“When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.” 

For a brief moment, those words — captured in a video from 2005, then published by the Washington Post in October 2016 — were expected to seriously damage Donald Trump’s first bid for the US presidency. They didn’t, of course, but they did become a focus for feminist rage. This man, now set to assume leadership for a second time, does not even attempt to hide his misogyny. He is untouchable — “you can do anything” — while women have no right to privacy at all. Grab ’em, assault ’em, loom over ’em in debates. 

As feminist writers such as Jessica Valenti noted at the time, “pussy-grabbing” wasn’t just about the thing in itself. It didn’t matter whether every woman who came into contact with Trump was assaulted in that particular way. It represented a belief about what women are, socially, culturally, politically. He didn’t touch Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential debates, but his choice not to respect her personal space — in a context where she was under pressure not to over-emphasise her sex — offered a further display of entitlement. He could do anything; she could say nothing. 

Woman, wrote Andrea Dworkin, “is human, of course, but by a standard that does not include physical privacy”:

She is, in fact, human by a standard that precludes physical privacy, since to keep a man out altogether and for a lifetime is deviant in the extreme, a psychopathology, a repudiation of the way in which she is expected to manifest her humanity.

One of the key messages of feminism — a message that came through in responses to the 2005 tape — is that women are entitled to boundaries. Men such as Trump, who define their masculinity on the basis of ownership, entitlement, male untouchability versus female compliance and availability, do not accept this refusal. Hence: your body, my choice. Hence also: you shall have no spaces — no refuges, no locker rooms, no bathrooms — into which I may not enter, should I so wish. It is enough for a woman to know this for it to make her world smaller. The hand doesn’t need to be on you, and most of the time it isn’t. It’s enough to know that it could be and that the world around you will not respect your right to say “no’’. You know that nothing belongs to you, not even your body, not even your words, not even the places which claim to be only for you. 

Resistance to this is feminism. It is more than just “resistance to Trump” or “resistance to Republicans” or “resistance to male people whose denial of female boundaries manifests itself in this one specific way”. Feminism is bigger than that. There are principles that matter, ones which must be defended in all contexts, including those which might lead us to be at odds with those closest to us. Otherwise, objections to “grab ’em by the pussy” politics become flimsy and contingent, obsessed with first checking which hand is doing the grabbing before female bodily integrity is deemed to count. 

… have you ever considered you could object to both forms of sexism at once?

For example, this week Republican representative Nancy Mace has been seeking to keep single-sex toilets on Capitol Hill single-sex (which seems a pretty small ask). The response from many nominally liberal quarters has exposed deep antipathy to female boundaries, presumably on the basis that in this case they don’t count. The Guardian has reported Mace’s attempts as “efforts to ban trans people from using bathrooms … which match their gender identity”, while the Washington Post has furiously demanded “does Nancy Mace know how women’s bathrooms work?” Meanwhile, Democrat representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has delivered a speech raging against the proposal, including such claims as “what it inevitably results in are women and girls who are primed for assault because people are going to want to check their private parts” and “all it does is allow these Republicans to go around and bully any woman who isn’t wearing a skirt”. Reading AOC’s take, I’m getting that it would be really bad if Republicans were to enforce the gendered expectation of women wearing skirts, but not at all bad if Democrats were to enforce the (much more far-reaching, universal) gendered expectation of women having no spaces whatsoever of their own. Great feministing, AOC! (But have you ever considered you could object to both forms of sexism at once?)

To be clear, I’m not an expert on Nancy Mace’s personal motivations in choosing to fight this particular battle. They could be entirely opportunistic, given the massive open goal the Democrats have created with their current position on sex and gender. This is hardly the point. Gotchas and personal smears are not arguments against the fundamental feminist principle that women — adult human females — have their own right to privacy. This is true regardless of whether it is difficult to maintain these rights by force (which it is — that’s why we use shared expectations of decent behaviour on the part of males). It’s also true regardless of whether all women care about the maintenance of boundaries. As Trump himself claimed, some women “let you do it”. If feminism always deferred to the women who “let you do it” — whether the issue is one of sexual consent, reproductive rights, voting, personal space — women would have no rights at all. 

Did they ever believe in those essential feminist principles at all? 

There is something I find incredibly dismaying about women who claim to be feminists thinking they’ve come up with a neat little riposte that will shut up anyone pointing out the incompatibility of feminism and gender identity theory, when what they’re actually doing is showing how loose their own attachment to feminist principles is. They’ll rape you anyways! No one can police single-sex spaces! Your toilet at home is gender neutral! Look — those anti-choice Republicans are so much worse! Suddenly, it all comes pouring out. Did they ever believe in those essential feminist principles at all? 

AOC has tweeted that “women know that men don’t scheme to ‘dress like girls’ to assault them”:

They do it every day in broad daylight. And the ones in power protect each other to keep it quiet. Just ask the House Ethics Committee. Or the President-elect of the United States.

Trump’s an abuser of women. I get that, AOC. I totally agree with you. Nonetheless, I find tweets like this grotesque because they separate men’s choice to assault women from another feminist insight: that it’s about power, control and humiliation. It’s not something a man does simply because he’s horny, or appreciates the feel of a pussy on a palm. Trump chooses to assault women, but he also chooses — as shown by the Clinton example —- just to hover and intimidate. These things are connected. A man who chooses to force a woman to call him using words which deny her own perceptions, or to identify in a way which gives him a free pass to women’s spaces, doesn’t have to assault her. He can still make her feel small and ashamed just by making those declarations of entitlement. I have no time for a “feminist” position on female boundaries which intermittently retreats to a pathetic mix of “he didn’t even touch you” and “that form of manipulation only counts if it’s the other side”. It’s no feminism at all. 

It doesn’t matter that trans woman representative Sarah McBride claims to have never intended to use a communal woman’s bathroom on Capitol Hill (part of me wants to add “respect to McBride for saying so”, but I also can’t help feeling “god, why should the bar be so low?”). What responses to Mace’s proposal have revealed is something else — that if a male person did want access to those spaces, a whole host of self-identified feminists would vilify any woman who objected. And to me, this speaks to something that goes way beyond “the trans issue”. 

So many feminists are right there with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez when she challenges Trump’s misogyny, but she’s not with women who happen to encounter the more inconvenient kind of misogynist. This response will be so familiar to any woman who has raged against misogyny with members of her family or friendship group, only to be completely abandoned the moment she dared to say that that family member or that friend was an abuser, too. Mace has experienced death threats for her position, and there is utter silence on that. Trans activists, in this case, are the equivalent of the family patriarch, the “good guy” or the priest whom it’s not permissible to cross. 

“You can do anything.” Isn’t that always the truth.