Women for Trump and E. Jean Carroll on Hideous Men

                                                          Ivanka and Melania Trump

At the end of the second week of April, Women for Trump, an auxiliary arm of the Trump campaign, hosted another of its trademark “Hour to Empower” sessions to rally the female faithful. In keeping with traditions that the newly housebound have adopted since the coronavirus pandemic dropped on the country with its full force, the women broadcasted from home. The president’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, served as the de facto host for GOP chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, Michigan GOP chair Laura Cox, and Ben Carson’s daughter-in-law Merlynn Carson, who all appeared on a screen split into quadrants. ‘

“We are so fortunate to have a wartime president to lead us through this global challenge!” Lara Trump announced from the upper left corner of the screen, a blueish potted plant over her right shoulder, giant glass candelabra over her left. Carson praised the recently passed stimulus package to the heavens. Collectively, they discussed how “most Democrat governors” have shown their gratitude to Trump during the crisis, with the exception of Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer, the ingrate who was “politicizing in time of crisis.” They concluded with some banter about how they’re handling all their home time.

Veteran viewers of the “Hour to Empower” might have experienced it all as a wan attempt at keeping up appearances during the president’s crisis year. It hardly matched the optimistic fervor of the last edition, which took place in Sandy Springs, Georgia, and featured red-clad White House allies Kimberly Guilfoyle and Katrina Pierson regaling a roomful of Peachtree State women about the president’s ability to keep the economy humming. Guilfoyle and Pierson drew the loudest applause from the assembled by enthusing about the number of federal judges Trump had already appointed—judges who, it needed no reminding, were vetted for their extreme anti-choice positions.

Women for Trump have always proclaimed that no matter how misogynistic Trump appears to be, no matter how many women have accused him of abuse, and no matter that he supports policies to abolish women’s liberty, he is in fact “empowering” women. In fairness, “empowerment” is one of those famously flexible terms—akin to that other right-wing go-to word, “liberty”—that’s strayed far from its original meaning. But for these women, theirs is a hobbled empowerment, literally and figuratively. 

The damage done to women by the Trump administration has been incalculable, the disempowerment immense. In office, he has set women back decades both politically and through policies aimed at limiting their rights and autonomy. He has promoted hundreds of anti-choice judges, mostly male and white, including two to the Supreme Court. He has encouraged toxic masculinity in his supporters, and pushed for anti-woman policies at every level of government, from the Department of Education to Health and Human Services. And Trump’s election, after the most openly misogynistic campaign in modern history, convinced most Democratic Party regulars that American women were unelectable to the highest office in the land for at least another cycle. 

If Trump can be said to “empower” women at all, it is in the same way that he empowers the women closest to him, promoting them as commodities; as deal enhancers. Trump’s wife, daughters, and daughters-in-law must resemble in style and stature the thousands of women this impresario of female flesh has lined up beside himself for years in his beauty pageants and reality television escapades. They must choose his favorite shoe and relinquish their right to run.

The “empowered” Trump women part ways with non-Trump women in a number of ways. They do not give lip service to other women’s rights, because in their Hobbesian view of the world, everyone gets ahead “on her own.”  They have an unusually strong tolerance for hypocrisy. White women for Trump put him over the top in 2016, apparently unconcerned with the October surprise of a hot mic tape in which Trump bragged about sexual assault, which in turn opened the floodgates to what are now more than 40 accusations of sexual misconduct, up to and including rape. Last year, Trump was the presidential candidate with the largest number of donations from women, with women constituting 41 percent of his donors.

The Trump women’s willingness to submit to abuse goes along with their willingness to participate in the commodification of the feminine. Female flesh is a marketing tool with which to hawk everything from cars to music to movies. Many women already participate in this trade, with Anna Wintour at one end of the spectrum and Stormy Daniels at the other. Trump and his women emerged from this world.

Branding women has been his avocation. He opened his “T Model” agency at a time when model industry practices were just a few legalities removed from human trafficking. Jeffrey Epstein is not the only one of Trump’s running buddies to be credibly accused of pedophilia. Trump not only attended parties for aspiring models, many of them underage girls; he hosted them, on his yacht and in halls at his hotel in New York. The goal of all the New York “modelizers” was to interact sexually with as many nubile out-of-towners as physically possible. Ambitious, disoriented young girls would submit to, if they were lucky, just a thorough ogling or manhandling; and if unlucky, rape.

Loyalty and discretion are the two chief job qualifications required for anyone to rise in Trumpworld, but especially so for women intimately connected to him, who might be familiar with whatever really lies behind the orange mask and coif de greffe de cheveux. The supposed empowerment of Trump women has been amplified by access journalists, whose work routinely normalizes daughter Ivanka and wife Melania as political figures. Ivanka plays the media like a fiddle, carefully choosing outlets—The Financial Times, The Washington Post—for rare interviews, but mostly appearing on the Fox News Channel or remaining silent. The more guarded Melania forces journalists to become adept at “reading” her fashion choices—choices that really are one man’s full time job. One CNN reporter assigned to the FLOTUS beat has speculated that Melania’s habitual look of steely suffering is not a reflection of the inner torment of a woman in a transactional relationship with an oleaginous obese oaf, but rather a cultural holdover from her Slovenian youth, where “a non-genuine smile isn’t really a thing.”

No one masks Trump’s malevolence toward women more effectively than his “empowered” female clone, Ivanka. In her senior adviser role she traipses around the world collecting the home numbers of corporate and political leaders (need those numbers on hand if Dad goes to jail) all while spewing bromides about women’s empowerment at ridiculous events like February’s Dubai women’s conference, held just days before a British court accused the Dubai sheikh of kidnapping and torturing his own adult daughters.

Ivanka came of professional age along with what Sheelah Kolhatkar has dubbed the “Women’s Empowerment Industrial Complex.” The lucrative seminar circuit flies brand-name speakers around the world to join panels of mic’ed up, well-heeled women sitting on stage couches, to talk for 45 minutes about “networking” or breaking the glass ceiling. Empowered with a few new contacts, they part ways and return to jobs where they mostly serve The Man until the next first class ticket to the next seminar.

The ideal “empowered” Trump Woman is the “entrepreneur,” the go-it-alone girl-boss who’s palatable to corporate America; a job-creator who can save the American masses from their deaths of despair.  Last week, Trump told business leaders that Ivanka had created 15 million jobs. As with all his brazen lies, that number was snatched from the ether. In November, he had credited her with creating 14 million jobs, so perhaps he’s rounding up as a bit of coronavirus crisis management. Meanwhile, the American economy only added 6.2 million jobs during Trump’s presidency.

While it’s long been the fever dream of the Beltway media that she’ll be a “moderating influence,” one will never find Ivanka correcting Dad. She is smart enough to understand that Trump’s base could care less about the facts. It is increasingly unlikely that she will be the daughter who will bring down the father, as Steve Bannon once predicted. The Republican wet dream now is that Ivanka becomes the first female president, and that the Trump dynasty lasts 16 years in office.

Melania is the other model of empowerment for the Women for Trump who, like her, are commonly accused of being complicit. But compliance must take root before complicity may flourish, and those close to Donald pay a price in loneliness and public humiliation. Most Boomer women who encounter men like him have learned how to navigate away with smiles, the brushings-away of groping hands, the deft changing of a subject of conversation. These are the many tricks of female subservience. They conduct business, and then—usually—get the hell out.

Shortly after the disastrous midterm election, which put her golden-egg laying goose in jeopardy of impeachment and the prospect of prison, Melania emerged from the shadows as her own power source, demanding the sacking of deputy national security advisor Mira Ricardel. That firing, granted the day after the request, was Melania’s first public act—beyond her infamous decision to wear her “i really don’t care do u” jacket to visit migrant children, and the slap-away of Donald’s hand on an Israeli tarmac—viral moments that consumed many hours of media attention nonetheless. Her real power play came a few months later, when Trump installed Melania’s spokeswoman Stephanie Grisham as White House press secretary, despite the fact that her prior experience had been limited to staffing state legislators in Arizona. Grisham had proved her utility to Trumpworld during Melania’s mysterious 24-day disappearance after what was supposedly a simple outpatient kidney procedure. Grisham distinguished herself by holding zero daily briefings during her tenure—a feat no standard-issue political flack of lesser grit would have dared attempt.

Trump’s evangelical base long ago forgave Melania her lesbian nude modeling shoot, her lolling nude on a fake Oval Office rug, and her donning S&M garb, because all of it went to embellish Donald’s brand. The religious right now calls her a “Proverbs 31 wife”—Bible-code for submissive and virtuous women. Now, from the East Wing, with its new glam room and Pilates gym, Melania has also managed her public profile as a human clothes hanger, forever sending what many still believe to be messages through her choice of attire.

These days, Melania is reaping the rewards that can come with this hobbled empowerment. Long gone are the days when Donald could discard a pretty young wife with a million-dollar payoff, as he did with Second Wife Marla Maples. Donald is today, by comparison to then, a slave to his hot “supermodel.” He is entirely dependent upon her continued willingness to accessorize him. And he has grown obedient under her occult power, as old men with young wives do. Trump has even “joked” that Melania wouldn’t care if he died. At a fundraiser for wounded Louisiana Congressman Steve Scalise, Trump marveled at the way Scalise’s wife had cried at the hospital. “I mean not many wives would react that way to tragedy, I know mine wouldn’t,” he said.

Trump’s notion of an empowered woman may be severely restricted, but through that cracked lens, Trump lives with his own peculiar fears. “Women have one of the great acts of all time. The smart ones act very feminine and needy, but inside they are real killers,” he wrote in Trump: The Art of the Comeback. “The person who came up with the expression ‘the weaker sex’ was either very naive or had to be kidding. I have seen women manipulate men with just a twitch of their eye—or perhaps another body part.”

                                                     Martha Nussbaum

As the philosopher Martha Nussbaum has noted, disgust is a foundational element of misogyny. Germaphobe Trump is horrified by female bodily functions, especially menstruation and childbirth (pregnancy is OK—it makes breasts grow), which likely explains why he fled into the arms of a plastic-fantastic porn star and Playboy bunny immediately after Melania produced Barron. Like the Hebrew ascetics who wrote the Bible, and the African shamans who ban menstruating women from villages, and his own father, Trump is infected with the ancient patriarchal belief that women’s natural functions are taboo. For Trump, the trouble with modern women is that you can never know when these female killers will have blood coming out of their “wherever.”

But the Women for Trump have adapted. They’ve learned to work within this foundational misogyny. The best of them, like Melania, possess a level of intense self-discipline and isolated rigor, a faux empowerment that betters the odds that the wager they’ve made will pay off eventually. In exchange, the patriarchy has much to offer; for a chosen few, it always has.

Trump’s Women Are Trapped in a Cult of “Empowerment”. By  Nina Burleigh. The New Republic,

 April 13 ,2020. 

                                                                    Lana Trump 

Republican campaign officials are deploying targeted marketing techniques to identify where undecided female voters will have the greatest impact in the 2020 election, amid warning signs that parts of the crucial bloc are abandoning the president.

President Donald Trump carried non-college-educated white women — 20% of all voters in presidential election years — by 27 points in 2016. But the group shifted by 13 points in the 2018 midterm elections, and in recent months warmed to the prospect of impeaching and removing Trump from office over his efforts to pressure Ukraine to investigate a domestic political rival.

The Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee are responding with an aggressive organizational effort to shore up these voters.

“We’ve talked a lot about how we’re a data-driven campaign,” said Hannah Castillo, director of coalitions for the Trump campaign. “We are all over the country where we’re doing these events.”

The campaign launched its Women for Trump group last year and says it has attracted 30,000 members ever since. Out of all of its “coalition” events targeting individual subgroups — including veterans, Latinos, evangelical Christians and African Americans — 63% have been held for women voters.

But it is unclear whether the campaign is making progress, as polls show growing disapproval of Trump among white working class women and suburban women — two critical subgroups in the upcoming general election.

“The share of the white working class in the industrial states are where we need to look to see if we’re going to have major, consequential gaps going forward,” said Karlyn Bowman, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and an expert on American public opinion. “It’s clear that something’s happening, that there’s a division.”

The RNC is planning a host of “Women Empowerment Days” in various states throughout the country, hoping to engage wider networks of female voters.

The Trump campaign and RNC are both using “Designated Market Area” research — often used in advertising to target consumers based on geographical metadata — to identify undecided communities.

“When we have a Women for Trump event, it’s obviously in substantial turf for target DMA where we see women can be impactful in those target states,” a campaign official said.

Democratic super PAC Priorities USA released polling this fall that found Trump “under water” in key battleground states with white women — and specifically with white non-college-educated women, of which 45% approved of his job performance, while 55% disapproved.

“His overall numbers have been stable — low, but stable. But within these groups, there’s been some movement,” said Mark Mellman, a Democratic pollster and CEO of the Mellman Group. “There is no question that women are much more hostile to this president than men — there’s no question that college-educated women are particularly hostile. But there’s been movement among non-college-educated women, as well. He’s suffered some meaningful defections from his high points.”

Trump campaign officials look at the entirety of the women vote and express optimism.

“We hear a lot about women, women, women,” said a second senior campaign official.

Drawing on polling from NBC and the Wall Street Journal, the official compared Trump’s current approval among women, 37% nationally, to exit polling in 2016, in which 41% of women supported the president.

That difference, within the average margin of polling error, has given the campaign a “quiet confidence” its numbers have remained consistent — despite signs that suggest Trump faces growing problems among white working class women, a pillar of his political base.

Lara Trump, the president’s daughter-in-law and senior advisor, said the Women for Trump group is based on a loose concept from 2016.

“After the president was inaugurated, and we had time to really focus on getting things set up the right way for this campaign, something we talked about was very early on rolling out our coalitions, so that we could do things the right way this time,” she said.

She said half of the campaign’s donations come from women. The number cannot be independently checked because the campaign is not required to disclose donors who give under $200 and it does not voluntarily provide itemized information for many of those supporters to the Federal Elections Commission.

At the end of September, the time of the last available donation tally, the Center for Responsive Politics found that women who gave more than $200 provided 34.7% of Trump’s campaign cash. They accounted for 43.9% of recorded donors.

The president’s campaign team says it is investing the money in states like New Hampshire and Minnesota that Trump barely lost in his first election. The outreach to women is in line with their goal to win those close contests in 2020.

That strategy was aimed at winning states he lost in 2016, rather than worries about losing women voters. “I don’t know that it’s that we’re concerned about women,” Lara Trump told McClatchy in an interview.

“Of course, strategically we’re targeting areas that we know we have to win,” she said.

Jessie Jane Duff, a Women for Trump advisory board member, said many of the events she attends on behalf of the group are at the invitation of organizations not directly affiliated with the campaign.

“It’s like all of these coalitions, that we’re demonstrating that there are active voices out there that are supporting this president from every demographic group, because the left have labeled us as a bunch of ignorant white people,” she said. “That’s not a label that any campaign or president should be just sitting there and ignoring.”

Duff and other women supporters of Trump who spoke to McClatchy said they believed that some people who might publicly say they don’t support Trump, vote for him at the ballot box.

Amy Kremer, a conservative activist who runs a political action committee aimed at increasing support from women for Trump, told McClatchy that women frequently show their support for the president in subtle ways such as a thumbs up when she’s traveling in pro-Trump gear.

“Do you know how many people tell me pollsters call their house and they lie to them, because they don’t want people to know how much they love Donald Trump?” she said.

Kremer said the women are “afraid of the backlash” they would receive for backing Trump publicly. She said she expects women who backed Trump in 2016 to vote for him again in 2020. She identified the economy and health care as the two issues most important to women.

In their research, the campaign and RNC have also identified those as motivating policy issues for women voters who support Trump. Education also tops the list.

Lanae Erickson, senior vice president for social policy and politics at the left-aligned Third Way, said the think tank’s battleground state polling also reflects education, the economy and health care as top priorities. She said congressional Democrats who beat their Republican opponents in the midterm elections with the help of women focused on baseline economic issues.

                                                            Lanae Erickson

Based on the president’s approval rating among women, “It’s hard to picture any woman who didn’t vote for Donald Trump the first time voting for him,” Erickson said.

“He’s not picking up any new female voters,” she said. “Spending a lot of money to shore women up shows that they know that and they’re trying to hold the ones they got the first time.“

Erickson added, “But I just think that Trump is not doing anything to appeal to swing women at this point, he’s just trying not to hemorrhage as many as possible.”

Specific reforms that have found an advocate in the president’s daughter and senior adviser, Ivanka Trump, provide the campaign with some identifiable policy victories. The administration supported a provision of this year’s National Defense Authorization Act that included paid family leave for federal workers.

“President Trump is delivering on his promises with his policies benefiting women across the country,” Allie Carroll, the RNC’s assistant national press secretary, said. “With near record-low unemployment for women, paid family leave for federal workers, and a doubling of the child tax credit, women are winning across America and they will play a crucial role in ensuring that the success of the Trump administration continues for four more years.”

Christina Reynolds, vice president of communications at EMILY’s List, a groups that supports female candidates who back abortion rights, said that Democratic candidates tend to hold positions that are more in line with women’s views on the issues that turn out voters.

Reynolds said that Trump’s advertising may not mention issues that will deter women from voting for him, “So it will be our job to go out, offer our own agenda and to point out where they’re getting it wrong.”

Trump’s data operation is targeting women voters amid warning signs. By Michael Wilner and Francesca Chambers.  McClatchy DC , January 9, 2020.

                                                       E. Jean Carroll

My first rich boy pulled down my underpants. My last rich boy pulled down my tights. My first rich boy — I had fixed my eyes on his face long enough to know — was beautiful, with dark gray eyes and long golden-brown hair across his forehead. I don’t know what he grew up to be. My last rich boy was blond. He grew up to be the president of the United States.

The first rich boy’s name was James. He was raped by his grandfather. He was raped by his uncles. He was beaten by his father. My mother told me the stories much later. When James was 6, he was taken away from his father and given to a rich couple, Arthur and Evelyn. Arthur and Evelyn were best friends with my parents, Tom and Betty. One day my parents gave a party. Everyone brought their kids. Arthur and Evelyn drove up from Indianapolis with James to the redbrick schoolhouse where we lived, deep in the hills north of Fort Wayne. As the parents drank cocktails in our big yard with the scent of the blooming wads of cash infusing every inch of Indiana just after WWII, the kids played up on the hill beside the schoolhouse.

James was 7 and a half or 8, a bloodthirsty, beautiful, relentless boy. He ordered everyone around, even the older kids. To me he said, “I’m going to shove this up you again.”

We’d played this game before. Our families had gone on a camping trip to Pokagon State Park, and I learned that an object could be shoved up the place where I tinkled. I don’t remember now what it was, probably a stick, or maybe a rock. It felt like being cut with a knife. I remember I bled.

“I don’t want to,” I said.

We were standing on the hill. James looked at me with his feral gray eyes.

He wadded up a piece of fabric — it was a light blue-violet shade and looked fluffy, like a bunched-up hairnet.

“Put this in your underpants,” he said.

He pulled up my dress and crammed the balled-up material down my pants. Late at night, when the guests had gone home, I took off my dress, pulled down my pants. And there it still was, the wadded-up thing.

James and I played so many ferocious games while camping that summer: hooking each other with fishhooks, holding each other underwater, tying each other up, shooting each other with cap guns, chasing each other with garter snakes, dumping hot embers on each other’s heads. I am not putting him on the Most Hideous Men of My Life List — whether he belongs there is for him to decide. It is

his uncles, his father, his grandfather who belong on such a list.

Now, about this Most Hideous Men of My Life List: It is a list of the 21 most revolting scoundrels I have ever met. I started it in October 2017, the day Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey published their Harvey Weinstein bombshells in the New York Times. As the riotous, sickening stories of #MeToo surged across the country, I, like many women, could not help but be reminded of certain men in my own life. When I began, I was not sure which among all the foul harassers, molesters, traducers, swindlers, stranglers, and no-goods I’ve known were going to make the final accounting. I considered Matt Lauer, Bill O’Reilly, and the giant dingleberry Charlie Rose, all guys whose TV shows I was on many times and who made headlines during the rise of #MeToo. But in the end, they do not make my Hideous List.

Hunter S. Thompson … now, there’s a good candidate. I know. I wrote his biography. Does Hunter, the greatest degenerate of his generation, who kept yelling, “Off with your pants!” as he sliced the leggings from my body with a long knife in his hot tub, make the list? Naw.

And if having my pants hacked off by a man lit to the eyebrows with acid, Chivas Regal, Champagne, grass, Chartreuse, Dunhills, cocaine, and Dove Bars does not make the list — because to me there is a big difference between an “adventure” and an “attack” — who, in God’s name, does make my Hideous List?

After almost two years of drawing and redrawing my list, I’ve come to realize that, though my hideosity bar is high, my criteria are a little cockeyed. It is a gut call. I am like Justice Potter Stewart. I just know a hideous man when I see one. And I have seen plenty. For 26 years, I have been writing the “Ask E. Jean” column in Elle, and for 26 years, no matter what problems are driving women crazy — their careers, wardrobes, love affairs, children, orgasms, finances — there comes a line in almost every letter when the cause of the correspondent’s quagmire is revealed. And that cause is men.

Viz.: the man who thinks 30 seconds of foreplay is “enough,” the man who cheats on his wife, the man who passes women over for promotion, the man who steals his girlfriend’s credit cards, the man who keeps 19 guns in the basement, the man who tells his co-worker she “talks too much in meetings,” the man who won’t bathe, the man who beats his girlfriend’s dog, the man who takes his female colleagues’ ideas, the man who tries to kill his rich wife by putting poison in her shampoo. Every woman, whether consciously or not, has a catalogue of the hideous men she’s known.

As it turns out, a Hideous Man marks practically every stage of my life. And so, Reader, from this cavalcade of 21 assholes, I am selecting a few choice specimens. One or two may not be pleasant for you to read about, I apologize. But if we all just lean over and put our heads between our knees, the fainting feeling will pass. No one need be carried from the room.

When I entered Indiana University, I was the most boy-crazy 17-year-old in the nation.

If you’d met me my freshman year, you would never have imagined I was born to be an advice columnist. But imagine it now. Thirteen miles from the Bloomington campus, there I am: young Jeanie Carroll, driving with a boy down a hilly back road in Brown County State Park, where IU students go on October Sundays to supposedly look at the famous leaves.

My situation in life — my father being a Beta Theta Pi from Wabash College, my mother being a Kappa Delta from UCLA, my wild wish to pledge either Pi Beta Phi or Kappa Kappa Gamma, my rah-rah disposition, my total ignorance of what is going on in the world, the fact that I never crack a book — all are equally against my becoming a columnist, the first requirement of which is acknowledging that there are other beings on the planet besides boys.

How I end up in that car, who the boy is … well, I don’t remember. I’ve been looking through my 1961 datebook, and each day is so chock-full of the names of boys who called me, the names of boys whom I expected to call me and didn’t, the names of boys who did call me but I didn’t care if they called me, the names of boys who if they didn’t call me I was never going to speak to again, the names of boys who if they called me I would not pick up the phone, and the names of boys I would have my roommate, Connie, call and ask if they called me while she was on the line with a boy who was begging me to call him back, I can’t figure out who this boy is. But meet No. 1 on the Most Hideous Men of My Life List.

He belongs to that class of boys who are not athletes and so must make their mark on campus with their devastating looks or gobs of money. I don’t remember this boy having either. I remember this boy’s thing is his car. It is a stick shift. Nobody knows how to “drive a stick,” he says, except him and A. J. Foyt, the Indianapolis 500 winner, and so I am amazed when he releases the clutch like he’s stepping on a yellow-jacket nest and grinds the gears when he pulls over in the dirt and stops.

I look around. “I gotta get back to the dorm,” I say.

He turns off the engine.

“Youuuuuuuu liiiitttttttttllllllllllll prrrrrrrrrrrrik teeeeeeeeeeez,” he says. This opening compliment, “You little prick tease,” is paid to every girl at some point or other in 1961, and I don’t wait to be paid another. I open the car door and slide out.

What am I wearing? Tennis shoes, jeans, big sweatshirt, and — blam, he lunges from the car and bolts his arms around me. We crash, like felled trees, to the ground.

We land in grass covered in yellow leaves. Thanks to Mr. Weber, my high-school biology teacher, I can, with 100 percent confidence, say those yellow leaves are poplar leaves. They crackle as I struggle to get up.

Straddling me, the boy looks zonked out of his mind with the possibilities. He pushes my sweatshirt up to my neck.

I remember the thought flashes through my mind that could I have foreseen the circumstance of a boy throwing me down and pushing my sweatshirt up to my chin, I would not have worn a padded bra. A padded bra makes a girl look like she lacks something.

“I don’t want to wrestle,” I say. “Get off!”

He pins my arms over my head by my wrists.

“Get off!” I say again.

He is holding my wrists with both his hands, and, before I can react, he changes his hold to one hand and, with his free hand, pulls a knife out of his back pocket.

“See this?” he whispers.

I look at it. At the time, I own two Girl Scout knives, a Girl Scout knife-safety certificate, and my own personal hatchet, and the neighbor kids believe I have reached a height of felicity rarely attained on Illsley Place, our street, because of my winning 30 rounds of mumblety-peg, a game where we throw pocketknives at each other’s bare feet. So, yes, I can “see” his knife. It’s a jackknife, a knife with a folding blade, dark brownish-gray, made out of some kind of horn, about five or six inches. If he opens it, it will measure, end to end, 10 or 11 inches. It’s not the knife. Well, it is the knife, but it’s the look on his face that scares me.

“Get off,” I say.

He pushes my bra up over my breasts. I can smell his excitement; it’s like electrified butter, and I zero in on the fact that he must use two hands to open the knife.

“Get off!” I say.

“I am gonna get off,” he whispers.

He lets go of both of my wrists for two seconds to open the knife, and I roll out from under him and run.

I was voted Best Girl Athlete in high school, but I was a high jumper, not a runner. I outrun this boy nonetheless. And on a twisty back road through tangled orange-and-scarlet thickets, a young couple in a car pick me up about a quarter-hour after I escape. The girl says, “I’ll bet a boy tried something with you,” and I say, “Yeah,” and that is the last word I utter about the attack until now.

Had I been an artist, I could have carried the front seat of the car the boy was driving wherever I went on Indiana University’s campus to protest his assault like Emma Sulkowicz carrying her mattress around Columbia University in the greatest art show of 2014, but I didn’t think of it. Perhaps hauling around just the gearshift would have sufficed. But, like many women who are attacked, when I had the most to say, I said the least.

Let’s just double-check my diary: Do I write that I went to the campus police and reported the boy? Do I say I went to the university health clinic and talked with a therapist? No. I say:

BE IT KNOWN—

That from this day forth I will not except [sic] or go on any dates that are not of my choice — they must be boys who are to my liking [I can’t read what I crossed out here]. I have to [sic] many things to do — rather than waste my time with CREEPY BOYS.

(signed) Jeanie Carroll

After college and bumming around Africa, I arrive in Chicago, ready to start my so-called career. I meet one of those semi-good-looking, brown-haired, unimpeachably but forgettably dressed young men who are vice-presidents because their fathers own the company, in this case an employment agency–and–accounting firm–type thing, which, despite the gloss of its golden promise, no longer exists.

He hires me to help “land new accounts.”

“You start tonight,” he says.

“Great!” I say.

“We’re meeting the people from Marshall Field’s. Be at the Pump Room at eight o’clock.”

“Wow!” I say. “The Pump Room!”

Congo-green paisley taffeta dinner suit, whisk-broom eyelashes, Rorschach-inkblot eye shadow, stacked heels, Marquis de Sade hair bow, and skirt up to here, I arrive in the Pump Room. I remember lots of white linen. Sparkling silver. The maître d’ escorts me to a booth, where No. 13 on the Most Hideous Men of My Life List rises to greet me and says, “They canceled.”

“Oh dear,” I reply.

“Never mind,” he says. “Sit down.”

He orders drinks, an extra glass of ice, tells me in detail about the new suit he is wearing, and then says, surprised, “Oh damn! My ex-wife just walked in.”

My false eyelashes spring open like parasols.

A smashingly put-together woman with a flamboyant mane of rich red hair is being escorted with an older chap (he is probably all of 35) to a table across the room. When they are seated, my boss raises his glass to her. She nods and raises one eyebrow at him.

“She’s a cunt,” he says.

Ten minutes later, an odd thing happens. My boss’s ex-wife takes her chap’s hand and raises it to her lips. A moment later, my boss takes my hand and raises it to his lips.

I jerk my hand away.

“Just a welcome smooch,” he says. “Don’t be bourgeois.”

He orders another drink. Across the room, my boss’s ex-wife glances at us and puts her two very, very red open lips on her chap’s cheek and — well, there is no verb available — squishes her lips up and down and sorta rolls them around his face like she is the press-and-steam girl at a dry cleaner.

After she concludes, my boss picks up the glass filled with ice, globs in a mouthful, crunches it for a few seconds, and then plants his freezing lips and tongue on my face.

I nearly fly out of the booth.

“GET OFF!” I cry. “Ewwwwwww!”

“You’re soooo booooooozzzzshwaaaaahh,” says my boss.

“Keep it in your mouth, mister!” I say. “Where’s the waiter? I need more bread and butter!”

I am not a foodie. Give me a three-cheese foot-long with a mound of red onions on it or a couple of Amy’s organic black-bean burritos and I’m happy. But wild, half-witted, greener-than-green Jeanie Carroll, 50 years before #MeToo, 40 years before women even begin expecting things could be different Jeanie Carroll, who takes her licks and doesn’t look back, is not about to pass up a dinner in the goddamn Pump Room!

I have the filet mignon. (One of the last times I ever eat meat, so disgusting is this night.)

My boss? He orders another drink and becomes more and more excited, slobbering on my hand like a Doberman playing with his squeaky toy, and meanwhile my boss’s ex-wife — who I now, half a century later, suspect was actually his wife and this was a little game they played to spice things up — starts rubbing her chap’s leg.

My boss and I can’t really see her doing it, as the table linen hangs nearly to the floor, but it is clear from the feverish action of her upper body that she is rubbing and rubbing and rubbing, and when her chap’s eyes close, she goes on rubbing until, with his face still smeared with lipstick and looking like a sophomore standing on the free-throw line in a tied game, the chap stands up, heaves a wad of cash on the table, grabs the wife, and they scamper toward the exit. My boss asks for the check.

My Jean Rhys Good Morning, Midnight room in the old Hotel Eastgate on Ontario Street no longer exists. But at the time, it is only a dozen or so blocks away, and my boss insists on driving me home. It is my first ride in a Mercedes. I am surprised at how uncomfortable the stiff leather seats are. Two or three blocks from my place, my boss runs a red light, stomps the brakes, skids to a halt, and, jabbering about “that cunt” or “a cunt” or “all cunts,” jams his hand between my legs so hard I bang my head into the dashboard trying to protect myself. I open the car door and bound into the traffic.

My boss must be doing the following things: pulling over, getting out, etc., because as I am about to turn in to the Hotel Eastgate, I look back and see him weaving toward me in a drunken trot. I remember that his legs look menacingly short. I run into the empty hotel lobby. Spurt past the desk. No manager in sight. Check the elevators. Decide to take the stairs two at a time. Hit the second floor. Feeling for the room key in my jacket pocket, I run down the hall, and as I try to put the key in the door, my boss catches me from behind and clamps his teeth on the nape of my neck. I kick backward at his shins, manage to get the key to work, jab a backward elbow into his ribs, squeeze into my room, and push, push, push the door closed.

Have you ever shut a dog outside who wants to come in? My boss scratches and whimpers at that door for the next quarter of an hour. The next day, I get a new job — and never has my lack of all talent been put to better advantage — as a greeter-and-seater at Gino’s East, the Chicago pizza joint beloved by mob guys, journos, and TV glamorosi, and do not so much as call No. 13 to tell him I quit.

Do I attract hideous men? Possibly. But I’ve also encountered many creeps, villains, dickwads,and chumps simply because I’ve been around a long time. I was mostly single, free of encumbrances, and working in the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, when a woman could scarcely walk down the street without getting hit on or take a job without being underpaid.

So … we may proceed to No. 15 on the Most Hideous Men of My Life List: Les Moonves, chairman of the board, president, and chief executive officer of the CBS Corporation.

This happens in the time — one of the happiest of my happy life — when I am booming around the country writing for Esquire. I have been interviewing Moonves in the lounge of the Hotel Nikko in Beverly Hills for a story (presciently titled by my editor “Dangerous Minds,” February 1997), and the short, gravel-voiced Moonves apparently takes one look at me — a 50-something journalist in a pair of old brown-and-beige oxfords — and his life is no longer his own.

After the interview is finished (and for a man like Moonves, talking about himself for an hour and a half is as good as downing two gallons of Spanish fly), he follows me to the elevator. When I turn to say good-bye, he says: “You’re smart.”

I say: “Thank you!”

He says: “Smart enough to choose an out-of-the-way hotel,” and he steps into the elevator behind me and, his pants bursting with demands, goes at me like an octopus. I don’t know how many apertures and openings you possess, Reader, but Moonves, with his arms squirming and poking and goosing and scooping and pricking and prodding and jabbing, is looking for fissures I don’t even know I own, and — by God! — I am not certain that even if I pull off one of his arms it won’t crawl after me and attack me in my hotel bed. Hell, I am thrilled I escape before he expels his ink.

Naturally, I do not mention this in the article. I am a member of the Silent Generation. We do not flap our gums. We laugh it off and get on with life. (Moonves, for his part, told New York he “emphatically denies” the incident occurred.)

By now, Silent Generation aside, the question has occurred to you: Why does this woman seem so unfazed by all this horrible crap? Well, I am shallower than most people. I do not dwell on the past. I feel greater empathy for others than for myself. I do not try to control everything. But mainly, I think it is because I have done the thing no Indiana University football team has ever done in history — I have won a national championship: Miss Cheerleader USA. And they fly me to Washington, D.C., to meet President Lyndon Johnson in the Rose Garden. My photo (in a swimsuit!) plays on front pages across the nation. I get a big scholarship and appear on the TV quiz show To Tell the Truth.

This championship is, in fact, so important to the Indiana athletic department that they put me on billboards all over the state of Indiana — giant images of an ecstatic Jeanie escaped from her bottle, soaring above the stunned crowd in the Indiana University football stadium, a big i on my crimson sweater, cheerleading skirt aswirl, legs split like the atom.

And, well, I’ve never really come down … have I?

I’m up there, perpetually, eternally, forever in mid-leap, urging the crowd to never lose hope. I was a cheerleader in grade school. I was a cheerleader in high school. My sisters, Cande and Barbie, were cheerleaders; my brother, Tom, was a pole vaulter, so he jumped too. Today I open a letter for my column, I read the question, and what do I do? I start shouting and yelling and cheering at the correspondent to pick herself up and go on. And, by God! The correspondent does pick herself up and does go on! Because if she doesn’t, I keep yelling at her. And every now and then I shout at myself, “Get the hell up, E. Jean! You half-wit! My God! Get on with it!”

And many women my age just “get on with it” too. It is how we handle things: Chin up! Stop griping! We do not cast ourselves as victims because we do not see ourselves as victims. While the strategy has worked for me, I wish I hadn’t waited so long to say something about two of my Hideous Men.

Beauty contests are such a rage when I am growing up that my camp — a Girl Scout camp! — holds yearly pageants. So it happens that the first beauty contest I am nominated for is Miss Camp Ella J. Logan. (Later I’ll win Miss Indiana University, no doubt due to my “talent”: I take to the stage dressed as Edith Sitwell and perform a dramatic reading of Dick and Jane.)

There is no talent portion at camp, alas. We contestants walk up and down the dock; the judges, who’ve roared across the lake in a magnificent Chris-Craft and who are now seated in deck chairs, call my name.

I walk over and whisper: “What?”

They whisper: “You are Miss Camp Ella J. Logan.”

After they put the papier-mâché crown on my head, the cape on my shoulders, and give me the baton covered in Reynolds Wrap, Old Cam, No. 6 on the Most Hideous Men of My Life List, the waterfront director, takes me out in a boat and runs his hands under my shirt and up my shorts. He is breathing and moving his hand slowly and hotly, and I fight no battles in my head. My mind goes white. This is Cam. This is the man who has watched me grow from an 8-year-old Brownie Scout, and his notice is an honor. This is Cam, who teaches me to swim and dive and awards me the coveted White Cap! This is Cam, who continues to run his hand inside my shorts and under my blouse — even in the dining room during dinner, under the table, squeezing my thighs, shoving his fingers — saying, “You’re my girl. You’re my girl. You’re my girl,” and making me Girl Scout–promise “not to tell anyone.”

I am astonished by what I’m about to write: I keep laughing.

He does this until I go home. I am 12.

My friends will be stunned to read this. My sisters and brother will be speechless. But Aly Raisman, the great Olympian gymnast, and the more than 150 young women who spoke out in court about Lawrence Nassar, the USA Gymnastics team doctor, will not be shocked. Nassar abused some of the young women in front of their own mothers. Nobody saw it.

And old Cam? He writes a book called The Girl Scout Man. It is listed in “rather remarkable” condition, though there is some “light foxing and some very modest yellowing of the pages,” on Abe Books, the rare-books dealer. Here is a shortened version of its description:

“This loving homage to Girl Scouting is a record of many of the experiences and incidents and occurrences spanning the over twenty-five years of dedicated service of Cam Parks, done mostly at Camp Ella J. Logan, near Fort Wayne, Indiana, on the shore of Dewart Lake. If you, Reader, are an alumnus of Logan … memories of time spent at this camp may well be sweeping over you right now.”

No thank you.

As a Scout, I returned to Camp Ella J. Logan year after year, becoming tall and womanly, receiving letters from boys with swak written on the backs of the envelopes, going on weeklong canoe trips, and completing my counselor-in-training program.

Cam I avoided. Never once did I speak to him or look at him again, but my brain does not avoid him. He and his maroon swim trunks may have been dead these last 40 years, but old Cam and the boat are the events — of all the events in my life — that somehow swim constantly back into my head. And it’s Cam who, when he dies at the age of 72 and the story starts going around that he was “suddenly dismissed” from coaching, causes me the most pain.

I could have spoken up! Maybe not when I was 12. But when I was 25. He died when I was 34. I might have stopped him.

Which brings me to the other rich boy. Before I discuss him, I must mention that there are two great handicaps to telling you what happened to me in Bergdorf’s: (a) The man I will be talking about denies it, as he has denied accusations of sexual misconduct made by at least 15 credible women, namely, Jessica Leeds, Kristin Anderson, Jill Harth, Cathy Heller, Temple Taggart McDowell, Karena Virginia, Melinda McGillivray, Rachel Crooks, Natasha Stoynoff, Jessica Drake, Ninni Laaksonen, Summer Zervos, Juliet Huddy, Alva Johnson, and Cassandra Searles. (Here’s what the White House said:  “This is a completely false and unrealistic story surfacing 25 years after allegedly taking place and was created simply to make the President look bad.”) And (b) I run the risk of making him more popular by revealing what he did.

His admirers can’t get enough of hearing that he’s rich enough, lusty enough, and powerful enough to be sued by and to pay off every splashy porn star or Playboy Playmate who “comes forward,” so I can’t imagine how ecstatic the poor saps will be to hear their favorite Walking Phallus got it on with an old lady in the world’s most prestigious department store.

This is during the years I am doing a daily Ask E. Jean TV show for the cable station America’s Talking, a precursor to MSNBC launched by Roger Ailes (who, by the way, is No. 16 on my list).

Early one evening, as I am about to go out Bergdorf’s revolving door on 58th Street, and one of New York’s most famous men comes in the revolving door, or it could have been a regular door at that time, I can’t recall, and he says: “Hey, you’re that advice lady!”

And I say to No. 20 on the Most Hideous Men of My Life List: “Hey, you’re that real-estate tycoon!”

I am surprised at how good-looking he is. We’ve met once before, and perhaps it is the dusky light but he looks prettier than ever. This has to be in the fall of 1995 or the spring of 1996 because he’s garbed in a faultless topcoat and I’m wearing my black wool Donna Karan coatdress and high heels but not a coat.

“Come advise me,” says the man. “I gotta buy a present.”

“Oh!” I say, charmed. “For whom?”

“A girl,” he says.

“Don’t the assistants of your secretaries buy things like that?” I say.

“Not this one,” he says. Or perhaps he says, “Not this time.” I can’t recall. He is a big talker, and from the instant we collide, he yammers about himself like he’s Alexander the Great ready to loot Babylon.

As we are standing just inside the door, I point to the handbags. “How about—”

“No!” he says, making the face where he pulls up both lips like he’s balancing a spoon under his nose, and begins talking about how he once thought about buying Bergdorf ’s.

“Or … a hat!” I say enthusiastically, walking toward the handbags, which, at the period I’m telling you about — and Bergdorf’s has been redone two or three times since then — are mixed in with, and displayed next to, the hats. “She’ll love a hat! You can’t go wrong with a hat!”

I don’t remember what he says, but he comes striding along — greeting a Bergdorf sales attendant like he owns the joint and permitting a shopper to gape in awe at him — and goes right for a fur number.

“Please,” I say. “No woman would wear a dead animal on her head!”

What he replies I don’t recall, but I remember he coddles the fur hat like it’s a baby otter.

“How old is the lady in question?” I ask.

“How old are you?” replies the man, fondling the hat and looking at me like Louis Leakey carbon-dating a thighbone he’s found in Olduvai Gorge.

“I’m 52,” I tell him.

“You’re so old!” he says, laughing — he was around 50 himself — and it’s at about this point that he drops the hat, looks in the direction of the escalator, and says, “Lingerie!” Or he may have said “Underwear!” So we stroll to the escalator. I don’t remember anybody else greeting him or galloping up to talk to him, which indicates how very few people are in the store at the time.

I have no recollection where lingerie is in that era of Bergdorf’s, but it seems to me it is on a floor with the evening gowns and bathing suits, and when the man and I arrive — and my memory now is vivid — no one is present.

There are two or three dainty boxes and a lacy see-through bodysuit of lilac gray on the counter. The man snatches the bodysuit up and says: “Go try this on!”

“You try it on,” I say, laughing. “It’s your color.”

“Try it on, come on,” he says, throwing it at me.

“It goes with your eyes,” I say, laughing and throwing it back.

“You’re in good shape,” he says, holding the filmy thing up against me. “I wanna see how this looks.”

“But it’s your size,” I say, laughing and trying to slap him back with one of the boxes on the counter.

“Come on,” he says, taking my arm. “Let’s put this on.”

This is gonna be hilarious, I’m saying to myself — and as I write this, I am staggered by my stupidity. As we head to the dressing rooms, I’m laughing aloud and saying in my mind: I’m gonna make him put this thing on over his pants!

There are several facts about what happens next that are so odd I want to clear them up before I go any further:

Did I report it to the police?

No.

Did I tell anyone about it?

Yes. I told two close friends. The first, a journalist, magazine writer, correspondent on the TV morning shows, author of many books, etc., begged me to go to the police.

“He raped you,” she kept repeating when I called her. “He raped you. Go to the police! I’ll go with you. We’ll go together.”

My second friend is also a journalist, a New York anchorwoman. She grew very quiet when I told her, then she grasped both my hands in her own and said, “Tell no one. Forget it! He has 200 lawyers. He’ll bury you.” (Two decades later, both still remember the incident clearly and confirmed their accounts to New York.)

Do I have photos or any visual evidence?

Bergdorf’s security cameras must have picked us up at the 58th Street entrance of the store. We would have been filmed on the ground floor in the bags-and-hats sections. Cameras also must have captured us going up the escalator and into the lingerie department. New York law at the time did not explicitly prohibit security cameras in dressing rooms to “prevent theft.” But even if it had been captured on tape, depending on the position of the camera, it would be very difficult to see the man unzipping his pants, because he was wearing a topcoat. The struggle might simply have read as “sexy.” The speculation is moot, anyway: The department store has confirmed that it no longer has tapes from that time.

Why were there no sales attendants in the lingerie department?

Bergdorf Goodman’s perfections are so well known — it is a store so noble, so clubby, so posh — that it is almost easier to accept the fact that I was attacked than the fact that, for a very brief period, there was no sales attendant in the lingerie department. Inconceivable is the word. Sometimes a person won’t find a sales attendant in Saks, it’s true; sometimes one has to look for a sales associate in Barneys, Bloomingdale’s, or even Tiffany’s; but 99 percent of the time, you will have an attendant in Bergdorf’s. All I can say is I did not, in this fleeting episode, see an attendant. And the other odd thing is that a dressing-room door was open. In Bergdorf’s dressing rooms, doors are usually locked until a client wants to try something on.

Why haven’t I “come forward” before now?

Receiving death threats, being driven from my home, being dismissed, being dragged through the mud, and joining the 15 women who’ve come forward with credible stories about how the man grabbed, badgered, belittled, mauled, molested, and assaulted them, only to see the man turn it around, deny, threaten, and attack them, never sounded like much fun. Also, I am a coward.

 So now I will tell you what happened:

The moment the dressing-room door is closed, he lunges at me, pushes me against the wall, hitting my head quite badly, and puts his mouth against my lips. I am so shocked I shove him back and start laughing again. He seizes both my arms and pushes me up against the wall a second time, and, as I become aware of how large he is, he holds me against the wall with his shoulder and jams his hand under my coat dress and pulls down my tights.

I am astonished by what I’m about to write: I keep laughing. The next moment, still wearing correct business attire, shirt, tie, suit jacket, overcoat, he opens the overcoat, unzips his pants, and, forcing his fingers around my private area, thrusts his penis halfway — or completely, I’m not certain — inside me. It turns into a colossal struggle. I am wearing a pair of sturdy black patent-leather four-inch Barneys high heels, which puts my height around six-one, and I try to stomp his foot. I try to push him off with my one free hand — for some reason, I keep holding my purse with the other — and I finally get a knee up high enough to push him out and off and I turn, open the door, and run out of the dressing room.

The whole episode lasts no more than three minutes. I do not believe he ejaculates. I don’t remember if any person or attendant is now in the lingerie department. I don’t remember if I run for the elevator or if I take the slow ride down on the escalator. As soon as I land on the main floor, I run through the store and out the door — I don’t recall which door — and find myself outside on Fifth Avenue.

And that was my last hideous man. The Donna Karan coatdress still hangs on the back of my closet door, unworn and unlaundered since that evening. And whether it’s my age, the fact that I haven’t met anyone fascinating enough over the past couple of decades to feel “the sap rising,” as Tom Wolfe put it, or if it’s the blot of the real-estate tycoon, I can’t say. But I have never had sex with anybody ever again.

From What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal, by E. Jean Carroll. Copyright © 2019 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group. James, Arthur, and Evelyn are pseudonyms.

Hideous Men :  Donald Trump assaulted me in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room 23 years ago. But he’s not alone on the list of awful men in my life. By E. Jean Carroll.  The Cut, June 21, 2019.

                                                                   E. Jean Carroll

In the southeastern corner of Missouri is a tiny town that was named by a man, local lore has it, in honor of his girlfriend. She was Shawnee; when it was time to make his tribute to her official, the man, Samuel Green, came to the realization that he was unable to fully pronounce—or accurately spell—his beloved’s name. So he paid her what he determined to be the next-best form of appreciation: He named the town after the only Native American woman whose name he was able to spell. Pocahontas, Missouri, was born.

The writer E. Jean Carroll hears this bit of myth while visiting Pocahontas over the course of the extended road trip she takes for her new book, What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal. At a local pie shop, she asks the owners about the provenance of their town’s name. Getting her answer, Carroll finds herself considering the fate of the woman: “I like to imagine the Shawnee girlfriend,” she writes, “mounting her stallion, galloping out of Missouri, riding across America, founding her own town, and, because she can’t keep white guys straight, calling it DermotMulroneyDylanMcDermottDeanMcDermott.”

What Do We Need Men For?, which publishes this week, began as a conceit in search of an insight. Carroll, the initial plan went, would travel to American towns named after women—places such as Charlotte, Vermont; Tallulah, Louisiana; Marianna, Arkansas; Angelica, New York; and Pocahontas, Missouri. She would visit more than two dozen locations that celebrate, at least as far as the map goes, the lives of women—and then ask those towns’ residents a central, Jonathan Swift–ian, satirical-serious question: What do we need men for? It was a hero’s-journey setup, promising the kind of extended jape Carroll has specialized in, as a journalist and as a gimlet-eyed advice columnist for Elle magazine: roving, curious, compassionate, whimsical. Its emphasis on geography would add a cheeky new dimension to that foundationally feminist argument: that women navigate a world designed by, and for, men. “The whole female sex,” Carroll writes at the beginning of the book that resulted, “seems to agree that men are becoming a nuisance with their lying, cheating, robbing, perjuring, assaulting, murdering, voting debauchers onto the Supreme Court, threatening one another with intercontinental ballistic nuclear warheads, and so on.”

As Carroll embarked on the trip, however, her premise expanded. The journey began in October 2017, just after the alleged predations of Harvey Weinstein were revealed and not long after a man who bragged about assaulting women was elevated to the American presidency. As the roads unfurled before her, memories returned. Realities became unavoidable. In Anita, Indiana, Carroll met a woman with red hair, a shade shared by the friend who happened, decades before, to glimpse welts on Carroll’s neck and put the pieces together. Neurons zipped. Trauma erupts unpredictably. Travel has a way of making things plain.

If you’ve read the excerpt from Carroll’s book that New York magazine published late last month, then you have a sense of the shape What Do We Need Men For? ultimately took, as satire’s center proved unable, fully, to hold. The memoir is currently getting the attention it is (such as it is) in part because its author is a beloved and famous writer, but in part as well because of one of the many claims Carroll makes in it: that, in the mid-1990s, Donald Trump cornered her in a department-store dressing room and raped her. (The president has dismissed Carroll’s story, just as he has dismissed the claims of the 21 other women who have accused him of sexual misconduct.) New York magazine’s lengthy excerpt of the book goes out of its way to contextualize the news-making allegation: “Donald Trump assaulted me in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room 23 years ago,” its headline reads. “But he’s not alone on the list of awful men in my life.”

It is that rarest of things—a headline that undersells. Donald Trump, in this setting, is most assuredly not alone. The story that started with a road trip structures itself instead around the collection Carroll describes as her Most Hideous Men of My Life List—21 of them, alternately neglectful and mendacious and careless and violent and cruel. It takes her 273 pages to describe them all. The list includes Les Moonves, who, Carroll claims, attacked her in an elevator after she interviewed him for a report about the psychology of TV executives. (Moonves, too, denies Carroll’s allegation.) It includes the romantic partner who, Carroll alleges, in a fit of rage, nearly choked her to death. (The New York Times, reporting on Carroll’s allegations, contacted the man she identifies in the book only by his initials; he declined to comment.) It includes a college classmate who, one crisp fall weekend, drove Carroll to an isolated area to look at the color-changing leaves, threw her on the ground, pulled a knife, and tried to rape her (she fought him off and then outran him, she writes). It includes the boyfriend of a babysitter who, with the sitter, made a game out of disrobing and then fondling the very young Carroll. It includes a camp counselor who molested her when she was 12.

There’s much more, as Carroll drives and remembers; the thing about a list is that it will keep on going until the list itself decides it is finished. There’s the television publicist who attacked Carroll in her car, she writes, “the same week Moonves attacked me in the Nikko Hotel elevator.” There’s the mob boss in Chicago. There’s Carroll’s own boss in the same city. There’s the official who refused to issue her a passport “unless I had dinner with him and sat on his lap.” There’s the rapist and serial killer—yes—who approached Carroll when she was on the porch of her house outside Nyack, New York, and who, when her dog growled at him, backed away. The man, Carroll writes, would go on to rape and nearly kill her neighbor later the same day.

There is still more. And not all the hideousness is sexual in nature. There’s—and at this point, Auntie E. might warn her readers that there is one more round of listing to go, and advise them to take a cleansing breath—the fur trapper in Montana (“a torturer of animals”), and the financial adviser (Dweebie D. Fleecer, she dubs him) who lost much of the money Carroll had given him as a seed for a retirement fund and then, when she questioned the failure, blamed her for his bad investments. There’s the mechanic Carroll meets on her road trip, after her car breaks down in Blytheville, Arkansas; he charges her an exorbitant fee to make the repairs, shortly after which the car breaks down again, leaving her driving without functioning brakes. (Carroll is able to maneuver the car into a stop at an empty parking lot; a man materializes to inform her, angrily, “You can’t park here.” Carroll explains the situation: busted brakes, just need to park long enough to get a tow, the whole thing. The fellow who quickly makes it to No. 9 on Carroll’s Hideous Men list repeats his no-parking mandate and punctuates it, she writes, with a warning: “Get out now.” She has little choice but to restart her brakeless car and comply.)

There are, then, two versions of Carroll’s book. There is, on the one hand, What Do We Need Men For? as a news maker—as a memoir that contains a serious allegation of sexual violence against the sitting president of the United States. But there is also What Do We Need Men For? as a consideration of the we of the book’s title: a story of gendered predation, as it has stretched across Carroll’s own life and across the lives of many of the women she speaks with as she travels. This latter version is strikingly cheery in its tone. Carroll refers to herself as “an eccentric personality,” and this is evident even in her story about abuse. The car she travels in is a Toyota Prius that she bought used and then hand-painted with large polka dots and frogs. (She named the vehicle Miss Bingley, after Jane Austen’s side-eyeing mean girl.) Her companion for the trip is her dog, a poodle rescue named Lewis Carroll. (Her cat, Vagina T. Fireball, she left in the care of a neighbor in New York.) You get the sense, as the story goes along, that Carroll’s quirkiness itself has a double valence: It is evidence of her simply being true to herself, but it is also an act of resistance—a declaration, to those who would try to diminish her, that she will respond with insistent humanity.

Carroll, in interviews, has emphasized the whimsy of the book—the memoir is “a merry romp,” she told CNN’s Brian Stelter—and there is indeed a certain mirth to the proceedings. But the strategic collisions of tragedy and comedy also become, as the story goes on, reliably gutting. “I am sick to my stomach,” Carroll writes on page 184, in an extended footnote about Moonves and his assorted enablers. By that point, dear reader, you are very likely feeling the same.

Carroll’s “merry romp” is overwhelming. It is exhausting. That is the point. This is not only a book about the failures of individual men; it is also a book, as its Swiftian title suggests, about the failures of a system that has given men the power to determine the whos and wheres and hows of women’s lives. Carroll does not talk much about patriarchy or toxic masculinity or trauma or otherwise make much use of the current feminist vernacular; the book can read, at points, as preemptively dated, with its references to “the whole female sex” and similarly winking generalizations. What it offers, though, is a kind of literary impressionism, based on 75 years of lived experience—a sense of what it feels like to have pulsing veins and fiery nerves and a teeming mind and be caught within the cold infrastructures of sexism.

The list Carroll creates, in that way, isn’t merely a list, or a method of organizing a narrative; it is also an indictment. It is a testament to the dull banalities of sexual violence. It is a reminder of the varied forms, insidious as well as obvious, such violence can take. The book stayed true, in that sense, to Carroll’s initial premise for it: It is a memoir that is rooted in maps. It suggests all that can happen, at the most local of levels, in a land that names towns after women and tells the rest of them to know their place.

You Should Really Read E. Jean Carroll’s Memoir :  What Do We Need Men For? is overwhelming. It is exhausting. That is the point. By Megan Garber. The Atlantic, July 3, 2019.