"The great shame is not that Mr. Trump brought an anachronistic masculinity into the Oval Office, but that he used the Oval Office to market a very modern brand of compensatory manhood — with a twist."

"The hallmarks of contemporary ornamental masculinity — being valued as the object of the gaze, playing the perpetual child, pedestal-perching and mirror-gazing — are the very ones that women have, for half a century, struggled to dismantle as belittling, misogynist characterizations of femininity. The preoccupation with popularity, glamour, celebrity, appearance — what are these qualities but the old consumer face of the Girl? If Mr. Trump is reclaiming a traditional stereotypical sex role, it’s one that long belonged to women. Why have so many of the modern-day grunts who mourn the loss of 'old-fashioned' manhood hitched their wagon to a silk-suited flyboy? Since at least the 1990s, and at full tilt in the era of social media, men have been faced with a quandary: how to define their sex in a culture where visibility, performance and marketability are the currency. You could say that Mr. Trump has, if nothing else, found a way. But he’s done so not by defending the Greatest Generation man, but by abandoning him."

From "Trump’s Thoroughly Modern Masculinity/The president isn’t a throwback to old-school masculinity. He’s a he-man specifically engineered for our image-based, sensation-saturated times" by Susan Faludi (NYT).

"Flyboy" is explained elsewhere in the column. It's a WWII epithet for aviators who posed in silk scarves, Faludi explains, and were disparaged as not showing true manliness.

By the way is Trump "silk-suited"? I presume his suits are wool, not silk. I looked it up and found a lot of articles about how cheap Trump's suits look! Here's an example of such an article from right before he won the 2016 election. We were told it matters because "you can tell a lot about someone by the way they dress," and Trump's baggy clothes show that "he isn't detail-oriented." The article ends: "Next Tuesday, vote with your sartorial conscience."

Now, right before the 2020 election, Susan Faludi portrays Trump as fussily "silk-suited." And you can tell a lot about him from the way he — supposedly, in her mind — dresses. Look how far she's going disparaging him as feminine! I'm sure she imagines that she is safe from accusations of sexism and homophobia. But why?! One reason is she's attacking Trump. That seems to authorize anything. But in my book, if you insult men for seeming like women, you are sexist, and if you are a feminist, you put feminism first, ahead of your desire to help one political candidate or another. 

That made me want to look up whether Susan Faludi defended Bill Clinton.

Susan Faludi, author of Backlash, the best-selling book that warned against the slippage of women's rights in America, commented on the Lewinsky affair with a touch of backlash herself. "If anything, it sounds like she put the moves on him," Faludi declared, seemingly comfortable with the idea that a man should never, ever be expected to resist sex when it's offered to him on a plate.