One need look no further than psychoanalytic legend Sigmund Freud, whose works can oddly be used to simultaneously demonstrate and explain misogyny. Suffice it to say that while he was successfully married and surrounded by female colleagues in his field, his views on women and men’s treatment of them showed very little indication that he fully understood or cared about the varied needs and wants of the female psyche. Freud’s analysis is also widely criticized for being far more apt to blame mothers for failures in emotional development, than it is to seek understanding of maternal drives and emotions. In this regard, he is not unlike the GOP-controlled Congress that is 80 percent white and male, but still believes itself to have the insight and diversity of life experience to adequately represent the millions of souls marching in the streets against them.

As such, the Republican party’s first order of business has been a continuance of its assault on reproductive rights. Despite the fact that 7 in 10 Americans support the Roe v. Wade decision and a woman’s right to privacy, we are predictably in store for yet another round of attempts to overrule our reproductive choice and our votes. Yet again we are being demanded to relinquish our lives to the control and will of people who don’t even value us enough as human beings to respect our bodily autonomy. The only major difference now is the man making those demands is not only doing so verbally, but admits to being the type of man who will literally grab a woman’s genitalia whether she consents to it or not. Again, “why do we never hear him discuss his mother” and why isn't her superego effectively imploring him to do better by women and humanity in general?

As a mother of two sons, I would be horrified if either one of them grew up to be a man that brags about sexual assault, let alone became president despite (or because of) doing so. I would be appalled at having raised a man who pays so little mind to the pain, suffering, and death that will result from his termination of health care for 20 million human beings. I would be disgusted at his lack of shame, and incestuous pride in being sexually attracted to his own daughter. As I watched Donald Trump hurl insults at the latest objects of his misogynistic rage, from Megyn Kelly to Alicia Machado, Rosie O’Donnell, and Hillary Clinton, I couldn’t help but ask if his mother would approve, and why the women in his life today haven’t taught him any better. As he thumbs his nose at the millions of women marching in solidarity against him, I also have to wonder how many times the women in his life have ever told him “no.” We’ve gone from a president who dotes on and reveres his wife, daughters, and mother-in-law, to a man who was too self-absorbed on Inauguration day to even assist his spouse in walking up the White House stairs. We’ve transitioned from a loving man and wife to an odd first couple that will be living in separate residences, and has now been captured on camera scowling at each other.

A man who loves a woman deliberately prioritizes the first bill he signs into law as president to be an amendment to the Civil Rights Act to champion equal pay for women. A man who hates a woman is met by millions of women who hate him back at the very outset of his presidency, before he ever signs his first bill. Maybe that's why we never hear him discuss his mother. ...