To my guy friends who voted for Donald Trump: (circa 2016)

Guys, I love you all and I wouldn’t be writing this piece if I didn’t. If I didn’t care about you, if I didn’t believe you are all decent people who are trying to do the right thing, if I didn’t believe that you all want the very best for your country, it wouldn’t matter to me what you think or why. But I do care and so let me give it to you straight. Your vote for Donald Trump insulted me and, more importantly, it insulted the many, many women in my life, including my wife, my two daughters, my granddaughter, and many of my friends and colleagues. This is a man who bragged about grabbing young girls by the genitals, kissing and fondling them for no better reason than because he could. This is a man who belittles women with epitaphs like “dog” and “fat pig.” This is a man prepared to use the power of the presidency to retaliate against the women who came out and identified themselves as people to whom he did exactly what he said he did. This goes way beyond personal morality. Nobody expects moral perfection from a president or anyone else for that matter. But here we are talking criminal acts against women that are physically and emotionally crippling-and joking about it.

“It’s just a distraction,” you say. “I voted for Trump because of where he stood on the real issues, the economy, immigration, national defense, etc.,” “The locker room banter is no big deal,” “It’s the biased media focusing on unimportant trivia.” “Let’s stay focused on the real issues.” Excuse me. Sexual assault against women damn well is a real issue. Half the people in this country are women. One in four of them will be sexually assaulted before she reaches eighteen. One in five American college women are sexually assaulted during their time on campus. If that isn’t an important issue for you, if you don’t think it matters that the president of the United States, the one entrusted with the enforcement of our laws, boasts of being a sexual predator, if you think joking about sexually assaulting girls is just harmless “guy talk,” then I pray to God for your daughters. I pray that they have some other wholesome influences in their lives to assure them that they are valued people in their own right so they don’t grow up thinking they have to be sex toys for any rich, famous and politically powerful man who can’t seem to keep his hands in his pockets. I pray that they will not learn the lesson taught to all young girls by the outcome of this election: If a man wants your body, he is entitled to take it and there isn’t a thing you can do about it.

There it is. You might choose to unfriend me after this. That’s your prerogative. But I am hoping you will instead catch just a glimpse of how the women in your life experience the world. I hope you will get an inkling of what it is like to be insulted, abused and violated in the most hurtful and humiliating way imaginable and, on top of that, to be publicly shamed for it. I am hoping that you will go home tonight and look into the eyes of the women you love. If I can’t convince you that women deserve dignity and respect, that our girls deserve a world where they don’t have to fear men grabbing at their genitals and that these are important issues, perhaps they can.