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"The great shame is not that Mr. Trump brought an anachronistic masculinity into the Oval Office, but that he used the Oval Office to market a very modern brand of compensatory manhood ? with a twist."

"The hallmarks of contemporary ornamental masculinity ? being valued as the object of the gaze, playing the perpetual child, pedestal-perching and mirror-gazing ? are the very ones that women have, for half a century, struggled to dismantle as belittling, misogynist characterizations of femininity. The preoccupation with popularity, glamour, celebrity, appearance ? what are these qualities but the old consumer face of the Girl? If Mr. Trump is reclaiming a traditional stereotypical sex role, it?s one that long belonged to women. Why have so many of the modern-day grunts who mourn the loss of 'old-fashioned' manhood hitched their wagon to a silk-suited flyboy? Since at least the 1990s, and at full tilt in the era of social media, men have been faced with a quandary: how to define their sex in a culture where visibility, performance and marketability are the currency. You could say that Mr. Trump has, if nothing else, found a way. But he?s done so not by defending the Greatest Generation man, but by abandoning him."

Susan Faludi, author of Backlash, the best-selling book that warned against the slippage of women's rights in America, commented on the Lewinsky affair with a touch of backlash herself. "If anything, it sounds like she put the moves on him," Faludi declared, seemingly comfortable with the idea that a man should never, ever be expected to resist sex when it's offered to him on a plate.

Full post as published by Althouse on October 29, 2020 (boomark / email).