“I cherish women,” Mr. Trump has said. But this is not the same as recognizing women’s equal humanity. As Ruth Bader Ginsburg, quoting a California judicial opinion, told the Supreme Court in 1971, “the pedestal upon which women have been placed has all too often, upon closer inspection, been revealed as a cage.” When we declare that men will always be brutes and women can only shrug from on high, we engage in what President George W. Bush once called the soft bigotry of low expectations.

Feminists’ critique of male power has long been caricatured as hatred of men. But it is feminists whose fight is motivated by the belief that men can be better, if we can make clear that they, too, benefit from a safer, more equal and more just world. We have little choice but to try — men still control so much, and besides, many of us love them.

Our intimate lives, where we are the most vulnerable and the least rational, are the hardest to reconcile with politics. And the very idea that men and women can and should be equal partners is only a generation or two old. Most of us, even now, are just making it up as we go along.

In 1996, Gloria Steinem offered a theory about why so many people hated Hillary Clinton: “She and the president are presenting, at a very high, visible level, a new paradigm of a male-female relationship. And that is very much resented.” Mrs. Clinton was pilloried for her ostensibly traditional choice to stay with her unfaithful husband. It would come back to haunt her. This year, renewed attention to accusations against Bill Clinton did nothing to dispel the notion that all men are pigs, effectively defusing the many accusations against Mr. Trump. They’re crazy. That’s men.

Or as Melania Trump put it in an interview after the “Access Hollywood” video surfaced: “Sometimes I say I have two boys at home — I have my young son and I have my husband. But I know how some men talk, and that’s how I saw it.”

The Trump marriage offers some pretty basic math on what women can expect from men. In 2005, months into his third marriage, Mr. Trump acknowledged that in some quarters, marriage had changed. “There’s a lot of women out there that demand that the husband act like the wife, and you know, there’s a lot of husbands that listen to that,” he said in a radio interview. Mr. Trump, he made clear, was not one of those husbands. “I mean, I won’t do anything to take care of them,” he said of his future offspring. “I’ll supply funds and she’ll take care of the kids. It’s not like I’m gonna be walking the kids down Central Park.”