Donald Trump has said repugnant, insulting things about women—over and over and over again—for as long as he’s been in the public eye. He has called various women crazy, flat-chested, pigs. He refers to them as “pieces of ass.” He said pumping breast milk was “disgusting.”
“Women,” he told New York magazine in 1992. “You have to treat them like shit.”
Trump’s misogyny is shocking because it’s so brazen, but it’s infuriating because it’s so familiar. Chances are, if you’re a woman in 2016, you’ve heard it all before.
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The first time you meet Donald Trump, he’s an older male relative who smells like cigarettes and asks when you are going to lose that weight. You’re 9 years old. Your parents have to go out and buy a bottle of vodka for him before he arrives. His name is Dick. No, really, it is. At dinner one night, he explains to you that black people are dangerous. “If you turn around, they’ll put a knife in your back.” Except Bill Cosby. “He’s one of the good ones.” Turns out he’s wrong about Cosby and everything else, but the statute of limitations on Dick’s existence on Earth will run out before that information is widely available.
The next time you meet Donald Trump you’re in high school. You’re on the Academic Decathlon team because those are the kinds of extracurriculars a nerd like you gets down with. Model U.N., Thespians, Scholar Quiz, getting those good report cards with no boyfriends anywhere, girl! The teacher who’s volunteered to cover the Lit portion of the Decathlon is also the tennis coach, and he’s going over Ezra Pound’s poem, “Portrait d’une Femme,” with you and your teammates. He’s the first person who looks at you a certain way that will happen again and again for the rest of your life, as if he simultaneously can’t see you and would like to kill you. He tells you the woman in the poem is “clearly a prostitute,” which is very, very wrong. You explain to him that this part …