On Saturday Andrew and Tristan Tate, 2 alleged rapists, were arrested in Florida in connection with an extradition request from Great Britain. They are heroes in the manosphere and a symbol of ultra-masculinity for right wing men around the world:

I don’t care what people wear. If a man wants to wear a women’s blouse or some shantung silk capris, I think it’s great. People should have fun with their appearance and be free to express themselves to the world. But it is weird for the 2 of them to dress this way as manosphere heroes.

The GOP has gone all in for hyper-masculinity. President Grievance is held up as a strong male leader, and his weird hair and makeup are in service of the virility he is desperate to project. (The sleeping in public, less so.) The Secretary of Health and Human Services frolics in an E. coli-infested stream. The Secretary of Transportation wants people to work out at the airport. And last week the Secretary of Defense addressed an important issue with the military:

The Defense Department will test the testosterone levels of service members 30 and older and offer voluntary testosterone replacement therapy to those with low testosterone levels, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced.

“We must constantly look for new ways to optimize your performance, your resilience and your long-term health,” Hegseth said of the country’s military in a video on X that was captioned “The High-T Department of War.”

Hegseth’s announcement Wednesday raised immediate questions about its impact on female troops and how this new policy would be folded into the Pentagon’s bigger focus on more rigorous fitness standards that critics have said are meant to eliminate women from combat roles.

The part of it which will be used against women in the military is relevant.

The roots of this weirdness, as is the case with most of the weirdness that comes from the GOP, are in right wing Christianity.

I’ll start with Hawley. Within conservative evangelical spaces, first of all, there is the idea that masculinity is a God-given thing. When Hawley is talking about an attack on men and saying that the left is attacking manhood and that they hate this country and don’t believe in gender … all of that sounds very familiar. In white evangelicalism, this has been a refrain for decades now. In evangelical spaces, Christian manhood has long been equated, particularly in conservative circles, with a kind of rugged, militant quality.

Since the 1960s, conservative evangelicals have elevated a more militant ideal of masculinity, one that is both provider and protector. And they have argued that God has created man to fulfill these roles: He’s filled men with testosterone to give them strength, and that testosterone makes them aggressive and they need to channel that aggression for good. That is their God-given duty as men. And so when I heard Hawley talk about courage and independence and assertiveness, that is very similar to how masculinity is discussed in evangelical spaces. Although often rather than assertiveness, they substitute aggressiveness.

This is a kind of reactionary masculinity that emerges in the 1960s and 1970s in conservative evangelical spaces and more broadly in American conservatism. And the context here is important. Coming out of the postwar era, there was the baby boom, and traditional family values were all the rage, at least among the white middle class. Then you have this disruptive moment in the 1960s. You have the civil rights movement, which is particularly disruptive in the American South to the status quo. And you have the early feminist wave and second-wave feminism in the 1960s — full-swing in the 1970s — and very importantly, the Vietnam War and the anti-war movement.

All of these things are seen to destabilize the social order, and conservatives are particularly concerned. And in all three of these cases, it’s the assertion of white, patriarchal authority or power that can restore order. They believed feminism was threatening to emasculate American men, which was leaving the nation weak and unable to defend itself against communism. The anti-war movement — all those hippies, men with long hair, “make love, not war” — was leaving the nation imperiled. The civil rights movement, as well, was seen as a threat. In the American South, particularly to white families, the integration of schools was seen as a threat to white children.

Against that backdrop, this kind of restoration of a rugged American manhood becomes not just popular, but politicized in a very partisan way.

But it’s not just politicized—it’s weaponized. It’s a version of masculinity that seeks to hurt anyone who is not like that. Pete Hegeseth isn’t just trying to get women out of the military—he’s got a history of alleged violence against women. The president is an adjudicated rapist. The Tates are alleged rapists. So is Graham Platner, because the manosphere lives in space at the ends of the horseshoe. This is not a masculinity that builds; instead its entire purpose to oppose, to destroy, and to intimidate. And that violence and intimidation is all too often directed against women.

It’s also a fringe view as the American public does not see this behavior as positive:

The Democrats have a good contrast to this harmful ideology and that’s James Talarico. He’s been unafraid to openly speak about masculinity and his description is much closer to what Americans tell Pew they value.

And of course the GOP has responded to him. His opponent Ken Paxton has called him “low-T”. Stephen Miller, the guy who wears spray-on hair, called him “transgender”. And the right wing was desperate to discount the fact that Talarico has a girlfriend. They got so desperate they even called him a vegan.

But he had a great response to that that can work for other male Democratic candidates moving forward:

I don’t know a lot more about Talarico than what I see here and there, but Democrats have to be able to talk about a masculinity that is creative and positive, and not aggressive and destructive, and he provides a starting point.

I’ll leave you with this: