He That is Without Sin Among You, Let Him

--You Sexy Thing

I can bring home the bacon.

Fry it up in a pan

And never, never let you forget you're a man

--Enjoli advert

To all the girls I've loved before

Who traveled in and out my door

I'm glad they came along

I dedicate this song

To all the girls I've loved before 

--To All the Girls I've Loved Before,

Willie Nelson  

Men don't have platonic friends okay?

We just have women we haven't f*cked yet

--Chris Rock

First Lady: As I was saying, how do you find the new vicarage?

Vicar: Oh yes, certainly, yes indeed,

I find the grounds delightful,

and the servants most attentive and particularly

the little serving maid with the great big knockers,

and when she gets going...

 --The Dirty Vicar, Monty Python

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O,k., boys. You did not like my last post, and since I always take my 2nd opportunity when it's 2-for-1 night, I shall give you another chance. (We women can be such harpies and shrews, vixens and wenches.)

To whet you whistle: Think about what's happening as we count down to the final weeks before our presidential election. We are being whipped up into a Puritanical, proletariat frenzy about morality, such as we haven't seen since, well, I dunno.

We are all beside ourselves at the discovery that female objectification is still alive and well. I reflect fondly upon the good ole' days when President Clinton sat in the oval office and did a bit of groping and penetration himself.

Whoever wins this election, we shall have a groper back in the White House (Bubba will be the Mister, this time.) It's all sex and violins, as Ruth Buzzi said.
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So the powers situated to emplace She That Will Not Be Denied on the Presidential throne feel they can finally wipe the sweat from their brow.

We have learned from last Sunday's Great Debate that Mr. Trump objectifies and covets women's lady parts. Shocked, you say? Much like Capt. Renault, I s'pect. Puh-leeze.

Anderson Cooper -- that greatly underwhelming talking head who could not even win a round of dumbed-down celebrity Jeopardy! (Ranger had even a SEAL reader -- God bless you, Stevie -- who won a real Jeopardy! contest)  -- came out of the gate like a snorting bull about Trump's sexcapades 20 years ago.

A real "gotcha" moment, eh? News worthy of being "broken" by a national paper like The Washington Post (not). Kinda makes you proud to be an American, no?

But how does Mr. Trump's machismo and bravado disqualify him from the Presidency? Are we riding some sort of crest of female empowerment of which I am unaware?

Less than 100 years ago, the 19th Amendment (1920) gave women the right to vote. (The 15th Amendment granting black males that right was ratified 50 years earlier.) In the first blush of that voting rights victory, the Equal Rights Amendment, designed to guarantee equal rights for women across the board, was introduced to Congress in 1923.

Ninety-three years on, it has yet to be ratified.

Females currently compose a little over 4% of Fortune 500 company's CEO's. Women earn 80 cents for every dollar earned by a man, a gender wage gap of 20%. Intimate partner violence shows no signs of abating, and 20% of women report having been raped in their lifetime.

Forty percent of Americans are regular viewers of online pornography, and 20% of men say they have viewed porn online at work.

Candidate Trump is not accused of rape. Powerful and monied men are an aphrodisiac for some women (news flash, right?). Trump does not hide his proclivities ("I just start kissing them.") To be in the stable of a man like Trump is not to be surprised by his track record.

If we were honest, we would acknowledge that powerful men throughout history take their just desserts. Italy's Silvio Berlusconi, Dominique Strauss-Kahn ("DSK") and Russia's Vladimir Putin, are but a few. But let us look at ourselves first.

Innumerable United States Presidents have pussyfooted about with women to whom they were not married. Among these were Thomas Jefferson, Warren G. Harding, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Woodrow Wilson, FDR (who died in the presence of his mistress), JFK and Bill Clinton (both with teenage White House interns, among others) and LBJ. And the beat goes on.

These were all Gropers-in-Chief, yet we turned a polite eye to their dalliances provided they steered the ship of state with some skill and attention. Their inability to be emancipated men -- whatever that means -- and overmaster their heady and hormonal drives did not disqualify them from their job. Their opponents attempted, to a greater or lesser extent, to utilize their actions against them.

Thing is, reporters -- when that was an actual profession -- used to enjoy habitual relationships with the Presidents. They had entree to the actual news, while agreeing to keep the sordid stuff out of the headlines. Nod, nod - wink, wink.

Make no mistake: The people who slandered these men did not do so on any chivalric grounds of protecting women's honor. Any muck-racking was done with the sheer intent of toppling these men's presidencies. 

Neither people nor the societal structures which house and instruct them, have changed in the mere 2,0000 years when we wrote down some rules about what we should and shouldn't do. (One might go so far back as almost 4,000 years with Hammurabi's Code; in any event, we have not been operating under rules approximately equable to all for very long, and the rules were certainly not equally applied to women.)

Sadly today, the smut has become the kernel. Rather than a ship of the state, the next President will steer a ship of fools. Our behaviors have not regressed; we are the same nutty sexual monkeys.

What has changed is that voyeurism and exhibitionism have moved from the edge to the center. Representative Weiner can send an image of his over a cell phone, and someone like Anderson Cooper can make us think that the voyeuristic "bust" is actual news.

The move to accept the LGBTQQIP2SSA communities got you thinking the sky's the limit in terms of gender enlightenment? You may pat your smiling liberal self on the back, but think again.

Last Monday's BBC America featured a two-minute story on the travails of newly-robbed multi-millionairess Kim Kardashian and her husband Kanye's end-of-show response -- approximately 7% of the network's world news broadcast for that day. Now ask yourself a question: what makes Mrs. Kardashian newsworthy? 

It is one thing alone, to wit: her massive tits and arse. You can't have it both ways, people.

Seen another way, what makes candidate Clinton preferable? Is it because she is monastic? Is she consistent?

In 1992 in the face of sexual misconduct charges against her husband, President Clinton, Mrs. Clinton  told CBS anchor Steve Croft that she was not a "stand by your man" kind of woman. She also asked the news media not to turn the 1992 campaign into "a game of 'gotcha'." 

But she ended up standing beside her man for future political returns and "gotcha" is now her game. Even then, her feminist creds were decaying as she worked hard to discredit every woman associated with Mr. Clinton.

This is the Caesarean Secretary of State Clinton who said of Libya's President's death by mob, "We came, we saw, he died." Today, she is Lady Macbeth silently screaming, "Out, out, damned spot!"

She has now morphed into Grandma Hillary, a safe and sexless white woman with a milquetoast running mate in Mr. Kaine (an acceptable white male.). But Grandma Hillary is not toothless.

She is Jung's archetypal Old Crone, and she may subvert or conform to the power structure at will; she has nothing left to lose. She will not usher in an Age of Aquarius because she will have to be (as Ranger puts it) a "Billy Badass" as the first United States female head of state.

If one believes what one reads, it seems that despite the amazing support that elected a Republican candidate not even backed by his own party, Mrs. Clinton must win. It is somehow cognitive dissonance to think otherwise.

She is the politician between the two, and politicians become Presidents. You could not have a haberdasher, or a community organizer or a peanut farmer, fer gawdssakes.

But back to the sex story. It is unlikely that Mr. Trump would grab for Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel's vajayjay for any reason, and is not she the only one who really matters? And did not our own President G. W. Bush err by attempting a back rub of the Frosty One?

The only one to watch out for would be Denmark's Prime Minister Helle-Thorning Schmidt, with whom President Obama and England's David Cameron enjoyed a selfie (to the apparent disdain of Mrs. Obama). However,  the lovely Mrs. Trump should provide eye-candy enough to keep her husband's roving little hands at home.

But as Donovan sang, this may be the Season of the Witch. No het white male today is immune from excoriation at the press's whim. Secretary of State John Kerry was lambasted for his effete Spandex-wearing, Francophile ways. Now, Mr. Trump for his machismo.

So Trump wants to grab and kiss women? BFD. In a Don Draper sort of way, he is like a rib-eye steak in a world of crepe-y raw vegans. As it is written of the Big Macher in the Sky, so it could be said of Mr. Trump, "I am that I am". (As for the shape-shifter Mrs. Clinton, there is no declarative "I AM" in her "I" -- only a reflection of her audience du jour.)

We could watch no more after this October Surprise. Such thin gruel for such a glutted audience
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Addendum:

It was deplorable when the Republicans moved to impeach President Clinton over his indiscretions, and it's equally deplorable that this lower level of lasciviousness has the Democrats so wrapped over Mr, Trump.

Granted President Clinton showed no discretion and poor morality with his Oval Office escapades. It was so Arkansas and tatty. Surely there were throngs of older women among his wealthy inner circle of supporters who would have obliged him (though they might not have been wearing thongs.) But it was not comme il faut to dally at work, when one should be focused on world leaders and such. Off-duty, please.

Now, Mrs. Clinton has the opportunity to rise to the occasion, to address the madding throngs and say, "Good sirs, please let us all join in the important matter before us, which is to help the American people understand our positions on matters of State, not of the genitals."

She could be a giant. Instead, she revels in the swampland, in silence. We know she's there, salivating as her moment approaches. She hasn't got the cahones to do what is needed at this moment.

Another stray thought:

It is clear how entrenched our patriarchy is when it cravenly exploits the few women they've kept in the pocket to expose Trump's poor behavior, as though they are silly little maidens who had no idea how to protect themselves from the Big Bad Wolf's roving hands. (I will develop that idea soon.)

Also, the NYT Book Review features a new release on Eleanor Roosevelt's lesbian affair with Lorena Hickok. Why is it that a man's affair, once revealed, become licentious, but a woman's lesbian affair is accepted de facto.

Any thoughts?

[cross-posted @ Rangeragainstwar.]