Bax’s loyalty to her mate Donald misplaced
ROSEMARY McLEOD
Better by far for Kylie Bax to have just kept quiet about her devotion to Donald Trump. To send a private message is one thing; to tell the world you did is a bunch of other things amongst which foolish is a mild adjective.
There is sisterhood, and there is privilege-hood, which never comes across all that well. It means smug. It means you are better than other women because you are better looking.
Bax is, or has been, a supermodel, which means that, as an acknowledged beauty, she belongs to a world far away from most New Zealanders – about as far away as New York, in fact, where she has moved in billionaire circles where, as Mick and Keith famously describe the jet-set life, she was sittin’ back in a rose-pink Cadillac for quite some time. Only now that she’s 41 she’s six years past where Trump’s interest in women ends. After 35, he has said in all his wisdom, women are dog tucker.
I very much doubt that they can be friends. What could a woman over 35 possibly be useful for? For that matter I very much doubt that he has any friends. A woman past his idea of her prime in Cambridge, New Zealand will be scant consolation as he unravels, even if she’s an apologist for his groping behaviour and the disrespect he shows to the women who come forward to contradict his claimed ‘‘love’’ and ‘‘respect’’ of her gender.
You and I are not discovered in a shopping mall and rocketed to the covers of glossy magazines, but the lives of the beautiful are marked by such events. Men revere them, unapproachable goddesses on high pedestals, unavailable except to billionaires like Trump, for whom they are prestige accessories.
Knowing their beauty is impermanent, they are often insecure. Flattery from very rich men must be a comfort, and you may be sure that even Trump’s kind hesitate to reach out and grab their genitals, or slobber on their lipstick, uninvited. They have respect because they have beauty, a currency almost equal to wealth.
There is the top shelf, then, and there are remainder bins where men grope with impunity, thinking women there are begging for it. Their beauty isn’t great enough, or acclaimed enough, to earn respect, so they are merely mobile slabs of erotic meat. What a beautiful woman might, in moments of insecurity, regard as tribute to her unique charms, is what you and I slap down and are insulted by, because what we have to rely on is more than beauty. It may be wit, talent, kindness, skill, intelligence, or just decency. In dollar terms we’re cheap.
Echoing Trump, Bax says the women who’ve been groped and insulted by him just want five minutes of fame. She joins him in insulting them. She is special. They are not. And look at them, one of them is now even older than Trump himself. What an object of ridicule she is to him, and how pathetic they all are for wanting the fame she worked so hard to get.
‘‘I know how he treated me. I know how he treated his friends, so I know exactly what he is like,’’ Bax says, when she knows nothing of the sort. She knows a construct in her own head, based on the gilded life, not on reality, where the drudge who cleaned her apartment could well have had Trump’s unwelcome hand up her skirt just because he owns the world, and all the women in it.
She is very wrong, because how a man treats his perceived friends and equals is not the true test of his nature; it’s how he treats the people he regards as inferiors that matters. We know that he’s no gentleman, because we’ve heard what he calls his locker room talk. We know that only a cad abuses women.
There is little more to say about him, other than that he currently appeals to the worst in human nature – fear, anger, despair, envy, xenophobia, destructiveness. Surely she can’t admire that, because that would make her as objectionable as he is.
I like to think Bax merely believes loyalty to be an overriding virtue, but loyalty can lead people to dark places. Better to have standards for yourself and your friends, for goodness’ sake, in which mutual respect has some relevance.
Better by far to delete his picture from your photograph album, and forget you ever knew him.