Pete Hegseth, American Man?

What Hegseth means about American masculinity.

Photo by Samantha Sophia on Unsplash

In his second go-around as president-elect, Donald Trump has displayed peculiar taste in cabinet appointees. It would be difficult not to notice just how many of them have been accused of various crimes and offenses against women. Or, as Axios’ Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen put it last week: “[Trump] has unabashedly surrounded himself with men who've said, done or been accused of things that would disqualify them under any other U.S. leader in our lifetimes.”

Why is this? Allen and VandeHei serve up their armchair psychoanalysis of Trump:

Trump has a very 1950s view of powerful men. In this view, the successful ones are rugged, often handsome, tough and flawed. Polite men, who often dominate politics, are too soft and fake to confront the harsh realities of real life. It takes daring men to do the hard things in fighting crime or illegal immigration, or confronting China, or negotiating with stone-cold killers like Vladimir Putin….

We're told Trump's gains in the election fueled his bad-boy instincts. "He knows and intuitively understands that men voted for him in huge numbers in part because they reject the notion that all male behavior is toxic," the insider said. "He wants to drive home the message that he is discarding the old norms and he is setting the new ones."

There is no denying that Pete Hegseth is a norm-breaker. The former Fox News weekend anchor is not remotely qualified to run the largest bureaucracy in the world has been nominated to be Trump’s next Secretary of Defense. The dude’s actual policy preferences are at best controversial and at worst disturbing as fuck.

On top of that, however, is Hegseth’s treatment of the women in his life. Is Hegseth “handsome, tough and flawed,” or is he a weak-willed misogynist? The evidence sure seems to point to the latter, based on some damning evidence that has surfaced as of late. Hegseth’s own mother wrote the following to him in April 2018:

You are an abuser of women — that is the ugly truth and I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego. You are that man (and have been for years) and as your mother, it pains me and embarrasses me to say that, but it is the sad, sad truth.

I am not a saint, far from it.. so don’t throw that in my face,. but your abuse over the years to women (dishonesty, sleeping around, betrayal, debasing, belittling) needs to be called out….

I don’t want to debate with you. You twist and abuse everything I say anyway. But… On behalf of all the women (and I know it’s many) you have abused in some way, I say… get some help and take an honest look at yourself.

It should be noted that according to the New York Times’ Sharon LaFraniere and Julie Tate — the reporters who broke this story — Hegseth’s mother followed this up with an apologetic note and has defended her son in the years since. But I don’t think any of that erases the sting of her initial letter.

The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer reported out even more damning information about Hegseth’s “leadership” of various conservative veteran’s groups. I put leadership in quotes because, well…

A trail of documents, corroborated by the accounts of former colleagues, indicates that Hegseth was forced to step down by both of the two nonprofit advocacy groups that he ran—Veterans for Freedom and Concerned Veterans for America—in the face of serious allegations of financial mismanagement, sexual impropriety, and personal misconduct.…

A previously undisclosed whistle-blower report on Hegseth’s tenure as the president of Concerned Veterans for America, from 2013 until 2016, describes him as being repeatedly intoxicated while acting in his official capacity—to the point of needing to be carried out of the organization’s events. The detailed seven-page report—which was compiled by multiple former C.V.A. employees and sent to the organization’s senior management in February, 2015—states that, at one point, Hegseth had to be restrained while drunk from joining the dancers on the stage of a Louisiana strip club, where he had brought his team. The report also says that Hegseth, who was married at the time, and other members of his management team sexually pursued the organization’s female staffers, whom they divided into two groups—the “party girls” and the “not party girls.” In addition, the report asserts that, under Hegseth’s leadership, the organization became a hostile workplace that ignored serious accusations of impropriety, including an allegation made by a female employee that another employee on Hegseth’s staff had attempted to sexually assault her at the Louisiana strip club….

I spoke at length with two people who identified themselves as having contributed to the whistle-blower report. One of them said of Hegseth, “I’ve seen him drunk so many times. I’ve seen him dragged away not a few times but multiple times. To have him at the Pentagon would be scary,” adding, “When those of us who worked at C.V.A. heard he was being considered for SecDef, it wasn’t ‘No,’ it was ‘Hell No!’ ” According to the complaint, at one such C.V.A. event in Virginia Beach, on Memorial Day weekend in 2014, Hegseth was “totally sloshed” and needed to be carried to his room because “he was so intoxicated.” The following month, during an event in Cleveland, Hegseth, who had gone with his team to a bar around the corner from their hotel, was described as “completely drunk in a public place.”

That excerpt is a small sample of the damning stories Mayer has collected in her reportage. What shines through her story is a guy who can’t seem to hold his liquor or sustain respect for women. Little wonder that he opposes women serving in combat roles.

Hegseth isn’t a tough but flawed man. He’s someone who failed to live up to his potential and has been using alcohol, misogyny, and tattoos to make up for his lack of self-esteem. Oh, and he cannot manage his way out of a paper bag.

And yet, it would appear that a certain fraction of young men are comfortable with Hegseth as SecDef despite — or perhaps because of — his sexual assaults. According to the Associated Press’ Christine Fernando:

An emboldened fringe of right-wing “manosphere” influencers… have seized on Republican Donald Trump ’s presidential win to justify and amplify misogynistic derision and threats online. Many have appropriated a 1960s abortion rights rallying cry, declaring “Your body, my choice” at women online and on college campuses….

Isabelle Frances-Wright, director of technology and society at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank focusing on polarization and extremism, said she had seen a “very large uptick in a number of types of misogynistic rhetoric immediately after the election,” including some “extremely violent misogyny.”….

Women on TikTok have reported seeing it inundate their comment sections. The slogan also has made its way offline with boys chanting it in middle schools or men directing it at women on college campuses, according to the Institute for Strategic Dialogue report and social media reports. One mother said her daughter heard the phrase on her college campus three times, the report said….

Online declarations for women to “Get back in the kitcahen” or to “Repeal the 19th,” a reference to the constitutional amendment that gave women the right to vote, have spread rapidly. In the days surrounding the election, the extremism think tank found that the top 10 posts on X calling for repeal of the 19th Amendment received more than 4 million views collectively.

There are two ways to interpret this, and both narratives have some validity to them. One way is to connect the rise of Trump and the manosphere with the crisis of masculinity in a post-industrial society. Writing in the New York Times, Sarah Bernstein highlights some of the trendlines that have disadvantaged American men:

Recently, men’s and women’s fortunes have been trending in opposite directions. Women’s college enrollment first eclipsed men’s around 1980, but in the past two decades or so this gap has become a chasm. In 2022, men made up only 42 percent of 18-to-24-year-olds at four-year schools, and their graduation rates were lower than women’s as well. Since 2019, there have been more college-educated women in the work force than men….

Women’s growing success, coupled with the belief that a male partner must always be more successful, gives the shrinking pool of more successful men tremendous power. In 2017, researchers at the University of Utah found that in unbalanced populations, “the more common sex must cater to the preferences of the rarer sex in order to acquire a mate.” This could explain why today social media is rife with male fantasies, from beautiful, submissive “tradwives” to the hyper-feminine sorority pledges of “Bama Rush.” It could also explain why, alongside popular hashtags like #marryup and #richmen, another trending topic for women is celibacy.

And while a small group of #richmen may be reaping the benefits, many others find themselves shut out. According to Richard Reeves, whose book “Of Boys and Men” explores the reasons behind the growing gender achievement gap, heterosexual men who fall behind their female peers often experience a hit to both their romantic prospects and their sense of identity, leaving them searching for ways to affirm their manhood.

Enter the manosphere.

Going directly to the source, Reeves’ Of Boys And Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It explains how Republicans used these trends to attract male voters:

Conservatives have paid more attention than progressives to the growing problems faced by boys and men. But their agenda turns out to be equally unhelpful…. many conservatives fuel male grievances for political gain, which simply creates more anger and discontent…. they see the solution to men’s problems as lying in the past rather than in the future, in the form of a restoration of traditional economic relations between male providers and female carers. Rather than helping men adapt to the new world, conservatives beguile them with promises of the old.

One could hypothesize that Trump’s retrograde view of masculinity, as embodied in Hegseth’s myriad pathologies, are a siren song for men desperate to reclaim their place in the American social hierarchy.

Over at Good Authority, however, John Sides makes a counterargument. Drawing from a September 2024 Pew Survey entitled, “How Americans See Men and Masculinity,” Sides argues that even Republican men are not all that down with this kind of manosphere BS:

The Pew survey asked respondents whether “most people in the U.S.” value certain traits in men. What stands out is that most people think Americans don’t value stereotypically feminine traits enough: being caring, open about their emotions, soft-spoken, or affectionate. Relatively few people think that stereotypically masculine traits like being confident or physically strong aren’t valued enough.

And it isn’t just woke liberals who say this. Roughly half or more of Republicans said that most Americans don’t value traits like being affectionate in men. So, while there are some partisan differences – Democrats are a bit more likely than Republicans to think traits like being caring aren’t valued and to think that masculine traits are valued too much – there is more of a partisan consensus than on many other issues.

Most American also think it’s not acceptable for men to behave like jerks….

Most people reject behaviors like men drinking too much with friends or fighting or sleeping around or talking about women in a sexual way. Majorities of both genders think this, although the majorities among women are about 10 points larger than among men.

And, notably, both Republicans and Democrats think this.

Sides has a point. Here are the two relevant Pew charts:

When broken down by party, what stands out is that Republican men are more appalled at the kind of behavior that Hegseth and Trump’s other appointees are displaying, such as excessive alcohol consumption:

Is there any way to square the emergent narrative about the manosphere with the polling results from Pew? I suspect there is. Like a lot of general polling issues, this might be one where the active minority voice places a higher salience on these issues than the more passive majority voice. Or, to put it another way, the douchebros yell a lot louder than everyone else and in doing so capture the attention of elites.

Hegseth’s pathway to confirmation remains unclear at this point, but whether he makes it or not will be an interesting harbinger of what matters more: the loud but tiny manosphere or the more silent majority.

Developing…