Fill in the blank : _______________ masculinity.
Even if you don’t agree with the accusation, your mind probably went directly to the word “toxic.”
That is because very powerful social forces have essentially wedded these two words together so closely, they have nearly become one in our collective social consciousness.
That was a genuinely evil move.
These two words could not be more opposite in their meaning. “Toxic” is always bad. There is no way to be toxic in a “good way.” At the same time, masculinity, in its organic sense, is always good. It is a male virtue. Machismo, selfishness and passivity are male energy turned negative. These are what become toxic. Masculinity never is.
Consider this.
A young woman in an office group is happily set up on a blind date by her female work-peers. Excited, she wants to know more about this young man prior to the date. The women all say, “Well, he’s very masculine.” No woman asks, “Is he getting help for that?” We all know she is happily intrigued and says, “Tell me more!” and will listen to everything they have to tell her.
Most women know masculinity is desirable when they are thinking about what they want in a man. They never consider having to separate “good” masculinity from “bad.” They know unsavory traits in men are a violation of their masculinity, not the fruit of it.
We should always condemn efforts to poison what it means to be male and female.
We are seeing a great divide between male and female in our national politics. One party famously dare not define what a man or woman is. The other is more clear, but has its own problems.
Both parties have tried hard to reach out to and appeal to men and women with very different results. One party has been far more successful than the other.
Becoming the party to support and defend men has clearly helped conservatives. Indeed, the Trump campaign especially targeted men by having both Trump and Vance appear on long-form podcasts with Joe Rogan, Theo Von and others with distinctly male audiences. Joel Kotkin, a center-right social and political demographer, recently explained how sex difference helped decide the decisive election results of November 5.
He holds that while the Harris campaign appealed to younger, single women who supported her by 61 percent and black women who voted for her by 91%, it was men who turned the election in Trump’s direction. Kotkin states,
Men clearly preferred the Trump model to that presented by Democratic men, who proudly boasted of being “less masculine” than their Republican counterparts, leading to comparisons with Bud Light’s disastrous flirtation with a transgender influencer.
Kotkin continued, “The low point, however, was the laughable attempt to manufacture he-men who ‘eat carburetors for breakfast’ and vote for Harris, in a TV ad later revealed to have been created independently of her official campaign by Hollywood actors and writers.”
The pro-Harris advertisement Kotkin refers to was embarrassingly horrific. It was fully staged with males acting (badly) like they were trying to be men, but merely demonstrating the creators have no idea what an actual man is.
Kotkin explains,
The election confirmed the sexual divide in US politics: macho boys are the GOP base while women, particularly single women, constitute the core progressive constituency. The existence of a gender gap is nothing new, certainly, but according to recent Gallup surveys it is now five times bigger than in 2000.
The sex-divide between conservatives and liberals is five times bigger now than it was in 2000. Kotkin adds,
Survey data has found that, from 1999 to 2013, about three in 10 women aged 18 to 29 consistently identified as liberal. That figure rose to 40 percent in 2023.
Yes, the democrats have a man problem. They don’t seem to realize that telling men, and the women who love them, that their fundamental nature as men is inherently toxic and that they should act like bad caricatures of men is a super-efficient way to lose voters.
But progressives don’t just have a serious man problem. They also have a very real woman problem.
Christine Rosen, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), recently explained, citing one of her AEI colleagues, “Contrary to much pre-election discussion, Harris’ margin among women was actually less than Biden’s in 2020, 7 points for Harris vs. 12 points for Biden.”
Her colleague, Ruy Teixeira, explains this was true even among young, single women who many assumed were Harris’ silver bullet: ““Women under 30 supported Biden by 32 points in 2020 but supported Harris by just 18 points in this election, a 14-point shift toward Trump.”
Rosen adds, “As for young women, evidently no amount of ‘brat summer’ posturing or Harris-themed TikTok dancing was enough to persuade them that Harris was the best option.”
Rosen explains, “She was condescending to women.”
As evidence, Rosen cites a New York Times post-election roundtable with young voters to understand why they voted as they did. Twenty-three-year-old Abigail explained why she switched her 2020 vote for Biden into a 2024 Trump vote. It was Democrat advertising that turned her:
The ad where there are two married couples and the two wives went in to vote secretly and they glanced at each other and then both voted for Kamala Harris — oh, my gosh. Is that what you think of married women, that we don’t have the confidence to marry men who are our equal partners? I cannot vote for a party that thinks that poorly of me.
Boom.
It doesn’t stop there though. Rosen also points out the following:
Or, as writer Andrew Sullivan, no fan of Trump, correctly, and bluntly, summarized, the overarching message of a radical pro-trans agenda contains within it much that is anti-woman:
Sullivan is not wrong. Condescend to and insult men and women and guess what? They go elsewhere. That is precisely what they did.
The progressive culture war on gender blew up in their face and helped keep them from taking the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives.
This is one of the lessons progressives must learn from their present predicament. Keep stoking the gender wars and you only end up burning your own house down.
Image credit: The Hill
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