Beware Men Who Wage War to Prove They Are Men

Seemingly endless recitations throughout history of what constitutes virtuous citizenship emphasize military life. A specifically masculine heritage of violence in the service of the nation oversees and delimits democracy and authority—a privileged area of social welfare in contrast to health, education, the environment, or poverty.

Much classical and modern political theory assumes and even endorses domestic violence, bellicose masculinity, and the notion that “real” politics is generated, discussed, and concluded between men. The idea that male virtue is tied to violence, whether in defense of faith, family, or the border, is immensely strong.

From individual duels to national campaigns, the “right” way to engage in violence has given rise to ideas of nobility. Masculine worth is supposedly incarnate in bloodshed and authoritarian leadership, embodied in the military as a righteous national embodiment of power, spirit, religiosity, and victory.

Raewyn Connell articulates the history of North Atlantic countries that conquered much of the world with contemporary ethnographic study of gender politics. She finds white male sexuality in Western Europe and North America is isomorphic with power: Men seek global dominance and desire, orchestrated to oppress women through hegemonic masculinity.

US masculine anxiety is repeating itself in a manner that may be totally predictable, but is no less disastrous for humanity, other animals, and the planet.

This encompasses overt sexism—rape, domestic violence, and obstacles to female career advancement—and more subtle domination, such as excluding women from social settings and sports teams, or the bourgeois media’s fascination with men. Ironically, women’s rights are often invoked to justify invasions that injure them. For example, the British used traditional limitations on women’s freedom and education to legitimize the colonization of India.

Everywhere you look, from diplomats to bombers to correspondents, war is an implicitly and explicitly masculine activity. This is rarely, if ever, recognized in mainstream media coverage and academic knowledge, or problematized as such.

That said, reactionary commentators, male and female alike, have gone out of their way to valorize the hypermasculinity that has been unleashed, beyond even normal limits, in the United States since 2001, laying claim to chivalry, dominance, and certainty.

Reactionary public commentators churn out press columns and viral videos, seizing the opportunities afforded by war to push a domestic agenda for male power, using international relations to denounce queerness and feminism.

Camille Paglia, Peggy Noonan and Ann Coulter endorse compulsory heterosexuality. Coulter called one deceased soldier “an American original—virtuous, pure, and masculine as only an American man can be” who “died bringing freedom and democracy to 28 million Afghans.” She insisted that “there is no other country in the world—certainly not in continental Europe—that could have produced such a man.”

In 2025, US Chief of Protocol Monica Crowley stated that “we are in an era of true masculinity thanks to the bold and muscular leadership of President Trump and our Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.” And Hegseth dutifully promises “maximum lethality, not lukewarm legality” in the assault on Iran.

But behind those loud voices lurks a figure long plagued by doubts, failures, and weaknesses—actually existing masculinity. Hence Niccolo Machiavelli in the 16th century proposing that men dressed in uniform and trained to fight lose any “habits they consider effeminate.”

Such anxiety has been common among imperial powers across history and geography, with numerous institutions dedicated to carrying forward errant masculine impulses or channeling them into military readiness: physical culture, “strenuous living,” social Darwinism, rational recreation, and French neoclassical romanticism among them.

Matthew Arnold famously wrote, “The battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton”; but a deep concern for military preparedness led him to warn that “disasters have been prepared on those playing fields as well as victories.” Pierre de Coubertin revived the ancient Olympics in 1896 as an international festival of male athletes and diplomats that could cultivate “man’s moral musculature,” redeeming French masculinity after the shocks of the Franco-Prussian conflict a quarter of a century earlier.

By the end of the 19th century, the United States had been at peace for three decades, ever since its bloody Civil War. As most veterans of that conflict passed away, there was public debate about whether American men were still capable of martial masculinity.

Wars in Cuba and the Philippines followed in quick succession. Hundreds of thousands were killed and wounded to expand US imperialism—part of a desperate, felt need to “build masterful male citizens.”

That has its modern corollaries. In 1960, President-elect John F. Kennedy alerted Sports Illustrated readers to a “growing softness, our increasing lack of fitness.” Such trends supposedly constituted “a threat to our security” that must be addressed, per Ancient Greece’s Olympian quest to forge and maintain “a vigorous state.” After all, “struggles against aggressors throughout our history have been won on the playgrounds and corner lots and fields of America.”

Concerns about masculinity and domination of territory routinely underpin the allocation of government resources. Donald J. Trump’s National Youth Sports Strategy feared that “most young people are not moving enough,” detailing “surveillance systems” to monitor children. His 2025 “Presidential Fitness Test” for school pupils aimed to improve “our economy, military readiness, academic performance, and national morale” and “emphasize the importance” of “military readiness.”

The hypermasculinity unleashed across Iran by the current White House can come as no surprise. The fact that it is reinforced by a video of Hollywood explosions and outbursts makes this horror simultaneously banal and fatal, as propaganda and movies meet in male bodies: “machismo from film and television, crassly interspersed with real infrared kill-shot footage.”

US masculine anxiety is repeating itself in a manner that may be totally predictable, but is no less disastrous for humanity, other animals, and the planet.

It’s what those men do.

Not all men—the ones who need war to ensure that they are, in fact, men. To them, Hegseth and his cadre represent “less a symbol of toxic masculinity than a masculine tonic.”

Shall we join in? Thanks, but no thanks.