Peggy Orenstein, New York Times – October 15, 2016
One afternoon, while reporting for a book on girls’ sexual experience, I sat in on a health class at a progressive Bay Area high school. Toward the end of the session, a blond boy wearing a school athletic jersey raised his hand. “You know that baseball metaphor for sex?” he asked. “Well, in baseball there’s a winner and a loser. So who is supposed to be the ‘loser’ in sex?”
Melissa Deckman, Washington Post – October 14, 2016
Political fallout from last Friday’s leaked “Access Hollywood” footage, which features Donald Trump bragging about his ability to sexually assault women thanks to his fame, has been swift. In the days following the tape’s release, more than 60 elected Republican officials have stated they will no longer vote for the GOP presidential nominee, though a few of these lawmakers later recanted.
Donald J. Trump, especially the Donald J. Trump we heard last week on tape, is nothing new to me. His macho-isms, his penchant for dividing the world into losers and winners, his lack of empathy for anyone but himself — it all reminds me of home, and the sense I had, even as a boy, of a system of privilege that has ailed this country since its beginnings, but now seems to be, and sees itself, fading away.
Megan Twohey & Michael Barbaro, New York Times – October 12, 2016
Donald J. Trump was emphatic in the second presidential debate: Yes, he had boasted about kissing women without permission and grabbing their genitals. But he had never actually done those things, he said. “No,” he declared under questioning on Sunday evening, “I have not.”
Arthur Delaney, Huffington Post – October 12, 2016
Maine Gov. Paul LePage (R) would apparently like for Republican nominee Donald Trump to rule with absolute power and squelch personal freedom. At least that’s what he seemed to be saying in a radio interview Tuesday when he called for Trump to embrace authoritarianism.
An NBA player and a former NFL player added strong voices to the chorus of athletes, journalists and others who pushed back over the weekend at Donald Trump’s characterization of his lewd comments about women as merely “locker room talk.” Marvin Williams of the Charlotte Hornets and Chris Kluwe, a former NFL punter, were horrified to find their workplace lumped into the “locker room banter” defense waged by Trump and his surrogates over his comments about grabbing women’s genitals.
Nick Corasaniti, New York Times – October 11, 2016
As his campaign battles to stave off defections from within the Republican Party, Donald J. Trump has released a new ad attacking Hillary Clinton as “Dangerous” on foreign policy grounds and portraying her as physically incapable of meeting the demands of the presidency.
Elliot Hannon, Slate – October 10, 2016
There is, presumably, a mother lode of outtake footage out there somewhere of Donald Trump acting like Donald Trump. On Monday, the Huffington Post unearthed a transcript (but not the video) of Trump during the ninth season of his reality show, The Apprentice, that is not as profoundly disturbing as the recently released 2005 video of Trump conversing with locker room creep Billy Bush, but is pretty yucky in its own right.
It was Donald J. Trump’s chance to sound contrite and mature, to explain away the sexually predatory boasts he was caught making on tape and to persuade Americans that — for all his no-apologies braggadocio — he was, in fact, capable of feeling shame. Maura Cotter, 22, a senior at the University of Notre Dame, was shocked at what Mr. Trump did instead in Sunday’s debate: repeat, over and over, that what he had said on the 2005 recording, about forcing himself on women and grabbing their genitals, was simply “locker-room banter.”
Charlotte Alter, TIME – October 8, 2016
If 2016 was going to be a Battle of the Sexes, everyone thought Hillary Clinton would be the main combatant. She’s the first woman to win a major-party presidential nomination, after all.