It's in the Code ep 173: “They Just Hate Men”

Dan Miller: Hello and welcome to It's in the Code, a series that is part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus. My name is Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College. Pleased to be with you as always. Thank you for listening or watching or however you happen to be coming across this content.

As always, I want to remind you that It's in the Code in particular is driven by you. I can't do it without listeners. I can't do it without your ideas, your feedback, your topics for new series, new episodes, responses to issues that come up that we might bring up in the live supplemental episodes that we do—all of those kinds of things. So please keep those coming. danielmillerswaj@gmail.com is the best way to reach me. I do haunt the Discord and all of that, but please let me hear from you. We'd love to hear your thoughts and your feedback on this.

And I'm going to dive right in, because once again, I'm a little wound up with our topic. To situate where we are: we are continuing the deep dive that we've been undertaking basically into the discourse on masculinity and manhood that structures almost everything about the ideology of the right at this point. As I record this, I look at the news going on in the world and the US around us, and the kinds of comments and things that come out, and you just realize how central this is.

So we're continuing to look at that, and we're doing this by looking at Josh Hawley's book Manhood. And as a reminder—I was kind of looking back and thought it was worth reminding—how the book is laid out. The book's divided into two parts, just Part One and Part Two. There's no description of them, like "Part One colon whatever Part One's about." It's just Part One and Part Two.

Part One has four chapters, and I think the point of these four chapters is to provide the kind of overview about his conception of manhood as such, and that's where we've been. We're starting in Chapter Four, the last of those four chapters today. And Part Two has six chapters, and those appear to highlight different specific roles that men are called to play within society. So what I think he's doing in his book is he has these four sort of programmatic overview chapters that lay out in broad brush strokes: here's what manhood is, here's what masculinity is, and so forth. I think he's going to dive in deeper on those specific roles that people have to play.

So as I say, we're in Chapter Four. It's the final part of Part One. And this final chapter is called "Man's Promise." I think it's supposed to be about leadership. The reason I say this is it takes him a long time to get to the concept of leadership, and he hasn't actually talked about man's promise yet as you kind of go through this. So I'm not entirely sure what that means.

And I have trouble stating exactly what the chapter is about, because it is exceptionally bad. This is a really bad chapter. And it's not to say that Hawley's chapters are great, but if you've been listening to this series, you know I've disagreed with him on almost everything to this point. But I've also noted several times that in those early chapters, I've been surprised at the level of attention and work that he puts into the points that he's making.

It's not the case in Chapter Four. His logic is hard to follow. The folksy examples he opens his chapters with—it always starts with this folksy example, like walking with his grandpa, or here it's about coaching or whatever—and he's just trying to convince us he's just a regular guy. That's the trick with all these right-wing populist writers: they're not regular people. They're elites. They have lots of money, they're well educated, they're in elite positions. You don't get much more elite in American society than being a US Senator and so forth. They want to convince everybody they're just the dude down the street.

So he starts with all these folksy examples. They don't seem to fit, and the points he tries to make are incoherent. And as I was reading through it—because again, I'm reading this as we go. I haven't read the whole book, and I'm kind of doing that by design to kind of get a feel for it as we go, and maybe not quite a hot take, but something similar to that. And all in all, I was having a hard time even understanding the chapter.

And then it hit me why. And the reason is that Hawley's confused. He doesn't think that he is, but he is. The reason the reasoning is hard to follow, the reason it's bad, is because Hawley doesn't really understand what he's talking about. And maybe that shouldn't surprise us. Maybe that shouldn't surprise me. I sometimes, as an academic, can have this mistaken assumption when you come to a book or a text that it's going to be well written, it's going to be well articulated, that people are going to have reasons for the things that they say.

And at the end of the day, I think Hawley—the reasons he has, the reasons he gives—they're not the ones that are really motivating what he's doing. And I think we're going to start seeing that more and more as we go along. But I think in this chapter, which again we're only four chapters into, like, a ten-chapter book, but in this fourth chapter we get at what I think is, in some ways, the heart of the book, in the sense that it gives us the clearest view of what he thinks his opponents think about masculinity.

Let me say that again: what he thinks his opponents—opponents like me—think about masculinity. That is, we're getting, I think, the clearest view of what masculinity is as he conceives it, coming from the people he disagrees with. And I think the mistake is in trying to make sense of this, because analytically, from a perspective of analysis and looking at what people actually say and do and believe and what words mean, for example, it doesn't make sense. It's an analytical mess. But that's the point.

This is a book that masquerades as analysis, and it's different from Allie Beth Stuckey's book in this way. We did a series looking at Allie Beth Stuckey's book Toxic Empathy. She doesn't pretend to be doing analysis. I mean, she's a podcaster—don't trust the podcasters, wink wink. She's a podcaster, she's offering her opinion, but she's not, I think, even pretending to do the kind of analysis that Hawley is pretending to do here.

But this is a book that masquerades as analysis—analysis of the Bible and of culture and of politics and society, in some ways of history as well. And I think he probably believes that he's doing analysis, but it's not. It's not analysis. What it is is a defense of patriarchal, Christian supremacist society. That's what it is. He wants to defend that. The trappings of analysis serve that end. It's not really an analytical book, even though I think he wants us to think that it is. And I think his confused attempt to present it as something else is precisely the evidence of this—that he tries to present it as more than it is, and in chapters like this, it just falls apart.

So we're going to look at what Hawley has to say, and I'm going to try to highlight some of the tangles and confusions in the chapter. I'm going to do that some in this episode. We're going to spend probably a couple other episodes further untangling this. We're not going to get to everything in Chapter Four today, but I'm going to try to untangle those.

And what I hope emerges over the next few episodes is the nature of the caricature that Hawley is presenting to shore up his own gender ideology. So I would invite you, if you're listening to this—I'm guessing, maybe not, but I'm guessing you don't agree with Hawley. And if you don't agree with Hawley, and the things he says about gender kind of drive you nuts, I would just invite you to sort of put yourself in the position: Is he describing what you think? Because he thinks he is.

The people he calls liberals, or the Epicureans, or—you know, he ties them to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It's like he can't find any intellectual currents from the twentieth century, but the most recent he gets is Marx. So when he describes those people, and if you're listening to this, you're probably one of those people, ask yourself: Is he really describing you, or is he describing a caricature?

Because I know he's describing a caricature of me. I know that what he's describing is not what I think or do. It's not what anybody I know thinks or does. He spends a lot of time in this chapter critiquing academics. We're probably going to get into that next episode. I've spent my entire adult life in academia. I am one of those academic elites. I've never heard the kinds of things that he says academics all believe about masculinity and manhood and so forth. It's all a caricature.

Okay, so this chapter—I think the book as a whole, but this chapter really highlights—it's a classic so-called straw man example. It's an example where he sets up a caricature of a bunch of ideas he doesn't like, so it's easy to critique them and at the same time make it look like what he's saying is more significant and more analytical and more robust than it is.

Okay, so we'll dive into this. And I want to start with the way that he seems to use a number of terms interchangeably. And I think this is going to be important as we go along, not just here, but throughout the book. He uses different terms that don't mean the same thing. They don't have any inherent connection, but he toggles back and forth between them. Sometimes he'll just sort of plug one in in one place and one in another place. And I think this suggests that for him, they do mean the same thing—that as he uses these terms, they're all equivalent, they all mean the same thing.

And I think this is going to be really important. Again, I think it's something we have to hold up for the rest of the book, because this is the kind of rhetorical sleight of hand that Hawley is going to use. Number one, to make his arguments sound better than they are. And number two, I think they're also the sleight of hand you have to grab hold of to understand what he really believes and what's really going on.

So I want to start with the beginning of his chapter, where he begins by sharing some anecdotes about his life. That's what he does in these chapters, and they're intended, again, to be folksy and to endear us to him as he shares his valuable life lessons about masculinity. Josh is not just one of the guys, but he's lived some life, and he knows about masculinity and so forth. And his focus in this case is on coaching.

And so he talks about the importance of sports growing up and the influence that his middle and high school coaches had on him. I'm sure it's a story that a lot of us, myself included, can identify with. Lots of people—coaches have been mentors and important people in their lives, and he's no different.

And then he takes a roundabout way to discuss his brief stint as a coach. So during his gap year between college and law school, when he's on a fellowship in the UK—just a regular guy—he's working at a school in the UK, and he talks about how he spent part of his freshman year in college rowing on the rowing team before he got injured and eventually quit. So he made it through, like, part of a rowing season. So that's his background in rowing.

And at this school, essentially the fellows, I guess, who are there are asked to be involved with the kids or whatever. And so he becomes essentially the JV rowing coach. Okay, so that's all the setup for Josh Hawley as coach, his one year of coaching experience, I suppose.

And he essentially tells us that, as it turns out, he wasn't a good coach, and the kids didn't seem to respond to him. That's what he tells us. He says this. He says, "I wanted to inspire my rowers and motivate them, but as the months wore on, I wasn't having much luck. Instead, I could feel my irritation building. Why wouldn't they do as I said? Why weren't they getting better?"

And then he tells a story of what happens one day in the weight room. He says he's barking commands to some dude on bench, and there's a younger rower who's doing squats, and he says he sort of loses his balance, almost falls down, and an older rower, an upperclassman kid he calls Michael, helps him recover and offers him some words of encouragement.

And Hawley says this. He says, "It wasn't long. It wasn't a speech, but it was real." Doesn't tell us what those words of encouragement are. He just says that Michael, who seemed like a withdrawn kid, suddenly steps up and encourages a teammate, and so forth.

And so this pretty basic incident around sports—the notion of an upperclassman athlete on a team encouraging a lowerclassman is not, I don't know, it's not that weird or noteworthy. But he talks about it. He says it has a significant effect on him. He describes it as an inflection point in his brief stint as a coach. He says that he caught a glimpse of what the future Michael could become, this kid, and what he was doing.

And then he says, quote, "I knew, having glimpsed it, having seen the possibility in him, I was obliged to serve it. I was obliged to serve what he might be. If I wanted to lead these young rowers and help them achieve what they could, I had to get myself out of the way and serve the best possibilities in them."

And then he goes on to say that the incident taught him, quote, "the real character culminates in servanthood."

And then he goes on to talk about how the team had more success after this—there's been this inflection point, this is more success. But he doesn't say anything about, like, how his coaching changed, or what he did, or what he did to serve these kids, or how it was different, or whatever. That's why I say it's kind of a weird chapter. Like, okay, cool dude, cool story. I don't get it, but okay.

"Introducing leadership," I suppose. "If I wanted to lead these young rowers and help them, I had to get myself out of the way." It's where he mentions leadership. But I mean, exactly, okay.

So here's why I'm highlighting this. He introduces a couple key terms here: the terms of leadership, or the concept of leadership, and the term servanthood. And when I read this—leadership and servanthood, he says, "If I was obliged to serve them, if I wanted to lead them, I had to serve them," and so forth—I read that. I thought, okay, okay, I know where he's going. Okay.

Having come of age in evangelicalism of the nineties and aughts, I sense a discussion of so-called servant leadership coming. If you're of a certain age, you'll remember a time when servant leadership, being a servant leader, was the buzzword of buzzwords in evangelicalism. And I figured that that's where he's headed. But instead, he makes a hard turn.

Okay, with no transition and no shift, no warning—like, literally in the next sentence—he goes on to say this right after talking about how if he wants to serve, or excuse me, if he wants to lead them, he has to serve them. He makes this—he says this: "Of course, mention men, leadership, and power in the same breath these days, you're liable to be denounced as a misogynist, or worse."

I'm like, dude, in that paragraph you didn't mention men or power. I mean, you did talk about leading, but you didn't say those words. Okay?

He goes on to say, "Liberal voices portray masculine power as a disease in need of curing, as a particularly virulent social toxin. Their message to men, consequently: shut up, be passive, abjure leadership."

I read that and was like, wait, what? In all the coaching talk, it takes him forever to actually make it clear that the point is leadership. You can kind of tease that out. And he's like, "When I lead these kids," or whatever. You're like, oh, okay, here's the point of the story. He doesn't say at the beginning that leadership is the focus—you've got to tease that out. But his leadership—and when he sums up this life lesson that he learned in relation to coaching, he brings up the topic of servanthood.

But then, like, in the next sentence, he doesn't mention servanthood at all. Instead, he talks about masculinity and power in relation to leadership. He leads with masculinity, power, and leadership. Servanthood just disappears.

So what happened? Like, why are we suddenly talking about power? And like, how does that relate to masculinity? He doesn't draw any connections here. This is why I say when I read this, I was like, whoa, wait. Like, if I was reading a student paper and it was written this way, or if I was invited to review something that somebody else has written, I'd be like, we've got a rough transition here. I don't see the connection between these two paragraphs.

He doesn't have any connection. He just makes the shift. And he goes on. He does go on more to say about how liberals hate men and blame masculinity for everything that troubles America. He's just into attack mode.

So why does servanthood disappear? We don't know for sure. He doesn't tell us. But this is one of the places where, I think, the reason it disappears for Hawley is that he assumes they're the same thing. That is, I think he thinks that whatever power is, he seems to think that power and servanthood are the same. So he can define leadership in terms of servanthood, and then the next paragraph start talking about masculine power, and for him, they're just equivalent. They're just the same thing.

And that's something I want us to hold on to, because we're going to come to it in this episode, and we're going to come to it through the rest of this book. What Hawley can't imagine is that there could be more than one way of being masculine, and that's how that discourse on the right works. Masculinity is one thing, and it is only one thing, and it is always one thing.

And so he can just switch and toggle back and forth between servanthood and masculine power, because I think for him, those two things are somehow the same. And if you're listening to this saying, "Well, that doesn't sound like the same thing," well then you're with me.

Okay, so he goes on to say, on the same page, says that God calls men to, quote, "the kind of character that embraces servanthood." So we get that toggling back and forth: servanthood, then masculine power, then another throwaway reference to servanthood. But he doesn't explain anywhere: How does power relate to servanthood? You're talking about servanthood—like, what does that have to do with masculine power, or masculinity as such?

We're going to dive a little more. He's going to go back to the Bible and back to Genesis on this notion of leadership. And I think we're going to tackle that in the next episode. We'll get to that. But he just toggles back and forth.

So there's a lot of confusion in his presentation. And here's my prediction, not just for this chapter, but for the book. My prediction is what we're going to see is the swapping of concepts like power and servanthood is going to remain interchangeable. Because what this does—what it's going to do, it's the same thing it does for everybody on the right who talks this way—it's going to allow Hawley to affirm a model of masculinity defined by power. And that's also how he's going to define authority. It's always going to be defined by power, by will, by the exercise of what one wills and so forth.

He's going to affirm a model of masculinity defined by power, but he's going to try to pass it off as servanthood, or power serving the good, and therefore it's fine, or whatever. And what that's going to do is it's going to allow this rhetorical move. And this is what happens: you get a model of masculinity that affirms power. You get criticisms of it. And we're going to come to that in an episode or two as well. We'll introduce it here. We're going to dive deeper.

You get criticisms of that, and then he's going to throw his arms, his shoulders, his hands in the air. "But I don't understand. Christians say that men are servants. We're just affirming a model of men as servant leaders. Like, how could you be opposed to that? What's your problem? Why don't you want servants?"

God, that's the shift. That's the sleight of hand that he's going to do. So people are actually critiquing practices that involve the exercise of power over others. But we're going to get this defensive response as, "Hey, I'm just saying that men should be serving others. I don't know what your problem is."

So why do I think that's the direction it's going to go? He hasn't done that yet. Why do I think it's the direction it's going to go? I got two reasons.

One, again, it's completely consistent with the way conservative American Christians talk about masculinity and the way that they have for decades. A lot of the stuff in contemporary discourse about masculinity is inflected differently than it has been in recent years and the not-so-distant past, but the ideas are the same. Conservative Christians have talked this way forever. That's number one.

But number two, we already see hints of this in the discussion that he has. Okay? So as I said, he goes on to attack liberals for how they hate men and critique masculinity. And the same selective ignoring of distinctions and terms underpins his whole argument. We can see how this plays out.

So appealing to a buzzword that is near and dear to everyone on the right, Hawley identifies Cultural Marxism—it's not a thing, folks, it's just not—but he identifies Cultural Marxism as the culprit behind critiques of masculinity. And in this regard, he specifically highlights a statement that was put forward by the American Psychological Association, or the American Psychiatric Association—I'm not clear which. I think it's the American Psychiatric Association. You can let me know.

But this is a statement that he quotes in his book, and I want to hover on it for a few minutes here. Okay, this is what he says. It's a 2019 statement. The statement said, quote, "Traditional masculinity, marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance, and aggression, is on the whole harmful," end quote.

And then that statement went on to say that conforming to traditional masculine ideology can, quote, "negatively influence mental health and physical health."

That's the quote. Hawley goes nuts. Okay?

But before we get to Hawley's response, I want to pause for just a second to think about what this statement is saying and what it's implying. The key term here, obviously, is "traditional masculinity." But what does that mean to describe it as traditional masculinity? It's got that adjective: traditional masculinity. It doesn't just say masculinity. It does not say masculinity is on the whole harmful. Masculinity can negatively influence mental health and physical health. No, it says traditional masculinity, defined as what?

It says, well, traditional masculinity—what is it saying? Masculinity has traditionally in our society been defined and performed in a particular way, according to a particular ideal. And within that ideal, men are stoic and competitive. They exercise dominance over others. They're aggressive.

And I don't think you have to look far or way back in American history or your own experience to recognize that that is indeed a dominant model of, quote-unquote, "manhood" within American society. So it seems to say this is what it means by traditional masculinity: masculinity defined by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance, and aggression—that these would be the defining features of what makes a man a man, of what defines masculinity. It says that is what is dangerous. That is what is harmful. It presents negative mental health and physical health outcomes.

But here's what's also implied in that: that there are other ways of being masculine. The adjective matters here. It's a critique of traditional masculinity, which is the same as when people critique militant masculinity or toxic masculinity. These are all broad synonyms that people who are not Hawley and his ilk criticize, and they criticize a certain conception of manhood and masculinity. But they all imply, to my mind, that there are other models of masculinity. That's my understanding, and I think it's the understanding of most people I know.

But Hawley, just like everyone on the right, conveniently overlooks all of this. The APA, the American Psychiatric Association, according to him, just critiques masculinity. It's as if that word "traditional" just wasn't there. In fact, he says that the APA attacks men by saying that men are aggressive and violent and so forth.

This is what he says. He says that this was the shift since the sixties—and that's always the time when the people on the right are freaking out about, is always the sixties. He says, quote, "The problem was men."

So he twists these criticisms of a particular but really culturally dominant expression of masculinity. He takes what are criticisms of a particular model of masculinity, and he twists them into criticisms of masculinity and men as such. That's the move he makes.

So he says liberals hate men—not masculinity, not traditional masculinity. Not "liberals critique traditional masculinity." Because he says liberals hate men because masculinity is toxic and fragile and violent and aggressive. That's the claim that is being made.

This is what I mean when I say this chapter gives us a view of what he thinks other people think about masculinity. His claim is they just hate men. It makes me wonder about all the liberal men. Just as an aside, as somebody who could be described, I think, as a progressive man, I'm curious—I don't know how much I hate men. They just hate men. That's what he presents it as.

And this is the key rhetorical move that energizes his entire discourse and everything on the right about masculinity. They take critiques of a particular understanding of masculinity and present it as a critique of masculinity as such.

Now that's a problem for a lot of reasons. It's bad reasoning, it's not a good argument, it's not factually accurate. Those are all real. But here's the biggest reason it's a problem for me, and this is why it's worth hovering over this to decode it: it means that people on the right and people like Hawley, they actually define that model of masculinity as masculinity.

What Hawley is defending is so-called traditional masculinity. That's what he's going to be defending. So a masculinity marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance, and aggression. What he's actually going to do is he is going to do exactly what I'm saying is the mistake. He's going to say that is what masculinity is.

Masculinity, for them, becomes a code for exactly that kind of masculinity. So if you critique aggression or dominance or stoicism or competitiveness, if you have any criticisms of those things, you're attacking men. That's what he's going to assume.

They are the ones—that is, Hawley and the right—they're the ones who accept toxic or traditional or militarized or militant, rather, masculinity as real or authentic masculinity, and they actively defend those models. So that's what he's going to do for the rest of the book. He's going to take that traditional model and what we would call toxic masculinity, and he's going to try to defend it. That's what's going to happen.

And that's where the language of servanthood, that Christian language, is going to come back in. And I want to just throw out there: I've never heard a liberal or progressive say they're opposed to servanthood, that if there are men whose model of masculinity is about serving others, like, oh, that's terrible. It's terrible to serve others. I've never met anybody who says that. Why? Because that's not what they're criticizing.

But that's where the sleight of hand is going to come in. He's going to take all of that, but he's going to put it under the word servanthood, and he's essentially going to baptize it—pretty literally going to baptize it, in the sense that he's going to say it's divinely ordained. It comes from God. So that's what's going to happen.

So there's this complex sort of, for me, this mirror play here, where he sees a critique on the left and sees it one way. And the reason he sees that critique is because he finds in them what he actually thinks. He thinks they're critiquing masculinity as such, because that's how he defines masculinity. What they define as a kind of masculinity which is problematic and should be rethought, that's what he sees as masculinity. That's why he feels attacked, that's why he feels provoked, and that's why he's always launching this kind of offensive.

But as we've seen, it's a caricature. It's not what those people actually think. We're going to look at that more next episode. We're going to look at a bunch of other things next episode. I've got to wind this down.

In the meantime, though, as I say, I think even just the first part of this, this fourth chapter, really illustrates what it is and the supposed critique of masculinity that just triggers Hawley and everybody on the right. Because if your vision of masculinity is that it is defined by aggressiveness and power—men are called to be leaders, but we're going to define leaders in terms of power, and power is going to be defined in terms of aggression and so forth—then critiques of aggressiveness are a threat. They're a threat to your manhood, they're a threat to your masculinity, they're a threat to your power. And it provokes exactly the response we see in Hawley.

I think we're going to see this play out more as we go along. We're going to dive in a couple more episodes, and we'll look at again what—why it is that religiously he thinks this holds. I also think I want to say some more about what he says liberals and academics and others say about manhood. And I'm going to have a couple critiques of the liberals and academics as well, because we are not blameless in this. But we'll get to that when we get to that.

In the meantime, again, thank you for listening. If you're a subscriber, thank you. You help us do so many things that we do. If you're not a subscriber, and that's something you would be able or willing to do, I'd ask you to consider that. I want to thank all of you who say, "You know what, I can't afford to subscribe, but I will send gifts from time to time and help support the work that you're doing." Thank you so much for that.

We do a lot of things, as Brad has been saying in the weekly roundups. We have some more things on tap for 2026 that we're trying to get up and running. You let us do that. So please keep that coming. And thank you so much.

And as always, danielmillerswaj@gmail.com—best way to reach me. I value your input and insights. That's what I'm trying to say. So please keep those ideas coming. I'm always looking forward—Hawley's book is not going to last forever, thank God. And I've got some ideas for new episodes, new series after that. But I would love to hear more. I'd love to hear what you're thinking.

In the meantime, once again, thank you, and as always, please be well until we get a chance to talk again.