’50 Shades of Trump:’ Do women want political submission?

Did Hillary Clinton, literally, scare the pants off of us?

As female voters balanced the security of having someone strong tell them what to do with the trepidation of opportunity, did women this election — faced with having a woman become leader of the free world — find that embracing their own authority was too scary, the costs too threatening. 

{mosads}“Feminism” has become a moniker, not for empowerment or reveling in all things woman, but the opposite — the concept of women mobilizing to access clout and authority rendering them militant, masculine, undesirable. This is at odds with powerful media imagery of women as sexy and vibrant objects of desire, so widespread a cultural perception that it appears not only accessible but ageless.

Did some of this election simply boil down to women wanting to be a Melania, unclothed and airbrushed and largely unheard, rather than a pant-suited and powerful Hillary?

Fetishizing obedience is nothing new, but women’s reaction to the so-called romance novel “50 Shades of Grey” was.

With that book series women made stories of sexual submission a widespread phenomenon, bringing S&M from pornography and hidden rooms to guilty pleasure book clubs and being displayed internationally in airport bookstores. It was even made into a mainstream movie. Can we really be surprised by the number of women who just voted for political submission in near equal droves?

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“,”field_free_html[und][0][format]”:”full_html”,”style”:””},”type”:”media”,”attributes”:{}}]]The real “WTF” moment of the recent election is not as much the political party upset as the politics of authority and submission and gender.

That some women, at the first chance of having a woman represent them (Hillary Clinton who, whatever else is, has been a long-standing champion of women and their rights) chose instead to vote for Donald Trump, a man with no political experience who rates women by number and denounces them publicly for being too fat or too old or too ugly, choosing even in national debate to attack a noted lesbian.  

An entire nation heard this man say, in his own voice, that his celebrity status enabled him to “grab them by the p-ssy.” The phrase we want to stop hearing, but can’t. Because in this election, that’s exactly what he did. 

Women in this election flocked to a “Daddy-figure,” a bottomless wallet who commanded enough authority to allay fears and put forth enough negatively sexual and even Oedipal energy to perversely attract the female vote.

The imagery of a president with a wife 24 years his junior is powerful and persuasive; the Daddy Warbucks displays of wealth both aspirational and reassuring; and the characterization of his accusers as not attractive enough to be believed a strange yet powerful statement of sexual status and virility. 

At times, the campaign dialogue was reframed to compare Donald Trump to Bill Clinton in terms of who was the biggest womanizer, with Trump declaring “Nobody respects women more than I do!” despite the well-documented litany of public insults against women, and the many women accusing him of sexual assault.  But the real campaign comparison may have been the underlying one between Hillary Clinton and Melania Trump.

Many women apparently wanted to identify with Melania, choosing to be the supermodel in a gilded cage, not the articulate and strident grandmother who was famously and flagrantly cheated on.  

They chose the security and relief of giving in, to a strong man who asserted with unquestionable authority. With him at the helm they could sleep at night despite ISIS at the door, insecure jobs, school shootings and domestic terrorism.

If they feared environmental change, Trump told them not to worry about the climate change bogeyman under the bed — he wasn’t real. Many policy iterations were simply that — don’t worry about this, I’ve got this, can’t tell you the details but it will be OK. 

Just as “50 Shades of Grey’s” Christian Grey, troubled and twisted but wealthy and successful and invincible, played into women’s desire to be chosen and overtaken and taken care of by someone powerful, women in this election voted for electoral dominance — the promise of unassailable command on all fronts. With, maybe, just a little bit of humiliation as part of the package.