When it was all over, the score went something like this:
Donald Trump: 40. Hillary Clinton: 1.
That was my rough calculation anyway, of the times that Mr. Trump interrupted Mrs. Clinton, and vice versa, during the first presidential debate on Monday night.
But to be honest, I lost track.
I noted Mr. Trump scoffing, “Who gave it that name?” as Mrs. Clinton criticized what she called the “Trump loophole” in his tax plan (“Mr. Trump, this is Secretary Clinton’s two minutes,” the moderator, Lester Holt, interjected); chiming in with a “That’s for sure” as Mrs. Clinton acknowledged making a mistake in using a private email server. There was an “ugh” when she criticized his depiction of the black community, and a repeated “Wrong!” as she described his support for the Iraq war (a description that was not, in fact, wrong).
At the 26-minute mark, the website Vox posted a graphic showing that Mr. Trump had interrupted Mrs. Clinton a whopping 25 times. Shortly thereafter, The Huffington Post proclaimed, “This is what manterrupting looks like.”
There was a time, not so long ago, when Kanye West was the most famous manterrupter — man-interrupting a woman, of course — of our era. You may recall, back in 2009, when he jumped onstage during Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech at the MTV Video Music Awards, grabbed the microphone, and declared, “Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time!” Whether or not you agreed with his musical assessment then, what was clear last night was that Mr. Trump stole Mr. West’s interruption crown.
To anyone who has observed Mr. Trump speak, it shouldn’t have been surprising: Shouting, talking over, bulldozing, mansplaining — these are Mr. Trump’s linguistic trademarks. Yet to the rest of us, or at least the 51 percent of us who are women, Mr. Trump’s behavior was also painfully familiar, reminiscent of the types of dismissals so many of us deal with every day.
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| People reacting to the debate at a watch party in Rosemont, Penn. Mark Makela for The New York Times |
“To the men amazed Clinton hasn’t snapped: Every woman you know has learned to do this. This is our life in society,” one woman mused to her 300 Twitter followers the night of the debate. By morning, she’d been retweeted more than 7,000 times.
Women don’t imagine this behavior.
Women are in fact twice as likely to be interrupted as men are — by both men and women — and more so if they are a member of a minority group. And you know that old trope about the “chatty” female? It’s not true. It’s actually men who talk more than women: 75 percent more in male-dominated groups like legislatures (and, one might presume, politics). MORE
Source: The New York Times
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