The Coming To Washington Of A Man Who Loves Women - Donald Trump And The New Sexual Ethos

The political-social climate in America has been censorious, presumptuous, and unrelenting in its righteousness. Social reformers have been intent on neutering sexuality, removing all traces of a Lawrentian, Williams-like heterosexual power, and replacing it with a passionless gender spectrum.   

All that is behind us now as Donald Trump will soon be in the White House.  An unapologetic lover of women, a bad boy par excellence, a man of male allure, attraction, and sexual intent, he brings with him to Washington a sexual counter-revolution.  The old game of seduction is alive and well.  The lap dogs trained and muzzled by women in the MeToo, No Means No ethos, the men who bought the whole consideration, flowers-on-her-birthday, do-the-dishes cant of the progressive era are now supernumerary, flotsam and jetsam, muscled aside by the newcomers. 

It is about time, and in our low-brow society, Trump brings with him not just sex but glitzy, sequined, arm candy sex - the kind of uninhibited, unabashed love of perfume and high heels, décolleté, and a walk that turns heads. 

There is something irresistible about glamorous, showy women – the ones who wear makeup and perfume, high heels, and minks.  Outrageous to some they display sex and feminine sexuality like no other.  They are burlesque, Can-Can, Folies Bergères, painted, gussied, long-legged beauties who fill music halls and casinos.  Men may say they prefer sobriety, good taste, and intelligence in their women, but their heads turn at something entirely different.

For the last four years there has been a sexless drone to the Oval Office.  Despite his past weakness for ‘inappropriate touching’, Joe Biden kept his sexual distance from women.  Some feminists have suggested that it is exactly this immature sexuality – hesitatingly and affectionately touching them but never ever really wanting women– that has kept the President faithful.  

Whatever it has been, Biden’s silly familiarity with women, a kind of chummy fraternity transposed to the opposite sex, was never really male; certainly not in the JFK mold, nor in LBJ's, and not in Bill Clinton's.  It has been  decidedly asexual, friendly – the intimacy of an old, harmless uncle.

Today’s feminists and their male coterie make automatic assumptions about such relationships.  Tennessee Williams’ ‘fragile’ female characters – Blanche, Alma, Laura – are, these progressive advocates insist, are all oppressed and dominated by the men in their lives.  They are victims, sufferers, and in no way independent from the predatory male.  

Williams of course thought just the opposite, and put social assumptions and environment aside.   Sexual attraction at its best and worst is primitive, and at the heart of both epiphany and disaster.  In either case it is not an affair of misogyny, abuse, or oppressive domination.

Donald Trump comes to office with a sexual defiance that in one fell swoop will wipe away every last trace of solemnity, obeisance to the feminist canon, fantastical notions of  gender reform and alternate sexuality.  The bump and grind is back, hookers and playmates will again be frequent visitors to the White House, and an ethos of virility, male pursuits, and feminine allure will be the meme. 

The French have always been the beacon of frank, mature sexuality.  Former President Sarkozy kept his mistress in the Elysees Palace, and his predecessor Francois Mitterrand's mistress and illegitimate child stood hand in hand with his wife and their children at his funeral.  Putin's mistresses are legendary, and sexual permissiveness is the rule from the Thames to the Volga.  

Chinese emperors had their concubines, the shahs of Persia had their harems, and the kings and courtiers of Europe were always accompanied by high-toned elegant princesses or harlots.  Sex was for the asking and taking; but not in America, land of puritanical, bonneted, cloistered, and deeply censured sexual relationships; but now, finally, the lid has been lifted, Shakespeare's Boar's Head Tavern and the tricks of Mistress Quickly are back on Pennsylvania Avenue.  

Most importantly, the Trump White House will be the residence of The Man Who Loves Women, an unabashedly virile President who makes no apologies for his desire.  The President-elect has not one precious, timid, and sexually demurring bone in his body.  His allure comes from that confidence, pursuit, and persistent sexual intent.  

One of Donald Trump's political advisors, had always been, like his boss, a man who loved women.  As a young man he made the rounds of the classrooms and refectories of Miss Willard’s and soon the most adventurous and sexually precocious girls were seen with him.  It didn’t seem to bother them that he had already had his share of girls from both sides of the tracks, that he bedded and left them quickly and unceremoniously, that he showed no interest in love or a relationship, or that he showed no signs of interest in them as people, individuals, beings of value.  In fact every new report of his dereliction piqued their interest even more.  

None of this is surprising or new, of course.  Good girls have always fallen for bad boys. Their unshakeable male confidence; their calm, determined sexual nature; their social defiance, and their rejection of the proper and the predictable are Darwinian traits.  The righteous, the dutiful, and the honorable cannot hold a candle to them.  It is their children that good girls want.  They want to pass on to their sons their mates’ irrefutable maleness. 

Although the other side of the brain tells them to be sensible, to marry a good provider, a family man, a man of principle and caring, they cannot resist the allure of bad boys.  Most women fall prey to the inevitable social pressures of a good, profitable marriage, and a solid roof over their heads; but will always regret never having at least tasted a wild seed. 

Those who do marry bad boys soon realize what they have done, for they never change.  Their irresistibility to women and their desire for them remains as much a part of them as it did before marriage.  The very traits that led to a marriage with a good girl lead to the beds of hundreds of others.  Ironically but not surprisingly, this male irresistibility is part of what keeps these women married.  They hate the idea of such an attractive, virile mate sleeping with other women, but this sexual insistence is why they married him.

D.H. Lawrence, perhaps more than any other writer understood sexual determinism – sex is not simply an act of pleasurable procreation, nor one of intimacy and consolidation; but one of almost epiphanic importance.  Men and women seek each other for the possibility of a uniquely powerful, if not transformative sexual experience.  Lady Chatterley and Mellors seek each other out despite the great differences in social class because of this instinctive, irresistible attraction. 

Flaubert’s Madame Bovary wanted nothing to do with her pedestrian, dutiful, and insufferably boring husband; and looked to men of physical beauty, sexual allure, and social prominence.

Sinclair Lewis’ heroine in Main Street grew  increasingly impatient with her rural doctor husband and his patient dutifulness.  She wanted  more than a man of principle and good intent, and she eventually left her husband to find her own way. While Lewis brings her back to reality and to her husband, he has created a female character of vitality and sexual energy.

Tennessee Williams’ Alma, the main character in Summer and Smoke was brought up in a rectory by a censorious, disciplinarian father, and has for most of her youth followed his precepts and good counsel; and yet she is ineluctably attracted to the bad boy next door, the ‘wastrel’, womanizer, and libertine.  He is the one, not the schoolmarmish, bookish young man who seeks her company.

Blanche and Stella, main characters in Williams’ Streetcar Named Desire both are attracted to Stanley, an unashamed male who likes women, who understands them, and in his irrevocably powerful sexuality attracts them easily and often.  In Williams’ mind, like Lawrence’s, this primitive, inexplicable, but captivating sexuality is the central point of male-female relationships.  It is no surprise that women like Stella, unpretentiously feminine in her wifely and motherly role; and Blanche in her sexually promiscuous way are both attracted to Stanley.

Because good girls always fall for bad boys, the boys have no reason whatsoever to reform, to repent, or to apologize for their ways.  They understand the indefinable but inevitable captivity of sexual bonding.  The wives who have married them for their untrappable ways, and who have voluntarily agreed to this particular marital contract will bear up, conciliate, draw some of their own lines in the sand, but be satisfied.

This is the essence of the Trump counter-revolution - a forward, unintimidated, supremely confident stable of men with no apologies for their sexual interest, and a pen of women who love them, want them, and bed them without reservation.