the release of a recording of Donald J. Trump
engaging in banter about forcing himself on women had dealt a
potentially fatal blow to his presidential campaign, it also had become a
rallying cry for survivors of sexual assault, harassment and other
forms of abuse.
“I won’t give details, but I was 12, and he went to jail,” Emily Willingham, a writer, posted on Twitter.
A
social media movement was born as multitudes of women came forward to
share their stories. The result has been a kind of collective,
nationwide purge of painful, often long-buried memories.
Facebook
pages and Twitter feeds filled with comments and multiplying threads
from women who recalled being groped by doctors, by piano teachers, by
photography instructors, by perfect strangers. They told stories of
being flashed on the bus by masturbators, of having male colleagues rub
up against them at the copy machine in their office, of dates and bosses
demanding sex.
Sasha Stone, an entertainment journalist, told of being forced to perform oral sex on a man “after he offered me a ride home and then threatened me. I was 14.”
Wendy Luxenburg, 45, a hospital administrator in Chicago, recalled being in a Florida department store with her mother: “She was an aisle away. Man walks by me, rubbed by crotch. I was 11.”
And the actress Amber Tamblyn wrote on Instagram
of being accosted at a nightclub by an ex-boyfriend who grabbed her by
the hair and, with his other hand, lifted her by her vagina, bruising
her badly, and “carried me, like something he owned, like a piece of
trash, out of the club.”
This
is scarcely the first protest movement to emerge in response to
violence against women: The 1970s gave rise to the first Take Back the
Night candlelight marches.
More
recently, after a Toronto police officer told college students that if
women wanted to avoid rape, they should not dress like “sluts,” groups
in cities from New York to New Delhi have staged SlutWalks.
Nor
is Mr. Trump the first public figure whose sexual behavior has been
scrutinized. It seems fair to wonder if Bill Clinton could be elected
today, given what is now known about his extramarital history. And, of
course, there was Anthony Weiner, with his penchant for sending lewd
social media messages and photos.
But
to many victims of sexual assault, Mr. Trump’s words struck a
particular nerve. It was not simply that he is the Republican
presidential nominee, and that a hot microphone had captured him
speaking unguardedly. It was his casual tone, the manner in which he and
the television personality Billy Bush appeared to be speaking a common
language, many women said, that gave Mr. Trump’s boasts a special
resonance.
What
he said and how he said it seemed to say as much about the broader
environment toward women — an environment that had kept many of these
women silent for so long — as they did about the candidate. And Mr.
Trump’s dismissal of his actions as “locker room talk” only underscored
the point.
“This
is RAPE CULTURE — the cultural conditioning of men and boys to feel
entitled to treat women as objects,” Jill Gallenstein, 40, a retail
executive in Los Angeles, wrote on Facebook.
“It’s women and girls questioning what they have done to provoke such
behavior. It’s the dismissing of this behavior because ‘it’s the way it
has always been.’ It’s justifying the behavior because other powerful
men have done it too. ‘Locker room talk’ normalizes this behavior — what
we say matters.”
That locker room talk also seemed to create its own momentum online.
“I’ve never really thought about these moments cumulatively before,” Julie Oppenheimer of Chicago wrote on Facebook,
after listing a few episodes of her own, including being kissed on the
mouth by the janitor at her synagogue when she was 13. “In part, because
they seem so ‘small’ compared to what many have experienced — not
worthy of consideration. That’s because all of us already live in
Trump’s world, where these behaviors are commonplace.”
Laura
Sabransky was one of many women who added to Ms. Oppenheimer’s thread,
writing that she had been given date-rape drugs three times between high
school and college. “I call Trump a walking trigger alert,” she said in
an interview. “He is triggering anxiety and PTSD-like reactions in
women, me included.”
Even
before the release of the 2005 recording of Mr. Trump, 2016 was shaping
up as something of a watershed year for awareness of sexual harassment,
between the pending trial against Bill Cosby and the high-profile case of Brock Turner, the former Stanford University student who was convicted of sexual assault.
For many women watching and reacting to the weekend’s events, the surprise news conference on Facebook Live
that Mr. Trump staged before Sunday night’s debate, with three women
who have long accused Mr. Clinton of sexual assault or harassment, only
compounded the damage he had done in the original recording. They saw
him not as giving voice to victims of sexual abuse but as using the
women as props.
“It’s
pretty sad when you see it as, ‘My behavior is not as bad as another
man’s behavior,’” said Sonia Ossorio, the president of the National
Organization for Women of New York. “The irony for me is, in a campaign
short on any concrete policies, Donald Trump has accidentally shed light
on a very serious issue.”
Amy
Richards, a co-founder of the Third Wave Foundation, a group for young
feminists, said that many sexual abuse victims who unburdened themselves
after Mr. Trump’s video did not want his comments to be seen as
anomalous. “Some of it was so that we automatically didn’t go to this
place of having this one instance be an exception and therefore more
excusable,” she said. “Yes, this is women speaking up, but it’s speaking
up to all of the Donald Trumps in our lives.”
And there appear to be many.
“Grabbed from behind on the street. Thought it was my fault because I was wearing a dress,” Lynne Boschee, 50, of Phoenix, wrote on Twitter. “Never told anyone. I was 14.”
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