See a crack in the wall? Work it. Exploit it. Make it your own, and the New York Times is doing everything it can to turn the obvious crack created by Trump, and his insignificant sidekick, Billy Bush, to its own advantage. First, there was the effort to use Trump’s alleged “locker room talk” as proof that masculinity was toxic. Because the only good man is a woman.

Peggy Orenstein now teaches us how to raise boys to become her kind of man.

ONE afternoon, while reporting for a book on girls’ sexual experience, I sat in on a health class at a progressive Bay Area high school. Toward the end of the session, a blond boy wearing a school athletic jersey raised his hand. “You know that baseball metaphor for sex?” he asked. “Well, in baseball there’s a winner and a loser. So who is supposed to be the ‘loser’ in sex?”

A perfect opportunity for an adult to explain the limits of the rhetorical device of analogy, except that Orenstein instead uses it to conclusively prove in the New York Times that she doesn’t get it either. Or is she testing Times readers to see if they’re stupid enough not to notice?

That question has floated back to me over the past 10 days as the stream of revelations about Donald J. Trump surfaced.

See how it played into the hands of exploitation of the crack. “Floated” isn’t exactly a rational nexus. Maybe it made someone else think of broccoli. Does that make broccoli relevant? And I note, there is no winner in broccoli either, much like Orenstein’s inapt analogy (although, to her credit, she didn’t begin with a tear-jerking anecdote of a survivor of sexual assault who had nothing whatsoever to do with Trump, but was just like the women who claim he assaulted them).

The reports have sparked unprecedented discussions in the news media of “rape culture” and sexual consent.

Have they? Only to those who saw a crack to exploit to push their own unrelated agenda, and found a soapbox like the New York Times to make such inane claims about meaningless phrases that send a neo-feminist into paroxysms.

Certainly, such behavior is not representative of men, not by a long shot. Yet neither is it entirely atypical. Sexual coercion, in one form or another, is as American as that baseball metaphor — a metaphor that sees girls’ limits as a challenge boys should overcome.

No matter how strained her attempt to bring in her analogy to the baseball metaphor, there is one connection that exists: baseball players use locker rooms. Boom. Trump! But rather than question whether not “entirely atypical” suffices to make it real beyond the neo-feminists’ feelings, there is the insertion of “sexual coercion,” which relates to women’s inability to fend off the mad persuasion skillz of men to bed women.

Coercion once meant the use of force or threats. Trump didn’t coerce. Trump grabbed. But in the locker room, at least in Orenstein’s imagination, men plot ways to overcome the challenge of “girls’ limits.” Like, asking them after they’ve shown reticence. So toxic. If only there were women in men’s locker rooms to teach them the wrongfulness of their “entitlement to women’s bodies.”

In contrast, another op-ed in the New York Times by Judith Shulevitz about locker rooms. Not the locker rooms where men scheme to coerce women, but the ones where transgenders twerk.

You could be forgiven for thinking that the most fiercely contested territory in America right now is the bathroom. On Monday, the Supreme Court is expected to announce whether it will hear G.G. v. Gloucester School Board, which turns on the question of whether Gavin Grimm, a 16-year-old transgender boy, may use the men’s room.

But there’s another theater for the clash of values — gender inclusiveness versus bodily privacy — raised by transgender rights, and it may be even more charged. I mean the locker room.

In a thoughtful, comprehensive and detailed op-ed, Shulevitz raises adult issues with a problem that has gone under the radar now that Trump gave neo-feminists a crack to exploit. To a large extent, she raises issues that have appeared here, perhaps with even greater empathy toward transgender students.

In contrast to Orenstein’s deep dive down the rabbit hole, Shulevitz provides a survey of real concerns, problematic conflicts of rights and the overarching concern that transgender rights advocates are trying to sneak through a paradigm shift in law using a misguided process as a means of social engineering in the waning hours of the Obama administration. So much for the advocates’ facile cries of the bathroom predator strawman.

It’s hard even to write the words “locker room” after last Sunday’s presidential debate, when Donald J. Trump repeated the phrase “locker room talk” three times to justify his accounts of possibly felonious groping. In the popular imagination, the locker room is where mean kids bully vulnerable ones, including, of course, gender-nonconforming ones. It would seem to be the perfect place to render justice to transgender students.

The question is not, and never was, as advocates seek to frame it to appeal to simpletons, whether one loves or hates transgenders. We’re living in a complex society with varying interests and agendas, many of which are playing a zero-sum game about rights.

There is no reason why women’s rights have to come at the expense of men’s, but that’s only if women want equality. When the demand is to exceed equality, to swing the pendulum beyond equality into favoritism, then there’s a problem. Similarly, the right of transgender people, whether young or old, to be protected from harm and abuse, but what that means in reality remains an issue to be determined.  And not by a “Dear Colleague” letter from a bureaucrat with an agenda.

The point of Trump claiming we should ignore his talk because it was “locker room” stuff is that he suggests locker rooms are sanctuaries, where people can be as disgusting as they wanna be. What happens in a locker room stays in a locker room. Guys lie, brag, show off and beat up transgender students in a locker room. Somehow, this is supposed to make locker rooms off limits to scrutiny.

Locker rooms aren’t to blame for these issues. Intellectual dishonesty is the problem, and it can happen in a locker room or on the op-ed pages of a major newspaper, where we can either spew nonsense to further an agenda or write something deeply thoughtful that can address serious issues. Don’t be misled because they both tend to smell the same.