With Hillary Clinton having recently made like a schoolyard bully, maybe this isn’t the right moment to bring up the issue of misogyny. Or maybe it is.

Anybody who thinks this is a dead-letter issue should take a look at those e-mailed erectile dysfunction advertisements bubbling up from the cesspools of humanity. Their revolting language is full of references to the male member as a weapon. They talk of overpowering, exploding and nailing women. They assure men “their” women will be delighted by this weaponization of sexuality.

This arrived yesterday from “Laurie”: “You will be seriously dangerous with your new weapon.” And this one from “Rosa”: “Terrorize her with your massive nine inches.” They go on and on: “Unveil your new bazooka,” “Nail her to the wall.”

I wonder if sales of anti-nausea medicines are up.

These salesmen sound like arms merchants, assuring their clandestine clients they will be able to wreak havoc on the cheap. Wreak havoc on whom? Women. The enemy. You don’t talk about weapons unless you have an enemy in mind. The “women” these advertisements posit are not women at all, they’re lab dummies. Considering the gun-slinging lingo being used, women might as well be terrorists.

Most of this illiterate trash originates overseas. They project an American market who want to harm and degrade women.

I’ve been searching my memory banks, because this language is painfully familiar. Did I hear it in the Navy? No, I didn’t, or at least not much. Where then? It has taken me several weeks to conduct this search, helped to some extent by the fact that an old man’s long-term memory is a lot better than his short-term memory. This morning it came to me. And it was horrific. I heard this talk from the same boys in school who tortured animals—this terrible impulse to hurt another  being. The difference is hypocrisy. If you’re torturing a turtle or a snake, you can’t very well claim you’re doing it because the victim likes it. But that’s exactly what those who weaponize sex claim. They’re not unlike the political hacks who tell us that to protect us they’re suspending our rights.

I learned long before I joined the Navy that bullies are cowards. You can’t trust them when the chips are down. I guess our politicians haven’t learned that. But then they didn’t go to my school. I wouldn’t be here to tell the tale if I hadn’t learned what bullies are made of. What’s the difference between saying women like it and the only good Arab is a dead Arab? There isn’t much difference. Whoever says it hasn’t been a woman or an Arab, not in this life.

No wonder the market for ED drugs is huge; we’re talking about impotent rage. And once we can see that, once we can talk about it, then we ought to talk about the impotence, because much of it too can be traced to bullying and victimization. But that’s another story and another day. For now, perhaps we might just consider this scary language.

So what is going on here? Sex is war and someone has to be subdued and degraded? I don’t hear the preachers who yap about pornography yapping about this pornography, this demonization of half the human race. What’s this about, preachers? I hear some churches yapping about abortion but not a peep about hatred of women—I guess they have better spam filters than I do.

I’m not arguing for censoring the Internet or any medium, for that matter. Far from it. I think this ugly phenomenon offers us a unique opportunity to cast a very cold eye at misogyny. I also happen to think it’s not unlike the kind of politics to which we’ve been treated: low, mean and scabrous.—DM