WHAT IS A MAN?

In the 1950s it wasn’t easy to be a man, but it was easy to know what it took to be a man. A man never cried. He talked tough when necessary and he’d settle disputes with a knuckle sandwich, also when necessary. A man would grow up, get married, have children and automatically become the head of the family. He was the breadwinner. At home, he was the boss. And at work, he fought with all his might to be the boss there too. He was the decision maker, the disciplinarian. As far as his family went, his word was final. He bought the house. He bought the car. He signed the contracts. He was the man of the house. And he raised his son(s) to be just like him, often naming his firstborn son after himself. He took pride in fixing things without having to call for help. A ‘real man,’ of course, had a gun or several guns. And he’d prove his manliness by going out and shooting animals and taking trophies. Real men left those soft feelings for the women in their lives. Women were the mothers, the housekeepers, the nurturers. The man’s job was to protect the “little lady” and his family…and if called upon, to protect his country by killing the enemy. A “real man” didn’t abide ‘deviancy.’ A man always knew who he was.

Today, women grow up, go to college, become doctors and lawyers (in greater numbers than men) and maybe even become President. In more and more companies and large corporations, women are the supervisors, the managers, the CEOs. They often make the larger share of the family income. Marriages are partnerships…and that’s if the woman chooses to marry at all. Women in the 21st Century compete and they compete to win. They no longer throw the game to protect their male counterpart’s ego. Women make their own decisions. They vote for the candidate of their choice. They repair things around the house. Women decide if they want to become mothers or not. They are often single parents. They have sex for pleasure, not just to procreate. Women wear pants, and with greater and greater frequency, win the majority of America’s gold medals in sports over their male colleagues’ teams. In many important respects, women do not ‘need’ men.

This is not to say that all women want to exercise every one of these rights. Some women prefer a more traditional role for themselves and that too is her choice. The fact that some women can go to the gym and squat more weight than a lot of the men doesn’t mean that she has to or even wants to. But she can choose to pursue that goal if she likes. It has been a long, grueling struggle. Women were not given these choices, they earned them. And at long last this is the Century where women achieve parity. Yet all too many males feel threatened by this new, modern woman. They want to go back in time to an era when men called the shots.

It seems to me that trump is nakedly trying to appeal to those boys, young males and weak fellows who think that manhood is defined by the size of a bicep or how tall he is, or how many vulgarities he can squeeze into a sentence. Like a “Chatty Cathy” doll, trump jabbers on about the size of Arnold Palmer’s penis, and his ability to grab a woman by her female parts. trump’s idea of manhood is as stunted as his sense of morality. To real men, trump is a joke…a cartoonish figure without any substance.

Please, read transcripts from trump’s rally speeches. When he’s not yammering on about people he wants you to resent for supposedly eating dogs and cats, he prattles endlessly about his admiration for fictional villains, and real life thugs like Hitler, Al Capone, Nazi Generals and his favorite dictators…people he wants to imitate. Then pay close attention to how often he refers to these fellow criminals as “strong” or “powerful.” I counted the number of times trump used these two adjectives in reference to monsters like Putin and Kim Jong un in just one of his harangues…37 times!

Now this sort of immature idolatry of tyrants may appeal to fragile males, children and young fellows who are lost and frightened by this new age. But the answer to boys who don’t understand manhood is not to denigrate women or to try and control women’s bodies or minds. When you hear trump, Vance and the rest of these characters engineering plans to outlaw all abortions, stop IVF procedures, remove contraceptives from the market, limit the right to divorce, and compel women (ESPECIALLY White women) to have more babies, it does not take a Sherlock Holmes to see what these reprobates are up to.

trump and his crowd are not interested in helping boys to become men. They want to handicap women so that weak males, like trump, can FEEL like ‘men’ … the sort of ‘men’ that, like trump, abuse women. trump is a wimp…a pantywaist. He is so far away from any hint of manhood we’d have to measure the distance in lightcenturies.

Before filling out your ballot, think about the true men you’ve known in your life. Hold that image in mind, then compare trump’s notion of some aging cartoonish character ripping his shirt off, to the REAL thing. Then vote.