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To say he was a hit is pure understatement. The fashion press – Vogue, Elle, Huffington Post – was in full swoon mode, as were most of the attendees, one of the latter capturing the rapture with this observation: “He’s tailor-made for a conference like this. He checks every box you could want, except for actually being a woman.” And with “gender roles” being revised it seems every minute these days, who’s to say that by next year he (she) won’t be able, even eager, to tick off that box too.

Just as a side-note on that very point – how much longer, in a world of porous and mutable gender identities, will a conference like Women in the World conference be tenable? Is “women,” under the new protean understanding of gender, an “exclusionist” label? Then too, if it is only women attending a women’s conference, where is the diversity? These are deep questions.

The Prime Minister received praise as well for combating the idea “that the feminist movement is female-centric movement,” a proposition which before this week I would have thought the purest tautology. Evidently, as a report in People makes clear, feminism is (also) “beneficial to men and masculinity in itself” and having a “man in power” tell women that was just “great.”

Trudeau had a wonderful sit-down with the woman who colourized the venerable New Yorker, and attenuated the academic turn of Vanity Fair, Tina Brown. Brown, as noted by many, is an “acerbic” interviewer, proof of which came in her very first question to the feminist Prime Minister: “How does it feel to be cast as world’s big new superhero?” There are not many politicians who could wiggle off a hook that barbed. But Trudeau is a rhetorical Houdini. He responded with a deft verbal shimmy on the “importance of listening,” which won smiles all around while leaving the question about his superhero status entirely unmolested.