Josh Hawley is so very, very alpha male!

At a recent conservative conference, Sen. Josh Hawley declared that liberals have evil plans for those of us with a Y-chromosome: ” the deconstruction of America begins with and depends on the deconstruction of American men … The Left want to define traditional masculinity as toxic. They want to define the traditional masculine virtues—things like courage, and independence, and assertiveness—as a danger to society.”

Does Hawley provide any examples? Of course not. Nor do I recall anyone saying that courage, independence and assertiveness are bad things. I assume this is the usual religious conservative bilge defining aggression and male dominance as assertiveness and courage. Of course he also works in anti-vax material — vaccine mandates are an attack on American men! And these attacks are making men retreat into videogames.

Lord, even though I don’t game, I find “men play too many videogames!” an incredibly stupid critique. It’s not just a male activity or a young person’s activity — lots of people, including people with professional careers, play games. It’s just a convenient shorthand for laziness, like “watching too much TV” when I was a kid (the Literary Dissection Tray has more).

Plus, of course the usual bogeymen such as critical race theory, feminism and quoting college professors and obscure 20th century liberals as PROOF of Joe Biden’s agenda! Nevertheless right-wing pundit Josh Hammer hails his fellow Josh’s speech as very alpha. As LGM says at the link, if you have to tell people something or someone is alpha, it ain’t alpha.

Meanwhile, accused sexual assailant Madison Cawthorn complains that “the left” wants to make America “sexless, genderless and Godless.” Sexless? Oh, right, I keep forgetting that while we’re libertines whose sexual revolution made predators like Harvey Weinstein possible (because nobody ever raped or harassed people before Free Love!), we’re also anti-sex prudes — after all, we criticized Cawthorn about sexual harassment, didn’t we?

Like so many right-wingers, Hawley is also worried we’re not breeding enough. Right-wingers are obsessed with that shit, like Tom Cotton declaring non-parents are not qualified to be teachers. My default assumption is that the real issue is women controlling their fertility instead of staying home and becoming mothers. Because it always is.