Josh Hawley (R-MO) Champions Cult of Toxic Masculinity as He Accuses "Liberals" of Driving Men to Pornography
Missouri Republican Senator Josh Hawley has masculinity concerns. (DonkeyHotey)
November 9, 2021
BY MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH
Josh Hawley would have you believe, given a recent speech and interview, that American men are being denied their “masculinity” by liberals and women. This he says is driving them to become addicted to pornography, to become video game fanatics and to recoil from getting work. Now take a deep breath and try to unpack the political appeal Hawley is making to particularly white males to place him high up in contention for the 2024 GOP presidential bid should Trump not run.
As Gloria Berger of CNN wrote:
Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley has decided to make us fret about something he considers to be a crucial issue of our time: the decline of masculinity. American men, he says, are being attacked as part of a concerted leftist project.
"The left want to define traditional masculinity as toxic," he said in a speech at the National Conservatism Conference on November 1. "They want to define the traditional masculine virtues -- things like courage and independence and assertiveness -- as a danger to society.”
Really? Funny, I've never run into anyone of any political persuasion who thinks those virtues are dangerous, in either men or women. But enough of that.
The best retort to Hawley saying the quiet part out loud is actually how AOC responded today to a twitter that insurrectionist Congressman Paul Gosar (R-AZ) posted that showed a manipulated anime in which Gosar slashes Ocasio-Cortez to death and physically attacks President Biden. (Nancy Pelosi is calling for multiple investigations and disciplining of Gosar for this threats of grotesque violence.) AOC tweeted of Gosar:
This dude is a just a collection of wet toothpicks anyway. White supremacy is for extremely fragile people &sad men like him, whose self concept relies on the myth that he was born superior because deep down he knows he couldn’t open a pickle jar or read a whole book by himself.
White supremacy is the subtext of Hawley’s call to arms against an alleged attack on masculine virility. When he blames liberals for the self-pity of males, he is including people of color among the imagined persecutors of white males (although he does not use racial terms, whites are primarily the males that vote Republican).
Anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers, “2nd Amendment Rights advocates,” for instance account for perhaps a majority of the white males that Hawley is coming to the defense of, despite there being no threat to them.
Amanda Marcotte wrote in Salon:
Hawley is defending is evident in this porn-and-video-games talk. That's just a tired sexist trope, that men's presence in women's lives needs to be purchased with women's submission, and if women demand equality, men will reject them entirely. This threat of male abandonment has been leveraged to keep women down for, well, ever. In recent decades, however, it's lost some teeth. Women are no longer barred from having checking accounts and jobs, and so aren't in danger of being destitute for the sin of being too uppity. The premise that a man's value is so self-evident that a woman should subjugate herself to keep a man happy, which was treated as gospel in the 50s era America the right is so nostalgic for, has also lost a lot of its shine. Straight women are increasingly asking men to demonstrate real worth, by being a partner instead of entitled and domineering. Hawley is speaking to an audience terrified of having to actually step up and be something more than a paycheck with a pulse to women.
"The left-wing attack on manhood says to men: You're part of the problem," Hawley told an interviewer. "It says that your masculinity is inherently problematic. It's inherently oppressive."
When it comes to the Trump version of hyper-masculinity that he promoted for four years, Hawley may finally have hit upon a truth. A patriarchal society that automatically puts white men at the head of the line and at the top of government is doomed to become attenuated and in decline.
Maybe Hawley should try getting free pornography and video games for “emasculated males” in the second infrastructure bill. They clearly, according to Hawley, need our support due to emotional disabilities.