The masculinity of Trump is exactly the caricatured, counterfeit masculinity of the feminist fever dream. It takes the full energy of manhood and devotes it to sex, money, and power. It’s posturing masquerading as toughness and anger drained of bravery. (Is the man who recoils from Michelle Fields and obsesses over Megyn Kelly really going to take down ISIS?) Trump represents aggression channeled into greed. Apologies are for the weak, and self-sacrifice is for suckers. Trump is a kind of man that many people can recognize but none should emulate. He is the indefensible man.

And he breathes new life into a feminism that is so extreme, so hysterical, that even a majority of women reject it. Yet the more that frustrated men and their conservative female cheerleaders flock to Trump, proclaiming him the answer to the feminizing of America, the more they grant the intellectual, cultural, and moral high ground to a movement that has been degenerating into self-parody.

In Trump, feminists have a true cultural bogeyman, and he is actually dangerous. Trump is commandeering the debate over masculinity and providing the cultural Left with a lifetime’s worth of dissertations, think pieces, and television tropes on the evils of “manhood.” And Trump will have helped define their terms.

He has brought out of the woodwork a bloc of people who apparently believe that the answer to political correctness isn’t truth and virtue but rather becoming what the other side most hates. If the other side polices language, then the answer is vulgarity. If the other side embraces diversity, then the answer is flirtation with white nationalism and white-identity politics. If the other side tries to cast men as dangerous, sex-obsessed bullies, well then hoist the middle finger, glory in Trump’s apparent sexual and financial success, and relish the whining of feminists and “betas” everywhere.