More Retro Toxic Masculinity (J. D. Vance Edition)
American society “wants to turn everybody, whether male or female, into androgynous idiots who think the same, talk the same and act the same.”
(J. D. Vance, 20 February 2025)
Back in January 2025, I wrote a piece (here) on “Retro Toxic Masculinity.” I wrote it in response to some bass-ackward nonsense from Mark Zuckerberg. Today, a response to some nonsense spouted by J. D. Vance.
Six days ago (20 Feb. 2025), J. D. Vance appeared at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) and offered, among other things, his take on masculinity. His words at CPAC were not new. He has been banging this particular drum for a while. He has made similar comments elsewhere.
For one, he faithfully trumpets Trump’s Executive Order in which he declares that God made male and female and that’s it. ( They’re wrong. I’ve addressed this issue here.) The political and religious right have been saying as much for a long time. Project 2025 chimes in with the same idea. Trump followed the Project 2025 playbook with his Executive Order. At CPAC, Vance argues that God made only two sexes, and that they (he and the Trump administration) will help all young men and women thrive under that paradigm. As I said in the earlier piece, such an argument flies in the face of Nature.
Vance also argues that boys and men are being insulted and devalued for being “men.” When Vance continues, he provides examples of what he sees as manly behavior: drinking beer, telling jokes, and being competitive.
1) If there is a cultural war on drinking beer, no one has informed me. The beer industry has never done so well. Large corporations are posting record profits. Independent breweries are flourishing. (Several local micro breweries have opened up near me.) Home brewing has taken on a new life (as many things did during COVID). True, the medical establishment has recently offered new guidance on alcohol consumption. Medical advice now suggests that consuming alcohol — at any level — is unsafe. But to be clear, that statement by the medical community has nothing to do with “men” or “gender” or any cultural identity. It applies to all individuals. And, even in the wake of such guidance, beer consumption continues apace with all adults.
The above says nothing about Vance’s insistence that beer drinking is a masculine pursuit. First, brewing has a very long tradition with women. According to the National Women’s History Museum, women brewed beer as much as 4000 years ago. Women brewed beer in Europe and brought the tradition to the colonies. The Exploress podcast provides a much longer and more detailed history of women and beer. The Exploress suggests that beer was something both genders enjoyed equally, that is until its production and consumption moved out of the home and into a business establishment. At that point, women were banned from bars and men drank with their mates. Drinking beer with other men at the bar became a masculine-identified space and a masculine-identified activity. The perception that beer is masculine persists, but that perception erases a very long history.
One more tidbit for Vance and manosphere: as Technology Inquirer reports, drinking beer is actually (in Vance’s own words) feminizing. Beer, and especially hoppy beers, contains a lot of estrogen, in particular phytoestrogen. The consumption of beer causes a shift in hormone balances and causes the growth of fatty tissue. In particular, beer drinking produces the accumulation of fatty tissue in the breast area, a process called “gynecomastia.” In other words, “man boobs.” A little paradox for Vance and friends who want to claim beer drinking as a masculine activity.
2) As in the case of beer, we have a cultural notion that sexist and off-color humor is part of the masculine domain. Boys and men, in locker rooms and workplaces, just love to tell dirty jokes. Vance suggests that taking that away from boys and men is feminizing them. We all remember presidential candidate Trump’s Access Hollywood tape, which he dismissed as “locker room talk.” Way back in 1983, the science fiction writer (and womanizer) Isaac Asimov wrote a piece in The New York Times about men and raunchy humor. He argues that raunchy humor takes place in masculine spaces because the topics are forbidden in polite company. Although more common now, for a very long time, Asimov argues that it was inappropriate to talk about sex or bodily functions, and so men took glee in being able to let loose and tell dirty jokes when not in mixed company. Even so, that logic would seem to apply to women, as well. Indeed, Asimov writes:
“But don’t women suffer from the same social hypocrisy as men do? Aren’t women repressed even more than men, since women are supposed to be ‘ladylike’ and ‘pure?’ Of course! And it is my experience that women laugh as hard at dirty jokes as men do and show even greater tolerance for those that are not really very funny, but are very dirty.”
In other words, it seems that jokes, humor, and raunchy humor are not the sole province of men, at all. So, just how is talking about, and redefining appropriate humor, a de-masculinization of boys and men? Because, the logic suggests, if boys and men can no longer put down, objectify, and sexualize women, how will they feel like men? And that’s a pretty fragile sense of masculinity.
3) Finally, competition as a masculine trait. It does seem to be true that, culturally speaking, in the US/West, we align masculinity with competition, and we align femininity with cooperation. If we think about the kinds of games that girls and boys are encouraged to play, “girl games” often incorporate cooperation (tea parties) and “boy games” often incorporate competition (dodge ball). However, as early as 1792, philosopher and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft pointed out how these distinctions were socially produced and enforced — to the detriment of everyone. Much later, developmental psychologists (Piaget, Lever) studied girls at play and boys at play, and they arrived at conclusions about competition: boy’s games prepared them to be competitive and to be successful in the (capitalist) world. Girls’ games left them dependent and unethical. As philosopher and feminist Carol Gilligan points out, that conclusion ONLY makes sense if you take masculinity as the norm.
So, we associate competition with masculinity, and we encourage boys and men to be competitive. What’s the problem in that? We see several problems, in fact.
For one, relegating boys to one and girls to the other produces partial subjects. Each is leaving out part of what it means to be human. Each is leaving out something that we value as humans. For every person, competition can be good in some situations. For every person, being cooperative can be good in some situations. As Wollstonecraft writes: if it is a human virtue for one sex, it is also a virtue for the other: “virtue has no sex.” Despite Vance’s claim that our feminized culture wants everyone to be “androgynous idiots,” he’s plain wrong. Every person will take on and demonstrate the whole range of human characteristics in different ways. If anything Vance’s notion of gender is limiting human personalities and behaviors.
For another, the separation valorizes one over the other. We know that when we create a binary, one of the two terms will be more valued than the others. And it is obvious from Vance and his pals that they value masculine qualities over feminine qualities. They rail against any signs of femininity in public life: language, culture, politics. That is a loss for everyone.
Finally, the division of characteristics or qualities cuts girls/women off from parts of society. For retro masculinists like Vance, that is exactly the point. They would prefer a time when women were confined to the domestic sphere and men had the freedom of movement (and speech) in the public realm. They want their masculine spaces back! (See more in the first essay I wrote on Retro Toxic Masculinity for a much more in-depth look at this.)
Vance’s comments are not isolated speech. In fact, they are part and parcel of a concerted effort by the political right to, in their view, de-feminize US society (which includes education, culture, sports, work, religion, and politics). They want all elements of femininity eliminated from public spaces. They want to re-establish gender norms from before the 2nd wave of feminism, before the civil Rights Era.
Resist.
Ritch Calvin is an Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at SUNY Stony Brook. He is the author of Queering SF: Readings (Aqueduct), Feminist Epistemology and Feminist Science Fiction (Palgrave McMillan) and edited a collection of essays on Gilmore Girls (McFarland). His most recent book is Queering SF Comics: Readings (2024, Aqueduct Press).
