Man, I'd really wish they'd let me join a women-only gym |
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I can't abide them even now and then
Of all the types I've ever met within our democracy
I hate the most the MAGA man with his manner bold and brassy
He may have hair upon his chest
But, sister, so has Lassie
- Kate's discerning critique of the opposite sex - slightly updated to fit our times - in Cole Porter's Kiss Me, Kate.
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As well as being examples of mankind at its worst, the MAGA men of this Trump era are especially disgusting because they are men at their worst.
Everywhere one follows horrified discussion and analysis of Trump, of his obnoxiously macho secretary for war Pete Hegseth and of all MAGA appointees, one finds shocked mentions of these mens' "hypermasculinity".
"MAGA, the story goes, is making masculinity great again," Jill Filipovic winces in her piece The Adolescent Style in American Politics for The Atlantic.
"But the version of manhood on display ... is manhood imagined by adolescent boys. And at his core, Trump is an adolescent president, surrounded by adolescent flunkies, cheered into office by adolescent men."
"In the MAGA movement an adolescent way of moving through the world - high-risk, low-regulation, near-total disinhibition - characterises leaders and thrills followers.
"[Hegseth] evinces [this] lack of continence in his personal life. Hegseth is currently married to the woman he impregnated while still married to his second wife, who herself was the mistress he married after cheating on his first wife ..."
Ms Filipovic is right about MAGA men but I'm afraid that what she is diagnosing as characteristics of MAGA males are uglinesses that lurk to some extent in all or most members of this columnist's gender. Thinkers and writers as diverse as Sigmund Freud and Germaine Greer have pointed to an innate, ineradicable, aggressive awfulness in men.
Your columnist is a man........