But alas, when it comes to Trump, Ryan is right. The leading face of the Republican party, at least for now, is embarrassingly sexist. While Trump and his surrogates go around defending his “grab them” remarks as mere “locker-room talk,” people like Howard Stern — Howard Stern — are busy telling America that those would be some seriously messed up locker rooms. GOP operatives, meanwhile, haplessly bring up the nefarious Bill Clinton, forgetting that he’s not the one running for president. We should expect Hillary Clinton and the feminist movement to milk this for all it’s worth.

This whole debacle boasts a sad side effect: While attempting to defend one man, Trump apologists throw America’s boys right under the bus. In this week’s one-on-one interview with CNN, Melania Trump dismissed her husband’s infamous “grab them” remarks as normal, natural “boy talk.” Various GOP spokespeople have done the same, quietly enforcing the narrative that boys are beasts and naturally behave this way. What a shame.

“There’s something both grotesque and bracing,” writes Margaret Talbot in this month’s New Yorker, “about the confrontation between Clinton, with her disciplined professionalism, and Trump, with his increasingly frenzied assertions of male prerogative. Like the female protagonist of a quest narrative — or, perhaps, of a dystopian fantasy — Clinton has made it through all her challenges to face the bull-headed Minotaur of sexism at the end of the maze.”

If you think that’s over-the-top, you haven’t seen anything yet. Trump’s various “sexist” comments, wrote Ruth Marcus on September 8 in the Washington Post — a full month before the real doozies surfaced — illustrate “some of the gender-based challenges that Hillary Clinton confronts as she seeks to become the nation’s first female president, and that she would continue to face in office.”