This is Not What Real Men Do

At least it’s not what decent, caring, honest, hard-working, patriotic, family men do. None of it. Instead, this is what bigots, racists, and fascists do, be they male or female…

Image by Sasin Tipchai from Pixabay

The song that was inspired by this article is available here.
My reading this article as an audio podcast is available here.

North Carolina Republican gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson apparently posted to a porn website that he’s a “Black Nazi,” would like to own slaves, and is really into weird sex, including with his sister-in-law.

This is the same guy who: told an audience in a church that, “Some people need killing”; called the queer community “maggots,” “filth,” and “flies”; claimed Michelle Obama was born a man; said Jewish bankers are one of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse; the moon landing was faked; it’s “time to start reading” the writings of Hitler and Mao; and claimed the movie Black Panther was made by an “agnostic Jew” who was only interested in Black people’s “shekels.”

Although multiple members of his staff resigned over the weekend, it still appears Robinson is committed to carrying his candidacy all the way to November. And for good reason: many if not most of his supporters are still with him.

Raw Story reporter Tom Boggioni asked several Trump/Robinson voters about his comments and found that most are still enthusiastic about him. As Boggioni writes:

“Kirk Giles, 50, asserted that is is kind of a guy thing.

“‘There’s not a man alive that’s never looked at porn or did something stupid on porn because we’re men. That’s what men do,’ he admitted.

“Pressed on Robertson’s praise of Nazism, he offered, ‘There’s a lot of men that say some stupid stuff on those porn sites. The thing is, you say some stupid stuff just to get attention. People strive for attention. There’s attention-seekers out there.’”

For the record, this is not “what men do.” At least it’s not what decent, caring, honest, hard-working, patriotic, family men do. None of it.

Instead, this is what bigots, racists, and fascists do, be they male or female.

Another thing that decent men don’t do is tattoo serial numbers on the arms of children before transporting them to concentration camps. That, however, appears to be something close to what Donald Trump proposed he would do on Saturday.

When Republican President Dwight Eisenhower deported just short of a million “illegal immigrants” in the 1950s in his infamous Operation Wetback, an estimated 20,000 American citizens were swept up and deported to Mexico along with non-citizens.

Sinclair Broadcasting’s Sharyl Attkisson asked Trump how to avoid a similar legal and political disaster (this really hurt Eisenhower’s and America’s reputation), and his response was shocking, saying he’d be able to sort out the ”illegals” because they’d be given “serial numbers”:

“But we're getting the criminals out, and we're going to do that fast, and we know who they are, and the local police know their names, and they know their serial numbers.”

Trump added that the serial numbers are a critical part of his deportation plan, to avoid any blowback from the “liberal media” and “radical left lunatics”:

“You take a young woman with two beautiful children, and you put her on a bus, and it ends up on the front page of every newspaper. It makes it a lot harder. So, yes to mass deportation, even of women and children. You put one wrong person onto a bus or onto an airplane, and your radical left lunatics will try and make it sound like the worst thing that's ever happened.”

Trump has also told evangelicals that if they elect him this year they’ll never have to vote again, and, most recently, said that if he became president:

"WOMEN WILL BE HAPPY, HEALTHY, CONFIDENT AND FREE! YOU WILL NO LONGER BE THINKING ABOUT ABORTION, BECAUSE IT IS NOW WHERE IT ALWAYS HAD TO BE, WITH THE STATES, AND A VOTE OF THE PEOPLE."

These are not the words of a “real man.” Trump is essentially a frightened, angry child, as his niece Mary Trump has so often pointed out on her great Substack newsletter; he’s incapable of empathizing with anybody who’s not a wealthy white predatory man.

As my SiriusXM colleague Dean Obeidallah wrote yesterday, and then documented in detail:

“Trump and the GOP spewed bigotry, sexism, or incited violence every day last week…”

Trump’s a pathetic simulacrum of a man, and the example of masculinity he’s offering is damaging many of the young men of our nation, as well as anybody with whom they interact. It’s destroying families, ruining lives, and hardening America to misogynistic brutality.

And it’s increasingly common across the GOP. From Trump calling women “horseface,” “dog,” “crazed, crying lowlife,” and “nasty,” to bragging that “when you’re a star they let you do it,” Republicans are enthusiastically mimicking Trump’s vulgar scabrosity.

Mike Huckabee said Democrats make women “believe that they are helpless without Uncle Sugar … because they cannot control their libido.” Todd Akin famously said women can’t get pregnant from “legitimate rape,” an opinion that also appears to be held by the governors of Texas and Florida. Joe Walsh claimed that “you can’t find one instance” of a life-threatening pregnancy that might require an abortion. Paul Ryan called rape “a method of conception,” while JD Vance castigated “childless cat ladies.”

America is desperately in need of new male political role models, and Tim Walz and Doug Emhoff could fit the bill well.

Walz recently made a video explaining how to fix the carburetor on his old vehicle, comparing the car’s owner’s manual to Project 2025. Emhoff is very much his own man, while supporting the ambitions and career of his wife, Kamala Harris.

They offer a more advanced and humane form of masculinity that acknowledges both gender roles and social obligations, mixing being male with having empathy, acceptance, and the ability to listen to other viewpoints. There’s an elegant courtesy to both men.

It’s way past time to abandon the man-child role models of Wall Street’s predatory “masters of the universe,” adjudicated rapist Trump, and Elon Musk with his bizarre public put-downs of his own child’s sexuality and gender identity.

Man-as-predator-and-dominator must be replaced with man-as-partner-and-cooperator if the young men in our society are to progress and grow beyond Trump’s emotionally stunted preadolescent stage of development.

This fall isn’t just an opportunity to rescue democracy in America. It’s also our opportunity to rescue an entire generation of young men who’re entranced by Trump, Fuentes, Bannon, and the entire bunch of toxic racists and misogynists.

And that process begins with an overwhelming repudiation at the ballot box of these weird “manly men” like “fist bump” Josh Hawley, cat-lady-hating JD Vance, and smarmy Ted Cruz who grovels at Trump’s feet when he calls Heidi Cruz “ugly.”  

Vote!