Trump’s “grab them by the pussy” has triggered another one of those social media floods, the Times reports.

It was the author Kelly Oxford, a social media powerhouse, who got things started on Friday night.

“Women: tweet me your first assaults,” she wrote on Twitter at 7:48 p.m. “They aren’t just stats. I’ll go first: Old man on city bus grabs my ‘pussy’ and smiles at me, I’m 12.”

When she first posted the message, Ms. Oxford said in an interview later, she did not expect more than a handful of replies. “It was such a personal question,” she said. “I thought, ‘No one is going to share anything on Twitter.’”

Yet by Saturday morning, she was getting as many as 50 responses per minute: often-explicit, first-person accounts of molestation. A hashtag had materialized: “#notokay.” The Twitter posts continued to pour in through the weekend. And by Monday afternoon, nearly 27 million people had responded or visited Ms. Oxford’s Twitter page.

There’s probably not a woman on the planet who hasn’t experienced it, multiple times.

Facebook pages and Twitter feeds filled with comments and multiplying threads from women who recalled being groped by doctors, by piano teachers, by photography instructors, by perfect strangers. They told stories of being flashed on the bus by masturbators, of having male colleagues rub up against them at the copy machine in their office, of dates and bosses demanding sex.

It’s a wonder more women aren’t put off sex for life. In fact…it occurs to me that this ubiquity makes it very strange – stranger than I already thought it – that libertarian feminists like to call radical feminists “sex negative.” Why wouldn’t many women be “sex negative” given this background? Why isn’t that a perfectly understandable and legitimate (however sad) response to an experience of repeated sexual assaults? It’s good that most women don’t hate sex, but it’s pretty generous of them not to.

[T]o 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.

Exactly. Trump said what he said so confidently, and Billy Bush played up so obligingly – it’s all too obvious that it’s just normal.

“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.”

The “locker room talk” is the cultural conditioning of men and boys to feel entitled to treat women as objects. As Deborah Cameron explained, they bond with each other by exchanging these tokens of entitlement and contempt.

Even before the release of the 2005 recording of Mr. Trump, 2016 was shaping up as something of a watershed year for awareness of sexual harassment, between the pending trial against Bill Cosby and the high-profile case of Brock Turner, the former Stanford University student who was convicted of sexual assault.

For many women watching and reacting to the weekend’s events, the surprise news conference on Facebook Live that Mr. Trump staged before Sunday night’s debate, with three women who have long accused Mr. Clinton of sexual assault or harassment, only compounded the damage he had done in the original recording. They saw him not as giving voice to victims of sexual abuse but as using the women as props.

Props in his project of bullying and degrading a woman who dares to compete with him.

Michael Gerson says the Republicans deserve their fate. True. They spent the night in the dog’s bed and now they’re full of fleas.

What Trump actually did was ensure that hardcore conservatives stay with him until the end of his political journey, when Republicans begin the search for survivors and examine the charred black box. Trump’s performance was perfectly tuned to make a loyal Rush Limbaugh listener burst out in “Hell, yeah!” Put Juanita Broaddrick in the audience? Threaten to jail your opponent? Throw WikiLeaks in her face? Blame her for the death of Capt. Humayun Khan in Iraq? Dismiss all the fuss about sexual predation as locker-room talk? Hell, yeah!

This kind of thing has been normalized in far-right discourse for decades. To the most partisan and polarized portion of the right, these excuses and accusations were familiar and appropriate.

To many people outside the talk-radio hothouse, I can attest, Trump’s debate performance was appalling, contemptible, shameful, squalid, vile.

Exactly so. He makes mediocrities like Bush and Reagan seem stellar.

Trump and his advisers must know that the conservative talk-radio audience, and the Republican primary electorate, is different from a national electorate, which actually includes minorities, young people and women who don’t like disgusting boors. Perhaps Trump’s strategy was a recognition that even his strongest supporters were on the verge of bolting and needed to be appeased. Perhaps Trump’s knowledge of policy is so thin that it fills three or four minutes of a 90-minute debate and all he has left is trash talk. Or perhaps he is captive to his impulses, incapable of shame and nasty to the core.

Those last two. It was those. Trash talk is all he’s got, because he is trashy.

This sad Republican fate is deserved. It is the culmination, the fruition, of an absurdly simplistic anti-establishment attitude. The Trump campaign is what happens when you choose a presidential candidate without the taint of electoral experience — and all the past vetting that comes with it. It is what happens when you pick a candidate who has not engaged in serious public argument over a period in which his or her views and consistency can be tested. It is what happens when you embrace a candidate only on the basis of an outsider persona, who lacks actual political skills — like making a policy argument, empathizing with a voter or avoiding a constant stream of distracting gaffes.

The same can be said of Bush and Reagan, to name two. But compared to Trump, they’re Burke reincarnated.

A dance critic dissects Trump’s moves in the debate.

Donald Trump, looming behind Hillary Clinton like a mob boss, only reinforced his perception as a schoolyard bully in the second presidential debate Sunday night.

…

The dance was grim from the start. Trump entered looking exhausted. In a break with protocol, the candidates didn’t shake hands. And then Trump began lurking behind Clinton when she spoke, with his carefully planted stance, his narrowed eyes and his frown.

More a scowl than a frown. He looked ridiculous. Intimidating, yes, but also ridiculous.

“This is exactly who Donald Trump is,” Clinton said, speaking about the tapes. Trump helpfully backed her up with his demeanor. He paced and rocked and grimaced as she spoke; he broke into her time by shouting over her. When she protested that she had not done the same to him, he shot back with all the finesse you’d hear in a middle school gym: “That’s ’cause you got nothin’ to say.”

Ignorant, vulgar, and rude – what an adornment to the office he would be.

When it was his turn to speak, Trump got angry, pointed at her, swung his arms around with alarming force. Clinton had to have been disturbed by the ill temper and aggressive gestures he directed at her, though she seemed remarkably unflappable.

But bullying was on her mind. Late in the evening she mentioned “the Trump effect” and noted that bullies in school are on the rise because of it. She was referring to a 2016 survey of K-12 teachers, titled “The Trump Effect,” that was conducted by Teaching Tolerance, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center. It found a recent increase in bullying, harassment and intimidation among students, along with a rise in fear and anxiety, particularly among the minority groups Trump has targeted.

I haven’t read the survey and have no idea how they determined that Trump was cause and not correlation…but it would be odd if he hadn’t had any effect at all. I suppose we could hope that his long-term effect will turn out to be revulsion and a diminution of bullying…Yeah, that will happen…

Then there was the part where he announced that if elected he would appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Hillary Clinton’s email setup. Josh Gerstein at Politico reports that it “provoked a sharp blowback from former U.S. prosecutors, who said Trump’s view of the Justice Department serving the whims of the president is antithetical to the American system.”

Well ok but Trump doesn’t know much about the American system. He knows about real estate profiteering, and cheating, and bankruptcy, and pretending to be a Big Boss on tv. Oh and grabbing women by the pussy whether they want him to or not.

While presidents appoint the attorney general, they do not make decisions on whom to prosecute for crimes — and were Trump to do so, prosecutors warned, he would spark a constitutional crisis similar to that of the “Saturday Night Massacre” in the Nixon administration. In that case, Nixon attempted to fire the prosecutor investigating the Watergate scandal, and the top two Justice Department officials resigned on the spot.

Oh well Trump would just have them executed, or sent to Russia, or something.

He said it again at a rally in Ambridge, Pennsylvania this afternoon.

“Special prosecutor, here we come, right? If I win, we’re going to appoint a special prosecutor,” Trump declared.

However, former Republican appointees to senior Justice Department posts used words like “abhorrent,” “absurd” and “terrifying” to describe Trump’s threat to use the legal system to imprison Clinton.

“For Donald Trump to say he will have a special prosecutor appointed and to have tried and convicted her already and say she’d go to jail is wholly inappropriate and the kind of talk more befitting a Third World country than it is our democracy,” said Paul Charlton, who spent a decade as a federal prosecutor before serving as U.S. attorney for Arizona under President George W. Bush.

Just locker room talk. No big deal.

Chris Kluwe, a football (US football) player, tells Trump that even football players don’t say the kind of thing he said. I don’t really believe that claim, but he says some good things.

Now, Donald, I’m sure you’re wondering just what it is we talk about in a professional locker room, if we don’t spend all our time regarding 50 percent of the population as mobile fuck receptacles eagerly awaiting our tiny-handed grasp on their love lapels. I shall educate you!

We talk about our families. We talk about our significant others, our children, and our parents. We talk about our fears that if a Hitler wannabe who can’t even string together a coherent statement on domestic policy becomes president, what that might mean for those of us who are married to a member of a minority community, or are a member of a minority community, or have children going to schools where hopefully nobody screams racial epithets at them or tells them to go back to [insert foreign country they couldn’t identify on a map here].

And travel, and foreign cities, and money, and paying taxes – which they actually do, unlike some.

We talk about how all of us pay taxes, every year, and wonder what a presidential candidate might have to hide if he so stubbornly refuses to release his returns, what possible foreign debts might be lurking in that finance closet he so desperately holds shut with every ounce of his contemptible mental faculties.

They talk about accountability.

In a professional sports environment, all of us are accountable to each other. We’re a team. If one of us messes up on the field, it affects everyone. Just like if a president makes a bad decision, it affects everyone. And do you know, Donald, the only way the team wins games? The only way we win is if, in the locker room, we’re willing to accept that accountability, address our mistakes, and work as hard as we possibly can to make sure those mistakes don’t happen again.

We don’t double down on a shitty play simply because a small portion of the fan base got excited by it. We don’t try to carve the team apart from the inside to appease a certain position group. We don’t blame our mistakes on something someone else did, because if we do any of those things, we lose, something you’ve become intimately familiar with on a personal, financial, and political level, and I’m not having too many difficulties reviewing how that happened to you on the game film.

So let me conclude with some advice for you, Donald. The next time you want to claim that something is “locker room talk,” take a moment to recognize the fact that were you in an actual locker room, you would be universally reviled as a cancerous, egotistical train wreck of a disgrace that no team could possibly find the time to employ and, honestly, would never even have on their draft board to begin with.

I’ve been in locker rooms, Donald, and you’re the type of narcissistic, pants-soiling fecal eruption that just doesn’t belong. Even football players are smart enough to know that.

He can play football and he can write.

Paul Ryan got everybody on a conference call and said he and Trump are totally not friends any more.

Mr. Ryan informed Republican lawmakers on a morning conference call that he would never again campaign alongside Mr. Trump and would dedicate himself instead to defending the party’s majority in Congress, according to five lawmakers who participated in the call and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Effectively conceding defeat for his party in the presidential race, Mr. Ryan said his most urgent task was ensuring that Hillary Clinton did not enter the White House with Democratic control of the House and Senate, two lawmakers said.

Well there’s always gerrymandering oh right they did that already.

Trump fans were furious.

Mr. Trump’s candidacy was already in a dire condition before Mr. Ryan’s announcement. A poll published Monday by NBC News and The Wall Street Journal found him trailing Mrs. Clinton by a wide margin and drawing less than 40 percent of the vote. The survey was taken before Sunday night’s debate.

Representative Scott Rigell of Virginia, a Republican who has long been opposed to Mr. Trump, said there was a general sense in the House that more humiliating disclosures about Mr. Trump were likely to come before Nov. 8, Election Day.

Well, you know, when you base a party on misogyny and racism and homophobia, that’s the kind of people you attract. We did warn you.

Mr. Trump’s campaign had hoped that the debate would halt an exodus of fellow Republicans from his candidacy, and it publicly implored members of the party on Monday morning to hang with him through Election Day.

After all, he’s such a great guy.

Crude but fitting.

My cartoon in today's @thetimes. #TRUMP pic.twitter.com/ZT2JRKOKWk

— mortenmorland (@mortenmorland) October 10, 2016

Matt Yglesias points out the obvious but important fact that Trump is entirely unqualified to do the job he’s campaigning for.

Trump, it turns out, doesn’t really understand anything about how the American government or American public policy works. That the former host of The Apprentice isn’t really up to speed when it comes to the details of managing public affairs is a bit dull and unsurprising. But it deserves to be front and center in a campaign in 2016.

Above and beyond the wilder and more outrageous sides of Donald Trump’s history and persona is the simple fact that he has no idea what he’s talking about. You wouldn’t ask Barack Obama to pilot a submarine — he has no idea how — and Donald Trump has no more business piloting the ship of state.

He doesn’t even know how to do something as basic to the job as talk coherently. He exclaims and interjects and bounces from one thought to the next within a single sentence. He talks like a toddler on a sugar high. He’s a hot mess.

Policy issues were not really central to the second debate any more than they were to the first debate or, really, the entire 2016 campaign. Once again, we sat through an entire 90-minute debate in which nobody was asked about climate change. Once again, Clinton’s main argument was about Trump’s character and temperament and Trump’s main argument was about Clinton’s honesty and insider status.

But the presidency is important largely because the president is an important policymaker. And Trump has no grasp of any policy issues — he can’t describe his own tax plan, and in an answer about judicial nominations he didn’t seem to know the names of any of the people on his own short list.

That’s what servants are for.

Nobody — even the best presidents — is conversant in every policy issue under the sun. But Trump appears not to be conversant in any of them. And he doesn’t care. When his ignorance is revealed, he doesn’t study up and do better next time. He figures it doesn’t matter and he moves on.

But try to picture a man serving as president who has no idea what he’s doing. A man who doesn’t understand why a junior senator can’t unilaterally change the tax code, or that Russia has had nuclear weapons for a long time, or who regulates health care, or what a safe zone is, or where Syrians come from. It’s alarming. And even while people strive to stay shocked by the most outlandish of Trump’s behaviors, it’s also worth stayed focused on his most banal failings — he’s a rich kid and reality television star who seems somewhat talented at bilking people out of money, who for some reason wants to be president.

Wants to be, and is not at all abashed at the fact that he knows nothing whatsoever about it.

This isn’t a political campaign, it’s a Playboy article from the 70s. It’s heads he wins tails she loses. It’s one greedy man’s sexual assaults up against a woman who is blamed for another greedy man’s sexual predations. Two men are greedy sexual predators, yet somehow one of them gets away with blaming a woman for the other one. Trump is a pig, Bill Clinton is a pig, but Trump is attacking Hillary Clinton because Bill Clinton is a pig. How does that work?? How is Hillary Clinton responsible for Bill Clinton’s piggery?

Ok in the bigger picture you can make a case that she helped enable him by not leaving him yadda yadda – but the fact remains that it’s Trump who’s the rapey wife-dumping pig, and it makes me want to resign from the human species to watch all these piggy men using Bill Clinton’s fucking around as a weapon against Hillary Clinton.

Grown men on Trump’s team tried hard to get Bill Clinton’s victims seated in Trump’s family box at the debate. Trump is a rapey pig, so they tried to deflect attention to his opponent’s spouse.

Donald Trump’s campaign sought to intimidate Hillary Clinton and embarrass her husband by seating women who have accused former president Bill Clinton of sexual abuse in the Trump family’s box at the presidential debate here Sunday night, according to four people involved in the discussions.

The campaign’s plan, which was closely held and unknown to several of Trump’s top aides, was thwarted just minutes before it could be executed when officials with the Commission on Presidential Debates intervened. The commission officials warned that, if the Trump campaign tried to seat the accusers in the elevated family box, security officers would remove the women, according to the people involved, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the discussions were confidential.

Bill Clinton is not the candidate. Hillary Clinton is not the one who abused those women.

“We were going to put the four women in the VIP box,” said former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, who represents Trump in debate negotiations. “We had it all set. We wanted to have them shake hands with Bill, to see if Bill would shake hands with them.”

He’s another one of these sexually greedy pig-bros. They’ve got each other’s backs.

Giuliani said [Trump campaign chief executive Stephen] Bannon kept pushing to have the women come out until three minutes before the debate began.

“But we pulled it because we were going to have a big incident on national TV,” Giuliani said. “Frank Fahrenkopf stopped us, and we weren’t going to have a fight on national TV with the commission to start the debate.”

Bannon declined to comment late Sunday, but his role in coming up with the idea was confirmed by multiple Trump campaign advisers.

Men. Men attacking a woman by throwing her husband’s prey at her.

It’s a god damn frat party, not an election.

Deborah Cameron has written a post that explains everything about Trump and That Tape and banter and structural sexual inequality. Drop everything and read it.

She starts with the first part of the tape.

In this sequence Trump is not boasting about having sex: he’s telling a personal anecdote about an occasion when he didn’t manage to have sex (‘I failed I’ll admit it’). He then returns to what seems to be the original topic, how to assess the woman’s physical attractiveness. The first speaker’s turn suggests that this has diminished over time (‘she used to be great’), but whereas he thinks ‘she’s still very beautiful’, Trump’s reference to her ‘big phony tits’ implies that he no longer finds her as desirable.

What’s going on here is gossip. Like the young men’s gossip I discussed in my earlier post, this is judgmental talk about an absent other which serves to reinforce group norms (in this case, for male heterosexual behaviour and for female attractiveness).

This is what people with PhDs in linguistics are for innit – bringing into focus things we’d sort of seen but only sort of. I’d sort of seen that all this bro talk about which woman is hot and which is below their high standard was an established ritual of some sort, but I hadn’t seen quite that – that it’s judgmental talk about an absent other which serves to reinforce group norms (in this case, for male heterosexual behaviour and for female attractiveness). They bond via judging the hotness of women. Judging strictly is part of it – it wouldn’t do to bounce like a puppy over every eligible (i.e. under 35) woman, because that would be naïf and weak. Real Men will admire only the best.

Then the “just kiss them…grab them by the pussy” section.

Trump’s contribution to this extract looks more like the ‘sex boast’ of the news headlines. But we shouldn’t overlook the fact that this too is an enactment of male bonding. Trump, the alpha male of the group, takes centre stage, but the other men support him throughout with affiliative responses–saying ‘woah’ and ‘yes’, echoing his sentiments (‘Trump: you can do anything’/ ‘Bush: whatever you want’), and above all, greeting his most overtly offensive remarks with laughter. They laugh when he says he doesn’t wait for permission to kiss a woman; they laugh again when he mentions ‘grab[bing] [women] by the pussy’. (You can listen for yourself, but my assessment of this laughter is that it’s appreciative rather than embarrassed, awkward or forced.)

I think it’s a little bit embarrassed as well as appreciative…or not so much embarrassed as…a little startled? There’s a tiny pause before the burst of laughter – it sounds like “Oh no you didn’t!” Not disapproving, but maybe surprised that he would be that disinhibited with them. Shock jock stuff, in short.

What Cameron says about it is brilliant.

The transgressiveness of sexual banter–its tendency to report markedly offensive acts or desires in deliberately offensive (or in the media’s terms, ‘lewd’) language, is not just accidental, a case of men allowing the mask to slip when they think they’re alone. It’s deliberate, and it’s part of the bonding process. Like the sharing of secrets, the sharing of transgressive desires, acts and words is a token of intimacy and trust. It says, ‘I am showing that I trust you by saying things, and using words, that I wouldn’t want the whole world to hear’.

That confirms the way I heard the laughter at “grab her by the pussy” – they were startled that he trusted them, when he’s the alpha and they’re underlings.

Anyway the point is that men [of this type] use contempt for women to bond with each other. No wonder misogyny is so entrenched.

This, Cameron goes on, is why the perps get so indignant that their “banter” is being taken out of context.

Public exposure does literally take this kind of conversation out of its original context (the metaphorical ‘locker room’, a private, all-male setting). And when the talk is removed from that context, critics will focus on its referential content rather than its interpersonal function. They won’t appreciate (or care) that what’s primarily motivating the boasting, the misogyny, the offensive language and the laughter isn’t so much the speakers’ hatred of women as their investment in their fraternal relationship with each other.

Oh, that “click” of recognition. Yeah.

Of course, I’ve had a lot of practice in recognizing this pattern over the past few years – watching a crowd of mostly male people creating a sibling relationship with each other via misogyny and laughter. The internet is a device for making a million locker rooms public space.

As I said before, though, that’s not meant to be an excuse: I’m not suggesting that banter isn’t ‘really’ sexist or damaging to women. On the contrary, I’m trying to suggest that it’s more damaging than most critical discussions acknowledge. Banter is not just what commentators on the Trump tape have mostly treated it as–a window into the mind of an individual sexist or misogynist. It’s a ritualised social practice which contributes to the maintenance of structural sexual inequality.

Yes.

I want to quote every word of this but it’s Deborah’s, not mine; be sure to read the whole thing. I’m tempted to memorize it.

She points out that all the public men now rebuking Trump and invoking their daughters have very likely done the same thing themselves.

Whatever their actual attitudes to women, as members of the US political elite these men have had to be assiduous in forging fraternal bonds with other powerful men. And wherever there are fraternal bonds there will also be banter.

And this, you know, is one of many reasons it really is necessary to engineer things so that women are present in the workplace. We break that shit up. I’ve seen it happen.

Feminists generally refer to the social system in which men dominate women as ‘patriarchy’, the rule of the fathers, but some theorists have suggested that in its modern (post-feudal) forms it might more aptly be called ‘fratriarchy’, the rule of the brothers, or in Carole Pateman’s term, ‘fraternal patriarchy’. Banter is fraternal patriarchy’s verbal glue. It strengthens the bonds of solidarity among male peers by excluding, Othering and dehumanising women; and in doing those things it also facilitates sexual violence.

Yes yes yes.

I’m just going to stop abruptly there, because there’s nothing I don’t want to quote. Read it.

Margaret Sullivan at the Washington Post wonders why NBC sat on the Trump tape for so long.

Why didn’t NBC News do the basic journalistic work of working through its own company’s archives on Trump months ago?

It may have to do with the split between the entertainment and the news divisions — both “The Apprentice” and “Access Hollywood” are products of NBC’s entertainment side, not its news side. NBC’s news reporters are often excellent — Katy Tur, for example, has covered the Trump campaign with admirable intelligence and assertiveness, and has taken a lot of flak from the campaign for doing so.

NBC’s entertainment division has had a long history with Trump because the network was the home of “The Apprentice,” which made him a reality-TV star. Separately, Trump did hundreds of interviews with NBC for “Access Hollywood.” That means there are two separate caches of Trump-on-tape that could yield news.

Maybe the people in News just don’t talk to the people in Entertainment. Clearly they should have.

One troubling factor is that “Access Hollywood’s” segment on Trump’s horrifyingly lewd RAPEY comments — despite their stunning news value — was not scheduled to appear immediately, a spokeswoman confirmed. That only changed when news of The Post’s imminent article forced producers’ hands; they aired it Friday night, after all.

Why this material was left in the hands of an entertainment show, and not the news division, was something I couldn’t get an answer to on Saturday. And when would it have run? Since the segment wasn’t scheduled for Friday, the earliest possibility on the entertainment magazine show would have been Monday.

After the debate – the only debate moderated by a woman, Sullivan points out.

ay Rosen of New York University told me Saturday that it shouldn’t have taken very long to make the video public.

Because it was NBC’s own recording, there should have been no question about authenticity, and, as he put it, “the tape is the story.” Reaction from the campaign was the only thing left to do. “That’s an hour,” as he put it.

What’s more, NBC’s Billy Bush — a former co-host of “Access Hollywood” and now a co-host of its “Today” show, which is on the news side of NBC — knew about it for 11 years but apparently didn’t see it as newsworthy.

Or didn’t see it as something he wanted to point out to people, given all his sycophantic laughter on that tape, and his nasty “Don’t you want to give him a hug?” when he and Trump left the trailer.

There is significant public interest in knowing the answers to these questions. NBC owes it to the American electorate to answer them clearly.

Without adequate answers from the top, made publicly, it may not be unreasonable to conclude that one of the nation’s largest news companies simply wasn’t doing its job.

Does the tape shed a flattering light on NBC? No it does not.

The news media have had enough time now to grasp that the issue is not that Trump’s remarks were “lewd.” It’s that they were contemptuous, hostile, dehumanizing, and that they boasted of sexual assault.

The BBC for instance.

More senior Republicans have withdrawn support for US presidential candidate Donald Trump after his obscene remarks about women became public.

“Obscene” is not the issue. Pee po belly bum drawers.

One of the Republican support-withdrawers says it when the BBC couldn’t manage to:

New Hampshire Senator Kelly Ayotte said in a statement: “I cannot and will not support a candidate for president who brags about degrading and assaulting women,” she said.

There. It doesn’t take many words. It’s not that he said “pussy,” it’s that he said “you [meaning men, or rather himself] can grab their pussy.” It’s that he said you can assault them and get away with it. The obscene word isn’t “pussy,” it’s “grab.”