But it helps
begin quote from:
Barack
Obama at a Hillary Clinton rally in Greensboro, North Carolina, on
Tuesday. Sara D. Davis/Getty Images At a 9,000-person rally for Hillary
Clinton in North Carolina on Tuesday, …
What Women Really Think
Oct. 12 2016 5:36 PM
Obama to GOP: You Don’t Need Daughters to Object to Trump’s Misogyny
Sara D. Davis/Getty Images
At a 9,000-person rally
for Hillary Clinton in North Carolina on Tuesday, Barack Obama threw
significant shade at many Republicans who’ve disavowed Donald Trump’s
misogyny in the days since a recording of the candidate boasting about sexual assault came to light.
The president expressed disbelief that a wide swath of Republican leaders—including Paul Ryan, Ben Carson, and the Texas congressman
who would consider endorsing Trump even if he admitted to rape—could
express such disgust at Trump’s remarks but still recommend him for the
presidency. “Now you’ve got people saying, ‘Well, we strongly
disapprove. We really disagree. We find those comments disgusting. But
we’re still endorsing him. We still think he should be president.’ That
doesn’t make sense to me,” Obama said. “You can’t have it both ways
here. You can’t repeatedly denounce what is said by someone and then
say, ‘but I'm still gonna endorse him to be the most powerful person on
the planet and to put them in charge.’”
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He also condemned the line of thinking promoted by Republicans like Mitt Romney and Jason Chaffetz, who have said
they won’t support Trump, but primarily because of concern for their
female relatives. “You don’t have to be a husband or a father to hear
what we heard just a few days ago and say, ‘That’s not right,’” Obama
said on Tuesday. “You just have to be a decent human being to say,
‘That's not right.’”
This is a worthy disavowal of what I call the Daughter
Clause: the invocation of blood relations to transform misogynist
attacks into personal affronts to men. The Daughter Clause assesses a
woman’s value by her proximity to a man. I’m not saying Obama prepared
for his North Carolina address by poring over the piece I wrote
about the Daughter Clause’s role in the public response to Trump’s
“grab them by the pussy” remarks, but I’m not not saying that, either.
Obama’s “decent human being” statement is another bit of
evidence that the president’s feminism is getting markedly more coherent
as his tenure comes to a close. He’s made a few missteps: Earlier this
year, he told Misty Copeland that Michelle “has some curves”
and he finds those curves attractive, which has shored up his
daughters’ positive body image—a discouraging and common narrative that
perpetuates the idea that a woman’s self-confidence should wax and wane
with the preferences of men, that women are beautiful if and because
their partners say so. But, maybe because of the women who’ve amplified their way into top advisory positions, Obama is incorporating more nuanced feminist notions into his leadership. He published a pretty good essay about feminism in Glamour this
August, emphasizing the important role men must play in dismantling
patriarchal systems of power. Then again, he also credited two women in
particular with helped him better understand the struggles women face:
his daughters.
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