When men are pigs

Donald Trump recently justified his gutter-talk about women by calling it “locker-room” banter, and added that he’s heard much worse from Bill Clinton while playing golf. To his avid male supporters, Donnie’s potty-mouth probably sounds good; there are millions of men who talk trash about women every day.

I’ve heard it in the locker-room at the health club, but not very often. More frequently, I heard it while I lived in New York City after high school. I heard it on the streets from guys as women passed; sometimes cat-calls, whistles and “kisses” preceded the comments, which generally included exclamations like “take a look at those” and “I’d like to taste a piece of that!”

When I worked one summer in a sheet-metal factory, gutter-talk comprised a good 75% of all comments. Conversations revolved around who was “getting it,”, from whom and how often. One guy named Al operated a metal lathe in a separate room, where he had adorned the walls from floor to ceiling with pictures of nude women. He took me aside one day to confide in me. “Don’t tell the guys, Larry,” he said quietly, “but I’m part Jewish.” Bigotry and overt sexism often run hand-in-hand.

There’s no denying that humans are sexual beings; we’re biologically wired that way. Though the beginnings of psychotherapy were infused with the after-effects of confused Victorian attitudes towards sex in Freud’s theories, and though much of the twentieth century was spent trying to reconcile social and sexual equity between men and women, the die has been cast. In a free society, full equality of the sexes is inevitable.

However, the course and brutish attitudes of men – their objectifying and frequently harsh treatment of women – is still, as Donnie proves, prevalent in some circles. For misogynistic men, the sexual revolution of the 60s – women on “the pill” – legitimized and facilitated continued exploitation of women; guys like Hugh Hefner and Donnie Trump dressed up their sexist caveman act in nice clothes, cool jazz, long sideburns and pseudo-intellectualism.

Modern misogyny is an unfortunate legacy of a 10,000-year-old war on women waged by men. The replacement of feminine Earth-Moon Goddess worship with masculine Sun-God religion required a thorough rewriting of history, recasting of myth and revision of culture. This effort is well-documented in books such as Robert Graves’ “The White Goddess” and Riane Eisler’s “The Chalice and the Blade” which recount the ways in which established forms of the feminine were systematically denigrated and relegated to inferior status in order to elevate patriarchy and establish male-dominance. Inheritance, for example, shifted from mother-to-child to father-to-child, despite frequent uncertainty in determining male parentage.

Faced with the probable election of 68-year-old Hillary Clinton, male competitive juices are overflowing. The evolution of consciousness and society has overtaken the imperatives of historical male dominance, and the crude and vulgar piggishness displayed by Trump, Ailes, Gingrich and Giuliani stands in stark relief against the increasing influence of women in twenty-first century America.

The 10,000 year-old war against women is being lost in America, and will in time be lost globally. Donnie Trump and his band of Neanderthals are headed for extinction. The man-pigs won’t give up easily; consider Saudi Arabia, for example, but it’s only a matter of time.