The Body Politic: Rebecca Traister

The Nice Men of the Left An election defined by two very different kinds of guys.

"WHAT A SPLIT screen," Doug Emhoff said to a crowd at a private fundraiser on the coast of Maine in the last days of July. The Second Gentleman was referring to Donald Trump' remarks that afternoon to the National Association of Black Journalists in Chicago, where he berated Rachel Scott of ABC News for being "nasty" and suggested that Kamala Harris had only recently "turned Black" Emhoff appeared gobsmacked by the raw vulgarity. "The contrast could not be clearer;' he said.

Since Joe Biden's decision to step aside, the loudest contrast in the presidential race has been between the elderly white man at the head of the Republican ticket and the younger Black and Indian American woman on the other side. But a disparity of the intragender variety has also come to the fore: the difference between how the men of the right and the left define masculinity.

On the one hand is the Republican Party's view of manhood: its furious resentments toward women and their power, its mean obsession with forcing women to be babymakers. On the other hand is the emergence of a Democratic man newly confident in his equal-to-subsidiary status: happily deferential, unapologetically supportive of women's rights, committed to partnership.

The new Democratic man is embodied by Harris surrogates like Emhoff, whose first solo public appearance since his wife became the de facto nominee was at a Planned Parenthood in Portland, Maine, and Harris's vice-presidential pick, Governor Tim Walz, the former National Guardsman and football coach whom the right has taken to calling "Tampon Tim' for passing a law in his home state of Minnesota requiring public schools to stock free menstrual products in all school bathrooms.