JUST BE MACHO IF YOU WANT TO BE OH MY GOD NOBODY CARES

These people are never ever going to shut up about how we won't 'let them' be men.

One thing I’m always a little impressed by is when I’m at the nail salon, getting my talons redone, and I see a stereotypically “manly” looking man coming in for a manicure. Because, you know, that is a man who is not only quite considerate, it is a man who is secure as all hell. He does not give a fuck and does not have to. It’s a total power move, if you ask me.

Perhaps that is why I nearly threw my laptop across the room upon reading The Atlantic’s latest drivel about “The Return of the Democratic Manly Man.” I just … I can’t take it anymore. It’s not just because I don’t quite believe that our “real” problem is that Democratic men are insufficiently macho, but that I think it is a weird and boring conversation that reads as insecure, regardless of who is having it. And right now it seems like everyone is having it way too often.

On the Right, it seems they never shut up about it. Scammers charge suckers thousands of dollars for “masculinity coaching”; creeps like Andrew Tate and pals rake in millions telling men that in order to be super macho and cool they need to treat women like shit. We’ve been dealing with that kind of nonsense for over a decade at this point. Now we have to deal with endless think pieces and pundits hand-wringing over whether or not Democratic men are manly enough to win elections — which doesn’t bode well for the future of women in politics.

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Here are just a few very normal excerpts from the Atlantic piece:

Brian Poindexter had just finished wolfing down a Reuben sandwich in a deli outside Cleveland when he delivered a message that, coming from a Democratic House candidate in the year 2026, sounded almost provocative. “There’s nothing wrong with being masculine,” Poindexter told me. It’s okay, he said, to be “a manly man.”

Poindexter’s own manliness credentials are fully in order. The 46-year-old started working in a machine shop as a teenager and spent years hauling furniture across the country before finding stability as a union ironworker. He drives a Ram Big Horn pickup truck and built, with his buddy turned campaign manager, a shed in his backyard.

A pickup truck? A shed? A “buddy”? Well, I never! This Brian Poindexter fella is simply a master of gender performance. A virtuoso, if you will. Who even cares what he stands for? Just think of how impressive his testicles must be!

“You really can’t fake it,” Representative Jason Crow of Colorado, a former Army Ranger who helped lead recruitment for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, told me. He said that people can tell a lot about a candidate just by shaking their hand—“Do they have calluses?”

You know who also has calluses? Joni Mitchell. Just gonna put that out there.

In a pair of competitive House races, Democrats believe that the candidates they’ve chosen won’t face such attacks. Bobby Pulido, the nominee in the Fifteenth District, is a Tejano music star who named his son Remington after his favorite gun. Johnny Garcia, the Democratic pick in the Thirty-Fifth District, spent years as a hostage negotiator in the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office.

Pulido, by the way, is part of a hip new gang of Democratic centrists, led by Tom Suozzi, who are very upset about Democratic socialists winning elections and signed a “Promise to America” swearing that they are “capitalist, not socialist,” “mainstream, not extreme,” and “proud, not ashamed of America,” that they want “safety, not lawlessness” and that they are “responsible, not reckless” in fiscal matters. You know, unlike all those wacky commies who keep winning elections with their “actual plans to do actual things” and “help people” and what have you.

Naturally the piece, by Atlantic staff writer Russell Berman, gets into how Kamala Harris lost the male vote and most Democrats lose the male vote and even Obama only won the male vote by one point against McCain. It also delves into the Graham Platner of it all, because apparently we all have to pretend that people were voting for him because of his mustache and his Nazi tattoo and his history of saying shitty things on Reddit forums and not, you know, in spite of some of those things because they wanted healthcare and were not especially into helping Israel decimate Gaza. That, he notes, did not work out on account of Platner having been accused of sexual assault by some ladies — suggesting that this could be a “downside” of “centering a campaign on authenticity.”

Or gee, I don’t know, of insufficiently vetting candidates for public office? I’ve never personally considered sexual assailants to be paragons of “authenticity,” but what do I know?

Berman also points out that deep down in the heart of Texas, Ken Paxton is calling his Democratic opponent James Talarico names like “Six-Gender Jimmy” and “Low-T Talarico.”

Talarico happens to be leading Paxton in many of the polls. In fact, he’s doing just about as well as Platner was, and with a relatively similar platform, but in Texas — which I would say is actually a pretty big deal, even if he does not have a mustache.

This, like the many think pieces on the “male loneliness crisis” leaves me with a strong feeling of “What is it that you want me to do with this information?” Do women need to set up playdates for grown men? Should we run fewer women for office? Are we not doing enough to placate men with facial hair, calluses, and children named after gun manufacturers? Must we launch a nationwide search for America’s Next Top Democratic Joe Rogan?

Democrats are always going to have an easier time attracting female voters than male voters, simply by virtue of the fact that women are more likely to be socialized to care whether other people live or die. According to Poindexter, the issue Democrats have with “men like him” is less policy than “vibes” — but he, himself, says that what pushed him from Republican to Democrat was not, in fact, the visual of a liberal Stanley Kowalski, but finding out how much better things were for him in a union job versus a non-union job. That’s not “vibes,” that is, very explicitly, “policy.” We’re not going to easily reach people whose votes are swayed by gender performance alone (or aesthetics, period), because that is stupid and stupid people tend to vote Republican or not vote at all.

In fact, it seems to me that the people most obsessed with this “Oh no, how do we get these macho, macho men to vote Republican? How do we reach the manosphere?” nonsense also tend to be the least interested in policies that actually help people. Could be a coincidence, could just be that they happen to be deeply shallow human beings. One of the two.

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To me, this all ultimately reads as insecure — which, ironically, some might consider explicitly unmanly. The fact is, if you’re secure, if you believe in yourself, you can pull off anything and people will go along with you. That’s a better lesson to learn from Trump than any kind of macho posturing. Sure, Trump loves to sexually assault women, but he also eats his steak well done and loves tacky gold shit even more than I do, and I’m Italian. Obsessing over aesthetics? Whining that “no one will let you” be masculine? That’s weakness. Not having insufficiently calloused hands.

It’s also pretty damned condescending. If I were a man and I kept seeing people go on and on about “Oh, well, we need to run super macho men for office in order to get guys like this to vote for us! It’s not like they care about what people actually stand for!” I would be just as insulted and disrespected as I am every time someone insinuates that, as a woman, I would be more likely to vote for a man because he’s nice looking (cough, Gavin Newsom, cough).

To be clear, I have no issue at all with these men being stereotypically masculine. People are who they are. I happen to be so femme that it’s basically camp at this point, so I’m actually hyper-aware of the fact that what reads as stereotypical gender performance, on both ends of the spectrum, has a tendency to read as anti-intellectual to some people. Personally, I find those people pretty obnoxious and not-all-that-swift themselves. Going either way — trying to run people for office just because they’re stereotypically manly, or making assumptions about people’s values and intelligence because they are stereotypically masculine or feminine — is not going to help us.

Good policy, good ideas, treating people with respect and as though they are people who make thoughtful decisions about who to vote for based on good policies and ideas? That’s gonna go a whole lot further than any facial hair statement.

OPEN THREAD.

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