Bragging about pussy-grabbing doesn’t preclude Trump and his supporters from participating in pedestal politics, of course. Their #repealthe19th hashtag perfectly combines an aggressive attack on women’s personhood with throwback nostalgia for the days when rough-and-tumble politics were thought to be too intellectually taxing for irrational, impressionable women.

Trump’s oft-repeated defense that his remarks were "locker-room" banter — Melania followed up by dismissing them as "boy talk" — and thus forgivable, says that of course guys speak in ways we delicate flowers could never understand when they are in the safely macho space of the proverbial locker room (or older men on a tour bus on the way to a professional engagement, that is).

Trump's meanest jabs at Hillary Clinton reflect the same sensibility — in the days before the first debate, he whipped up a fervor about her physical health and then concluded the debate by questioning her stamina outright, exploiting stereotypes about female frailty. Holding Clinton to a higher moral standard and treating her only in relation to her husband, Trump depicts her role as a wronged wife a serious character flaw, while he gets a pass on his own philandering.

Even his rare charitable moments are in this spirit; Trump announced in the second debate: "I'm a gentleman" and ceded the first response to a question on health care to Clinton. But to feminists who have, for decades, critiqued holding-doors-open, ladies-first chivalry as the softer side of sexism, he only made his ungentlemanly behavior on the bus and beyond worse.

Perhaps the best thing to come of Trump's candidacy is that we will no longer be blind to the coexisting, and mutually reinforcing, perils of the pussy-grab and the pedestal.