How Donald Trump Contributes to Rape Culture by Sylvia Kloian

Everyone knows Donald Trump; in the face of this election, he has become a household name. And almost everyone knows the allegations against him, and the things he has been quoted on saying, but not many people stop to think how his words affect others. In a world where a woman is raped and the man serves only three months jail time, this topic is much more relevant than you might think. Every 109 seconds, somebody is sexually assaulted. And 7% of those people were at their school at the time(s) of the assault. That might not seem like a large percentage, but just one person being sexually assaulted is already too many.
So how does this relate to Donald Trump? A recording released from a conversation between Billy Bush and Donald Trump in 2005 puts Trump on the record saying, "I’ve got to use some Tic Tacs just in case I start kissing her. You know, I’m automatically attracted to beautiful—I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. I just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything…Grab them by the p**sy … You can do anything." This quote alone is startling, but what Trump has said about it after the release is even more unsettling. Trump has put this quote down as simply "locker room talk", and has said that they are "just words". He said that these are "just things that people say".
These words are dangerous. Trump basically admitted that he sexually assaults women, but then  again,  "everyone" says that, right? He is normalizing his actions, making it seem like his words are something you would hear mixed in with the camaraderie of the "locker room". But Trump was not in a locker room; he was in a trailer on set for an interview. And so many others who speak this way are not in the locker room, they are on the streets, or in their houses, or at a restaurant.
Trump's attitude is comparable to the "boys will be boys" outlook. It is sentences like these that make victims believe that it is their fault that they were assaulted. It is sentences like these that leaves a rapist with little guilt. It is sentences like these that bring us one step closer to completely accepting rape as an every-day occurrence instead of a heinous crime.
One might be saying, "But Donald Trump said this back in 2005. Can you really be judging him on a quote from 11 years ago?". This quote isn't the last instance of Trump making sexist and offensive comments. In a 2013 tweet, Trump commented on sexual assault in the military, saying "26,000 unreported sexual assults [sic] in the military-only 238 convictions. What did these geniuses expect when they put men & women together?". Think about those words. Trump is saying that one can expect nothing less if you put men and women together, that sexual assault is normal, so why would someone expect for it to not happen? This is exactly what someone means when they say "rape culture"! By insinuating that people can't control themselves, and that the only way to stop sexual assault is to keep men and women separate, is to say that it is human nature to take advantage of someone. It is not. Or at least is shouldn't be.
Every time someone says something sexist or demeaning, we get farther away from an assault-free future. It is a basic right to be able to walk down the street without fearing an assault, but when Trump and people like him are still out there, saying these kinds of things, they are making it seem like that if an assault were to happen, it would be okay. This mindset is outdated. We must rise above negative comments and victim-shaming if we are ever to live in a rape-free world. And a rape-free world is one that is worth fighting for.

Citations
"Scope of the Problem: Statistics | RAINN." Scope of the Problem: Statistics | RAINN. RAINN, 2016. Web. 26 Oct. 2016.

Mahdawi, Arwa. "This Is What Rape Culture Looks like – in the Words of Donald Trump." The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 15 Sept. 2016. Web. 26 Oct. 2016.