When I was in college, there was a campaign against what was just beginning to be called “slut shaming.”

I remember seeing flyers that declared women should be able to wear anything we wanted, say anything we wanted and go anywhere we wanted without having to worry that we’d end up assaulted at the end of an evening.

That was common sense, although a bit naive. I remember thinking that no one deserved to be a victim, but that accountability mattered. If you drank too much and hung out with guys you’d just met, you didn’t deserve to be assaulted. But forewarned, and completely sober, was forearmed.

But even with that Catholic sense of “be a good girl and nothing will happen to you,” at some gut level, I understood that people should not be punished for bad judgment to a degree disproportionate to any social faux pas. In other words, there was no set number of inches above the knee that a skirt could be deemed to place a woman in the open target category.

Of course, I also noted as I matured and became more politically aware that there were double standards, and they had nothing to do with gender. When a liberal woman was the focus of some salacious attention from the public, the media, as a rule, responded with outrage. How dare they, “they” being conservative pundits, suggest that a woman who “owns” her sexuality be subjected to such offenses and disrespectful treatment? The nerve!

Enter Sarah Palin, and the whole paradigm collapsed. She was shamed, blamed and defamed for everything she said, did, or failed to say. I don’t need to run down the entire litany of attacks on the former VP candidate to prove that no one in the history of politics was more enthusiastically slut-shamed than Palin. And when it was pointed out, commentators and a depressingly large contingent of Democrats shrugged their shoulders and essentially said she deserved it.

Not condemning that double standard is wrong. I made that mistake when Democrats attacked the admittedly repellent Laura Loomer, a woman whose views are anathema to decent human beings, accused her of sleeping with former President Donald Trump after they saw her emerge from his plane last week. I didn’t defend her. I tweeted out that you need to actually have a good reputation to begin with in order to be defamed. I was legally correct, morally wrong. Slut shaming is as repellent as Loomer herself.

Which brings me, finally, to the former president. In the past week, Trump was nearly assassinated for a second time. After the initial, expected comments expressing relief that he was not hurt, the pundits pivoted to this: He brought it on himself. Many on the left recycled their old “Palin asked for it” rhetoric by suggesting that when you act like Hitler, you deserve everything that comes to you, including an assassin’s bullet.

After the assassination attempt, Never Trumper pundit David Frum posted this on X: “The difference: The upsetting things said by Trump and Vance are not true. The upsetting things said about Trump and Vance are true.” And? Is that supposed to mean that attacking the former president is justified? That he brought it on himself?

And that was just a drop in the bucket of vile suggestions that Trump’s tongue will dig his own grave. In other words, his skirt is too short.

No victim brings his or her victimization on themselves. The skirt is not too short. The makeup is not too heavy. The relationship is not too familiar. And the words are not too sharp, unless they are used to dehumanize a human being.

After the last assassination attempt against Trump, and how pathetic is it that I can even write that phrase, I wrote that the continued attacks on the former president have the power to whip up a dangerous level of anger against him, a level that could trigger repeat incidents.

I cautioned Trump’s critics to rein it in. I take no pride in having been prescient. My critics said words don’t matter. Then they discovered the power of lies about pet-eating immigrants and decided that words do matter, as long as they can be used against the right target. No matter what any woman wears, she does not deserve to be assaulted. No matter what anyone says, they do not deserve to be killed.

Copyright 2024 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at cflowers1961@gmail.com.