Dear Dinesh: In 2019, Being a Man Isn't About Not Being a Woman. It's About Not Being a Child.

From Esquire

The worst people in the world are feeling the wind at their backs at this moment in history, and sometimes, when they are relaxed and cocky, they accidentally show you exactly who they are.

To wit: a tweet from conservative commentator and attempted filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza, comparing the masculinity of President Donald Trump to that of Canadian Prime Minister and delicious, healthy between-meal snack Justin Trudeau.

Here, D’Souza challenges us to study a photograph and then take an unsparing look into our own souls and ask ourselves which kind of man we really are.

Are we the world leader who:

• complains on the Internet about how mean the world is to him;

• watches television all day, only taking breaks to complain on the internet about how mean the television is to him;

• makes up nasty nicknames for his opponents;

• claims that any news story that is critical of him is fake;

• speaks exclusively to audiences he knows he doesn’t have to win over;

• tells those crowds he’s in love with Kim Jong Un;

• takes time away from a D-Day memorial to publicly call Bette Midler a has-been;

• appears to be frightened of stairs;

• has had the upper hand in every single negotiation in his entire life due to massive inherited wealth;

• has actually lost money running a casino;

• fabricates quotes from girlfriends about how great his dick is and fed them to the press;

• has literally, proudly never read a book except his own, which he did not write;

• has actually probably not even read that book, let's be honest;

• does the thing in interviews or debates where he interrupts the other person and then if the other person dares to keep talking, says “excuse me,” like all of the sudden he has manners;

• brags on tape about sexually assaulting women, then sulkily apologizes for it, then says maybe it wasn’t him on that tape after all;

• has been accused by well over a dozen women of doing exactly what he talked about on that tape;

• defends himself against some of those allegations by suggesting he would only sexually assault more attractive women;

• has also been accused of rape in print by an ex-wife who later retracted the accusation;

• has joked on the record about dating one of his daughters and aborting the other one;

• really seems to think Metamucil is an appropriate and flattering skin tone;

• won’t go to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner because they will make jokes about him;

• lets his wife and son get soaked with rain while he keeps the umbrella over only himself;

• is so baffled by umbrella technology that he has no choice but to leave the whole, wide-open situation for someone else to deal with;

• suggests that a female journalist is asking him difficult questions in a televised debate because she is having her period

• says he refused to hang out with a different female journalist at Mar-a-Lago because she was "bleeding badly from a facelift";

• hugs flagpoles;

• refuses to defend his country against cyber-attacks from its largest geopolitical adversary;

• and has by multiple accounts really lingered in the changing areas of the teen beauty pageants he bought with his father’s money?

Or are we the one who crosses his ankles?

Gentlemen, I am not kidding when I tell you we are supposed to feel less masculine if we chose the second.

Now listen: does Justin Trudeau look a bit like Tom Thumb here, perched on a walnut shell, refreshed after drinking a morning dewdrop? Absolutely. He also seems to know and be comfortable with it, while the guy he’s sitting across from thinks he’s draping himself in enough Men’s Wearhouse Super 100's fabric that we haven’t noticed he’s overweight. Trudeau is a proud fancy lad, while Trump wears ties down to his knees because he thinks he’s creating an optical illusion.

This little exercise is nothing more than a slightly-elevated version of that thing you see on Twitter from time to time, where some guy reposts some young boy’s make-up tutorial and asks:

I mean, I think the kid in this video has got life pretty well figured out, so the only thing I might do if I were @k_madrino is ask myself why I am so starved for validation from strangers on Twitter. If I were the sitting President of the United States, I might ask the same.

Misogyny and homophobia are the subtext of 85 percent of what’s wrong with the world, and in the other 15 percent, like here, it’s just the text. Insecure men are so terrified of appearing feminine that they don’t even notice when they’re being childish. They define their masculinity negatively, against some bizarre 1950s notion of what women do, to the point where a person who gets paid for his opinions actually suggests Justin Trudeau is less of a man because he’s not putting his big fat ass all over one hundred percent of the chair.

Also, I guess it bears pointing out that D’Souza pleaded guilty to felony campaign finance law violations in 2014 and Donald Trump pardoned him last year.

He does make a good point though: It is indeed the 21 century now, and being a man is not about not being a woman anymore. It’s about not being a child.

We’re Trudeau, Dinesh. Thanks for asking.

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