Real Men Reject Archaic Notions of Masculinity
To their own detriment, China’s aging leaders are stubbornly enforcing an ideal that passed its prime decades ago.
Beauty has no gender.
Photographer: Wang Zhao/AFP via Getty Images
The Pentagon isn't in the habit of rebuking talk-show hosts. But last week, military officials and a sitting senator lashed out at Tucker Carlson for mocking pregnant service members and a “more feminine” U.S. military under President Joe Biden. This is all happening, he noted, as China's military resists “feminization” and becomes “more masculine.”
Carlson's comments about female soldiers received most of the attention. But his approving comments on Chinese government policies designed to boost masculinity deserve attention, too. For well over a decade, a generation of aging Chinese officials has openly worried that the nation's boys are being “spoiled by housewives and female teachers,” as Carlson put it. In response, they've encouraged sometimes cartoonish policies designed to avert a “masculinity crisis,” generating intense, popular backlash along the way. In the short term, this often misogynistic paranoia is reshaping Chinese school curriculums. Longer-term, it's a losing argument in a country that's developed more mature notions of what it is to be a man.