Here’s the most fascinating thing I’ve read in a minute: Studies show that voting for Donald Trump makes men feel more masculine.
To be clear, I don’t mean that Trump motivates men to be more masculine. That’s not the effect. He isn’t inspiring men to work out, or be more assertive, or confident, or stoic, or adventurous, or whatever they perceive masculinity to be. I mean that the mere act, alone, of voting for Trump makes men feel that they, themselves, are more masculine. As though the man himself, when situated in the White House, acts as a magic beacon that radiates outward and increases the masculinity of his supporters without them needing to take further action.
Given this, you might not be any further surprised to learn that men who vote for Trump’s opponents tend to self-report a drift away from masculinity.
To any actual Trump supporter reading this: First of all, hi, welcome to my newsletter, you’ll hate it here. But also, I know what you’re thinking—This makes absolute intuitive sense. Trump supporters are Based Alphas, and non-supporters are Beta Cucks. Supporters are drenched and nurtured in the high-T red meat (well done with ketchup) tiger blood winning energy of the God King, while his opponents languish and waste away on a diet of soy and estrogen.
This MAGA slop explanation misinterprets the causation claim, here. Men’s self-perception of their masculinity is not driving their choice of presidential candidate; their choice of presidential candidate is driving their self-perception of their masculinity.
The article I linked offers a pretty good theory about why men who don’t support Trump might distance themselves from the word: Though they might think of themselves as good men who identified with masculinity previously, the meaning of “masculinity” in the context of the Donald Trump administration may not be an image that they associate themselves with.
But why, on the flip side, would men see the act of voting for a particular individual as something that enhances their masculinity more than any actual effort they put toward being masculine in either action or appearance? My theory is that it’s much the same reason that an insecure man might purchase a very large vehicle. I’m going to call my theory “proxy masculinity” because “compensating-for-something-ism” is unbearably cumbersome.
The right will powerfully deny the idea of gender being a performative thing separate from biological sex in order to distance themselves from any implication that transgenderism might be a valid concept, but they will still paradoxically embrace the idea that men can be more or less masculine, or God forbid, feminine.
I’ll try not to get too scholarly, here, but there are types of gender performance that don’t rise to the level of gender identity. People who identify in their lives as a gender different to the sex they were assigned are transgender, but people can perform a gender that is either different or the same as the one that they either identify with or which lines up with their chromosomal sex. This is called drag. In short, yes, there are cisgender female drag queens.
The point I’m making is that Trump and his administration are basically drag performers.
They keep a stranglehold grip on a certain kind of male voter that is driven by fear: These people being in charge is what gives you your masculinity, and if they lose power, you lose your masculinity.
And remember: These men have come to believe somehow that they can’t get their masculinity from anywhere else. Voting for Donald Trump is the literal source of masculinity, like taking a necessary medication. If Trump loses the presidency then your testosterone is shut off like turning a spigot. You can’t get it back just by lifting or smoking cigars or growing out your beard or taking your shirt off to eat an entire bull liver.
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Decades of toxic charlatans trying to sell masculinity to men has led to a situation where men don’t even know how to feel like a man anymore. They don’t know how to find their own masculinity, or even understand that it is individual to everyone. They think it’s a drug they need to absorb through their skin, and like any drug they can only get it through a dealer, whether that be Andrew Tate, Joe Rogan, or the Liver King.
They make proxies of these influencers. Thus it becomes an excuse not to bother looking for their own identity. To the average Andrew Tate fan, they become more masculine by virtue of Andrew Tate existing. In a way, they are Andrew Tate.
You would think that men who feel emasculated and lonely would build up some form of bitterness or resentment of men like Tate who seem to effortlessly sleep with many beautiful women, but that’s just not how many men’s minds work. They find a man who is powerful in the way that they wish they were powerful, and make him their proxy. They both worship and become that man. This is a basis behind personality cults that surround nakedly despicable people like Andrew Tate, Elon Musk, and Donald Trump.
While in power, this gives Trump immense license to do what he wants, because the men who support him don’t really care about anything other than this. I think it’s even more important to them than the racism (or intertwined with it—ICE is also a masculinity proxy). Many of them are virtually one issue voters and it’s less MAGA than it is MMMA—Make Me Masculine Again. Trump can loot the treasury, run a pipeline from the tax collectors to his personal bank account, and enact insanely irresponsible policies that make the price of fuel and groceries skyrocket, as long as he continues promising manliness, or better, convincing men that these very policies are making them more masculine. Here’s some Fox News toadies running a bit indistinguishable from an Onion skit about how tariffs boost your testosterone and it’s a good thing if you lose your job because working at a computer makes you effeminate:
The fact that Trump has spent a great deal of his time as president, as well as a great deal of taxpayer money, throwing the Justice Department after people he carries personal grudges against, doesn’t bother the men who follow him. It shouldn’t mean anything to the average man that Trump is upset about Obama making fun of him at a White House dinner, or John Bolton speaking freely about him in a book, or James Comey insulting him on Instagram. But it does mean something to them, because, as Trump is their proxy, his personal grudges are their personal grudges.
For anyone thinking objectively, pouring the nation’s wealth into efforts to have these individuals thrown in prison is gross misconduct—it is not providing a service to the American people. But a lot of men don’t see it this way. For example, Trump’s latest mission is to imprison E. Jean Carroll, the woman who Trump sexually assaulted in the mid 90s, as decided beyond reasonable doubt by a jury in 2022. For a lot of men who were intimidated by the #MeToo movement, this is very much a worthwhile fight. They cannot get revenge on women directly, but via Trump as their proxy, they can feel at least somewhat avenged. Take a look at Twitter if you have the stomach for it—they are absolutely thrilled that Trump is using their money for this. It is inaccurate, to them, to say that he is not providing a service to the American people by doing this. Their sense of relief, their restored masculinity, fighting back against women’s encroaching empowerment, is doing them a tremendous service.
Trump and his cronies are putting most of their chips on this effect. The GOP campaign in the Texas midterm race between Democratic James Talarico and Republican Ken Paxton has had vanishingly little to do with policy and mostly concerns the respective masculinity of the candidates. Republicans from the president, to Stephen Miller, to Paxton, to Fox News have run hard on the campaign message that Talarico has low testosterone, that he’s short, that he’s considerably more effeminate than his opponent, and joked that he is transitioning to female. Bizarrely, they are pushing the lie that he is a vegan while simultaneously making fun of the way he eats barbecue.
Their gambit is that they have managed to instill a deep seated belief that Trump and anyone who holds the torch of Trump, when installed in a position of power, acts as a kind of engine that generates masculinity and makes America itself more masculine, as well as any man who submits to them and supports them. The fear they are attempting to spread is that if Texas elects a Democrat, the state will lose some of Trump’s radiance of masculinity and the men of Texas won’t be able to be men.
Keeping this racket going, however, requires a lot of work. They need to constantly show that they are enhancing the masculinity of everything to a clear and measurable extent. It’s an intensive directive of all departments that largely replaces the job of actually governing. Two years into this presidential term and the most notable works project, by far, remains the effort to make the White House look like the dilapidated home of your Midwestern uncle who throws his beer cans out the window and lets them land beside the rusted shells of two old Buicks.
Those who are upset about the desecration of the People’s House can’t decide which defilement is worse: The construction of a UFC fighting arena on the south lawn, or the demolition of the East Wing. In the latter case, besides the construction in its place of an immense monument to Donald Trump, few talk about the equally important reason that this historic building, in particular, needed to be removed: It was traditionally the office of the president’s wife.
The Secretary of Health and Human Services is absolutely derelict in his duty to an extent that should be criminal. While measles continues to rip through the American population, Robert Kennedy makes absurd claims designed specifically to appeal to the manosphere, such as that autism is caused by circumcision, and otherwise spends all his time making too-insane-to-parody shirtless exercise videos with Kid Rock, complete with explosions, eagles and sharks.
The Director of the FBI cultivates his masculine image by chugging beer at sporting events instead of investigating crimes. The Secretary of Defense, now renamed the Secretary of Manly War, gives long speeches about making the military explicitly more masculine. Even the whole DOGE thing, it has been convincingly argued, was about de-feminizing the workforce. The entire government project since Trump reclaimed the office has been nothing but one endless wrecking ball to anything under federal control that might be seen as effeminate, gay, or less than absolute rock-fucking manly, like the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, which Trump tried to deal with by, first, attempting to rename it after himself, and then just outright shuttering it, a decision which has mercifully been overturned by a judge in possession of a spine.
Someone in this administration with more than a potato battery in their head, if such a person exists, must realize that this is not a viable long-term strategy. Every drag performer needs to take the wig and the makeup off sooner or later. At some point this all begins to smell like desperation, and even the men who think that voting for Trump literally raised their T-levels will start needing more than this government is capable of providing. The problem is that I don’t know whether what happens next will be good or bad.
This article is closely related to a book that I'm writing about toxic masculinity, online culture, and how it all led to Trump. The working title is How Geeks Ate the World and if you like this newsletter then you'll probably like my book. If you're unsure, the good news is I’m going to be dropping parts of the draft into this very newsletter as the project comes along—but only for paid subscribers. So if you want to read along in real time, please consider subscribing. Otherwise I’ll be keeping you in the loop. Check it out here!
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Some News on My Book, and a Requiem For a Career
Next week I’m going to be submitting a 20-page book proposal to a real, living, big-deal literary agent, but it feels like being tagged out as I’m sliding into home base.
All depends on how you define “masculinity.” I think most of those who will quickly define themselves as “alphas” can generally be defined as unoriginal brutes who, to whatever extent they are capable of persuasion, do so by aggression or the threat of aggressive action. They tend to be sad and lonely, finding more tangible symbols of power like large trucks, loud motorcycles, beards, Joe Rogan, and watching men pound on each other in a mostly asexual way within an octagon. And by so making the decision to like the exact same things they are totally strong self-made creatures. I don’t think this is masculinity. It’s simply immaturity, men who didn’t handle adolescence well and still find themselves within its grip. The pathetic thing is that their aggression comes up regularly against the reality that they, like all of us, have no real chance to reshape the world according to our own needs. Wealth, beautiful women, the respect of all: yeah, none of that is heading their way.
Meanwhile, those of us who passed through adolescence and found our way to adulthood are able to converse with women without trying to get her to bed, and can converse with men to get them to work together for some slight improvement to our community’s well being. This is what masculinity means to me. Being a fully grownup human who happens to possess a dick.
Brilliant piece, even though the images nearly made me lose lunch!