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Toxic masculinity is on the ballot.
“Toxic masculinity is on the ballot.” That was the accidentally insightful headline of a column on an Ohio news site. Toxic masculinity was indeed on the ballot. But in a whole other way.
Gen Z men who had spent much of their lives being told that there was something wrong with them went out and voted for Trump. The cultural seismic shock waves of losing the male half of the youth are still rippling through the leftists who had long written off those same men.
The young men who voted for Trump attend high schools with ‘Healthy Masculinity’ classes and clubs which tell them that “the Man Box does not allow us to be fully human” and urges boys “to achieve their full human potential, free from restrictive masculinity.”
To be a boy is bad, but to be a man is even worse. College comes with mandatory sessions on consent and equity. White men in any classes less rigorous than math or science are there to be used as bad examples of privilege. Nearly any college movie from a decade ago now seems like it’s depicting another culture or another planet. No wonder men aren’t going to college.
Gen Z men have come of age being displaced in school, in society and in their hobbies and interests. But every time they display interest in something, whether it’s the NFL or Warhammer 40,000, it’s quickly taken away from them in the name of equity and diversity.
Complaining about it is toxic masculinity.
From an early age, boys are expected to be less seen, punished for their natural instincts and told that their main tasks are to be less like themselves and get out of the way of others. Gen Z men have grown up being seen as bad by the same system that wanted their votes in 2024.
Is it any wonder that Gen Z men didn’t want to vote for a political culture that saw them as toxic?
Leftists used to be able to win over the youth by pretending to be anti-establishment and offering freedom, but leftists have long since become the establishment and offer no freedom. Gen Z men were expected to vote for Kamala because she was the ‘progressive’ flag bearer, but what do progressives actually have to offer young men except shame and second class status?
We hate them. Why won’t they vote for us?
YES Magazine had hailed the Kamala campaign for offering a “nontoxic masculinity” in which “Gov. Tim Walz and others in the party are publicly relinquishing male power and privilege.”
Under the Left, the only good thing men could do was move to the back of the bus, to apologize for their existence and cheer on those replacing them. (Or identify as women themselves.)
Even as the polling warned Democrats they had a man problem, they couldn’t seem to stop shaming and scolding men. At Morehouse College, speaking to black men, Biden claimed that “their idea of being a man is toxic” and that to really be a man, you have to show “respect”, showing up to support the cause and “giving hate no safe harbor and leaving no one behind”.
Things got worse when the Obamas hit the campaign trail.
Barack infamously accused black men of sexism for not “feeling the idea of having a woman as president” and berated them, “women in our lives have been getting our backs this entire time.” Michelle Obama told women “we have every right to demand that the men in our lives do better by us” in the election and told men voting for Trump, “a vote for him is a vote against us.”
Men were sexists and predators. A condescending campaign ad urged women in red states to lie to their husbands and vote for Kamala. Rather than give women a reason to vote for them, the Democrats had gambled on bonding with women by demonizing men as toxic.
And they lost men because they couldn’t stop hating men.
Misunderstanding Men
The Trump campaign chose a millennial venture capitalist as its VP to appeal to younger men while the Kamala campaign picked a 60-year-old chubby ex-teacher whose shtick was cosplaying as various rural characters in Minnesota. Gov. Tim Walz was the kind of non-threatening ‘man’ that a group of upscale aging liberal women would pick to appeal to men.
Which VP were Gen Z men more likely to identify with: Vance or Walz?
The Kamala campaign thought that Walz would be avuncular but to Gen Z men he resembled one of the teachers, counselors and assorted school staffers who had hectored them all their lives. Rather than seeing a role model in remedying toxic masculinity that they were supposed to emulate, they saw a bureaucrat handing them DEI coursework and waiting for them to nod.
At the nadir of the campaign’s outreach to young men, Walz partnered with AOC to stream themselves playing Madden NFL on Twitch. A desktop setup had Walz wearing large headphones with a strategically placed bottle of Mountain Dew soda on the side.
The final score was 0-0.
Rather than reaching Gen Z men, it came off as a condescending tourist exercise during which the two lefty politicians pitched their various agendas, showed little familiarity with the game (despite Walz’s supposed background as a coach) and less interest in what men needed.
During the election when the Democrat media wanted to understand masculinity, they turned to
Ruth Whippman, a Berkeley liberal journalist and the author of ‘Boymom.’ While clearly an anti-conservative feminist, Whippman wrote about the culture of negativity toward boys and men on the Left even as she complained about the evils of masculine stereotypes.
Whippman’s work was in some ways less important than her gender. Many of the popular works about masculinity on the Left are written by women. When the media tried to interview ‘experts’ on masculinity and the election, they turned to Whippman and a few other women.
Democrats no longer even have men to explain men to them.
An entire sex has been inducted into the Marxist oppressor paradigm alongside capitalism, traditional religion (except Islam) heterosexuality, whiteness and being one’s own gender. There was no need to understand men in any terms except that they embodied all bad qualities.
In the 2024 election there were more voters on the bad side of the Left’s identity politics fence than on its good side.
Toxic Ideology
The Left lost men because it hated them. As the post-election party struggles to figure out how to fix the problem by investing more into podcasts, it’s up against its own ideology.
A movement can’t win over people it hates.
The idea of toxic masculinity is a product of a toxic ideology. Creating podcasts aimed at men while demonizing men won’t work. Many Gen Z men saw in Kamala another of the diversity hires who cut ahead of them in line and then got jobs lecturing them about their privilege.
The Left did well with young men when it appeared to be offering them freedom. Now all it offers them is a chance to be used as bad examples of toxic masculinity. The Left has gone from Animal House to the ‘Panderverse’, yet it expects young men to flock to them as if nothing has changed. Gen Z men see no reason to be leftists and nothing that the Left has to offer them.
Unless the Left stops hating men and offers them something more than a seat in the back of the bus, it will lose a generation of young men.
The real threat is Toxtic Femeninty and Toxic Liberalism
Yes, I notice lefties try to get boys to be effeminate and girls to be masculine.
Sick freaks.
They want all Boys to be Ballet Dancers like in that stupid movie Billy Elliot
Trump, “a vote for him is a vote against us.”
Yup!
It is increasingly hard to find young men who are willing to sacrifice their own careers so that woke group members of lesser qualifications can advance instead. Go figure.
That’s because they’re saying to themselves, sensibly, “Why should we?”
With reason. Don’t tell me I’m worthless and toxic and expect to support you, on election day or any other occasion.
Yeah, I’m as masculine as the next guy, I have hair on my chest, but I don’t feel toxic. Not unless you consider how good I am at taming the shrews. Chicks fall all over me. Does that make me toxic? I don’t think so. Not modest but not toxic either.
It is not always obvious that the other person is less qualified, but it works for the Right to pretend so. A bit of stats to explain.:
When Affirmative Action started legislating that a percentage of those let into higher learning should be from disadvantaged groups, it was conventional wisdomp that these people were less qualified.
Of course, what was being judged were their scores.
A Black leaving college after his degree generally had lower scores than a white person… so everyone deduced that, “Well, he wasn’t good enough in the first place!”
BUT. .. of course those people were not taking into account an internalized racism which made them feel inferior for most of their lives, and teh fact that they only had 3 years perhaos to make up for all the learned self-defeating attitudes tehy had accumulated, could explain that lower level result…
“BULLSHIT” you say;
However, what became interesting was if that same perosn went on to get a second degree;, then they generally finigshed in the top ranks! Why? Because it took them that extra three years to really shine after finally divesting themselves of the psychological handicaps.
I worked for a state agency for over 30 years. It was so estrogen drenched I’m lucky I didn’t turn into “Rachel” Levine. The only actual discrimination I ever saw was against white males. On the last interview panel I was on, the unanimous choice (including that of the biracial female heading the panel) was a white male. He had the most seniority, the best work record and answered interview questions (asked in the same order with the exact same wording to all interviewees) most satisfactorily. The choice was sent to the personnel liason (in every other case a pro forma move) and came back “we can’t fill this position with a white male”. I was sorely tempted to tell him because although he was a great employee, he was somewhere to the left of Elizabeth Warren and more ashamed of being male than Tim Walz or Barack Obama. To young men who decided the election on November 5th I can only say, “Congratulations. So, what took you so long?”
I am not a fan of Trump but I told everyone before the election that Harris was going to lose.
The Democrats message was:
“Vote for Harris or you are racist and sexist. The only way you can prove you are not racist and sexist is to vote for Harris. Even if you vote for Harris you will still be racist and sexist, because you are inherently racist and sexist.”
You cannot win an election by insulting and lecturing the people you want to vote for you. `
Race, sex, being non binary, gender fluid, or whatever, is not a talent or qualification for any job or political office.
Now all the Politically Correct Pundits are saying Trump won because the American people are racist, sexist or to stupid to know what is in their own interest.
The simple truth is Harris lost because she was a terrible candidate. No one ever voted for her. She did not win one primary in 2020 or 2024. She could not give a coherent answer to any question.
She kept repeating this mantra: “A future unburdened by what has been.”
What does that even mean? It means nothing. Harris’s whole campaign was just a series of meaningless slogans that she could never explain because no one ever asked her. They didn’t ask her because they wanted her to win.
Any competent Democrat could have beaten Trump. The Democrats have no one to blame but themselves for this result.
If you want to understand what “a future unburdened by what has been” means, look up the phrase “Year Zero”.
I don’t think any “competent Democrat” could have beaten Trump because right now there are not any! Nearly the entire party has gone insane on leftist gender-bending wokeness. Gavin Newsome would have lost. Chief Lizzie Warren? She’s another loser and even had fewer votes than Harris in Massachusetts. The governor of Colorado? Nope. Obnoxious Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan who insulted Catholics? Nope. And what’s scary is that they really do not understand what went wrong.
Why aren’t you a fan of Big Don Trump? He’s awesome.
You mean the “DonFather” who’s about to make the democrats a deal they can’t refuse! The dims are already quietly journeying to Mara-Lago to kiss the DonFather’s ring and ask for forgiveness!
But a few of them are going to have to sleep with the fish for all to be forgiven!
Donfather? Those dems are just becoming obsequious petitioners to toxic masculinity.
it’s said that there are 11 million plus young men who have opted out. the america dream does not exist. the democrat party for billionaires and banksters have twisted it and squeezed it to make it palatable for the 60 million illegals now living in our open borders and jobs.
young men now veg on video games and porn. perhaps they’re merely waiting for the revolution!
Or they’re hastening the collapse of a rotten system. Let’s hope Trump can reverse the damage done by feminism, which for all its “intersectional” happy horseshit exists primarily so that selfish, obnoxious upper class white females (this includes you, Maureen Dowd and Hanna Rosin) in the First World can feel “oppressed”, when their “oppression” exists mostly because of their worthless, overpriced degrees and bad career and lifestyle choices. Likewise with CRT, which is just racism with the added hypocrisy of pretending to oppose “racism” (no wonder Hamas supporters can maintain the pretense that they’re fighting “genocide”). If Trump cannot achieve a paradigm change the whole rotten edifice will eventually collapse, as it should.
I don’t know about video games (I think they suck) but I can understand porn addictions. I dumped my girlfriend a week ago and haven’t been the same since. I’ve become a spanking monkey.
I need to find another girlfriend. I’m so hard up I called my ex one at 2 am. So she said, I don’t remember. Who remembers what they do at 2 am?
Anyway, I think our youth are rebeling against their indoctrination. Ten and twenty years ago they were all Fem boys but I think they’re sick of that shit.
Finally, our young men have awakened to their value. The feminist, man-hating mantras are falling on deaf ears.
These monstrous females are best left with their cats. None of them should either give birth to or raise boys!!
While I taught my son to be both respectful, protective and appreciative of women, it was not accomplished by eviscerating his masculinity. He was raised knowing there are many differences between men and women but that different in no way implies lesser. Believe me when I say that women love him. If anyone tried to hurt any woman in his life, they would meet the masculine beast kept in check and immediately enabled only for the purpose of protecting those he loves.
The feminist approved soy boys have lost that which is fundamentally attractive to real women and if the left can’t figure that out they are doomed to hating that which they refuse to understand! In the meantime, may our men and boys know how very much we love and need them!
Do you know why the Left are against masculinity in men? Because they know that masculine men will stand up to them. If they eliminate masculine men, then there is no one to stand in the way of them setting up their desired Marxist dicatatorship.
Absolutely correct. The generation of men that stormed the beaches on D-Day would never have stood for the crap now taking place. Feminism had this planned out decades ago.
Interesting article. One of the consequences of the notion of toxic masculinity has been a drop in the number of young men willing to serve in the military. Moreover, the liberal left refuses to acknowledge the damage they’ve done and are continuing to do to and the damage done is much worse than just low recruitment numbers.
I honestly believe that if a world war broke out, the left’s first instinct would be to surrender. Imagine the consequences if that happened. Thus, in my view, the left is the real existential threat to America. More so than any external enemy.
No country has ever survived its internal enemies and America is no exception. We had better deal with them in earnest sooner rather than later or America won’t survive for much longer.
We’re already a divided nation. How much worse can or will it get?
Hating men, are you crazy? Our other halves, partners, complements, source of endless amazement because thank God, they are different! Why not hating life while you are at it? Oops, I forgot you women’s libs also hate life..
Toxic Femeninity and Toxic Liberalism is the real problem
The first thing we should do is take women out of combat roles in the military. The only reason they are there is because the left wants us to lose the next war, which will inevitably happen if women continue to take roles that should only be filled by men. Next, we should advocate for all male educational institutions.