he man tho

“From boast­ing about the size of his pe­nis on na­tion­al tele­vi­sion to re­leas­ing records of his high testos­terone lev­els, Pres­i­dent Trump’s rhetoric and be­hav­ior ex­ude machis­mo. His be­hav­ior also seems to have struck a chord with some male vot­ers. See, for ex­am­ple, the ‘Don­ald Trump: Fi­nal­ly Some­one With Balls’ T‑shirts com­mon at Trump ral­lies. But our re­search sug­gests that Trump is not nec­es­sar­i­ly at­tract­ing male sup­port­ers who are as con­fi­dent­ly mas­cu­line as the pres­i­dent presents him­self to be. In­stead, Trump ap­pears to ap­peal more to men who are se­cret­ly in­se­cure about their man­hood. We call this the ‘frag­ile mas­culin­i­ty hypothesis.’”
—Eric Knowles, Sarah DiMuc­cio, The Wash­ing­ton Post
 

It’s easy to re­flex­ive­ly go well, yeah to this. That’s not news.

I get that. 

But let’s look like one or two lev­els deep­er: What are com­mon traits you’ve seen in Trump­ist dudes you’ve run into online?

·  Car as pro­file pic
·  Fishing/hunting pre­sent­ed as a con­spic­u­ous­ly out­sized facet of their identity
·  The peren­ni­al ‘School of Hard Knocks’ ap­peals to rugged com­mon sense
·  When all else fails (as it in­vari­ably does) the laugh­able ‘you would­n’t say that to my face key­board tough guy’ (of­ten to some­one hun­dreds of miles away)

So you add all this up and the pic­ture it paints is of dudes that are grasp­ing des­per­ate­ly for ex­ter­nal iden­ti­fiers of mas­culin­i­ty as they tread wa­ter in a world that doesn’t re­al­ly need that shit anymore. 

As we be­come more evolved, more in­ter­con­nect­ed, and hell I’ll just say it: Smarter, we no longer place much val­ue in the out­mod­ed tropes of tra­di­tion­al 20th cen­tu­ry Amer­i­can masculinity. 

Why would we?

So nat­u­ral­ly these guys can’t nav­i­gate a world where drap­ing your­self in all that tired drag doesn’t get you very far (nor should it) and rather than evolve and join the rest of us in the 21st cen­tu­ry they dou­ble down on tox­ic 8th grad­er log­ic and re­treat fur­ther into car­toons of Uber Mas­culin­ty and sur­vival fan­tasies and good guy with gun day­dreams and Bass Pro Shop gift cards and find their bea­con in lead­ers that like­wise can’t make a case for them­selves be­yond chest-thumping. 

What are the far-right Proud Boys if not the He Man Woman Haters Club with hashtags?

It’s a front, and not a ter­ri­bly good one.

 
 

—ja­son malmberg

Flom­mist Ja­son Malm­berg is a sim­ple man who be­lieves in brown liquor and small dogs. He also makes art some­times. Copy­right © 2019 Ja­son Malmberg.

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