Please keep your hands off our girls

Ladies and gentlemen, sit up and pay attention: the games are about to begin.

Up until now, many of us have given casual interest to the US presidential elections. After-all, our own elections are round the corner and those tend to be full of intrigues, scandal and sadly, sometimes bloodshed. It’s like watching an epic tragi-comedy that lasts a few years. You can take a few months break and still catch-up without hitting rewind.

However, in my view, the drama playing itself out in the land of opportunity is increasing it’s ‘must watch’ status by the day. The best scriptwriters and producers can not make this up. And when Donald Trump decided to play a starring role, it ensured this campaign would have all the elements of a blockbuster. The kind you can’t stand to watch and can’t wait to watch.

The Republican nominee has touched very many raw nerves in his campaign but the one that may be its death knell, might be the women card. In a 2005 conversation tape leaked to the Washington Post, the presidential candidate talks about groping and trying to have sex women.

He adds, “When you are a star, they let you do it.” That conversation that is available online and must be given a PG 18 rating elicited strong reactions from his critics and supporters alike. Dawn Laguens, Planned Parenthood Action Fund Executive Vice President said, “What Trump described in these tapes amounts to sexual assault.”

Michelle Obama responded last week Thursday in a speech in which she said his comments had “shaken her to the core.”

Appearing visibly upset, her voice trembled with emotion. “This was not just a lewd conversation,” she said. “This wasn’t just locker room banter. This was a powerful individual speaking freely and openly about sexually predatory behavior, and actually bragging about kissing and groping women, using language so obscene that many of us were worried about our children hearing it when we turned on the TV.” The White House spokesman said President Obama found the discussion on the tape, ‘repugnant’, pretty strong language.

SEX OBJECTS

Since then, four women have come out with claims that Donald Trump touched them inappropriately, further damaging his credibility. What remains to be seen is how the people of America, in particular, the women of America will respond on November 8. In a piece on Rolling Stones magazine, Janet Reitman has called it, The Year Of The Woman: How Women Will Take Down Donald Trump. Aptly, because this is no longer Hillary Clinton’s campaign. It needs to become every woman’s campaign.

Why? Because every woman, regardless of her age, status or where she lives in the world knows what it means to be treated like a sex object or be the victim of unwanted sexual attention.

To be groped in classrooms by teachers or fellow students, buses by men she doesn’t know or offices by colleagues. Every woman has seen that look that undresses her, leaving her wanting to take a shower, even if nothing happens.  It is so normal that many rose to Trump’s defence calling it nothing more than locker room banter or bar room talk. They insist, he didn’t do anything, it was just words.

And that is just plain sad. That will live in a world where it is OK or normal to even engage in discussions that violate and dehumanise a woman. Eventually, as in Trump’s case, locker room banter becomes reality.

Even the Bible acknowledges that, “out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks.” In its extreme form, locker room banter looks like what happened last week in Murang'a where 36 year-old man was arrested after he raped his 98 year-old grandmother and a two year-old.

It looks like the MCAs who allegedly took school girls to a lodging to have their way with them. It looks like the man who defiled a girl and boasted about it on Facebook.

We need to censure this kind of talk the same way we censure tribalism or racism because it is wrong, inhuman and it does hurt women and girls. It may be 2016, but women are still an endangered species.

Michelle Obama summed it up well, “it’s that feeling of terror and violation that too many women have felt when someone has grabbed them or forced himself on them and they said no, but he didn’t listen.”