The roughly six months that have made up November this year have—it’s fair to say—not been a high point for women, journalism, women in journalism, women with jobs, or anyone following the news. A quick recap: On Friday, Donald Trump said to a reporter on Air Force One, “Quiet. Quiet, Piggy,” when she tried to complete the most basic requirement of her job by asking a question. Earlier this week, when a reporter at the White House asked Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince, about the determination by U.S. intelligence that he was complicit in the killing of a Washington Post journalist—a finding that bin Salman has denied—Trump viciously scolded her for her “horrible, insubordinate” question. On the flip side, a reporter, doing herself zero favors in the take-me-seriously department, published an excerpt from her memoir—in which she describes her love for a man she calls the “Politician” (clearly the much older Robert F. Kennedy Jr.), whom she’d ostensibly been profiling—after which one of the reporter’s (also much older) exes piled on with claims of his own.
Somehow, it all feels connected: the denigration of professionals doing their job, the fetishization of young women, the older men’s blindness to their own abuse of power. I’ve felt, consuming the news with no little amount of nausea these past few weeks, like we’re revisiting the same characters over and over, with no consequences and no forward momentum. A month or so ago—you may remember—the political commentator Helen Andrews published an essay for Compact magazine titled “The Great Feminization,” arguing at length that the defenestration of Larry Summers as president of Harvard in 2006, after he suggested that women had less natural aptitude for math and science than men, was the catastrophic and unjust work of a feminized woke mob, proof of how unreasonable and vindictive women can be when you give us any power. But then, here came Summers again, in the Epstein email cache released last week by the House Oversight Committee, quizzing one of the 21st century’s most notorious sex criminals for advice on how to get “horizontal” with an economist who was looking for a mentor, and joking about how women are so dumb that we didn’t even understand his brilliant joke about how dumb we are.
[From the January/February 2024 issue: Four more years of unchecked misogyny]
And still, it wasn’t over. Because here comes a New York Times podcast briefly titled “Did Women Ruin the Workplace?” (Not yet, but we do have several full ruination weeks left before the holidays.) And here comes Jeffrey Epstein again, sending apparently infinite ungrammatical, innuendo-filled emails to members of the Davos elite, and composing bizarre notes to himself about whether skin conveys thought. Here’s the manosphere hate preacher Andrew Tate, a man who has been charged with sex crimes (Tate has denied wrongdoing), and who is my personal least favorite of all the misogynist bobbleheads, having his confiscated personal devices returned to him by U.S. Customs and Border Protection after the intervention of Paul Ingrassia, who—it’s hard to keep track!—was previously accused of canceling a colleague’s hotel reservation so that she’d be forced to share a room with him. (Ingrassia’s attorney disputed the allegations.)
And here’s Olivia Nuzzi, being portrayed in The New York Times as a tragic Malibu Ophelia, in a profile in thrall to her excuses for having engaged in a romantic relationship with a married, elderly conspiracy theorist who may finally soon realize his apparent dream of making measles in the U.S. endemic again, and whose legacy will be measured in child death. Here’s Cheryl Hines, the conspiracy theorist’s wife, sharing a stage at an anti-vaxxer conference with Russell Brand, an alleged rapist. (Brand has denied being a rapist.) Here’s Keith Olbermann—it’s been a while, in fairness—popping up to claim that, yes, he did pay for Nuzzi’s jewelry and “writing studio” while she was barely an adult and Olbermann was a middle-aged TV host, but that he was justified in doing so because, according to him, they were in a four-year relationship and he was making a lot of money at the time.
A common thread weaves through all of these stories, these outbursts, these leaked emails and petulant tantrums and collusions and cursed blogs. Some men, possibly many men, have always believed that women are simply not their equal. Some women have believed or internalized this idea, too: that women can and should be fetishized, sexualized, domesticized, but not respected. In the recent past, as women gained rights and men seemed to gain enlightenment, the public tended to frown on these beliefs, which is why all the jokes about teenagers in Epstein’s birthday book were supposed to be private, and why Summers concluded an observation to Epstein about men who “hit on a few women 10 years ago and can’t work at a network or think tank” with the all-caps qualifier “DO NOT REPEAT THIS INSIGHT.” The impulse to dehumanize women used to be something that people had to hide. (In her recent memoir, Virginia Roberts Giuffre—who died by suicide earlier this year, and who alleged that Epstein had trafficked her to many rich and powerful men—noted that Epstein also used to say that a woman’s primary value was being “a life-support system for a vagina.”)
[Read: The dumb truth at the heart of the Epstein scandal]
What’s changed is Donald Trump. In the decade since he became the singular influence on American politics, he has completely and thoroughly dispensed with concepts of shame, of decency, of equality. He has proved himself time and again to be entirely self-seeking, totally amoral, cruel by nature, and impossibly fragile. And the rewards he’s gained in the process have emboldened others to be just as unabashedly themselves as he is.
It stands to reason, too, that journalists—the people whose job it is to consistently challenge power—have provoked such great ire from this administration. Highlight reels of the president insulting female reporters have gone viral over the past few days. When the White House press secretary responds to a reporter’s question with “Your mom,” it’s a signal that the decay has spread. When men direct particularly humiliating and degrading treatment at women, it is because of the “psychic threat,” as the philosopher Kate Manne once put it, that these women who question male authority pose.
It’s exhausting. It’s enraging. The past decade has been a gloomy lesson in how limited a proportion of men actually see women as equal human beings. The fact that many men believe they no longer even have to pretend to respect women in order to participate in public life makes it unlikely that anything will change anytime soon. The fish rots from the head. The pig is in the Oval Office.
The post The Pig Is in the White House appeared first on The Atlantic.
