ColumnSome people watch “The Real Housewives” for a reality television fix. I watch all the Republican National Convention (RNC) coverage…

I’ve been looking forward to and dreading this week since Donald Trump became the presumptive presidential nominee for the Republican party.

On one hand, I’m absolutely disgusted that so many Americans support a man who spouts racist, misogynist, cruel political stances that exclude the majority of “other” Americans. On the other hand, this coverage is just too good. Perhaps good isn’t the right word—deliciously stupid? Crazy entertaining? Stomach churning?

While we could discuss many things concerning the RNC—like how Eric and Donald Jr.’s presence and speeches made them appear American Psycho-esque—we’ve decided to look at the various women who have made the news by being at the convention so far. (As I write this, only one day has passed since the convention’s start.)

The bare naked ladies

Every protestor has a special tactic he or she uses to get a point across. This group of women chose to use their naked bodies.

In May, the group’s ringleader, Spencer Tunick, made a call for women to join up in Cleveland, Ohio during the RNC. The photographer wanted the women to disrobe and hold up mirrors that would “reflect the knowledge and wisdom of progressive women and the concept of ‘Mother Nature’ into and onto the convention center, cityscape, and horizon of Cleveland.” The name of the project is “Everything She Says Means Everything.”

Tunick specifically wanted only women to show up for this installation because of the GOP’s sexist bent.

“I have two daughters—9 and 11—and I want them to grow up in a progressive world with equal rights and equal pay and better treatment for women, and I feel like the 100 women lighting up the sky of Cleveland will send this ray of knowledge onto the cityscape,” Tunick says. “I think it will enlighten not only the delegates but set the vibe of the weekend, set a tone.”

The Women Vote For Trump failure

On Monday, the RNC hosted an event called “Women Vote Trump.” But the event was missing one key component: women.

Only about 30 people showed up to the event, and many of those attendees were journalists and news interns. And it gets worse: the event’s attendance was so bad, the women who were part of the talk’s panel had to ask each other questions…

This event doesn’t bode well for Trump’s support numbers. Right now, only 38 percent of American women support Trump, the Washington Post reports. “The Trump campaign hopes to improve the candidate’s numbers with women this week by mellowing out his often heated rhetoric, spotlighting his family, especially daughter Ivanka, and focusing on security,” The Huffington Post adds.

Good luck, Trump. You’re going to need it.

Melania Trump’s “original” speech

On Monday night, Mrs. Trump gave a rousing speech that glorified her husband’s values. She also discussed how his candidacy would improve America, and America’s people. But unfortunately for her—and Trump’s campaign—some of Melania’s speech was directly lifted from Michelle Obama’s 2008 Democratic National Convention (DNC) speech.

You can imagine how people reacted to this snafu. Social media lit up and every late night, and early morning talk show was obsessed with what happened. And for good reason—plagiarism is terrible thing.

But all and all, I’ve got to admit that I kind of feel for Melania Trump. This type of “mistake” doesn’t bode well for the candidate or his campaign, which has received increased criticism over the past few months for its lack of coordination and professionalism. And even though the Trump campaign has since fired a “staffer” who claims she’s responsible for the lifted passages, the apology seems… off.

First off: Meredith McIver, who is supposedly a family friend and writer for the Trump organization, magically appeared and apologized more than 36 hours after Melania’s speech. Apparently, McIver wrote down passages from a Michelle Obama speech that Melania Trump admired. The passages were discussed during a phone call.

“I wrote them down and later included some of the phrasing in the draft that ultimately became the final speech. I did not check Mrs. Obama’s speeches,” McIver writes. “This was my mistake, and I feel terrible for the chaos I have caused Melania and the Trumps, as well as to Mrs. Obama. No harm was meant.”

Although the apology seems genuine, McIver’s existence and the Trump campaign’s response to all of this does not.

Over the past day, plenty of journalists, pundits, etc. have poured over McIver’s online accounts and they look fishy. Her professional trail is spoty—she’s spent most of her time working for Trump. This has caused many people to think that she may be just another one of Trump’s fake personas. And although everyone’s pretty sure she’s real now (as of Thursday morning), the fact that Trump has made up people in his camp in the past makes this accusation somewhat plausible.

Also, let’s not forget how hard the campaign blamed Hillary Clinton for the news coverage about the speech’s “issues.” And although the campaign has since backed off on that attack route, Trump’s staffers still appear pretty petty, and incredibly unprofessional.

What does this all mean for Trump’s campaign? Big, bad, trouble.

So, any way you slice it, the Trump campaign, try as it might, is still in big trouble with women. Hell, it can’t even seem to get the women on its side to improve the campaign.

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The future of women and our country, as seen from the floor of the RNC.

So, the Republican National Convention is over. And since describing us as “concerned” over officially adopted Republican policy towards women’s rights issues is like saying Jon Stewart is “approving” of Clint Eastwood’s Obamachair speech, we thought we’d reflect.

We’re still a bit bewildered, frankly. So let’s cut the intro and get straight to the crazy.

1. A Whole Other Level Of Peanut Gallery

An attendee at the Republican National Convention in Tampa on Tuesday allegedly threw nuts at a black camera woman working for CNN and said ‘This is how we feed animals.’

– Kyle Leighton, TPM

(And then he was thrown out – because that’s how the world deals with animals.)

2. Shucks, Don’t You Worry Now

Ann Romney was comparing the entire nation to a high school girl being escorted home from a dance. That was her pitch: I love him, you should, too. Don’t worry your pretty little heads about the details.

– David Corn, Mother Jones

3. Facts Don’t Tell The Whole Story

Rae Lynne Chornenky, the president of the National Federation of Republican Women, addressed the convention on Monday, repeated the oft-discredited claim that 92 percent of all the jobs lost under Mr. Obama were those of women.

– Susan Saulny, New York Times

Here’s FactCheck.org on that very issue.

4. If I Might Address The Chair…?

Mr. Eastwood’s rambling and off-color appearance just moments before the biggest speech of Mr. Romney’s life instantly became a Twitter and cable-news sensation, which drowned out much of the usual post-convention analysis that his campaign had hoped to bask in.

It also startled and unsettled Mr. Romney’s top advisers and prompted a blame game among them. ‘Not me,’ an exasperated-looking senior adviser said when asked who was responsible for Mr. Eastwood’s speech. In interviews, aides called the speech ‘strange’ and ‘weird.’ One described it as ‘theater of the absurd.’

– Michae Barbaro & Michael D. Shear, New York Times

Back where we work at The Daily Show on the West Side of Hell’s Kitchen in New York City, you don’t have to go far to see an old man yelling at an inanimate object. But rarely is that inanimate object on stage at a national political convention. And almost never is that old man…Oscar winner Clint Eastwood.

– John Stewart, The Daily Show

And the show goes on: everyone give a warm welcome to Eastwooding and Invisible Obama. (As for POTUS, he said he remains a “huge fan“).

5. Climate Change? What Climate Change?

Thanks go to Grist for summing things up.

6. Pants On Fire

On the other hand, to anyone paying the slightest bit of attention to facts, Ryan’s speech was an apparent attempt to set the world record for the greatest number of blatant lies and misrepresentations slipped into a single political speech. On this measure, while it was  Romney who ran the Olympics, Ryan earned the gold.

– Sally Kohn, Fox News

7. Failing To Address The Elephant In The Room

Yes, we’re talking about him.

Image: Gage Skidmore

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Women like sex.

I’ve been thinking – buried under the crushing, exhausting weight of all the assorted indignities of the current war on women, maybe it’s time to flip the script and go back to the basics. My theory about why all of this inane madness is happening is this: elite white men are afraid that their god-given power is disappearing. After all, we have a black president, we’re on our third female Secretary of State, and apparently, women no longer “need” men.

I have a proposition: maybe what we do need is to get in touch with our most instinctual, sexual selves, the selves that could potentially make Rick Santorum’s head explode.

So what do women want? And why is it so necessary to ask that question right now?

The short answer is that women’s desire is a massive threat to men insecure about their own masculinity. Consider asking the question –  “What do I desire?” – and then pursuing the answer in the most pleasurable way possible. This may be more than just a fun, enlightening exercise– it may in fact be revolutionary.

Women who want to get inside their own desire must start by shredding some prevailing myths, beginning with the one about men wanting sex more than women. It’s been ingrained in us to accept that men are so man-like that they can’t help but stare at every pair of breasts within a one-block radius, watch porn in every free moment, and masturbate like monkeys. Then there’s the trope about how men cheat because they “can’t help it.”

Part exaggeration, part truth, but what’s true is that they have license to do this, and women culturally don’t.

There’s no shame in wanting sex, but women who express their desire at an early age are shamed as sluts. The only women who have the ability to not enter almighty slut-dome are those who are happily married, actively procreating, and (hopefully) have no desires whatsoever. Women are not allowed pleasure in this worldview, one that’s on the GOP platform in 2012.

Let’s tell Paul Ryan, Todd Akin, and their pals that we like sex and we don’t apologize for it. It’s not just for making babies. That if they want to take away our birth control, they’ll have to wrest it out of our cold, dead, hands. We’re not making more babies for them to recruit.

Feminist History 101

Women were literally property not that long ago. If you’re coveting or already have an engagement ring, note that it essentially evolved as a husband’s down payment on his soon-to-be-wife. Not only did we belong to our husbands like cattle or guns, we were not allowed to own any property, because we were not considered human beings. Since then we’ve gotten the vote, have been allowed to work outside the home, been set free by the pill, and presently find ourselves in a fraught conversation about what it means to “have it all.”

Second wave feminists did some great work, but the anti-porn bit missed one important fact: women like sex. Going all Lysistrata on men isn’t going to solve much except making us all really sexually frustrated. At the same time, we have to push back. We are not Eve, or Pandora, or some other hypersexual goddess seducing men to eat our poisoned apples. Nor are we their Virgin Mary. We need to be allowed to simply be women, and not be shamed or idealized for wanting what we want, when we want it.

Even though we’ve made ridiculous amounts of progress (and fought like fierce warriors for every victory) we’re still so very far from where our feminist forebears had hoped we’d be. And I think it’s because we haven’t allowed ourselves to have enough, desire enough, experiment enough with sex. There’s still too much shame. Many women who have a lot of sex are doing so without pleasure. It’s still in service of the ideal of wanting to be wanted – rather than understanding what we truly want.

Stefanie Iris Weiss is the author of Eco-Sex: Go Green Between the Sheets and Make Your Love Life Sustainable (Ten Speed Press/Crown Publishing, 2010) and eight other books. Stefanie keeps her carbon footprint small in New York City, where she writes about sustainability, sexuality, reproductive rights, dating and relationships, politics, fashion, beauty, and more for many publications. Learn more about her at ecosex.net, follow her eco-sex exploits on Twitter or join her on Facebook.

Image: Je@n

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