Rank and Vile

“That’s my dad!” If the Nielsen ratings tracked ugly crying in front of the TV, those three words would have sent the bawling-by-household stats for Democratic National Convention viewers skyrocketing. We couldn’t hear Gus Walz, but we could read his lips as the camera caught the seventeen-year-old launching himself out of his seat, smiling and sobbing, to wave as his father, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, accepted the Democratic nomination for vice president on stage in Chicago late last month.

It was as genuinely touching a moment as you’re ever likely to see on the public political stage, so of course Republicans immediately got creepy about it, proving once again that they are thoroughly undone by displays of regular human behavior. The scene online became a desperate scrum of incel-brained right-wingers trying to twist the eminently normal, heartwarming exchange into an indictment of both Walzes’ masculinity. One right-wing radio host called Gus “a blubbering bitch boy,” while Alec Lace, host of the “First Class Fatherhood” podcast, tweeted: “Get that kid a tampon already.” And then there was the guy who saw a kid overcome with pride for his dad and hastily ushered his mind in the only reasonable direction: questioning the quality of Tim Walz’s “spoiled semen.” Whomst among us, really?

Sparkling with originality, these insults are not. But they needn’t be in order to get the main point across. When your entire personality, your identity, and your membership in your social and religious community is predicated on your ability to perform sputtering, seething misogyny, the worst thing you can call another man is “woman.”

Of course, it only really works if the other guy gives a shit. And that’s the thing about Tim Walz and the new wave of lefty good-guy types hustling to get Kamala Harris into the White House: it really seems like they don’t, like at all, care whether working to elect the first-ever woman of color president makes them a bunch of impotent beta males in the opinion of a bunch of sperm-obsessed chucklefucks. Oh, sure, Walz is not above a little couch-related innuendo, but he and his buddies are mostly busy with the work of electing the first woman president.

This unbotheredness has proven to be a massive trigger for Republican men and the pick-me gals who’ve thrown in with guys who can only barely tolerate them (when they don’t outright hate them). Republicans have been throwing ever-frothier fits over the supposed emasculation of the Real American Man for years, but with Donald Trump’s selection of J.D. Vance for the veep spot, the red-pilled Very Online fedora bros have finally found their rightful home within the party proper. It’s an important shift for the GOP both in terms of party identity and overall political strategy, and we’re seeing its effects in this election’s sudden, lopsided tussle over masculinity—ironically, now that there’s a woman at the top of the ticket. A battle not of the sexes, but a battle-of-just-the-one.

This was originally supposed to be the abortion election, even before Joe Biden dropped out and took his pathological fear of the word with him. Harris, previously deputized as Biden’s abortion emissary, reprioritized abortion rights—explicitly, abortion—as a top national issue within days of taking over the ticket; meanwhile, organizers in over a half-dozen states have been working to get pro-abortion ballot measures and amendments in front of voters in November.

There’s also the matter of Harris’s historic run itself: should she win, she’ll become the first woman president, the first black woman president, and the first South Asian president. The early groundswell that started with the Zoom-crashing Win with Black Women call back in July was organized precisely because Harris’s grassroots backers anticipated a rough road ahead navigating attacks on the vice president’s race and gender.

I was sure that Harris’s unprecedented candidacy, combined with abortion rights at stake across the country, meant that we were in for a three-month firehose of nasty personal attacks on Harris’s identities, rather than on the substance of her politics and policies. And those attacks have certainly come—including Trump’s appalling, unabashedly racist display at the National Association of Black Journalists convention and the lazy, pissy “DEI hire” stuff. But the volume is somewhat lower, than I—and I think many others—worried it would be. Instead, here we are talking about the age of “Tampon Tim” Walz’s semen and whether Vance fucked a couch. President Barack Obama cracked a dick joke on live, prime-time national television, for chrissakes! I mean, of course men somehow managed to make this election about them. I don’t know why I’m surprised; men famously excel at taking up more space than they need or deserve. But it isn’t a bad thing that one of the biggest political narratives of the year is taking some of the heat off of Harris: sure, the Democratic nominee is a woman, but her opponents are men, and the worst kind.

There’s no need to hold either Trump or Vance up beside “Coach” Walz, the neighborly former national guardsman and champion of free lunches, to see the Republican ticket’s odious masculinity for what it is: less about being “manly” and more about spewing bare misogyny. As far as dudely tropes go, neither Trump nor Vance are the kind of guy you can imagine changing a tire; they are both vain and prone to whining. Of course, we’ve been subjected to nearly a decade of Trump’s vile, self-aggrandizing bigotry and criminality. He is an adjudicated sexual abuser who gets off on bragging about it. Vance, at least on the national stage, was a lesser-known quantity. And yet in a matter of weeks, he’s managed to match, and maybe even exceed, Trump’s rancid vibes. It makes sense that, back when Biden was still in the race, the seventy-eight-year-old Trump chose a spineless, power-hungry mini-me to serve as a foil to the youthful Harris. Alas, Vance quickly showed himself to be utterly juiceless at forty, a desiccated shell of thirsty sycophancy who couldn’t even be normal when ordering fast food for the campaign trail ‘grams.

If Vance has ever earned anything all on his own, he’s earned “weird.” When somebody suggested he looked like the kind of creep who would fuck a couch, the American people said: yeah, that tracks. Then Vance’s “childless cat lady” remarks resurfaced, along with his bizarre speculation about George Soros flying black women out of red states to get abortions, his enthusiasm for spying on people’s menstrual cycles, and that awful story about telling his seven-year-old son to “shut the hell up.”

Importantly, all of this happened before Harris named Walz as her VP. We lived through weeks—weeks!—of “weird” discourse about childless cat ladies before Walz came on the scene. Pre-Walz, the pro-Harris guy contingent, especially the “White Dudes for Harris,” seemed unsure how to proceed, even if they knew they had to do something. Their self-consciousness was loud, conspicuous; the word cringe got thrown around a lot as scores of dudes tried to get comfortable with feeling, and expressing, earnest enthusiasm for a black, South Asian woman presidential candidate.

But the race became couch-fucker versus coach practically as soon as Tim Walz made his first appearance as Harris’s running mate. Cringe went right out the window in a demonstration of just how desperately left-leaning men needed a regular-guy role model to show them it’s okay to just, you know, make sure a black woman can do her damn job. The Walz-Vance contrast was impossible to ignore; suddenly, white guys started seeing what marginalized folks have known all along: Republicans are extremely fucking weird about gender—including masculinity. Luckily, it’s easy to cut Republicans down to size when that’s the focus.

While lefty guys have worked to fulfill the brief, Republicans have gone with an alternative strategy: get even weirder. I should warn you that, shortly, we’re going to have to talk about another semen . . . thing—but first, we have to talk about Ross Douthat. I’m sorry. It was inevitable.

“Masculinity is on the ballot,” screeched the New York Times headline for a Douthat piece in which the columnist expressed skepticism that “liberalism perfected a model of modern masculinity while conservative culture slouches somewhere far behind.” His evidence to the contrary? That Doug Emhoff cheated on his first wife, that Amy Coney Barrett is a Supreme Court justice, and that Matt Yglesias thinks young men are depressed because progressive grown-ups have strong-armed them into believing that “structural racism, pervasive sexism, and rampant socioeconomic inequality” are somehow things to feel bummed out about.

It’s telling that Douthat, who usually trains his creepy moralizing on women who aren’t doing life the way he thinks best for us, has turned his eagle eye on the leftist American man. He concedes that there are some bad conservative eggs, embodied by the “toxic masculinity of Donald Trump” and “the anti-cat-lady conservatism of JD Vance,” but what about Harvey Weinstein? Wasn’t he some kind of liberal? And look how that turned out!

You won’t ever find me arguing that liberalism has “perfected a model of modern masculinity,” no matter how many fundraising calls white guys have for women candidates. For all of Walz’s aw-shucks charm, there’s still plenty of nastiness at the heart of mainstream Democratic policy, evidenced by the party’s despicable refusal to allow an “Uncommitted” Palestinian-American delegate to speak at the convention and the Biden administration’s ongoing facilitation of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

But at least Democrats aren’t putting Harvey Weinstein up for president! It’s a low bar, but there it is. Unable to offer any alternative to the whoops! bad eggs! at the top of the GOP ticket, Douthat is forced to rely on the milquetoast conclusion that “sleaze percolates on the left and right alike.” But I’ll take ten thousand Douthat columns over one “J.D. Vance Full Family Kit,” a specimen jar labeled with Vance’s face that appears to have been passed around at an Atlanta Trump rally in early August. Snopes “could not arrive at a true or false determination based on the available, inconclusive evidence,” but it looks as though at least a few Trump supporters thought holding up a fake jar of JD Vance fantasy splooge was a normal, chill way to show their support for a normal, chill man.

The semen cup thing is especially foul when you take into account how open Walz has been about he and his wife’s use of assisted reproductive technology to grow their family. And even if the cup was a stunt, it fits right in with “spoiled semen” and “bitch boy” and “Tampon Tim.” Those insults are immature, of course—real sixth-grader stuff—but they’re also craven and cruel, meant to finger Tim Walz as a traitor to masculinity.

It’s important to recognize that the Vance brand of toxic maleness is an order of magnitude different from the usual patriarchal, Christian-evangelical GOP fuckery to which we’re accustomed. Sure, Mike Pence is a stone-cold freak who refuses to hang out with women unless his wife is present, but that kind of misogyny is practically a charming antique compared to Vance’s version. These visions of masculinity share things in common: most significantly, the abject rebuke of the idea of mutual trust and respect between a father and his kid(s) or a husband and his wife. Both are deeply concerned with men as not only the heads of the house, but with them fulfilling the role of dictator and dominator, figures to be feared, revered, and above all, obeyed. This is part of what makes the contrast between Vance and demonstrably beloved family men such as Walz (and Doug Emhoff, and Barack Obama, and the list goes on) so striking.  

And it’s part of what makes Vance so appealing to the viciously cruel, immature, pathologically insecure incel crowd that he’s helping take over from the already miserable, gut-churning Trump base. Incels hate women, of course, but they hate another group even more: men who don’t hate women. Men who don’t hate women threaten these guys on a cellular level. They demonstrate, for example, the presumption of accountability in personal and professional relationships. It’s no wonder the extremely incel-adjacent “broligarchs” Peter Thiel and Elon Musk are backing Trump and Vance; they believe their wealth divorces them from human responsibility. They’re about compulsory fatherhood and capital-P-patriarchy, but only if you aren’t like, all cucky about it.

If I never see another post about a politician’s semen again it will be too soon, but if that’s the price of admission to this bizarro man-show reboot, I’ll take it. Bodily effluvia notwithstanding, I’m thrilled that the conversations we’re having this year about gender are about how fucked up it is for a guy to yell at his child to “shut the hell up,” how unhinged it is to deny menstrual products to kids who need them, and how unacceptable it is for men to back abortion bans.

These conversations are how we get even more “That’s my dad!” moments, not in front of the cameras on national television but in the small, normal places where we need them most: on football fields and in garages and in doctors’ offices and at PTA meetings and on fishing trips and during dance recitals and at dinner tables, anywhere and everywhere men can commit to doing better. Because if this election goes the wrong way, it’s going to be bad for the good guys too.