RUTHFULLY YOURS

Britain is allowing in some refugee children who have been encamped in Calais. The only trouble, as the white man said, is that some of them look as though they are 25 years old and all are male. I think it was agreed that the border-control people should lift their game without arriving at the obvious conclusion that corruption of one kind or another must be afoot.

A story was told of a lady with two young children who had agreed to foster a refugee child but, instead, had found a hulking young man on her doorstep. Reportedly, she is afraid for her safety and for her children’s safety. Ho-hum! I kid you not, at one point, we were told that it isn’t the fault of male refugees that they treat women badly; it is the fault of their culture. They know no better. No mention of Islam. Ho-hum!

All agreed, as you would expect from the BBC, that Britain had a responsibility to take in refugee children – though, to be fair, the white man did plaintively refer to homeless British children requiring support too. Nothing to see there; let’s move on — and they did, to Donald Trump. He was introduced into the conversation by one of the women as the “orange monster”. What followed was furious agreement that Mr Trump was unspeakable. But that wasn’t the end of it. Sexism is alive and well in the US apparently.

According to another of the women, the fact that Trump would win easily if only men voted and that Hillary Clinton would win easily if only women voted, showed that men were prejudiced against a woman candidate. The objection raised to this line of reasoning was that many women had found themselves voted into high office in the US and elsewhere with the support of men. But the more obvious retort that sexism can cut both ways was not made.

But there I go again forgetting that sexism, and racism too, only runs one way. Women couldn’t possibly be expected to vote for a lecherous man. On the other hand, Mrs Clinton’s persecution of women ill-used by her husband is forgivable. Because she is a woman?

As an older white man, I have a gender-related view of the voting landscape in the US. It is not the spurious and sexist one proffered on the program. Women for many years have been more wedded to the Democratic Party and less to the Republicans than have men. Men, relatively speaking, are more plugged into politics and therefore more likely to be swayed one way or the other by policies than are women, whose political preferences are more stable.

I would suggest that the sharper-than-usual gender gap of this election is to do with men seeing the need for the kinds of policies espoused by Trump and with women objecting to Trump’s character as they see it. It has little or nothing to do with men not wanting a woman for president. Why feminists need to put everything in this gender-preference perspective is annoying to say the least.

As to Trump’s character, it seems to me, as we used to say, that he has been a bit of a lad in his time. Most men don’t act around women as he evidently has, but many men do. I have seen them and wondered how they got away with it – patting women’s bottoms and such; particularly as those I saw were not rich and powerful. I dare say if they had become rich and powerful any number of women could have claimed they were groped by them decades later. At the time, none seemed to do other than to take it in their stride. This brings me to the latest woman dumping on Trump.

Karena Virginia, lawyered-up, said that Trump, in the company of friends, had admired her legs in 1998 and that she felt objectified. As reported: “He then walked up to me and reached with his right arm and grabbed my right arm. Then his hand touched the right inside of my breast. I was in shock. I flinched.” She said she saw Mr Trump again about five years ago at a business event, and that he looked at her “up and down”.”I had come to the realisation that I was the victim,” she said, adding that Mr Trump “had violated me when he groped me years earlier”.

Really, this is the most trivial and tenuous complaint that I can think of. Why did Trump take her arm? Maybe he wanted to introduce her to his friends as a pretext for asking her out. Too forward? Perhaps. Did she turn resulting in her breast touching his hand? Who knows and who the heck cares? If this is the worst ‘sexual assault’ this lady has suffered I can tell you I have suffered worse and lived not to tell the tale.

Give us all a break, Donald Trump wants to secure the borders, to send rapists packing and to rid the United States of Islamic extremism. Women should be worried about Muslim men and their attitude to women; particularly Muslim men from backward cultures or those who take their religion seriously. That is a real problem. Trump’s personal transgressions which, so far as I can see, stop well short of Bill Clinton’s (and of others in times when such transgressions were kept under wraps) are well beside the point. Women might see Trump as a lecherous orange monster but he is the best thing going for them in this increasingly Islamicised world.

The character of modern Britain is far different from the Britain of my youth. Women have a more prominent place and there is much more racial and cultural diversity. As we know, the same can be said of Australia and all Western nations. There is much good in this, no doubt. But a unified and masculine attitude of mind is necessary to counter threats. Diversity and feminisation is a fair weather indulgence. What I heard on the BBC was fair weather prattling, akin to Nero’s fiddling.

Western civilisation needs Trump. Western women need Trump. Feminists need Trump, as distasteful as this might seem to them. Let me go on. Christians need Trump. Jews need Trump. LGBTs need Trump. This is not the time to fret about Trump’s personal weaknesses for women. It is the time to rely on his strengths and his policies.