Toxic masculinity shows US Secretary of War is not a serious figure

[IwantToRetire]

he best way to understand the US position on Iran is machismo. There’s no point looking for a strategic calculation – you won’t find it. Donald Trump and his officials have tried several explanations: regime change, nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles and an upcoming attack on Israel. None of them last more than a couple of days. None of them are real.

Machismo offers the only compelling explanation for what is happening here. The Trump administration, like all hard-right governments throughout history, operates on an old idea of masculinity as power. The things it likes – from executive authority to fossil fuel – are male-coded. It demands that men and women adopt traditional gender roles. It has eroded the rights of transgender people, gay men and lesbians. It worships strength and despises weakness.

No one encapsulates this vision better than “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth, the pituitary moron who has unfathomably been put in charge of the armed forces. He has no qualities to speak of. He is perhaps the least complex individual ever given high office. And he therefore provides the best example of the administration’s gender anxiety. He represents the male personality when it is extracted from anything meaningful or decent and reduced to its crudest, most insecure form.

I am not posting this because I anything to say about what the US is doing, but I am intrigued by main stream media characterising armed aggression in terms that many feminists use in response to this type of confrontation. That behind all the big words and supposed political values etc., it is just a dick contest.

Although likely I suppose that msm is just using the arguement to say Trump and his henchmen are just not proper politicians.

https://inews.co.uk/opinion/hegseths-fragile-masculinity-doomed-us-4285066

also at https://archive.is/KGDRS

(In case anyone is interested the title is not generated by MN AI as this seems to have now disappeared, but is the title in the printed paper version of the i Paper, but online they have changed toxic to fragile. ???)

Edited to add (and really peed off) the stupid MN AI has put in a title I did NOT ask for.

The title should have been so please use this as the reference point as it shows what the i Paper is actually doing not some misunderstood AI fudge:

Toxic Masculinity Shows US Secretary of War is Not a Serious Figure

FFS mnhq, I dont know whether to ask you to delete the thread or change the title.

This stupid intervention is just a wind up.

Although likely I suppose that msm is just using the arguement to say Trump and his henchmen are just not proper politicians.
Exactly this. What does Ian Dunt call the IRGC and Khamenei?

And because they're such macho bully boys, it explains why they are so mean to the poor trans people.

All of those words could just as easily be replaced with a question about the last time a female (of the real sort) started a war.

Off the top of my head only Boudica comes to mind.

(Then I researched)

Zenobia of Palmyra (3rd century)
Olga of Kyiv (10th century)
Catherine the Great (18th century)

Pete Hegseth was all but beating his chest on television, and then they put out the stupid clip on SM. It’s like it’s a game to them, except when they get bored with it and turn it off, they will leave utter chaos.

Jane, I disagree, not all wars are started without at least some consideration or the purpose, the aims and some planning about the endgame

Jane, I disagree, not all wars are started without at least some consideration or the purpose, the aims and some planning about the endgame

?

I was just suggesting that it's (almost) exclusively the menz that start wars. I don't really care why or how they mean to end them.

You mean the Celts' revolt against the Roman invaders?
Boudica didn't start the war. The Romans started it.
One of the many wars that wouldn't have happened if imperialists had stayed at home🙄

Hesgeth is such a macho poser - the hectoring tone, the 'my country right or wrong', the slightly-too-tight suit jacket, the delight in describing death and destruction like it was a fun thing rather than [allegedly] a regrettable geopolitical necessity, the total lack of nuance, the Liam Neeson imitations*, the aggression towards anyone with the temerity to disagree, and then prayers - but only for his soldiers...

It's impressive in a scary way, he's totally committed to it, but I don't believe it's authentic.

*“If you threaten Americans anywhere on this earth, we will hunt you down without apology and without hesitation and we will kill you.”
Pete Hesgeth, Secretary of Defense War, 2026

I hear that with a slight Ballymena accent as in:
I will look for you, I will find you... and I will kill you.
Liam Neeson, Taken, 2008

Sorry, misread

If you threaten Americans anywhere on this earth, we will hunt you down without apology and without hesitation and we will kill you.”
Pete Hesgeth, Secretary of Defense War, 2026

Said without shame or any fear of recrimination for themselves after not just threatening, but actually bombing, a whole school full of little girls.

What a big man with a big, big gun you are, Pete.

How embarrassing for America.

Shame the US can't protect it's own women before it acts the billy big bollocks abroad.

I think sadly, even though I would love to think that journalists have all now adopted a feminist analysis of politics, that it is because they are insulting him.

But honestly, the posturing and the language, whether its toxic masculinity or school boy showing off, if it wasn't so serious is would be so cringe inducing.

Although I have always felt Trump's view of the world / politics is based on US films he has seen or US tv series he has followed.

That what is important is that 2 minute clip or whatever, some special effects and the world is put to rights. That that is all you have to do.

And when it doesn't work he just gets bored.

But Hegseth is like some really bad B movie. Terrible script and then, which is so gross, mixing actual bombardments with movie clips.

I wonder how those in the US see it.

Terrifying that these are the men who have the finger on the button of atomic weapons.

Although it would be niave of me not to realise that there will be parts of the US where they will applaud and agree with his behaviour.

I have an acquaintance in a red state, they lap it up. I honestly think they see everything through a Hollywood lens. Its what they want to believe, like thinking Covid was all made up because they can't face the truth.

How depressing.

Its strange how adults go on about young people being influenced by social media, when so many of them are totally captured by tv and film make believe.

And whatever the rights or wrongs in various parts of the middle east, the idea that people with this level of understanding are meddling there, and have the weapons, it really, really scary.

I worked with Americans, many would come to our office in the UK having never left their home state before. We had one women who was scared by everything; the food, the traffic, the different money. Many seem so unaware of a world outside the US.

I was surprised to find he had actually been in the military. Salivating over the 'American warrior' in his speech after the Venezuelan intervention, he came as the kind of guy who fantasised about being a soldier rather than actually having experience. Reading about the kind of officer he'd been made more sense, though.

The change of title from defence to war says it all. Defence is presumably too effeminate for a warrior. The fact he's so nakedly keen to project a hyper-masculine persona is frankly embarrassing, or would be in a world that hasn't gone quite so mad. Definite shades of dictators presiding over parades with massive missiles.

They barely get any news of anything abroad on the day to day tv.

Well now I am going to have to admit I am uninformed. It never occured to me he had been in the army. I thought he was all play ground make believe.

What kind of officer was he?

Hugo Rifkind’s article on this in the Times is a good read.

Pete Hegseth’s rhetoric gives me that sinking feeling

www.thetimes.com/article/7091b4bf-a972-4078-b4b0-d1db4f2802da?shareToken=ff675d07e6fe0ebc257d82754e6cf1f4

re Americans being uninformed about other countries.

I suspect it is much the same in the UK.

More and more mainstream news reporting is very UK centric and also very much about personality politics.

And really notice the difference with say France 24 which I "discovered" during the Olympics. There coverage on news from other countries is quite wide ranging. As is Al Jazeera's.

Although more through tv series etc., I think many in the UK think they know about the US.

He was a Major and served in Iraq etc., so he does actually know what he's talking about. Not an armchair general, then.
But he seems to romanticise the 'warrior culture' and some of what he says about 'the fallen heroes' sounds almost saccharine-sentimental.

He hasn't the same attitude to war as Wilfred Owen:

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Hesgeth survived, which Owen failed to do by just one week in 1918.

Thanks that's a good read.

" ... One might say Hegseth sounds like he thinks he is in a film, but only if it were a really bad film, perhaps written by a 15-year-old using ChatGPT. A comic, perhaps. A computer game. Probably, one should not use the phrase “small dick energy” on the comment pages, and particularly not when accusing other people of cheapening the discourse. But damn it, I think I must. ... "

I think it really jars.

But maybe all the UK made war films with noble foot soldiers and old school officers are false representation, and they too were / are more Hegseth in reality.

Maybe not ‘starting a war’ as such, but there was massive conflict during Queen Victoria’s reign throughout the Empire and also at least one in Europe. Margaret Thatcher was PM during the Falklands Conflict.

It’s interesting they were both female leaders with majority (total?) male advisers and male military at that time, certainly on the front line.

Lets not forget Good Queen Bess who not only started wars but sanctioned piracy by English ship captains.

Although in truth these females leaders adopted the appropriate male approach to keep their positions.

I think with Hegseth it is because it is so cartoonish, and facile.

And of course the utter US centric view that one US death requires presidents and all news challenges to show sadness, and yet 100+ school girls killed are not acknowledged.

They seem to almost fetishise war