Final Presidential Debate Recap, Congressional Candidate Interview: Jeff Dahlke, How To Be A Man In The Age Of Trump

Featured in this Show

• Recapping The Final Presidential Debate

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  Presidential hopefuls Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton squared off last night in the final presidential debate ahead of the election. We’ll speak with Julia Azari about the debate and how the candidates matched up.

• Congressional Candidate Interview: Jeff Dahlke

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  In our ongoing series of candidate interviews, Independent candidate Jeff Dahlke joins the show to talk about his campaign for Congress in Wisconsin’s 6th District.

• Masculinity And Sexual Assault

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  Sexual assault is in the spotlight during election 2016. Our guest says that the conversation about preventing sexual assault and understanding the culture that surrounds it is one that needs to include both genders and continue long after the election is over.

• What Should Boys Learn From Election News About Sexual Assault?

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  A sex education author says this election season is a good time to reopen conversations about sexual assault, consent and what we as a society teach boys and young men about sex.

  The issues have been in the spotlight since a 2005 videotape surfaced earlier this month showing Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump bragging about using his celebrity to grope and kiss women.

  Trump dismissed the tape as “locker room talk” and has denied subsequent allegations from at least 11 women who have stepped forward accusing him of some form of sexual assault.

  Peggy Orenstein, author of “Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape,” said the tape and Trump’s response to it is having negative effects on boys and young men as they build relationships with women.

  “The locker room talk that (Trump) was talking about is not natural. It’s not normal,” Orenstein said. “You don’t talk about assault like it’s a joke. And it is forming the way that boys think about masculinity, either in joining in, reacting against or staying silent.”

  Trump’s lewd conversation isn’t anything new, said Orenstein. She’s been chronicling misogyny in popular culture for years and says it’s often camouflaged in innocent ways or dismissed with a “boys will be boys” attitude. It hit home for her when she was watching the musical “Grease” with her daughter, and during the performance of the song “Summer Nights,” the leather-wearing men ask their leader, “Did she put up a fight?”

  “It’s just seen as a normal course of things that boys are supposed to push and girls are supposed to be the inertia that stops their unstoppable libido,” Orenstein said. “And that’s the way we’ve presumed things to be, and that’s the way that we see it in pop culture, and that’s the way that they see it in Internet porn.”

  For her book, Orenstein talked to many girls and young women about sexuality, sexual reciprocity and their experiences with coercion and assault. It became clear she was only having half of the conversation.

  “One of the things that I really felt after writing about girls was that as little as we talk to young women about sexuality and consent and all these issues, we talk to young men less,” Orenstein said, adding she plans a follow up book with males. “I felt that we were just sort of throwing them out there and expecting them to find their way and leaving them to be educated by these old ideas, by the media and by the Internet.”

  While these conversations often are not easy for parents, Orenstein recommended parents use recent political news events to help young people learn how to negotiate sexual relationships so they end with honor and integrity rather than guilt and shame.