Far-right conspiracy theorists, including Infowars’ Alex Jones, have long claimed that liberals, progressives and feminists are conspiring to emasculate men and turn them into low-testosterone “soy boys” — and they believe that soy products are specifically designed to make men more effeminate. President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth are arguing that the military needs to become more masculine and less “woke,” but according to Salon’s Amanda Marcotte, their obsession with “manliness” reflects feelings of deep insecurity on the far right.
On Wednesday, Hegseth announced that U.S. troops will be tested for their testosterone levels — an announcement that Marcotte describes as “just the latest example of a paradox that plagues MAGA men.”
“Efforts to prove their masculinity are so over-the-top that they inevitably read more as anxious than tough, revealing the deep well of insecurity fueling the movement,” Marcotte emphasizes in Salon. “Hegseth is an especially cringeworthy example, with an attitude toward the troops that is less of a leader and closer to a third-grade boy dressing up his GI Joes. He’s fixated entirely on superficial indicators of ‘manliness,’ which gets in the way of the concerns that any normal adult would have in the job, such as how to avoid causing and proceeding to losing them.”
According to Dr. Emile Redwood, a urologist with Physicians for Reproductive Health, Hegseth’s testosterone announcement is misguided.
Redwood told Marcotte, “There is no magic formula that can tell us what level of testosterone best prepares someone to serve in the United States military…. Testosterone levels have no place as a proxy for a myriad of physical and mental readiness tests, where capacity and readiness is directly measured.”
But according to Marcotte, it’s “unlikely” that Hegseth “understands or even cares about what the actual medical science says.”
“MAGA loves nothing more than a Potemkin village, and Trump has gotten as far as he has because he’s very good at using TV tricks to create the illusion of strength and competence, especially for those who aren’t looking very closely,” the Salon journalist writes. “The belief that reality doesn’t matter if the facade is showy enough reaches into every corner of modern right-wing culture, especially when it comes to gender. The pervasive plague of MAGA men hope to deflect attention from their myriad flaws with ostentatious but empty pantomimes of alleged manliness. From barbed wire tattoos to oversized pickup trucks to yelling ‘Michelle Obama is a man’ at a UFC fight, there are millions of men like Pete Hegseth, hoping their theatrics will hide the anxious little boy inside them.”