The legitimate agitation about the direction of young men and boys found its apotheosis in the hours after Donald Trump’s re-election. In a segment ostensibly to mark Trump’s victory Russian state TV’s 60 Minutes show chose to mark it with ... nude pictures of a woman. Melania Trump as she looked in 2000 for a GQ photo shoot and for a 1995 French men’s magazine.
The male presenter’s report about the Trumps’ impending return to the White House doesn’t even pretend to be anything other than a lame pretext to use salacious pictures of a woman taken decades ago. “This is the cover of the magazine GQ,” he says beside his smirking woman co-presenter, describing “the future first lady” lying “on top of furs...on a blue carpet with the US seal, as though the editors of the men’s magazine knew something in advance about the future of their model”. With jazzed up camera work zooming in and out, interspersed with a few thumping bars of YMCA, the producers manage to turn a few suggestive stills into a titillating slide show. To what purpose?
The clip shared by journalist Julia Davis, creator of the Russian Media Monitor and a Daily Beast columnist, seems authentic, as are the photographs which have been shuffled around the internet for years and are easily found. Even if the clip itself was to prove to be a fake someone has taken trouble to use a prominent woman’s body to achieve malicious ends. Yet despite the Kremlin’s timing the crass stunt has received only scant coverage in the US.
Mid-campaign last September Melania Trump used a promotional video for her new memoir to pre-empt the recurring question of the nude photographs. “Why do I stand proudly behind my nude modelling work? The more pressing question is why has the media chosen to scrutinise my celebration of the human form in a fashion photo shoot. Are we no longer able to appreciate the beauty of the human body?” she asks, amid scrolling famous images of the human form by “master artists”.
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But context is everything and her whimsical idea of lads’ mag nudes as the modern old masters doesn’t work in this one. R-1′s 60 Minutes is not a refined arts programme. It’s the flagship twice-daily talkshow on Russian state TV with studio discussions that promote the Kremlin line on everything in a country where the government has shut down independent Russian news sources and ensures that television – the principal public opinion-shaping tool – is on message.
So perhaps the more pressing question for Melania and all women is the motive behind the reproduction of those images within hours of Trump’s re-election.
The show aired after Trump, reportedly joined by Elon Musk, reportedly spoke to Putin on Thursday and reportedly warned him not to “escalate” Ukraine. The Kremlin denies that the conversation ever happened though some theorise that the pictures were Putin’s response.
Whatever the truth of it the fact of women’s bodies being used as political weapons is nothing new. Rape has been a weapon of war for as long as war itself. Donald Trump’s misogyny is baked into his appeal. These US election have been steeped in it.
Just like Trump, Putin has used misogynistic attacks and rhetoric for decades to humiliate and demean his enemies and bolster his supporters. Putin may also be using them as a coded reminder of more damaging kompromat on the target. Sharing Melania’s old photos on the show was meant as an obvious slight, a woman’s body used to spell out the power dynamic of the US-Russia relationship.
There is another possibility that in the twisted manosphere where both Trump and Putin reside, the airing of the pictures may be a tribute, a leering mutual affirmation of both men’s “manliness”. It would be reasonable to infer that Donald Trump is secretly delighted with Putin’s picture display.
It’s their leitmotif and the fanboys are all in. The 26-year-old white nationalist influencer and Hitler admirer Nick Fuentes – who dined with Trump two years ago – jubilantly posted after Trump’s re-election, “Your body. My choice”. A phrase that chills women to the bone has 35 million views and is now regularly heard in American schools and campuses.
Andrew Tate, self-proclaimed misogynist, idol of many schoolboys, currently under Romanian house arrest for alleged trafficking and sexual exploitation of minors, exulted that he is “moving back to America”. “I saw a woman crossing the road today but I just kept my foot down. Right of way? You no longer have rights,” he wrote, according to the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD).
The ISD tracked a near 5,000 per cent surge in the use of “Your Body. My Choice” along with other phrases such as “get back in the kitchen” and “repeal the 19th” (the right of women to vote) in recent weeks. The 50 per cent of the electorate that voted for Trump knew this would happen. Social media bubbles are not the issue; all the hatemongers are on right-wing channels, including Trump himself.
And so the squalid, witless, catastrophic mine-is-bigger-than-yours boys’ games will grow and surge on the backs of women’s bodies. Dead or alive. And women will be blamed for that too. This is the internet soup in which boys and young men are being raised.