God Save America from Donny T....What Trump's marriages may have in common with ours Hell Nothing.... Trump is a chauvinist,sexist,anti feminist along with horrific racist, suffers from terminal Islamophobia and supports Martine Le Pen ( her fathers daughter )of the Holocaust Solution to the Islam = ISIS =Muslim Camel Keepers . Donny T concept of dDemocracy is Me, Myself , I, Donald Trump Autocracy..... Capital Hill and Joint Chief of Staff... your services are no longer required.... who shall I nuke today.... why was I stacked and racked over London last week... what the hell lets nuke Elizabeth R 's Capital and for good measure England and Europe.
I hesitate to view the behavior of Donald Trump as a reflection of anything other than the behavior of Donald Trump.
His story — the "small loan" from his father, the string of private mansions, the reality TV stint — is so completely unrecognizable to most of us that it's difficult to imagine his life represents our lives in any real way.
But a column in Thursday's New York Times by Jill Filipovic looks at Donald Trump, family man, and draws some fascinating conclusions about his — and our — competing views of a woman's role in society.
In "Why men want to marry Melanias and raise Ivankas," Filipovic argues that the Trumps embody a family dynamic that looks all too familiar: "Men who want one thing for their wives and another for their children."
"Men have often given their female offspring more opportunities than their female partners," Filipovic writes, "perhaps seeing their children as extensions of themselves."
Ivanka Trump, Trump's older daughter, is scheduled to speak Thursday at the Republican National Convention. She's been proudly portrayed by Trump and his campaign as a successful entrepreneur, and she's writing a book called "Women Who Work."
But Trump has been less supportive of his wives working. He told ABC News his marriage to Ivana (Ivanka's mother) failed when Ivana started to work outside the home. "I have days where I think it's great," he said. "And I have days where, if I come home — and I don't want to sound too much like a chauvinist — but when I come home and dinner's not ready, I go through the roof."
He once told Howard Stern: "I won't do anything (to take care of the children.) I'll supply funds, and she'll take care of the kids," Filipovic points out.
So what does this have to do with the rest of us?
"Like Mr. Trump praising his daughter's business acumen, men want different things in their wives than in their daughters," Filipovic writes. "Changing gender roles look less threatening when it's their children who benefit."
According to a Shriver Report survey, she writes, two-thirds of men want an independent daughter, but only one in three want an independent wife. Fourteen percent of men said they wanted a wife who was a homemaker, and just 5 percent said the same about their daughters.
Sometimes this dynamic is less overt. In far too many families, the bulk of the domestic responsibilities of keeping a household running fall to the wife, whether she's working or not.
On an average day, 19 percent of men do housework (cleaning, laundry, etc.), compared with 49 percent of women, according to Time Use Survey data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Sixty-eight percent of women spent time on meal prep or cleanup, while 42 percent of men did. For families with kids under 6, the data show, women spent one hour providing physical care to children, while men spent 26 minutes providing physical care.
Those figures reflect our priorities in ways we may not admit to out loud. And they absolutely affect women's career success. As Sheryl Sandberg pointed out in "Lean In," when Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter was asked what men can do to advance women's leadership, she answered: "the laundry."
Filipovic's column is well worth your time — whether it forces you to examine unequal dynamics in your own home or inspires a moment of gratitude for happily equal ones.
"In our reluctantly feminist America," Filipovic writes, "one question this election poses is whether we've evolved enough to value women as individuals instead of assessing them relationally, as an attractive wife supporting her husband or as a high-achieving daughter reflecting a flattering light back on her parents."
Good questions to ask about our own families as well.
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