Trump’s victory is a loss for American women
By: Charis Nixon
“You know, it doesn’t matter what they write as long as you have a young and beautiful piece of ass.” — Donald Trump to Esquire, 1991.
At 11 p.m. Tuesday night, the tension was palpable at the Democratic Party of Washoe County’s election watch party. Inside the Grand Sierra Resort, attendees sleepily watched the MSNBC election coverage as Hillary Clinton’s chances of winning grew slimmer.
Earlier that evening, NV assemblywoman Teresa Benitez-Thompson had said, “This is going to be a celebration, we know it.” However, this sentiment changed over the course of the night as results came in state by state.
A long, chaotic and incredibly divisive election season finally came to an end with the announcement that Donald Trump had won the presidency.
Hillary Clinton’s candidacy was clearly significant for women, as she was the first female major party candidate for president of the United States. However, Trump’s win is significant for women of this country in a completely different way.
Trump has made a number of misogynistic comments, the most notorious of which was caught on a hot microphone in 2005. This past October, a tape was leaked of a conversation Trump had with Access Hollywood host Billy Bush.
“I’m automatically attracted to beautiful,” Trump notoriously said in the tape, “I just start kissing them. I don’t even wait … Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”
The actions Trump describes are sexual assault. In a country where one in six women has been a victim of an attempted or completed rape in her lifetime, these comments cannot be brushed aside or dismissed as insignificant “locker room banter”.
“It’s abhorrent that he thinks it is OK to speak like that to and about women,” says junior political science major Lauren Barton, “I feel upset that half of our country elected a person who upholds the ideals that sexual assault is OK.”
“I am not a ‘piece of ass’,” says Caitlin Gatchalian, a freshman political science major and member of The Young Democrats of Nevada, “I am a person, a human being … You do not ‘grab me by the pussy.’”
Trump’s misogyny is apparent not only in his comments, but in his policy. Trump has vowed to defund Planned Parenthood, and he has said that “there has to be some form of punishment” for women who seek abortions.
“While I don’t think abortion is the right option for all women, it should be something that we get to choose. I personally come from a family of health care providers who have seen the benefit of Planned Parenthood’s other medical services,” says Dana Clare Vierra, a senior secondary education major.
In fact, only three percent of Planned Parenthood’s services are abortion-related, while 41 percent are STI/STD testing and treatment, 34 percent are contraception services, and 10 percent are cancer screening and prevention.
“If someone is pro-life, I believe that they should approve of Planned Parenthood because they provide birth control that … decreases the amount of abortions,” says Gatchalian, “If he defunds Planned Parenthood, I see more women getting unsafe abortions.”
Although Clinton’s supporters are dismayed by the results of this election, they still see hope in the fact that a woman was finally able to come this far in the process.
“We just need to work harder as a society and educate people more and show that it is good for women to do this,” says Barton, “Getting that far, it shows that it is going to be possible in the future.”
