Just hours after Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump launched high-profile attacks against one another on foreign policy, the standoff continued into the night in back-to-back interviews on CNN’s The Final Five candidates’ forum.

The event featured interviews from all the remaining candidates in the 2016 election, but interviews with John Kasich and even Ted Cruz seemed like mere accents – distractions, even – in a larger, highly gendered standoff between Clinton and Trump that could foreshadow a general election in which the politics of sex and sexism is at the fore.

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One thing Monday night made clear is if Trump and Clinton do indeed win their parties’ respective nominations, it’s going to be a long, bumpy, gender-politics-ridden ride.

So much of what Trump says can be read as sexual innuendo. After Clinton suggested during a speech to Aipac on Monday that America needs “steady hands, not a president who says he’s neutral on Monday, pro-Israel on Tuesday, and who-knows-what on Wednesday,” Trump took her criticism straight to a physical place.

“I have the steadiest hands. Look at those hands,” he said, raising a fist up to show the moderator.

It’s an uncomfortable move given that Trump has already made his hands the topic of sexual innuendo once this campaign, after Marco Rubio ignominiously suggested Trump’s small hands were indicative of another small appendage.

“Look at these hands. Are they small hands?” Trump asked at a debate earlier this month, raising his hands up for the audience to see. “He referred to my hands, if they’re small something else must be small. I guarantee you there’s no problem.”

It’s a misstep, or at least a macho vulgarity, and Clinton may well have been baiting Trump to remind people of it in her phrasing of the criticism. And whether the intention was there or not, she succeeded. But when Trump makes such comments about his hands with respect to Clinton and her foreign policy prowess rather than with respect to another man, it may actually hurt him.

Because what translates as funny if immature dick jokes between men will read like pure sexism when it’s applied to Clinton. It already reads that way when he’s lambasting Megyn Kelly, but of course she isn’t vying for the top job. Still, public disdain of the way he speaks to Kelly may provide some insight.

Take the “steady hands” moment: Trump took Clinton’s argument about competence and made it about physicality. And shortly after debuting his “steady” fist, he went on to suggest, more or less, that Clinton isn’t man enough to do the job – specifically as it pertains to foreign policy, where women leaders are famously thought to be in danger of being perceived as soft or weak.

He went on to make precisely that insinuation. “Hillary Clinton does not have the stamina, doesn’t have the energy, she doesn’t have it. Doesn’t have the strength to be president,” he told his interviewer. He also said that with her “it’s always drama” – be it Whitewater, or her much more recent email controversy.

Such attacks – that it’s “always drama” with her and that she “doesn’t have the strength” for the job – sound like what you might expect to hear a teenage boy say if he were facing off against a teenage girl the race for seventh-grade class president.

It’s a familiar technique for Trump, who up until this point has employed schoolyard taunts to tremendous effect. And Trump has seemed to get a lot of mileage for everything from teasing Jeb Bush for turning to his “mommy”, to calling Cruz a “pussy” and dubbing Rubio “little Marco”.

But when it comes to sparring with a female opponent, machismo reads as sexism (rather than homophobia). At least, Clinton will do her best to push that narrative. On Monday night, for instance, a moderator, citing recent public comments about Clinton’s tone of voice and propensity to smile following electoral victories, asked her whether she thought she was held to a double standard.

“I don’t hear anyone say that about men, and I’ve seen a lot of male candidates who don’t smile very much and talk very loud,” she offered.

But when asked about how she’d campaign against Trump more directly, she took the high road.

“I intend to run a campaign about the real issues facing our country,” she said, arguing the election is like “a giant job interview”. What it’s about, she insisted, is “who is steady, who is predictable, who gets results”.

And just like that, as surely as Trump took the debate down to the level of physicality earlier in the night, Clinton took it back up to the cerebral. And maybe, that’s precisely what Clinton wanted to happen.