In the press, the intra-MAGA spat pitting wealthy tech bros Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy against the larger MAGA masses has been framed primarily as an immigration fight. That's fair enough, as the tech guys want to keep high-skilled immigrants working in Silicon Valley, whereas the Steve Bannon contingent intends to kick out as many immigrants of color as they can. But one low-key aspect of the dispute is gender, as evidenced by Ramaswamy's colorful insults of the American people.
"American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long," Ramaswamy complained on Musk's X, denouncing a culture that celebrates "the jock over the valedictorian." He mentioned the "prom queen" in passing, but his examples all involved contrasting these two stereotypes of masculinity. "A culture that venerates Cory from 'Boy Meets World,' or Zach & Slater over Screech in 'Saved by the Bell,' or ‘Stefan’ over Steve Urkel in 'Family Matters,' will not produce the best engineers," he griped.
For someone who fancies himself a leader in the MAGA movement, the tweet was deliciously tone-deaf. Anxious hyper-masculinity has always been central to Donald Trump's political cult, but this past year, the trying-too-hard aspects got downright comical. Trump received a major endorsement from podcaster Joe Rogan, whose entire schtick is being the standard-issue meathead who didn't do the reading before running his mouth. Trump's sidekick, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., built his career on shunning scientific knowledge and posting shirtless workout videos. They're the two most prominent examples, but Trumpworld floats on an ocean of masculinity grifters, all hawking useless supplements and assuring followers they, too, can have pecs the size of basketballs.
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To be certain, Ramaswamy isn't completely wrong. The MAGA coalition also includes a hefty population of bitter nerds, the kinds of guys who lurk on "incel" forums and complain that women are too busy dating beefcakes to notice the larger paychecks of the skinny programmers. (That a woman might care about a man's personality is assumed impossible.) Many of these guys are also big consumers of the masculinity grifters, throwing huge amounts of money away in the hope of finding manhood in a capsule.
MAGA masculinity is such a hazy and contradictory concept that it mostly gets defined by what it's not.
The rift reveals the larger paradox beating at the heart of MAGA: They venerate masculinity, but cannot tell you what it is. Look closely at their manhood discourse and the contradictions are immediately apparent. They insist gender is "natural," fixed at birth, and beyond an individual's power to change. They also treat manhood as a fragile status, easily snatched away by the smallest of choices. According to Jesse Watters at Fox News, merely wishing another man "happy birthday" is enough to remove man status from a person. Manfluencer and accused sex trafficker Andrew Tate declares one emasculated for admiring a woman's beauty. As I wrote about last week, MAGA hype man Josiah Moody claims it's "gay" to have sex with your wife for pleasure. Fox News' list of foods that strip your masculinity away is long, ranging from ice cream cones to soup. MAGA tells trans women they are still "men" despite hormones, surgeries and living as women. Yet to other cis men, they insist "man" is a designation so precious that it can be lost at a moment's notice for the slightest of reasons.
The incoherence is embodied by Trump himself. In the rhetoric of MAGA, Trump is a manly man, and he's often portrayed in cartoons and AI-generated imagery as muscle-bound and virile.
In truth, Trump conceals his 78 years of age with heavy makeup and an elaborate combover. Baggy clothes do not hide his substantial girth. He is so hostile to physical activity that he refused to walk 700 yards with other G7 leaders in Italy in 2017. MAGA tried to use the assassin's bullet that grazed Trump's ear to build up this fantasy of a strapping action hero leader. The reality, though, is he had to be helped to his feet and kept complaining about his shoes, only doing the fist bump when he remembered the cameras were on him.
MAGA masculinity is such a hazy and contradictory concept that it mostly gets defined by what it's not: not female, not queer, not allowed to eat ice cream or say "happy birthday." This ad for a Christian nationalist content network called Canon Press is a darkly funny example. It's just a litany of images of everything that allegedly makes men "cultural cuckolds": seeing gay couples, seeing drag queens, being nice to other people, drinking Budweiser. The most they can cough up as positive attributes of manhood are working out and parenting children. The libs, the queers, and the chicks probably do both on the regular more than the straight MAGA men this ad is aimed at.
One of the most telling examples of the emptiness of MAGA manhood this year was, ironically, a story about a woman. Haliey Welch is an extremely normal 22-year-old from Tennessee who found unexpected fame this year as the "Hawk Tuah" girl after she drunkenly described how she likes to "spit on that thang" to one of those irritating man-on-the-street hosts. The joke is mildly funny to liberal America, where no one is surprised that women can have raunchy senses of humor. But more conservative men were apparently shocked like they were cavemen seeing electricity for the first time, because they sent that clip around like it was the most important moment in history captured on film.
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Welch strenuously avoided partisan politics in her efforts to capitalize on her 15 minutes of fame, but that didn't stop the MAGA movement from trying to claim her as an icon, pairing her with images of Trump, and claiming falsely that she epitomized "conservative values." Instead of the relentless list of behaviors and tastes forbidden to men, this seemed like an effort to offer something substantive to define MAGA manhood. Welch was being held out as the kind of a woman a MAGA man is permitted — even expected — to be attracted to.
But even though Welch is young, blonde and conventionally attractive, even this feeble effort to put something in the "yes" column for defining MAGA manhood fell apart. There is no way to square the "Hawk Tuah" meme with the reality of the MAGA movement, which is busy banning abortion and electing leaders, like Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., who decry premarital sex and erotic self-expression as "sexual anarchy." Welch only became famous because she was enjoying hardwon freedoms the GOP wants to deny women, a contradiction that cannot be squared with trying to make her a MAGA icon. Unsurprisingly, her brand collapsed pretty quickly and she seems set on the path to return to normal, pre-meme life.
No doubt conservative readers will be angry with me, insisting I also cannot tell them what a "man" is. After all, these are the same people who thought it was a great troll to ask liberals "What is a woman?" and elicit confused responses. Of course, when asked the same question, Republicans can't answer, either. The difficulty in answering this "simple" question isn't a bad thing, however. It shows that the real answer is that human beings don't fit neatly into little boxes. A man can be muscular or not, straight or queer, tall or short. A woman can be all those things, too. Hell, a man does not — regardless of what Ramaswamy might say — have to choose between being the jock or the valedictorian. He can be both. Women, too. This is what freedom looks like, but instead of welcoming it, the self-described freedom-defenders of MAGA run as hard as they can to their never-ending list of "thou shalt nots" to define manhood, from drinking Bud to eating ice cream.
barryvm on December 31st, 2024 at 12:09 UTC »
The answer is quite simple IMHO. They're reactionaries, people who reject equality and believe in a natural social and moral hierarchy based on identity. The "masculinity" bit is simply an expression of that, an excuse they tell themselves to justify the feeling that they are better than someone else (in this case women) and should be privileged above them. The same thing is true for the racism, or the classism, the religious fundamentalism, or whatever else they've got going on. None of those have to be rational, articulated beliefs even, just having the right set of emotional biases, a bit of selfishness and a need to project, compensate for or vent emotions about real or imaginary grievances is enough to get caught up in it.
The reason they have no idea what masculinity means, why they can't define it, is that this does not matter to them. All their ideological constructs are a facade, erected around the selfish desire for social status and power. When they say "masculinity" should lead to privileges, then that simply means they should be privileged. When they imagine "masculinity" is being threatened, then that's just them constructing a grievance to justify lashing out against whomever they want. The same is true for all the other ideological components in their belief system (including religion).
Their beliefs are hollow because they don't spring from any principles, just a desire to justify their own feelings. They can't define their beliefs or reason about them because they are immaterial; they are excuses for their behaviour, not the source of it. It's bad faith.
sebastian404 on December 31st, 2024 at 11:40 UTC »
At this years trip to the inlaws I was told I'm not a real man because I have 'a fancy STEM job' and that I hav not managed to get my wife knocked up.
It was also laced with a large dose of anti-biden talk and how great things are now 'Trump is President'
This was before I got my coat off..
I've given up arguing with them and are was only there for the food.
zsreport on December 31st, 2024 at 11:10 UTC »
A tidbit from the commentary: