Why the best presidential candidate for American men is a woman.

We all certainly expected Hillary Clinton's nomination for president to inspire a discussion of gender, but I'm guessing few of us would have expected us to wind up discussing the nature of masculinity with the intensity that we have in recent days. While Rush Limbaugh suggests that liberals have taken all the fun out of sex by focusing on consent, Mike Pence intones lovingly about Donald Trump's "broad-shouldered leadership." When Marco Rubio gestured obliquely to the significance of Donald Trump's baby hands, I'm sure few of us expected Dr. Oz would affirm Trump's extraordinary testosterone levels. Although the model of Republican masculinity, Theodore Roosevelt, once said, "Speak softly and carry a big stick," Donald Trump apparently suggests men should speak loudly and incoherently and swing a big dick.

So while Trump's supporters strain the bounds of propriety for broadcast television with their obscene t-shirts, salivating through their broken and missing teeth that Trump is exactly the kind of man they want to be, let me suggest something different. Hillary Clinton's presidency is the best thing that could happen to American men, and, despite their protestations to the contrary, the responsibility for the decline of American masculinity lies squarely on the narrow shoulders of the Republican party.

Although the Bush administration provided ample opportunities for American men to bleed and die, suffer and kill on the battlefield, and thereby exercise one expression of traditional American masculinity, it also gutted the construction industry, which employs vastly more men than women as laborers. But men have been losing more jobs than women in every recession since the 1980s, all of which have been presided over by Republican presidents.  Mark Perry even called the Great Recession the "mancession" in his Congressional testimony. And the jobs where men go out, get dirty, and build things, have not returned. 

Perhaps this has also been part of Trump's appeal. In his continual repetition that he is a "builder" a "job-creator," he invokes the hard-hatted construction site, full of bawdy catcalling and expressions of brotherhood. Yet the other site traditionally associated with laboring men--the union hall--is another object of Trump's disdain. He has a long track record of hiring illegal, un-unionized immigrant laborers. In this way, he is right in line with the Republican mainstream. Their party platform praises the "right to work," which could be rephrased as the "right to be exploited."

So Hillary Clinton's promise to rejuvenate our infrastructure, to promote organized labor, is a promise to rescue American manhood from Trump's and the RNC's toxic interpretation of it. Take a look at her platform page for "fixing America's infrastructure" if you have any doubt. We see a line of proud, hairy-faced men, but only the white man is in focus. Her message is clear--if American masculinity is to survive with its positive associations intact -- strength, honor, virtue, pride, reliability, creativity -- American men have one choice: to vote for a woman.