It's International Women's Day so let's consider the size of Donald Trump's penis.
The only thing that seems to be standing in Hillary Clinton's way of becoming the first female president of the United States are angry old men, some of whom seem to think the girth or mirth of their opponent's member is worthy of consideration and criticism. Sadly, Clinton moving into the Oval Office will not mark the end of sexism, just like Barack Obama becoming president certainly didn't mark racism's demise.
If anything, many observers, both inside and outside of the United States, could make a strong case that racism in America only increased during Obama's tenure.
As president, Clinton will be the world's biggest target for misogynist men who think the free world has been in the fast lane to hell ever since the suffragettes got their way.
It will be open season on powerful women, all couched as criticism of Clinton personally, not women in general.
Political power is interesting enough but what gets everyone's heart racing is the examination of sexual power and how men and women wield it.
When Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio brought up the size of Trump's hands, it was more than a playground taunt about Trump's male member.
It was a below the belt shot about power and masculinity that could only have come from another man, one likely feeling his own deep insecurities when looking down at himself. As Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam explain in their fantastic book A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What The Internet Tells Us About Sexual Relationships, heterosexual and homosexual men both share an incredible fixation with penises, particularly those belonging to other men.
Sex researchers have some increasingly interesting theories about the human male's penis that speak volumes about gender relationships. As Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha argue in their book Sex At Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality, the size and shape of an adult male's erect penis, along with the interest in it by other adult males, all makes biological sense when women are free to love as many men as they like.
The authors persuasively lay out the growing amount of cross-disciplinary research that show adult men and women are natural philanderers, like the vast majority of the animal kingdom, and monogamy is little more than a cultural fabrication by men to control women's reproductive and sexual power.
They brushed aside the longheld whore narrative of human sexuality, where women have little interest in sex except to sell their bodies to the right man in exchange for food, shelter and protection for themselves and their children.
Ryan and Jetha put forward not only a biological and evolutionary case but also cite numerous anthropological reports from foraging cultures around the world where promiscuity, undetermined paternity of children and the raising of children by entire villages of aunts and uncles is standard.
Among such preindustrial cultures, sexual power doesn't exist as we know it because men and women are full partners, free to fornicate whenever and with whomever they please.
For these people, demanding fidelity is a shameful display of greed and control, of putting oneself over the needs of their fellow men and women.
Ryan and Jetha take great pleasure in pointing out that prehistorical humans and many of the isolated "primitive" societies were far less sexually prudish and far more progressive in regards to female sexuality than what passes for sophistication in the modern global society. It also saddens them to note that scientists and science has been twisted for centuries to repress everyone's sexuality and to control women in particular.
It turns out women don't have just human rights on their side when fighting for equality, they have human nature, too.
The alternative cultural and biological history of women is far more rich, complicated, powerful and compelling than previously believed, a narrative that shakes patriarchy to its core.
What Trump has in his jeans has no bearing on his inadequacy to be president.
What he, Clinton and the rest of humanity have in their genes, however, could help modern society forward to finally accepting the autonomy women should always have had.
-- Managing editor Neil Godbout
