Good News: Women Don't Have To Be Daughters In Order For You To Respect Them
You know the drill.
Anytime there's an undeniable insult to women, and it's time to show support for those same women, many of the most notable responses don't seem to be about, you know, women.
Instead, people find it much more effective to play on how we feel for the women we love.
But there's good news!
You don't have to think about your daughters, your sisters, your aunties, your mothers, your girlfriends or your wives in order to respect women.
You can just think of women as humans, worthy of dignity and respect for their space regardless of what relationships they have with men.
In fact, we recommend you take the latter option, because when you restrict yourself to the mother-sister-daughter card, you do a couple of things.
You take a conversation about what is a really serious and ugly issue and you keep it at a superficial level. Make no mistake about it, what Donald Trump said wasn't just impolite.
It was normalizing the idea of a man sexually imposing himself on a woman -- regardless of whether that imposition is welcome -- and celebrating the right to impose as a perk of having high status.
To not talk about such a problematic stain in our culture for all women, and instead choose to focus on the ones we're close to, is to shy away from fixing the problem.
And, if you rewind to Friday, you'll see that nothing highlights this better than the sheer irony in the timing of Trump's tape being released.
Just an hour before David Fahrenthold tweeted the news about Donald Trump saying he can "grab a woman by the pussy," Republican leader Paul Ryan tweeted this:
It's news celebrating the signing of a law that is meant to protect the rights of sexual assault victims. A statement from Ryan's press office said,
With this bill, Congress helps gives a voice to the voiceless. Because victims of sexual assault deserve full protection under the law—and this legislation reaffirms the fact that their right to justice is unconditional.
"Their right to justice is unconditional." Yes, that's true.
But for the most vulnerable to sexual assault, the type that Trump described and beyond, have a right to our respect that should be unconditional, too.
That should be the case for the ones who raised us, grew up in the same house with us and married us as much as it should for the ones who didn't.
An apology is not enough. Women, whoever they are, deserve better than that.
