What We’re Watching for in the Second Debate
Trump vs. Clinton on women, national security and everything else. Times Opinion writers weigh in before, during and after
.. Even his mangled syntax can be seen as manly. “Part of Trump’s appeal is that he’s inarticulate,” said Jackson Katz, the author of “Man Enough? Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump and the Politics of Presidential Masculinity.” “He seems more real,” as opposed to the intellectuals that Republicans have long dismissed as weak.
.. With his rejection of free trade, his resolve to build a wall to keep out immigrants and his swagger, he conjures an America where a man still gets good pay for an honest day’s work. That man could provide for his family so his wife could afford to stay home. In this America, men don’t face competition from immigrants or women for jobs. In this America, white men are restored to their dominant place in the economy, politics and the home.
.. Scholars point to an enduring ideal of American manhood, epitomized by the Western — the strong, silent and chivalrous man. Gary Cooper in High Noon. Alan Ladd in Shane. “The cowboy types that show up in our imagination would have nothing to do with Trump,” said Michael Kimmel, a professor of sociology and gender at Stony Brook University and the author of “Angry White Men.” “He’s not a man who’s done a lick of real work in his life. Let’s see you change a tire. Masculinity in America has always been something that you prove with your hands – not the size of your actual hands.”
.. The aggression that characterizes Mr. Trump’s words and behavior is both a reflection and a cartoonish exaggeration of traditional masculinity. That very ideal of what it is to be a man has been under assault for generations.