But to many victims of sexual assault, Mr. Trump’s words struck a particular nerve. It was not simply that he is the Republican presidential nominee, and that a hot microphone had captured him speaking unguardedly. It was his casual tone, the manner in which he and the television personality Billy Bush appeared to be speaking a common language, many women said, that gave Mr. Trump’s boasts a special resonance.What he said and how he said it seemed to say as much about the broader environment toward women — an environment that had kept many of these women silent for so long — as they did about the candidate. And Mr. Trump’s dismissal of his actions as “locker room talk” only underscored the point.“This is RAPE CULTURE — the cultural conditioning of men and boys to feel entitled to treat women as objects,” Jill Gallenstein, 40, a retail executive in Los Angeles, wrote on Facebook. “It’s women and girls questioning what they have done to provoke such behavior. It’s the dismissing of this behavior because ‘it’s the way it has always been.’ It’s justifying the behavior because other powerful men have done it too. ‘Locker room talk’ normalizes this behavior — what we say matters.”That locker room talk also seemed to create its own momentum online.“I’ve never really thought about these moments cumulatively before,” Julie Oppenheimer of Chicago wrote on Facebook, after listing a few episodes of her own, including being kissed on the mouth by the janitor at her synagogue when she was 13. “In part, because they seem so ‘small’ compared to what many have experienced — not worthy of consideration. That’s because all of us already live in Trump’s world, where these behaviors are commonplace.”Laura Sabransky was one of many women who added to Ms. Oppenheimer’s thread, writing that she had been given date-rape drugs three times between high school and college. “I call Trump a walking trigger alert,” she said in an interview. “He is triggering anxiety and PTSD-like reactions in women, me included.”
Source: With ‘Tweet Me Your First Assaults,’ a Protest Movement Is Born – The New York Times










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