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PORTSIDE CULTURE

MAN OVERBOARD  
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Rebecca Onion
May 18, 2023
Slate
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_ "Josh Hawley’s long-threatened tome about American masculinity is
here," writes this reviewer. "Savor it with me." _

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_Manhood
The Masculine Virtues America Needs_
Josh Hawley
ISBN-13: 9781684513574

Josh Hawley calls influencer Andrew Tate
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onto the carpet in his new book, _Manhood: The Masculine Virtues
America Needs_ [[link removed]],
the latest salvo in the Missouri senator’s campaign to make himself
relevant to anyone—_anyone_ at all. “Tate’s idea of success
apparently involved sleeping with as many women as possible, berating
them, abusing them, and celebrating it all as manly,” Hawley scolds.
“There is no real strength, no discipline or self-command, there. No
manhood.”

But to judge by this strange and ineffective book, Tate is,
apparently, the only actually bad man in the world. Everyone
else—every miserable man in America, of which there are
plenty—just needs to read a book like this, full of dense Bible
stories, sentimental tales about Hawley’s Midwestern childhood, and
potted right-wing histories of the French Revolution, and he’ll be
fine_. _

 
_Manhood _builds on Hawley’s previous tries to become a figure of
national relevance: a 2021 keynote
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on boyhood that the senator gave to the National Conservatism
Conference; his boring Christian lifestyle podcast _This is Living_
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which he co-hosted with his wife, Erin; and his last book, an argument
against Big Tech. It also draws on his longtime interest in Teddy
Roosevelt, the ultimate Man’s Man in politics, who _might _have done
something other than raise a supportive fist
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and then jog away comically
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the events of Jan. 6 had unfolded when he was alive.

And like almost everything Hawley does, the book is an epic disaster.
Why did a man who is probably our leading national pipsqueak decide
that promoting manliness was his ticket to political power? Maybe he
saw one of Jordan Peterson’s crying videos
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do it, why not me?” _Manhood_ is full of Peterson-esque “clean
your room” prescriptions: ”You can be a provider and a protector,
and you can start by producing something. Get a job. Keep it. Then pay
your bills. Then save some money. These small steps go long distances
toward making you the kind of man who can be a husband,” goes one
such passage. Later on: “Are you going out every night? Stop. Are
you sleeping in every morning? Get up.” And so on.

The part of _Manhood_ where Hawley dresses down Andrew Tate, calling
him not a man but “a child pretending to be a man he thinks someone
will like or respect,” turns out to be an outlier. The rest of
_Manhood_ imagines that men could change themselves, and the world,
just by _deciding_ to stop being “dependent,” get married, have
kids, and “build something.” The pre-existing systems, culture,
and structures that bind modern men and inform their choices are
framed merely as excuses for not doing what’s right.
 
Sometimes, people on the left—liberals, or their further-left
discontents—will say some version of the following: _It’s really
weird that we have entire podcasts, college courses, historical
subfields, and journalistic beats making good-faith efforts at
analyzing the development of conservative thought, while they never,
ever seem to return the favor_. Reading _Manhood_ has taught me that
we are almost certainly better off without that. Hawley traces all of
“liberalism” to the philosopher Epicurus, who, he says, counseled
people to leave religious faith behind, and to “arrange one’s
life, and society, in such a way as to allow maximum choice for
pursuing pleasure and personal satisfaction.”

Having introduced this idea, Hawley uses the term “Epicurean
liberals” throughout the book to describe what he presents as a
dominant monoculture: A world of non-conservatives, non-Godly people,
who consume treats and watch porn and play video games and don’t
like to work, and either _are _trans or support the right to trans
self-determination. (If you thought Hawley wouldn’t mention the
viral contretemps
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he got into with a Berkeley law professor over what “woman” means,
in a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing last year, think again. It’s
in the introduction! I think that may have been the best day of Josh
Hawley’s life.)

You will not be surprised to hear that Josh Hawley wants to claim true
“manhood”—a state embodied, for him, by the Biblical archetypes
of husband, father, warrior, builder, priest, and king, each of which
get a chapter in the second part of this book—as the province only
of the right wing. But the hoary chestnuts of advice in these sections
would be nothing without the straw man of “Epicurean liberalism”
to fight against. If men are going wrong, Hawley argues, it’s
because they’re falling into a culture trap set by Epicurean
liberals, just like Andrew Tate did. Hawley presents these same
“liberals” as undisturbed by, or even welcoming, the mental health
issues, persistent anomie, and rising suicide rates that plague
American men in 2023. Liberals who also have worries about the effects
of smartphones on their kids, or who get up early to lift weights,
don’t exist—only self-satisfied elites informed by, _hmm_, ancient
Greek philosophy.
 
This culture-warrior perspective on manhood is so bizarre to read,
knowing Hawley’s political indebtedness to the consumerist,
gimme-gimme, consequences-be-damned MAGA vibe that currently dominates
the Republican Party. In the chapter on being a “king,” Hawley
briefly acknowledges the existence of men who “desperately want
authority for all the wrong reasons.” Then, he basically describes
Donald Trump, a person whose name does not appear in this book:
“They preen, they abuse, they dominate. They see others as means to
their own ends.” This kind of manhood, marked by a wrongful use of
dominion, is actually—here comes the magic trick—a type of
masculinity that’s produced by Epicurean liberalism. It creates
people who live according to their own “moral truth,” but
”sooner or later, if you are not a megalomaniac, you grow up and
realize you are part of a world with other people in it that you have
no right to control.” Do you? Or do you bow down to, and serve such
a man, because it’s to your political advantage?

There was one part of this book that I liked. In the chapter about
being a husband, Hawley describes taking his boys to get donuts on a
Saturday morning, and seeing his older child walking with a limp. For
a while, he and his wife thought his son Elijah might have a rare
disease that would affect his joints and hinder his mobility for the
rest of his life. The way he wrote about this—describing exactly
what was happening in the moments before he saw the limp, laying out
all of the fears they had about his future—resonated with me, a
fellow parent and a noted sucker.
Josh Hawley: I’m glad it turned out not to be serious. I’m glad
Elijah is back to soccer. I also wish schoolkids got more recess. And
we like to explore creeks, too. Maybe your next book can be about
that.

REBECCA ONION is a Slate senior editor and the author of _Innocent
Experiments [[link removed]]_.

 

* republicans
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* masculinity
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* Senator Josh Hawley
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