Writing at The Atlantic, Megan Garber explains The Real Meaning of Trump’s ‘She’s Not My Type’ Defense (‘The president, in attempting to downplay E. Jean Carroll’s rape allegation against him, isn’t talking about attraction. He’s talking about protection‘):
There is, as always, a certain clarity to Trump’s cruelty. The president seems to understand, on some level, something profoundly true about the creaking mechanics of misogyny: Sexual abuse is not, ultimately, about sexual attraction. It is about power. It is about one person’s exertion of will over another. In this way, “She’s not my type” is deeply entangled with the president’s long-standing habit of dismissing unruly women through his negative assessments of their attractiveness: the women as the sexual commodities, Donald Trump as the discerning consumer.
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Google News, today, is a testament to Trump’s preferred framing of things. “Trump says columnist who accused him of sexual assault is ‘not my type.’” “Donald Trump says sexual assault accuser E Jean Carroll ‘not my type.’” On it goes. And the story, in the process, becomes not one about an alleged incident of sexual violence, or about an alleged serial sexual predator occupying the Oval Office, or about another woman—the 22nd woman—coming forward to accuse the president of the United States of sexual misconduct. It becomes a story about a man who has a type, and a woman who fails to live up to it.