Republican Sen. Josh Hawley delivered a rousing keynote speech at the recent National Conservatism Conference, in which he warned that the American Left is ruining men.
“The deconstruction of America begins with and depends on the deconstruction of American men,” Hawley said. “The Left want to define traditional masculinity as toxic. They want to define the traditional masculine virtues — things like courage and independence and assertiveness — as a danger to society. This is an effort the Left has been at for years now. And they have had alarming success.”
It was a lengthy speech filled with lots of hand-wringing over everything from declining marriage rates to women’s sports to “President Biden’s illegal vaccine mandate on private citizens.” One part of his speech, though, has received the lion’s share of attention.
“Can we be surprised,” Hawley posited, “that after years of being told they are the problem, that their manhood is the problem, more and more men are withdrawing into the enclave of idleness and pornography and video games?”
It struck me as an odd line of reasoning. Stop calling masculinity toxic! It makes men want to mow down fake people with fake firearms and watch women be dominated sexually!
Nonetheless, if “more and more men” were turning to video games and porn as a reaction to shifting cultural norms and women sharing spaces that used to be reserved exclusively for men — Hawley cited women outnumbering men in college as evidence of men’s downfall — that would strike me as a topic worthy of discussion.
Because equality is not a zero-sum game. A just society doesn’t take turns picking different populations to marginalize and ostracize. A just society strives for all people to find belonging and meaning and fulfillment and dignity.
It’s a shame that some politicians and provocateurs keep telling men that for others to succeed in life, they must fail. But if that message is resonating to such a degree that it’s increasing porn and video game use, I’d like to know it — particularly since I’m raising a son.
The thing is … it’s not.
“It’s one of those kinds of claims that’s so detached from any empirical evidence or quantitative data that it’s just laughably false,” said Joshua Grubbs, associate professor of psychology at Bowling Green State University. “We don't have any evidence that masculinity being attacked leads to more porn use.”
Grubbs’ research focuses on the scientific study of addiction, personality and morality. He recently published a peer-reviewed study on pornography use before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. I called him to get his thoughts on Hawley’s speech.
“There is some evidence that video game play and pornography use are higher than they were in years past,” Grubbs said. “But that has more to do with ease of access. The fact that everyone carries around a supercomputer with a high-definition screen in their pocket at all times means men are accessing video games and pornography more easily than say, 30 years ago. But so are women.”
Pornography use did spike in the early months of the pandemic, shortly after many states enacted lockdown orders, Grubbs found. But so did the use of other streaming services: Netflix, Hulu, Disney Plus, the decidedly buttoned-down BBC. Plus, Grubbs noted, Pornhub began offering its premium content for free in the first few months of the pandemic, which also likely drove increased viewership.
By last month, Grubbs found, porn use had dipped to pre-pandemic levels.
“It’s the sourdough bread effect,” he said. “People get bored — regression to the mean is the term we use in behavioral sciences. After a while, all that extra porn and video games get kind of boring.”
Grubbs said Hawley’s statement left him “perplexed.”
“It smacked of stringing together a bunch of buzzwords to see what hits and then doubling down on that to get a reaction,” he said. “It was a political statement meant to rile up an audience, but it’s not attached to any sort of evidence.”
Porn, he said, has long been used as a cultural lightning rod, but rarely in any kind of instructive way.
“It’s frustrating,” he said. “Because certain legislators love to talk about it, but they don’t pony up any money to research the effects of it.”
Making their alarm bells ring a little hollow.
I asked Grubbs, who is, after all, a psychologist — and a husband and a father — if there’s anything to be gained from the dialogue around Hawley’s speech.
“If you have teenage sons, instead of worrying about what Josh Hawley said, it may be a good time to check in with them, open a dialogue with them about their habits,” he said. “There’s always value in parents talking to their children about the motivation for the pastimes they have.”
And if Hawley’s words resonated, Grubbs said, examine that.
“If you are a man who is feeling kind of downtrodden and rejected by the world,” he continued, “think about how that’s affecting you and how you’re coping with that. Are you viewing porn because you’re feeling excluded, lonely, broken by life? If so, it’s a good time to check in with yourself and talk to someone. I don’t just mean a professional. Talk to a friend. Talk to someone you trust. Whatever the problem is, I can assure you video games and porn are probably not the solution.”
