What happens when you report on the decades-long blatant sexism of a man who could be the next president of the United States? You get letters like these: "Your article about Donald Trump and women is truly laughable. So the man likes pretty women — that is front-page news?" "[W]ith all the real issues — foreign policy, economics, nativism and disregard for truth — that need to be covered about Mr. Trump's candidacy, The Times is again presenting a 'soft' story. " "My modest proposal is that the Clinton and Trump campaigns and their surrogates agree to a moratorium on any further discussion of vixens and bimbos and that the media do likewise."

The background: the New York Times published an article on Donald Trump's history of sexism and boorishness toward women. It includes stories from women who said Trump sexually harassed them, criticized their bodies, and generally treated them like objects to accumulate and discard at will. The article topped the Times' most-shared list and was discussed widely.

Some readers, though, met the piece with a shrug — or irritation that sexism was even a topic of conversation. Surely, they write in, there are more important things at stake.

But are there? Women are more than half the U.S. population but remain at a disadvantage by nearly all measures: We're paid less, we are nearly nonexistent in the highest-paid positions, we're a small fraction of elected officials, and some of our most basic rights and liberties remain up for debate.

Discrimination is wrong on its face and a stain on American values. But in an election so much about inequality and the marginalization of the working class, the archetype of the working-class voter has been a white man. That's flat-out wrong: It's women, not men, who are more likely to be poor, and it's women who are more than twice as likely to work in a low-paid job. A higher proportion of African-American women are poor than white women or white men (they're more likely to be poor than black men and Hispanic men too). The "working-class voter" in America isn't just the white guy without a college degree who can no longer rely on a job at the factory down the street to sustain his family. It's also the black mother working as a home-health aid and a waitress, trying to cobble together an income to support her family. But she's routinely left out of the political discourse. And who advocates for her when she's invisible?

That's sexism. And while it may not seem like there's a direct line between Trump's modelizing and a low-income woman struggling to make ends meet, there is: In Trump-land, women are purely decorative. Women who don't fit his ideal model, or who disagree with him, or who he finds disgusting, are barely women at all. It becomes that much more acceptable for Trump and his supporters to mock them, to ignore them, to conclude that they don't matter.

The kind of "soft" misogyny Trump displays also feeds into a kind of cult of ideal femininity, where women's worth is measured not by their humanness, but by their physical appeal, their perceived moral goodness, or their service for or their relation to a man. No woman wins in this calculus. Some fall outside of that respectable ideal because they're sexual in some way a viewer deems unacceptable — the "vixens and bimbos," that New York Times letter writer might say — while others fall outside of it because they aren't hot enough to merit appreciation.

This has real policy consequences. Just look at the debates around abortion rights and contraception. First is the very fact that we're debating whether or not we will legally require women to stay pregnant against their wills — instead of letting reproduction be a private, individual decision, it's politicized, with women's bodies and their most intimate choices treated like public goods. That vision of women's bodies as public property isn't so far off from the rating of those bodies at Trump's own Miss Universe pageant and Trump's critiques of his female employees' physical forms.

Or look at equal pay. If women are objects to be appreciated or tossed depending on how pleasing a man in power finds them, surely that influences their ability to be treated, and compensated, fairly at work. Look at paid parental leave or federally funded childcare (neither of which exist yet in the United States): Trump himself refuses to change diapers and brags that his wife does the domestic labor. If women are the ones in charge of diaper changing and baby-raising, what impetus does the government have to give them paid leave from their jobs rather than just pushing them out completely, or to subsidize pre-kindergarten programs so moms can go back to work? Look at nativism and xenophobia: Hysteria over women sneaking across the boarder to have "anchor babies" remains rampant, and Trump himself has even argued that children of undocumented immigrants aren't Americans. It's hard to demonize "anchor babies" without thinking the women who have them are little more than vessels, not individuals with needs, desires, and motivations that might stem from caring about their family's future or fleeing violence.

Sexism has electoral consequences too. When readers shrug their shoulders at Trump's harassment of average women, why will they care any more about sexism directed at Hillary Clinton? We can assume Trump is going to come out swinging against his opponent, and given his history of outrageous comments, it's not out of bounds to assume he will eventually say something (or many things) keyed to Clinton's gender. Should we write it off because sexism is "soft" and not as important as, say, his insane foreign policy views? What message does that send to American women and girls: Someone running for the most powerful office in the country can denigrate you because of the body you were born in, and you should just suck it up, sweetie, because there are more important things?

These are the attitudes that hurt women, that keep us out of power, that keep us poor and marginalized. "Soft" sexism — the kind that says women are only worth however much men value them, that says it's not newsworthy or important when women are harassed or treated like playthings, that simply assumes mistreatment and sexualization of women is par for the course and to be expected from powerful men — keeps those same men powerful and women vulnerable. It's why many women end up leaving male-dominated spaces, like the sciences or the tech industry. It's why many women don't report sexual harassment, leaving harassers to continue on while women drop out of that particular workplace. It's why so many of us think it's normal for Americans to debate women's reproductive choices and shame normal, healthy female sexuality.

For a president, character is key. So is the ability to surround oneself with the best and the brightest, regardless of gender, race, or any other external characteristic — something that's impossible if you evaluate half the population on how good-looking they are. That Trump has not demonstrated good character, that he's an unrepentant sexist, that he decides if he wants to be around women based more on their bodies than their brains, speaks to his judgment and his fitness for office. For too long, women have been on the edges of political power, if they've even made it that far. That we may have yet another man in office who treats many women with less respect than he shows his luxury vehicles isn't "soft." It's central. And until the kind of misogyny Trump displays is disqualifying — for higher office, for employment generally, for respect — it should be front-page news.

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Jill Filipovic senior political writer Jill Filipovic is a contributing writer for cosmopolitan.com.

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