David QuinnThe presidential candidate is a symptom of a wider malaise, writes David Quinn
Culture produces character. By culture, I don’t mean high culture, I mean all the things that shape our attitudes and our values. Low culture also produces character and today culture has gone extremely low. It values the sordid, the crude and the vulgar.
Such a culture has produced Donald Trump. Donald Trump’s character is now under examination even more than his policies. A couple of weeks ago, an 11-year-old video came to light in which he casually discussed women in an incredibly crude, vulgar and demeaning way. Rightly, there was uproar.
But the surprise is that there was any surprise. Donald Trump has never tried to hide his attitudes towards sex and towards women. His attitudes are basically borrowed from Playboy magazine. In fact, he has appeared in Playboy videos, has hung out with Playboy ‘playmates’ and has a framed copy of a Playboy cover on the wall of one of his offices.
Supporter
Trump has happily appeared on Howard Stern’s radio show (Stern is a ‘shock jock’) and has aired his views about women and sex for all the world to hear. He has been doing this for years, including back when he was a supporter of the Democratic party and was feted by the likes of Bill and Hillary Clinton. They knew then the sort of man he was and they didn’t mind one bit.
Donald Trump is 70. He was born in 1946. He came of age during the 1960s and 1970s when the sex revolution was getting into full swing, when sales of the likes of Playboy were at their peak. Donald Trump probably fancies that he is a liberated man, that he has cast off the shackles of the ‘sexually repressive’ era that his parents and grandparents grew up in. Donald Trump is very much ‘Hugh Hefner Man’. Hefner is the founder of Playboy and in their attitudes towards women, there is probably the width of a cigarette paper to separate them.
Hefner, incidentally, is, like an earlier Trump, a supporter of the Democratic party. Like Trump until yesterday, he is a supporter of abortion. You can’t have the sexual revolution without abortion. Without abortion you’re probably going to have to commit to the person you’re having sex with in case there is a pregnancy. Contraception fails a lot of the time, after all, or you don’t use it in the heat of the moment. So abortion is needed as a back-up. First and foremost, ‘sexual liberation’ means ‘liberation’ from whatever ties sex to commitment, unless you’re finally ready to commit, of course.
This is why Trump’s sudden conversion to the pro-life cause simply can’t be taken seriously. It is totally insincere.
None of this is to say that there haven’t always been men like Donald Trump, that there haven’t always been men who have cheated on their wives and have regarded women as playthings. But it is a very long time since it has been made so easy to cheat on a spouse, and whether there has ever been such a sexually crude and highly sexualised culture is extremely open to question.
This is a culture where the singer Miley Cyrus tries to shake off her previous ‘good girl’ image by ‘twerking’ with the best of them onstage. (If you don’t know what that is, you’re far better off not knowing).
Mega-selling pop singers like Beyonce, her husband Jay Z, Rihanna, sell their millions of records by producing astonishingly sexually unabashed (‘liberated’) lyrics set to astonishingly sexually unabashed (‘liberated’) music videos.
Pop singers are, almost to the last man and woman, supporters of the Democratic party. So is nearly the entirety of Hollywood. Every other Hollywood movie encourages men and women to objectify each other and to think that sex has no relationship to, well, relationships, that sex is to be seen as an end in and of itself and that we’re better off regarding it so because that is ‘liberating’.
Series like Girls or Sex in the City encourage women to adopt the same sexual behaviour as the most predatory men.
Barack and Michelle Obama and Bill and Hillary Clinton like to hang out with gods and goddesses of the music industry and don’t seem especially bothered by the ultra-sexualised videos and lyrics produced by their pals in that industry. Or in Hollywood.
And lest we forget, Bill Clinton hasn’t exactly covered himself in glory when it comes to women either. He has been serially unfaithful to his wife and his former lovers have spoken extremely badly of him. The fact that his own party, and the American media generally, sprang to his defence suggests that their extreme indignation at Donald Trump is just a tad hypocritical.
In fact, when it came to light that Clinton had an affair with a young intern while in the White House, his defenders went big on the ‘sexually repressive’, ‘puritanical’ attitudes of his accusers. George W. Bush would not have gotten away with doing what Bill Clinton did. It helped, of course, that Bill is a charmer.
It might be said that the real problem with Trump isn’t so much his attitude to sex, as his attitude towards women.
That is to say, the problem isn’t so that he is into casual sex as his sexist behaviour generally.
I’m not sure the two are so easily separated, however. Once you teach that sex is only about the sex and that relationships are only an optional add-on, it is very hard not to go sexist, not to regard the opposite sex as a ‘piece of meat’ and little more. And this applies to both sexes.
It wasn’t moral traditionalists that produced this world. It wasn’t Christians that produced this world. We were accused of being sexually repressive. Sometimes this criticism was on the mark. Sometimes it wasn’t.
But whatever else we can be accused of, we can’t be charged with producing the ultra-crude and ultra-sexualised world that has produced the ultra-crude and sexist Donald Trump.
And recall again that until roughly yesterday the Democratic party embraced him and to this day it wraps tightly in its arms the industry, namely the entertainment industry, that has helped build and maintains this ‘liberated’ culture.