We’ve all met men like Donald Trump (DT) before, and if you’re a woman, you’ve probably met more than your fair share.
My “DT” came when I was just 19 years old, working as a summer TA to a college professor at community college. I was away from home, having gone to New York City from the South to “find myself.” My boss, a man who at first seemed hip for his age, began engaging in inappropriate conversations with me. During student presentations, he’d ask me about my sex life with my boyfriend. He commented on my looks and told me I dressed too modestly. “A girl like you should show more skin!” He would say in a jolly way, as if he were saying “Happy New Year!”
One night, he asked me to stay late and have a “working dinner.” I didn’t see it coming—I was 19, he was 40-something, and I hadn’t even heard of the term “sexual harassment.” It was 1993 and the gender rhetoric and landscape in mainstream society was quite different than it was today. Though I was a feminist and went to a women’s college, I had no idea that I should be suspicious of this “working dinner.”
Instead of ordering in a pizza, he took me all the way uptown, to a part of Manhattan I’d never been to before. I didn’t know where I was or how to get back to the lower East Side where I was living. He took me to a fancy restaurant that he said his “buddy” owned. They had no vegetarian dishes, and I couldn’t eat anything. He kept getting up nervously throughout the dinner, walking to the back, whispering with his “buddy,” and then coming back to the table. I don’t remember what we talked about—but when I got in the cab (at my insistence) to finally leave the place, he tried to lean in and kiss me. I turned my head, his disgusting mouth just barely missing my lips. I hopped in the cab and we sped away.
I didn’t tell anyone about the incident. I didn’t want to be fired; I couldn’t afford to lose my paycheck. Then too, I spent countless hours wondering what I had done to “send him the signal” that I was available or attracted to him. Going to work became terrifying, because I never knew what he was going to do. I wrapped myself in layers of clothing—long dresses with leggings underneath, head wraps, and long-sleeved shirts. It was July in New York City—I was unbearably hot all the time.
Though he never tried to kiss me again, he would follow me around at work. I’d be sitting in the cafeteria having lunch with a colleague, and I’d look up only to find him sitting at another table, staring at me. I started to receive prank calls at my apartment. I started to receive strange deliveries—balloons, random Chinese food, unsigned cards.
Eventually the summer, and the job, ended. I left New York City, returned to college and never saw this man again. I never told anyone about his behavior except for friends in private conversation. I was afraid of him and afraid of the consequences of reporting him. I did not yet have a playbook of female power from which to draw.
***
DT has, increasingly, been revealed to the be the predator and bully that his brash and uncouth language has always suggested he is. As I watched each debate, I was profoundly moved by one aspect of the debate performance of Hillary Clinton: her unflappable grit. I thought, “Here’s the playbook.”
I’ve tried to imagine myself confronted with the domineering bluster of a DT and something inside me pulls back. As women, we are so often conditioned to go quiet when attacked, to shrink back, to make ourselves smaller. (In fact, one of the first things you learn in a self-defense class for women is to curse and yell at any attacker because male attackers often do not expect women to come at them with a string of expletives.) But Hillary refuses to do that; she doesn’t shrink back. She is unafraid and unmoved by his attacks or his antics; she didn’t even break a sweat as he bloviated and called her names.
She didn’t let him off the hook for the things he said, she didn’t get exasperated by his obvious and insane lies—many of which were denials of things he’d said just days before and that were covered widely in the press—and she didn’t take a single bite of any of the obvious bait he threw at her. She did not equivocate on choice and she was able to control the conversation in a way that rendered him unmasked for everyone to see. By refusing to wilt in any way, Hillary showed DT to be the nervous, sensitive, thin-skinned narcissist that he is.
Watching this produced in me a strange turn of thought. I say that it is “strange” because as a staunch Bernie supporter throughout the primaries, I came to support Hillary out of party loyalty and an ever-increasing fear of Trump’s America. I continued to have serious doubts about Hillary despite deciding unwaveringly to vote for her many months ago. But last night, in the final debate, it finally hit me. I finally saw it in a way I never had; I finally saw Hillary for who she really is: a fearless, brilliant fighter.
In those moments of the debate when she was decimating DT, I felt like I was 19 again and what I saw on the stage was a stronger, wiser, older woman stepping in to reveal a dangerous and stupid predator for what he is. She has my back, I thought. I felt protected. She invoked in me a sense and feeling of safety in the face of retrograde masculinist thinking that perceives women as nothing more than “pieces of ass.” Hillary revealed herself to be the kind of advocate we all want when we are being victimized: calm, incisive, and strong.
Many memes online have compared the DT/HRC debates to two parents fighting.
Last night I felt somewhat like the imagined child of this meme and I thought: Mama got this. I don’t have to go “live with Grandma,” as this meme suggests, because Mama is handling her business.
This is profound because not only does it mean that, as Commander-in-Chief, she will unflinchingly advance the interests of Americans, but it also means that children like my daughter can grow up in a world seeing a public and powerful woman (or I too no longer take any shit) stand strong and steady in the face of blustering, toxic masculinity. This female grit is something we should choose and reward. It is an ideal we must uphold. It means that there will be a highly public model for women and girls of a particular iteration of female strength that we rarely get to see on the broad political and cultural stage.
Thank you, Hillary, for your indomitable spirit, for your grit.