Masculinity is increasingly being used as a political ideological test. It is being used in some political circles to define who appears strong and fit to lead, and who can be dismissed as weak or culturally suspect.
That dynamic is visible in the Texas U.S. Senate race. President Donald Trump, Republican nominee Ken Paxton and conservative commentators have falsely labeled Democratic nominee James Talarico a vegan. Talarico says he has never been vegan or vegetarian.
He says Republicans are calling him a non-meat-eater because they don’t want to talk about their positions on the issues that matter to Texans.
Conservative figures have also misgendered Talarico, including falsely describing him as transgender. Critics say the attacks substitute homophobic and transphobic insinuations for policy debate.
The rhetoric reaches beyond campaign mockery. Far-right activists are advocates for the repealing the 19th Amendment or replacing individual ballots with household voting controlled by a male head.
Repealing women’s voting rights would require another constitutional amendment which would be difficult to impossible to achieve. However, critics say if the SAVE America Act is passed by Congress, which President Trump is demanding, it could make registration and voting substantially more complicated for millions of women whose current names do not match the names on their birth certificates documents.
When large blocks of women vote, they tend to vote for the Democratic candidate. In the 2024 presidential election, a Pew Research Center validated-voter study found that women supported Kamala Harris by about seven percentage points, while men supported Donald Trump by 12 points. A majority of women has supported the Democratic presidential nominee in every election since 1996.
For Republicans, masculinism can unite factions divided over economics, trade and foreign policy, while appealing to men who believe institutions dismiss their problems. Trump’s 2024 gains among young men demonstrate its electoral value.
The “bro-podcast” world has turned masculinity into a political language by combining entertainment, self-improvement and male resentment. Programs built around combat sports, guns, physical fitness, money, dating and irreverent humor often tell young men that traditional institutions do not respect them — and that feminism, political correctness and an allegedly feminized culture are responsible for their declining status.
Joe Rogan generally presents this conversation as open-ended skepticism rather than a fixed ideology, while Andrew Tate promotes a much more explicitly misogynistic vision of male dominance. But across the broader ecosystem, personal frustrations involving loneliness, work, sex and social status can be recast as evidence that men are victims of an unjust political order.
That message has electoral power because podcast hosts develop a degree of familiarity and trust that conventional politicians and news organizations often lack.
Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign deliberately entered these male-dominated spaces, presenting him as a fighter against elites, feminism and cultural restraint. The result is not simply a group of men voting Republican. It is a political constituency increasingly organized around the belief that restoring male authority is necessary to restore the country.
Trump has reinforced his politics of masculinity through AI-generated images that recast him as a muscular action hero, a warrior and a superhero. The fantasy is the point: an 80-year-old politician, who is obese and wears make-up, is digitally transformed into the ideal male physical specimen.
By presenting this artificial body to supporters, Trump turns his masculine fantasy into political theater he is promoting the fiction that he is the nation’s alpha male and best suited to lead.
Guest:
Helen Lewis is a staff writer at The Atlantic. She is the author of Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights and The Genius Myth: A Curious History of a Dangerous Idea and the host of the BBC’s long-form interview series, The Spark. At The Atlantic, she writes about the intersection of politics, society, and digital culture.
