The Right Wing's "Crisis of Masculinity" Is Part of the War on Women

I recently wrote about how the dystopian future in Margaret Attwood's book, "The Handmaid's Tale" is becoming more real every day. To explain, I noted not only the legislation in many red states to essentially ban abortions, but the way Republicans have signaled that birth control is next on the list. Even more ominous are the whispers we're beginning to hear on the right about the need for women to have more babies and the attacks on those who remain childless.

But to get a full picture of what's going on, we have to include what right wingers are saying about men these days. In case you haven't heard, they want us to believe that we are experiencing a "crisis of masculinity." 

In a speech at the National Conservatism Conference last November, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) accused the political left of seeking to redefine traditional masculinity as toxic, and called for a "revival of strong and healthy manhood in America." Rep. Madison Cawthorn took it a step further.

Complaining that "our culture today is trying to completely demasculate all the young men," Rep. Madison Cawthorn issues a plea to parents: "If you are raising a young man, please raise them to be a monster." pic.twitter.com/v7b0pN3RA3

— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) October 18, 2021

The guru behind this movement is, of course, Jordan Peterson.

Jordan Peterson fills huge lecture halls and tells his audiences there’s no shame in looking backward to a model of how the world should be arranged. Look back to the 1950s, he says — and back even further. He tells his audiences that they are smart. He is bringing them knowledge, yes, but it is knowledge that they already know and feel in their bones. He casts this as ancient wisdom, delivered through religious allegories and fairy tales which contain truth, he says, that modern society has forgotten.

Most of his ideas stem from a gnawing anxiety around gender. “The masculine spirit is under assault,” he told me. “It’s obvious.”

In Mr. Peterson’s world, order is masculine. Chaos is feminine. And if an overdose of femininity is our new poison, Mr. Peterson knows the cure. Hence his new book’s subtitle: “An Antidote to Chaos.”

But given the fact that many of these right wing movements begin with Tucker Carlson, it is important to note that his more recent foray into producing "documentaries" is titled, "The End of Men." It was easy to laugh at the homoerotic nature of the visuals in the trailer Carlson put out. But the message wasn't even subtle. A narrator says, “once a society collapses, then, you’re in hard times. Well, hard iron sharpens iron, as they say. And those times inevitably produce men who are tough, men who are resourceful, men who are strong enough to survive. And they they go on to reestablish order, and so the cycle begins again.”

Carlson claims that his focus is on declining levels of testosterone in men. But as Nikki McCann Ramírez told Aaron Ruper, that last line from the narrator is the real message.

Tucker is focusing on this because, for a long time, he and right-wing media as a whole have been priming the men of their audience to view themselves as enforcers of the culture wars. These viewers aren't going to rush out to the nearest testicle tanning salon and have their balls baked. They're going to have an impression that there's a crisis in the world around them and that they are the ones who need to restore order.

This isn't a new subject for Carlson. Back in 2018 he did a whole series titled "Men in America," which covered a lot of the ground now being pushed by right wingers like Hawley. 

What lurks in the shadows of much of this rhetoric is the fear that men are being "feminized" - because masculinity is strong and femininity is weak. Hence, it is men who are strong and will go on to reestablish "order" from the "chaos" created by women.

Carlson let that cat out of the bag last December while talking to Nigel Farage about Boris Johnson's flip-flopping and blamed it on the British Prime Minister's bout with COVID. Carlson said "But the virus itself, this is true, does tend to take away the life force in some people I notice. I mean it does feminize people." 

For now, let's ignore the ridiculous statement from Carlson about the effects of COVID to zero in on his claim that Johnson's flip-flops represent a "feminized" chaos. But the real gut puncher is that he equated the loss of "the life force" with being feminized. In other words, "the life force" is inherently masculine.

In case you doubt that this message is getting through to the MAGA base, the topic came up in during a discussion the New York Times had with eight conservative men.

This country has become more feminized. It’s not the way it was when I was growing up. We started off talking about how the country has a weak image. They don’t call women the weaker sex for no reason. Men are necessary to maintain a vibrant society. And we’ve been feminized.

I'll be the first one to agree that the statistics demonstrating that some men in this country are in crisis confirm that it is a serious problem. But all the data points to a completely different cause and set of solutions. 

In other words, patriarchy isn't just bad for women, it hurts men too. Just as women begin to free themselves from the kind of bondage patriarch imposes, men will have to do the same. Far be it from me to womansplain what it means to be a man, but I can't help thinking of Dustin Hoffman's line in the final scene of Tootsie: "I was a better man with you as a woman than I ever was with a woman as a man." That wasn't just a line in a movie, it is clear that playing a woman had a dramatic effect on Hoffman in real life. That is what empathy and having an open mind will do for all of us.

Men like Hawley, Cawthorn, Peterson, and Carlson want to reawaken patriarchy as a means of validating themselves and putting women back in their place. When Carlson calls on men to "man up" and restore order, he's  asking them to engage in an actual war on women - through force if necessary. You can refer to "The Handmaid's Tale" to see how that one turns out.