Of Course Donald Trump Stood Up For His Penis

…is not a headline I thought I would ever write.

When Donald Trump, actual human can of farts and a potential world leader, stood on a stage with Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio and defended the size of his penis, I well and truly entered the void.

“This can’t be happening,” I said to myself. “This can’t be real life.” I even sent a Facebook message to my supervisor, who is under no circumstances an anarchist nor anyone I really feel comfortable talking about politics to, and we shared a moment of total disbelief.

My disdain for electoral politics in general notwithstanding, it was hard for me to feel anything but embarrassed and bewildered at the concept of a candidate for president of the United States engaging in a literal dick-measuring contest with his competitors. Like, when I say I cannot even, I literally cannot fucking even.

Upon further analysis, however, I not only came to the conclusion that I can even, I realized that Donald Trump defending the sanctity of his schlong from a critical public is 100 percent aligned with his image as the neo-fascist strongman archetype of present-day America.

Now, I’m not here to establish Trump’s bona fides as Lil’ Mussolini; other pundits and hot-take writers have already done that much more effectively (Gawker even got the butthair toupee-wearing fucker to retweet an actual Mussolini quote, which I find both hilarious and gutwrenchingly sad). What I’d like to do instead is say this: we should not be surprised that Donald Trump has brought the discourse to this point. The concept of male virility has always been super important to fascists.

One of the most important tenets of Fascism as it played out in 1930s Italy was the overemphasis on a “classic” interpretation of masculinity. The Roman strongman - Mussolini - was the ideal Italian man, and anyone who simply wasn’t that, anyone who displayed “bourgeois” traits or was weakened by the emasculating disease of intellectualism, was inferior. Essentially, the fascist ideal was the anti-modern ideal, and the backbone of that anti-modernism was enshrined in, as Alessandro Bellassai put it, “the normative representations of masculinity and femininity.” (2005)

“Ruralist, pro-natalist, nationalistic and anti-bourgeois rhetoric depicted a masculine identity that was firmly virile and dominant in the state, society and family, and launched apocalyptic appeals against the presumed decay of virility caused by modern, liberal, bourgeois civilization,” Bellassai wrote. “For these reasons, the term ‘virility’ represents a key feature of the fascist vision of the world.”

When Marco Rubio recently insulted Trump’s tiny hot-dog fingers and implied that something else might be smaller than normal, Rubio didn’t just make an offhand crack; he attacked the source of Trump’s power. For Trump and neo-fascists just like him, dick size is serious business.

I can’t fucking believe I just wrote this.