The third
film in my retrospective on the films of Karyn Kusama is the late blooming
horror classic Jennifer’s Body. Misunderstood, underrepresented and overlooked,
this 2009 film was ahead of its time, and the culture at large. The film
presents gender and sexuality in a way that we’ve barely touched on, outside of
vague indie dramas, in the near 15 years since its release. Even fewer, are the
films that are marketed to mass audiences and open wide as this film did. This
paper is an exploration of the historical revulsion of the film upon its
release, and its reconsideration a decade later, as well as an analysis of the
film’s broadly stroked gendered and sexual themes that become more intricately
detailed upon further and closer examination.
PLOT
High
School friends Anita and Jennifer have been inseparable since childhood. Jennifer,
the outgoing aggressive bombshell, is the gravitational force in their
relationship, while the diminutive Anita, who goes by the descriptive, albeit narratively
deceptive, “Needy”[1],
sits comfortably in her orbit. But when Jennifer gets lured away after a bar
fire and improperly sacrificed to Satan for an Emo Glam Rock Band’s desire for
fame and fortune, Anita “Needs” to take care of what remains, a demon succubus,
inside her best friend.
HISTORICAL CONTEXT
Production
Jennifer’s
Body marked the sophomore film for writer/producer Diablo
Cody and their second collaboration with Producer Jason Reitman after their
smash hit, Juno. Cody wanted to both pay homage to, and subvert, a lot
of the Horror tropes of the era by centering the narrative around girls and
their friendships, ultimately turning the genre into a double entendre.
While not confirmed, Cody
seemed to draw inspiration for Jennifer’s sacrifice from the real-life
murder of Elyse Pahler who in 1996 was lured from her home
in California and killed as a part of a Satanic ritual; all for the Metal Band Hatred
to be granted “The Craziness and Go Professional”. Once captured, the three
members of the band pleaded “no contest” and are each serving life sentences in
three separate penitentiaries across California. One of these men was denied
Parole in 2021 by Gov. Gavin Newsom, the other two have upcoming parole hirings
in 2023 and 2024 respectively. Feeling a lack of Justice, The Pahler Family
lashed out at the band Slayer, believing that their music and lyrics
promoted murder and violence, which in their mind, led to the death of their
daughter. All civil court cases were dismissed.
The script for Jennifer’s
Body was written in 2006 at the same time as Juno, but because of
the latter’s success, the second script by Diablo Cody was quickly put on the
list of the “most anticipated” unmade scripts of that year. Reitman was
initially set to direct, given his history with Cody, but realizing his vision
wasn’t the right fit, began shopping for directors. Kusama came on in the early
months of 2008, drawn to the project by the script and its overall themes, “a
fairytale gone psycho”, and was present during the additional drafts of the
script that zeroed in and highlighted its feminist messaging. Both Cody and
Kusama were adamant in wanting the story to remain about female friendships and
write these horror roles that [ so rarely] service women. While Cody’s popularity assured that this
script would be produced, the reactionary nature of the Hollywood industry,
ultimately guaranteed that the studio, in this case 20th Century Fox,
would not understand it.
The studio ignorance of this film festered.
Only seeing through the white male gaze of standard Hollywood pictures, Producers
believed this film to be a riff on the typical sex comedy in the vein of (what
would eventually become) National Lampoon’s trademark in the early 2000’s,
a sort of American Pie with a Succubus. Therefore, they hired an all-male
marketing team who focused their attention on capturing young white men, by
using their promotional budget to sexualize Megan Fox at the center of its
advertising. Billboards, posters, one sheets, and trailer editors all leaned in
on the hyper sexualized image of Megan Fox cultivated by the Studio in order to
get men into the theater with the promise of her naked body. According to
Kusama, this crack marketing team even had the deplorable idea that Fox should
do live chats for the film on Amateur Porn sites. This failure at the marketing
ultimately poisoned the public well of goodwill for the film. Thus, audiences
and critics at the time did not know exactly what the film was, nor what it was
trying to say; their expectations crashing upon the rocky shores of the film’s
actual messages. This incongruity left many (typically male) audience members
and critics feeling duped, leading to them unfairly criticizing the film, because
of its marketing tactics.
Reception
The initial
reviews of the film which were mixed but leaning towards
terrible, typically cited the script and direction as being at fault rather
than the performances. Yet, due to the mismanaged marketing, praise for the
performances rarely went beyond the physical, with one review stating: “Forget
Jennifer’s Body. This is all about Megan’s Body”. Several other reviews
lambasted the film for its “lack of fun” or stated that it was a film that was
“pretty to look at” but “without substance.” or calling the directing
amateurish and the writing a “disappointment from an Oscar winner” (meaning
Cody). Many critics felt that Cody was “trying too hard” to match her success
with Juno while others thought the film was too sexual, or conversely, not
sexual enough (which might have been code for not enough nudity, meaning they
didn’t get to see Megan Fox naked). While others just saw the finished product
as trashy B movie schlock.
It is difficult to truss
out whether these first negative reviews, were conceivably led a stray by the
piss poor marketing team, or if it’s a representation of the cultural subtext
of the patriarchy. Many of these negative reviews (typically, but not all from
men) read like the masculine gatekeeping of a genre. The keyboard warriors and early
internet trolls that believe that a female led and directed film, is by its
very creation, subpar. They are then inclined, nay, self-empowered, emboldened,
even entitled, to have their voice be heard and to “put these women in
their place.” These outbursts being tantamount to these men throwing a toddler’s
tantrum for the film not being what they wanted or expected. These negative
reviews shaped a generation’s opinion on this film. For a decade, anytime
anyone would suggest watching it, the inevitable refrain would be: “Oh I heard
its bad, isn’t it bad?” Fortunately, vindication and the valorization of Jennifer’s
Body eventually came with the shifting of gender politics in the US.
The
Emancipation of one Jennifer Check
Since
the film’s release in 2009, US audiences have seen the embolization of a white
supremacist misogyny, ever present in our history and culture, congeal, and
metastasize into the living tumor that is Donald Trump. His successful run for
the presidency against Hillary Clinton set off a wave of anti-immigrant, misogynistic
and racist behavior and its resistance. Many people were speaking up to this
tyranny that wouldn’t before; whether that be because they have finally had
enough or because Trump forced them to be introspective[2] is irrelevant. Regardless, people were beginning to have
conversations about structural forms of systemic racism and sexism that were
outside of academia. Yet, these conversations needed a catalytic spark to create
change. History would provide two events; the response to which would further a
new anti-sexism movement called #MeToo.
The phrase “MeToo” was coined in 2005 by
Tarana Burke, to illustrate the frequency and cultural ubiquity of sexual
assault and violence against women. Burke defined the tactic that would
eventually become the
movement’s mission statement:
“to empower sexually assaulted
people (especially young and vulnerable women of color) through empathy,
solidarity, and strength in numbers, by visibly demonstrating how many have
experienced sexual assault and harassment, especially in the workplace.”
While the movement started in 2005 it was not until 12
years later that it would gain both traction and a voice. The first event that initiated
the Me-Too movement was the New York Times expose on
the sex crimes of Miramax producer Harvey Weinstein, receiving over 100
different accusations including many from the Hollywood elite. The #MeToo began
trending on social media, giving many who were unaware (mostly men) their first
glimpse at the enormity of the problem of sexual assault and sexual violence;
ultimately contributing to Weinstein’s unlikely arrest and surprising conviction.
The second event that solidified
the movement was the appointment of an anthropomorphized can of Papts Blue
Ribbon to the Supreme Court through Brett Kavanaugh; regardless of Christine Blasey
Ford’s testimony about being allegedly assaulted by Kavanaugh while in college.
Veterans of the fight against sexism and the newly “woke” watched as the systemic
patriarchy rallied around Kavanaugh and protected him and his reputation with
all of the power at their disposal.
According
to Constance Grady (2018) it is among the backdrop of the
#MeToo Movement that Jennifer’s Body gets its reconsideration and recompence.
“In a post-#MeToo world, the
implications of this storyline look uncomfortably familiar. It’s the story of a
group of powerful men sacrificing a girl’s body on the altar of their own
professional advancement — and it’s also the story of them using her torment as
a bonding activity.”
Several
feminist and gender scholars have discussed at length the way that the
violation of women by men is used as a mechanism for male group cohesion
(Sanday 1984, Kimmel 2008). The members of Low Shoulder, quip, joke and sing
just before murdering Jennifer. Not only is this a way to decompress the
situation from its immensity, allowing them to either kill her or be complacent
to it, but their laughter illustrates more broadly the way that a lot of men in
their friendship circles hide from dangerous or uncomfortable situations. They
believe that if they can laugh about a situation then the gravity of what they
have done is dissipated (Orenstein 2020).
In the Me-Too era, Jennifer’s
Body can also be framed as a rape revenge fantasy, a reclamation of a
woman’s body after an assault. Living in the Rape Culture which defines
sexuality as violent and minimizes sexual assault by gaslighting women into silence,
how many assault stories end like Jennifer’s: bloodied, near catatonic, and
looking for comfort in the presence and safety of a best friend? What the public
has learned is that the story of what happens to Jennifer’s body, could have
happened to anybody. To that end, the only criticism I have of how this film
handles the assault is that it reinforces the tired trope that violence (typically
sexual violence) is the catalyst for Jennifer becoming powerful. Regardless of
what she eventually does with that power, it still has its origin in male
violence against her, which she then turns on others.
In 2023, Jennifer’s
story, or at least the beginnings of it, are all too familiar. This reframing transforms
the film from the marketed sex fantasy for men, to a revenge fantasy for women
and the importance, and complexity of female friendships. The broader (male)
society can now look at the film and rather than be distracted by the “male
gazey hotness of Megan Fox” put forth by the marketing, they can recognize the
allegorical gender messages the film always portended but was obfuscated by the
patriarchal and misogynistic industry standards of Hollywood. Many terribly
sexist films have been tacitly accepted through the socio-cultural hand waving
of “it was a product of the times.” The speech being used as a shield against any
intricate investigation through a more modern/less forgiving lens. Yet, films
like Jennifer’s Body become richer within the present context. While the
cynically glib part of me wants to flippantly exclaim that “the world had to
get bad enough in order to appreciate the film” But part of the point of the
#MeToo Movement is that it was always like this, we’ve now decided to see it…for
a while.
“You’re
Killing people.” “No, I’m killing Boys.”
SOCIAL ANALYSIS
The social analysis of Cody
and Kusama’s Jennifer’s Body developed in part along the same timeline
as the film’s reclamation. While there have always been supporters, the film
surviving on its cult status, the revivification of the love story between
Anita and Jennifer in the public discourse began with a Feminist theoretical
reading of the film. Through this lens, Jennifer’s Body becomes a
subversive and Feminist treatise on female social expectations, anger, and friendships,
while providing a space for the exploration of bisexuality, something that is still
radical today.
Upending The Patriarchal
Power of men
Part of the amenable
power of Jennifer’s Body is in its ability to shine a lens on the gendered
expectations and the fragile nature of masculinity within the patriarchy. To
say masculinity is fragile means that the veneer of manhood is easily broken because
the acceptable criterion for masculinity is so narrow and specific, often
surrounding violence, being tough, numerous sexual conquests, as well as protection,
provision, and alcohol consumption, that a person’s masculine presentation can
be obliterated with a simple question or a small behavioral slip. Say the
“wrong” thing, order the “wrong” drink, where the “wrong” clothes and you leave
yourself open to ridicule. Because the tenuous nature of masculinity is known,
masculinity needs to be reaffirmed/solidified in (nearly) every social
situation. Jennifer’s Body highlights the fact that boys and men are not
the only ones that learn these masculine rules, girls do too and use them to
glean power (In Jennifer’s case, their lifeforce) from them. Yet, because she
is working within the confines of already established gender norms, exploiting
them, rather than breaking them, she goes undetected.
In
the film, although Jennifer is always the last person to be seen with the victims,
she is never suspected. The tacit implication being that it is unthinkable that
a girl/woman could be the killer, especially given the horrifically gory cannibalistic
nature of the crimes. This gendered invisibility allows her to hunt without
interruption. Part of Jennifer’s stalking process is playing on the socially
constructed gender norms that police both men and women’s bodies. These boys
willfully go with Jennifer, or are lured by her, to secluded locations so that
she can feed. They do not fear her, even when the context of the situation
screams danger, because she is a girl. And still, they persist into danger because
of the promise of sex, because of the promise of “Jennifer’s Body.”
The
scene that clearly articulates this exploitation of fragile Masculinity is when
Colin (Kyle Gallner) is driving to a supposed “date” with Jennifer. As he is
driving, he notices that the streets get less populated, homes get darker, and
eventually everything looks abandoned. As he approaches the house where he is
supposed to meet Jennifer, he knows that at the very least, this seems like a
prank (and at worse he is in danger). Yet, he continues into the house because
of the allure of uncertainty, the possibility of Jennifer, and the masculine
gender police of his fellow men, that will mercilessly ridicule him for leaving. Jennifer weaponizes fragile masculinity and
she wields it with perfect precision.
The filmmaking intention of
scenes like the one above is to upend the trope of women dying in horror movies.
While the film is successful, to that end, it also goes further and makes all
the male characters utterly faceless and disposable, only identified by their particular
aesthetic (jackets, piercings, hairstyles etc.) much like female gendered
tropes in traditional horror movies. The
subversive thing about Jennifer’s Body is that the boys and men in this
film are one-dimensional mechanisms by which the relationship between Jennifer
and “Needy” play out; they are a function by which the relational dynamics of the
principal characters are explored.
“Do
You have a Tampon? I thought you might be plugging.”
“Needy” and Jennifer:
Best Frenemies Forever
At first glance, and in the opening scene, Jennifer
and “Needy” are supposed to embody a gaggle of female friendship tropes.
Jennifer is “the hot girl” and Anita is “the nerdy best friend”; each
identified with specific hairstyles, clothing, and make-up. The filmmakers even
go so far as to resurrect the 90’s trope of making an attractive girl seem ugly
by putting Amanda Seyfried behind a pair of glasses and tying her hair back.
This is even called out early in the film after Jennifer tells “Needy” to “Wear
something cute.” “Needy” understands exactly what that means. Her proceeding
explanation is so razor thin specific that she only needs to try on a few
outfits/ combinations that fit the criteria.
Woven into the character tropes of “Needy” and Jennifer is an exploration of female relational aggression (Simmons 2002). Because direct aggression is often coded as masculine, women have been socialized to express their anger in subtle indirect ways. This keeps them from seeming overtly hostile, and maintaining a “good girl” image, and therefore not sanctioned. This anger manifests through the weaponizing of relationships and using the practices of group exclusion, rumor spreading, and name calling (Simmons 2002). A lot of the aggression that “Needy” and Jennifer feel for each other is expressed through their interactions with other people. Jennifer expertly pits “Needy” against others (mostly Chip) in order to make “Needy” choose Jennifer; effectively sabotaging her other relationships so that they only belong to each other.
Jennifer
and “Needy’s” Bisexual Journey
Jennifer
and Anita’s love story begins in a sandbox when they were children (Sandbox
love never dies). Throughout the film, that bond is tweaked and stretched the
way a lot of young love develops, through flirtation and experimentation. Jennifer
and “Needy” are shown engaging in playful, semi aggressive shoving early in the
film which can often be a precursor to a sexual encounter. Moreover, when
Jennifer shows up in “Needy’s” bed in a t-shirt, underwear, and leggings, Jennifer
mentions that “[She] found her way back to [Needy]” and passively mentions that
they used to play “boyfriend and girlfriend”. In these moments, their love,
desire, and passion for each other is palpable; especially for “Needy”. For
Jennifer, because she is always sexually confident, it is in her quiet caring,
and unwillingness to harm “Needy”, that shows her tenderness and love. While these ideas were originally assumed by
critics to be solely for and about the heterosexual male audience, creating
titillation for the male gaze, what Jennifer and “Needy” display here is a
clear presentation of Adrianne Rich’s “Lesbian Existence”
In a previous
essay I provided an articulation of Rich’s main point and
context that is valid in Understanding the Sexual Politics of Jennifer’s
Body
“Lesbian existence comprises both the breaking of a
taboo and the rejection of a compulsory way of life. It is also a direct or
indirect attack on male right of access to women. But it is more than these,
although we may first begin to perceive it as a form of nay-saying to
patriarchy, an act of resistance. It has of course included role playing,
self-hatred, breakdown, alcoholism, suicide, and intrawoman violence; we
romanticize at our peril what it means to love and act against the grain, and
under heavy penalties; and lesbian existence has been lived (unlike, say,
Jewish or Catholic existence) without access to any knowledge of a tradition, a
continuity, a social underpinning. The destruction of records and memorabilia
and letters documenting the realities of lesbian existence must be taken very
seriously as a means of keeping heterosexuality compulsory for women, since
what has been kept from our knowledge is joy, sensuality, courage, and
community, as well as guilt, self-betrayal, and pain”
As the term "lesbian" has been held to
limiting, clinical associations in its patriarchal definition, female
friendship and comradeship have been set apart from the erotic, thus limiting
the erotic itself. But as we deepen and broaden the range of what we define as
lesbian existence, as we delineate a lesbian continuum, we begin to discover
the erotic in female terms: as that which is unconfined to any single part of
the body or solely to the body itself, as an energy not only diffuse but, as
Audre Lorde has described it, omnipresent in "the sharing of joy, whether
physical, emotional, psychic," and in the sharing of work; as the
empowering joy which "makes us less willing to accept powerlessness, or
those other supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as
resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial[7]
Rich identifies in this stitched together passage, (as
in the article as a whole) that in a patriarchal system women are taught to see
other women as a source of contention and competition for male attention (Thus
making heterosexuality compulsory through socialized behaviors, reinforced by
rewards from social structural institutions (Marriage, family, Military economy
etc.)), and denying the reality of the power women have among and with each
other by placing undue emphasis on the type and nature of a relationship rather
than what that relationship provides for the individuals involved. Thus, women
are socially trained through compulsory heterosexuality and patriarchal
oppression that the most important relationships that they have are with men,
and that all other relationships are secondary within this structure.
We
see this play out in Jennifer’s Body in the way that “Needy” only
engages in sexual contact with her boyfriend, Chip, because she feels
threatened by Jennifer (contention and competition for male attention) “Needy”
never initiates romantic or sexual contact with him that isn’t motivated by
Jennifer’s presence or her mentioning. Consistent to that point, Jennifer’s
pursuit of Chip is in service of affecting her relationship with “Needy”
Additionally, Amanda Seyfried
and Johnny Simmons (“Needy” and Chip respectively) have nonexistent on-screen
chemistry. When Chip is first introduced in “Needy’s” room, in the context of
the scene, the audience could just as easily infer that Chip is her brother rather
than her boyfriend. This is solidified when you juxtapose “Needy’s”
participation in her sexual interactions with both Chip and Jennifer. With
Chip, “Needy” is in the passive receiving missionary position with little to no
eye contact with her partner (to which Chip makes no notice or care for). Instead, it is clear in the context of the
scene that she is thinking about/linked with Jennifer. Conversely, later in the
film, after Jennifer initiates their kiss, it is “Needy” that becomes desirably
aggressive towards Jennifer, overcome with a passionate hunger neither she, nor
the audience, have seen from her before.
In the end, the
confluence of Jennifer and “Needy’s” relationship is a near perfect
distillation of Rich’s argument for the power of “The Lesbian existence”. They
do not define themselves by the patriarchal definition of lesbian, but instead define
the erotic in feminine terms, thereby allowing for the creation of a “lesbian
continuum” which includes their Bisexuality. Carmen Maria Machado (2022) reinforces
this in the way that they deconstruct
the final confrontation between Jennifer and “Needy”:
When Needy eventually
kills Jennifer, she does it facing her, straddling her; this is how Jennifer’s
mother finds them, compromised in Jennifer’s canopy bed.
The scene is shot less like a death scene and more
like teens being caught in a romantic entanglement. The culmination of the
fight has the subtext of mild sex play, and when the final blow is struck, it
plays out like a sexual climax rather than a death. This seems intentional considering
that orgasms have been historically referred to as “the little death” and acts
as a satisfying narrative metaphor for the pinnacle of their relationship. To
further this point, the reaction of Jennifer’s mother is first one of surprise
in seeing “Needy” intimately atop her daughter, and her reaction to Jennifer’s (dead)
body is one of sorrowful disappointment rather than anger which is also
consistent in many “coming out” stories.
Machado
(2022) goes
on to identify the Bisexual diversity through “Needy” and
Jennifer’s characters, believing that if Jennifer were not to be invaded by
Satan, that she would have turned out to be a bisexual that is primarily lesbian
in practice and “Needy” as a bisexual that also consistently dates men. While I
believe there is just as much evidence for the opposite given “Needy’s” desert
of chemistry with her Gaslighting jackass of a boyfriend; it’s important to
understand that stories of sexuality, actual, non-romanticized versions are
complicated and messy especially around the subject of sexual Identity…and
“such little grace is given to the perfect messiness of desire.” (Machado
2022:3)
Thus, the bisexual queerness of
Jennifer and “Needy’s” love story is complex and multifaceted; set in direct
opposition to the common bisexual stories we are subjected to in our
“post-modern” culture. The bisexual identity is less accepted and vilified on
both sides of the sexuality binary, with many people (on both sides) believing
that the bisexuality identity is a layover rather than a destination. This is
further complicated by the way the heteronormative structure allows for “spaces
of experimentation” usually college, where fluid sexual identities are more
accepted. Granted, many of these spaces were created still under the male gaze
and women in sexual congress with other women has been commodified by
heterosexual men for their own pleasure. But regardless of intention and
motivation, women are allowed to sexually experiment more openly in these
spaces and that has the potential to allow for greater sexual diversity beyond
the binary. Therefore, we need more complex messy stories like Jennifer and
Needy’s because not everything is blissfully explicit and wonderfully clean.
Machado (2022) sums this up nicely in
a recent interview:
People want queer representation to
be perfect, and it doesn’t have to be perfect — and also, people have different
ideas about what makes something perfect. And there is a deliciousness in
subtext and uncertainty… But
also, the standards are so high. Subtext is really fun! I feel like a lot of
younger people are like, “If it’s not explicit, it’s not worth it.” And I’m
like, “Eat your vegetables!”
CONCLUSION
Jennifer’s Body is
a wonderfully schlocky B movie horror feminist cult classic. It was undercut by
the marketing team and sold to the group that would hate it the most; under the
guise that the objectification of Megan Fox would continue in the service of the
white male gaze. Instead, what many of these men received was a understanding
of their minimal importance in the lives of girls and women when compared to
the complexity of female friendships. Upset, they decided to lash out at the
film for making them face this realization rather than be introspective about
their relationships and how they treat women. In
a recent court ruling, the US courts have determined that individuals can
sue production companies over the validity of their movie trailers. Meaning
that if something that is presented as significant in the trailers does not
make it into the final film, that could be grounds for a lawsuit. If this was precedence
in 2009, how quickly does anyone think these butthurt, dude-bros. would sue the
studio for not being this films target audience, feeling a sense of entitlement
to ogle at Megan Fox’s fully nude body. One of the key aspects of denial is
deflection. These men do not want to recognize that the power of “Jennifer’s
Body” has nothing to do with them, and that irrelevance is the harshest weapon
against the misogynistic patriarchy.
REFERENCES
Grady, Constance (2018) “How Jennifer’s Body went from a flop in 2009
to a feminist cult classic today The critical reevaluation of Jennifer’s Body,
explained” Retrieved at https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/10/31/18037996/jennifers-body-flop-cult-classic-feminist-horror
Retrieved on 12/30/2022
Kimmel, Micheal (2008) Guyland: The
perilous world where boys become men New York: Harper Collins
Machado, Carmen
Maria (2022) “ Both Ways” In It Came From The Closet: Queer Reflections on
Horror Retrieved at https://www.autostraddle.com/in-queer-horror-anthology-it-came-from-the-closet-carmen-maria-machado-considers-jennifers-body/
Retrieved on 12/30/2022
Orenstein, Peggy
(2020) Boys and Sex: Young men on Hookups, Love, Porn, Consent, and
Navigating the New Masculinity New York: Harper Collins
Rich, Adrianne (1980) “Compulsory
Heterosexuality and the Lesbian Existence” In Women, Sexand Sexuality 5(4) Chicago
University Press Retrieved at https://www.jstor.org/stable/3173834
retrieved on 12/22/22.
Sanday,
Peggy Reeves (1984). Fraternity Gang Rape New York: New York University Press.
Simmons, Rachel K. (2002) Odd Girl Out: The hidden
Culture of Aggression in Girls New York: Harcourt
[1]
After my rewatch of this film, I am convinced that the nickname of “Needy” was
something that Jennifer came up with (a constant subtle jab) and Anita accepted
it to maintain a relationship with Jennifer
[2] It
is important to keep in mind that during this many White men who openly and vocally
came out against Donald Trump did so under the guise of using Trump’s openly
inflammatory and blatantly discriminatory statements to distance themselves
from their own levels of racism and sexism. Because compared to Trump, their
level of Misogyny seems quaint. May people justifying their actions by saying
“At least I am not that bad”
