WashPo: If Kanye Wants 'Lessons About Masculinity' He Could Have Asked Caitlyn Jenner

[The] saddest of all, at least for me, was West's embrace of Trump on the grounds that "my dad and my mom separated, so there was not a lot of male energy in my home, and also I'm married to a family where, you know, there's not a lot of male energy."

[...] to mistake Trump, who ranks among the world's most morally impoverished human beings, as an example of nourishing "male energy" is to set expectations for men and for masculinity catastrophically low.

Judged by old-fashioned and decidedly restrictive standards of what it means to be a man, the president is a failure. He's hardly a macho archetype -- a man who took extraordinary measures to avoid service in Vietnam even as he mocked Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) for having been captured and held prisoner there, and whose most prominent display of physical force came in a professional wrestling match. His crude boasting about forcing himself on beautiful women, captured on tape in 2005, is ugly and unnerving, but it also reeks of a desperate desire to impress. And Trump's constant need to inflate his wealth and status speak to a profound insecurity.

[...] None of this is to say that West's hunger for male influences in his life is manufactured or misplaced. But lessons about masculinity are closer at hand than West suggests. If he wanted to know more about what it takes to evince "male energy" in the eyes of the public, and about the costs and privileges that come with having America see you as a masculine ideal, West doesn't need Trump. He could have asked his mother-in-law, Caitlyn Jenner.