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?
9 Comments
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Pussy Riot has ruined it, not Trump’s words.
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A subset would be Trump cruelty watch, how the powerless and already victimized are further victimized by his amorality. It’s rather like bear baiting, except it “cripple taunting”…
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Judging from myself, I’d say that leftists will be turned off by fantasies of Trump-style sexism. If until now, I had aggressive sexist fantasies at times, the fact that I now associate them with Trump is a complete turn-off. Thus, Trump’s talk about “grabbing pussy” because it comes from Trump will probably solidify the feminism of many males on the left, who up to now, secretly fantasized about grabbing certain parts of the female anatomy. A psychoanalyst probably could make something more of that, but that’s how I register it so far.
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That should be the worst thing Trump and the Republicends do.
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The nuclear war stuff is spot on. The short answer, obviously, is that they do not believe their own rhetoric. Of course they don’t, and we all know that implicitly. It’s akin to one of those things Zizek always brings up, when we just assume there’s some other imaginary person out there who believes the nonsense even if we personally don’t. It also shows in the utterly preposterous way they pretend as though the Democrats bellicose rhetoric as well as purposed actions (such as a no fly zone in Syria) with regards to Russia somehow made them less likely to start a war. They’ve done way, way more to pick a fight with Russia than Trump has come close to doing with China. They don’t actually believe this, but feel like their keeping up appearances for someone who does.
One of the worst social media arguments after the election I got in is when I dared to say that few things were as transparently phony as the outrage over “grab her by the pussy.” Even if you set aside the obvious glee with which every night show host and half your friends repeated the line and joked about it, this kind of language is mild at best and everyone in the room knows it. You hear far worse in pop music, on TV and in film every day. But we all go along pretending that some other imaginary person out there is really offended even if most of us art. I understand that sexual assault is a terrible thing and is also worthy of outrage, but a crude comment like that doesn’t equate to sexual assault, and everyone damn well knows it. You do too. It was made even more absurd by the fact Bill Clinton actually has sexually harassed Paula Jones. Everyone knows that too. But no…..once again we had to pretend that some other bozo might fall for the bullshit.
It’s all so phony. It’s almost paralyzed me, made me unable to engage in any political action.
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How do you compare the way people talk about Trump starting a nuclear war with the way people talk about climate change? I believe climate change is very real and will likely have effects comparable to nuclear war. Hell, I actually believe there is a chance climate change will itself precipitate a nuclear war over food.
How should I talk about this to prove my sincerity? How should I act to prove my sincerity? I think the answer for this as with the nuclear war fears is: the talk is weirdly passive because people genuinely have no idea what to do. If these things have/can happen(ed), then our whole way of life is implicated in them. And like Marcuse talks about in One Dimensional Man, we really don’t have the political imagination anymore to deal with such totalizing problems.
In that sense I think this is different than when I criticize people who claim to believe in Hell but sure do not act like they do. Often their religion has laid out some guidelines for how to avoid that, so at least there is a path for one to follow.
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An easy way to show you’re serious: openly criticize the Democrats for stoking hostilities with Russia both in terms of the overheated rhetoric as a result of the suspected (and to some degree substantiated…who knows what’s bullshit and what isn’t) hacking as well as our intervention in backing the coups in both Syria and Ukraine. A liberal who does these things is so rare that they’d be on the endangered species list. I, honest to God, had a Facebook fight with a friend who tried to argue that starting a new Cold War with Russia was a path to world peace as well as claiming “no one died during the Cold War.” I’d like to say this is unusual, but it’s pretty standard for the garbage that passes as liberal ideology in the US. Maybe Marcuse was right about a lack of critical thinking. He was also right about using the threat of nuclear war to bolster thoroughly reactionary politics and governments on both sides of the Cold War because this threat would frighten people into compliance.
If you’re actually serious about your Trump rhetoric, be more specific. “I think Trump’s recent actions concerning Taiwan and the South China Sea could lead to armed conflict and possibly even nuclear war.” I’d say that statement, in and of itself, is pretty far fetched, but at least it’s somewhat specific. It talks about actual nuclear super powers and actual things he has done. Not just some vague “nuclear war” where you don’t even talk about a scenario or potential antagonists involved. It’s silly, and I just don’t have the patience for it anymore.
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Having lived through the cold war and frequent nightmares about nuclear holocaust, this all rings familiar to me. You don’t really believe it will happen, but you know that it really can happen, and either way you are powerless to do anything about it. So you make a joke, get on with your day, and have more nightmares.
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Blondes. Hotter than brunettes. (See Brunettes).
Brunettes. Hotter than blondes. (See Blondes).
Woman. Member of the sex. One of Adam’s ribs. Don’t say ‘the little woman’ but ‘my lady’ or still preferable ‘my better half’.
(Flaubert, Dictionary of Received Ideas).