Trumpland, Day 1: What effect will Trump have on phone sex?
I’ve been thinking of starting a diary of life in Trumpland. Less a political journal than a record of the changes in the way we live and speak, the oddities of our new existence. I’ve always been fascinated by the everyday life of politics, how high matters of state insinuate themselves into the lowest corners of our minds and manners. Trump is going to offer us a lot of material.
So here are two things I’ve noticed.
First, the frequency with which people—friends, colleagues, family, on social media and in real life—talk about Trump starting a nuclear war. What strikes me is how passive the commentary is, as if people were contemplating a coming snowstorm or stretch of bad weather. You’d never know they were discussing the evaporation of themselves, their friends, and families. It reminds me of that title of Philip Gourevitch’s book on the Rwandan genocide: We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families.
Second, the suddenly ubiquitous use of the word “pussy.” I was first struck by this in a conversation I had not long after the election with an esteemed historian, who said something in passing to me about Trump “grabbing pussy.” But now I hear and see it everywhere. Parents and children knitting their pussy hats, making signs with the word pussy on it, everyone’s talking pussy. I wonder how mothers and fathers negotiate that terrain with their adolescent sons and daughters. Or, frankly, their grownup sons and daughters.
Conversely, I wonder what kind of effect this new Trumpist vernacular will have, or has had, on people’s sex lives. Has “pussy” been permanently ruined as an item of dirty talk, whether because of what Trump said or because people now use the word so so often and so casually? Has it been removed from the lexicon of phone sex? Or maybe there’s a political valence to its effects, with liberals and leftists turned off by it, conservatives and Republicans turned on by it? Or maybe the reverse?