Erica H 💙❤️💛

People wondered why the “grab ’em by the pussy” tape wasn’t enough to destroy Donald Trump’s political career. There are obviously many reasons Trump won in 2016. But I keep coming back to one reason that tape wasn’t politically disqualifying: what we heard on it wasn’t as far removed from the way women are viewed in our society as we would like to believe. And I thought about that again when I read the allegations coming out of Cornell. A former Cornell student has filed a lawsuit alleging that she was drugged and sexually assaulted by multiple members of a fraternity in 2024. Among the allegations in the lawsuit is a Snapchat message sent to a fraternity group chat referring to her as “free pussy” upstairs. Think about those words. Not a woman. Not a fellow student. Not a human being with agency over her own body. A body being offered up for other men to use. And that is the connection I can’t stop thinking about. “Grab ’em by the pussy.” “Free pussy upstairs.” These are radically different circumstances, and allegations in a lawsuit are not established facts. But the language reflects something we still have not adequately confronted: a culture that can teach boys and men to see women’s bodies as things to possess, consume, trade, judge, or abuse. Those lessons don’t suddenly begin in college. Boys can encounter pornography and highly sexualized content online long before they have the emotional maturity to understand intimacy, consent, or healthy relationships. Social media can then amplify influencers and communities that explicitly demean women or treat relationships as contests of male dominance. Maybe the question we should have been asking after the Access Hollywood tape wasn’t only, “How could people hear a man talk about women that way and still vote for him?” Maybe the bigger question was: Why did that way of talking about women sound familiar enough that millions of people could hear it and move on? Just as every man in that Cornell frat did nothing to stop the horrors inflicted on the human being in their frat.