“A man should be able to hear, and to share, the worst that could be said of him.”  – Saul Bellow

I work hard to avoid slipping into the hatred and judgment and accusation that has come to despoil our political system, and I am certain Donald Trump is doing the best he can, and that he is capable of good, and that he loves the people close to him.

I have no interest in the he-said, she-said infection, you don’t need me to tell you who to vote for or love. It’s  actually none of my business, and of no interest to me. We own our identities and ideas, we are entitled to them. If you want to hate, go to CNN or Fox News, or a thousand blogs, they will all be happy to have you. Not here.

But watching and listening to Mr. Trump in recent weeks, I appreciate that he has given me and my wife some considerable gifts.  He has challenged her to think about what it means to be a woman, he has inspired me to think about what it means to be a man.

Yesterday, I shared a powerful piece of writing by Maria about her response as a woman to Monday’s debate between Mr. Trump and Hillary Clinton. The post on her blog went viral soon after, and is rocketing around the Internet still.

I recommend that you read it for yourself, it describes the experience – seemingly common to so many women – of being interrupted, talked over, ridiculed and patronized by men in precisely the way Mr. Trump was interrupting, talking over, ridiculing and patronizing Hillary Clinton.

There is even a name for it, it is called manturrupting.

Maria can obviously speak for herself, her words are strong and clear and full of feeling.

But I want to speak for myself about what it means to be a man, and I am grateful to Donald Trump for making that clearer to me.

I love Saul Bellow’s quote about being a man, I believe I am finally able to hear, and to share, the worst that has been said of me. It is, in fact, an important and very conscious part of my writing, as I think many of you know.

Donald Trump is not the kind of man I wish to be.

For me, the end does not ever justify the means. I do not see women in terms of their size or “glamour” or beauty. I do not think myself smarter than them, or better.

I was much affected by own tormented mother, whose life was interrupted, curtailed, thwarted and exploited at every turn by men, especially my father. She spent her entire life in a desperate struggle to find herself and free her own powerful creativity, and every time she got close, she was undercut and overrun by men and their interests and arrogance. I asked her many times why she gave into it, surrendered to it.

She thought she had no choice, “what would become of me?,” she would ask.

My father was not nearly as crude as Donald Trump, but he  always got his own way, she always gave in to him and his needs and interests. And he always punished her for not being nice to him, as if it were an outrageous thing to do. He saw women in much the same way as Donald Trump, and I saw again and again how painful and destructive that was to my mother and my sister.  In many ways, neither fully ever recovered. Some wounds do not heal.

I find in my life that that there are so many men who use women but do not, in fact, like women, unless they submit to them and their idea of them. And there are many men who love women, and they seem the happiest and healthiest to me. I think of myself as one of them.

My idea of being a man is very different from Donald Trump’s. I do not have a large penis, but I have done all right with the one I have. I am not hugely successful, or powerful in any way.

I do not interrupt my wife, I listen carefully to her (most of the time). I never try to be stronger than her, but reveal my vulnerability to her freely. When we quarrel or when she challenges me, which is fairly often, I never punish her or pout or make her feel guilty for not being nice. I do not wish her to ever surrender to me, or to subordinate her own interests for mine. I do not traffic in guilt, in part because I believe some women have been taught to be vulnerable to it.

Maria does not live to please me, she lives to please herself, and that pleases me.

In the photo above, I am holding my granddaughter, I am showing her the world. I hope she is never at the mercy of a man like Donald Trump, who makes her feel ugly and foolish, and gleefully humiliates her in front of hordes of strangers. What kind of  man would wish that for any daughter or granddaughter?

In so many ways, Maria is much more of a “man” than I am, just watch her with a drill or on a ladder or with a hammer, and she has given me the opportunity to nurture, to cook, to shop, to move the furniture here or there.  My idea of being a man is to encourage the women in my life – my first wife, my daughter, Maria – to be fulfilled, to follow their bliss. The best companion is a happy and fulfilled person, not a subservient or intimidated one.

A real man celebrates every victory and triumph in his family or among his friends. Maria’s achievements are mine, I am as happy for her as I am for me. Real men nurture, they understand the worst that has been said of them, and the worst that is inside of them. A real man is acutely aware of the power his gender has wielded and the damage men have done.

The very best that can be said of a real man is that he was self-aware, that he changed, or tried to change. He sought to rewrite and relive the awful history of men and their abuse and persecution and diminishment of women.

The best I can say of Donald Trump is that he knows not what he does, or what he says.

When I think of Mr. Trump,  I think of the times I snuck into the bathroom and dug into my father’s stash of hidden Playboy Magazines, for my generation, our only window into the world of women and sexuality. I see that Donald Trump surrounds himself with the kind of women I saw in those magazines, they are his ideal. That was his golden world, that idea of maleness, of sexuality, of the role women should play for us and feed our wants and desires.

That is where he got stuck, and remains stuck. I loved to see those photos, I knew the very day those magazines would be in the house, but those women never seemed real to me, and as I grew older, my idea of beauty changed, I cannot imagine reading such a magazine now.

Those women posed and deferred constantly to men’s idea of what they should be, even to the point of posing naked for them. I saw it then, and I see it now, it was Trump’s World, and it still is.

We can either learn from our lives and be prisoners of them. Donald Trump is a prisoner of his times, it is, for him, an unfathomable sin for a beauty queen – one he believes he owns – to gain weight, even as he is, by his doctor’s own admission, overweight himself. He cannot imagine why anyone would object to such an obvious betrayal, why any woman should be permitted to get away with such a crime, to love eating!

And what, I wonder, does it say about us men that so many of us are addicted to a different crime, to love women only for their bodies.

So there you are, really, the different view of what it means to be a man. Women everywhere have recoiled and risen up in response to this idea of what a women ought to be. I saw this very clearly Monday night and afterwards. It is, of course, beyond politics and issues, something else Mr. Trump cannot seem to grasp. They don’t wish to surrender to this any longer.

Donald Trump cannot hear, or bear, the worst that is said of him. He literally cannot hear it, he throws his hands over his ears and denies and lies and screams and shines and complains, “it’s not fair,” the clarion call of the deposed schoolyard bully, always a man.

To me, men can be vulnerable, but they must not be cowards. They must listen and hear, they must stand up for love and encouragement and kindness. That is what a real man is about.

Donald Trump is no man to me.