Trump and women scorned: Why it matters

Comment published on New York Times blog in response to opinion essay by Times opinion columnist Charles M. Blow, “The princess versus the demagogue,” June 3, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/02/opinion/trump-princess-britain.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage:

Feminism is a politics of the particular that can succeed when it is linked to the universal, rather than identified with it, or given as approximating it through addition with other particulars (race/ethnicity, sexuality, foreignness, etc.) in an American a+b+c...+n logic of "e pluribus unum" (a "one" composed out of many).  To link the particular to the universal, one identifies a universal claim in the particular, which is its non-unique bearer.  

So: The Holocaust as event is Jewish but not only (there were other victims, anyone can be victim or executioner, and we must all care).  Or, Black Lives Matter even when they are being callously destroyed, in ways that can happen to anyone.  

What do women in particular represent that is universal?  They have represented feeling, vulnerability, greater innocence, and caring and nurturance.  They were oppressed through most of history as subordinated and limited to reproductive roles.  And whatever we can glean from history or science as "feminine" and "masculine" qualities, we, all of us, need both.  

Trump's treatment of women is a particular form of his more general disdain for people he disagrees with and thinks should obey and not want anything.  It is not unlike how capital at its worst can treat workers, or society treat the poor, etc.  His style of using language is performative and irrational because anti-democratic, closed to dialogue.  

Facing this, the nation itself is like a woman wronged.  We say no!