On Friday afternoon I submitted my absentee ballot for next month's U.S. presidential election. As that ballot makes its way from Halifax, Nova Scotia to a Town Clerk's office in Michigan the news of Donald Trump's latest bombast broke. This wasn't just a gaffe. It was gross. If I really wanted to, I could spend the whole weekend breaking down the social, psychological and political implications of Trump's latest sexist statement. But I won't.

I don't need to overthink this one.

We don't need to wrestle with academic theory on this.

Donald Trump is a Dirty Old Man. Period.

This certainly isn't the first offensive thing Mr. Trump has said -- and it surely won't be the last. But in my mind, it's the only evidence we need to make up our minds about this man. Language matters. The nouns and verbs we choose to use say something about who we are and how we see the world. To some degree, they must be connected to how we act in the world. They aren't merely the matters of high school English class.

"You know I'm automatically attracted to beautiful -- I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet. Just kiss. I don't even wait. And when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the p***y. You can do anything." - Donald Trump

While Trump surrogates quickly excused the language as the "locker room talk" of a 59-year-old man, I have found myself confused as to why this would be a viable excuse for anyone over the age of 15 or 16. While traditions of misogyny and harassment are terrible things to see at any age -- what's worse is hearing a major party candidate for President of the United States using the excuse of "all the other middle school boys were doing it too".

Let's not lose track of the fact we're talking about a 70 year old, thrice-married, beauty-pageant owner talking about the "bitches" he is trying to bed.

If that's not Dirty Old Man syndrome, I don't know what is.

Donald Trump's vulgar words reveal a vulgar character.

The excuse is laughable. Most men do not, in fact, speak like this. But more importantly, every single man, boy and child that does carry this sort of rhetoric forward should be confronted and held to account. It's not just "locker room talk". It's not "boys-being-boys". It's gross. It's toxic -- and it hurts everyone.

Men embracing this language are less than what they could be. They're insecure, small, and broken in some way. In wrestling with their own insecurity they find themselves lashing out to make other humans less... human. And the women confronted with these attitudes are not only left with the fallout from varying degrees of verbal, physical, and sexual assault -- they have to navigate the road to recovery while carrying all this excess baggage from weak, insecure men.

The weight of this baggage has never been more clear to me than it is today. Since the release of the Trump tape, I've done my best to avoid simply mansplaining why this is so bad. I listened to my wife. I put out an open invite for feedback from the women in my Facebook sphere.

I've been transfixed by NY Times best-selling-author and Twitter all-star Kelly Oxford's (@KellyOxford) #NotOkay timeline in which thousands of women have shared their everyday experiences with sexual assault and the regularity with which half of our population is grabbed -- as Donald Trump would say -- "by the p***y".