American manhood is a fragile and precarious thing, shattered by the slightest deviation from ever-shifting norms—eating the wrong taco, tasting tofu, not eating meat, or maybe eating too much meat. Or at least, that is what right-wing commentators have suggested by their attacks on the Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate in Texas, James Talarico.Since the 37-year-old state senator clinched the nomination, right-wing politicians and media figures have been running a bizarre smear campaign attacking Talarico for not being manly enough. President Donald Trump called Talarico a “vegan,” and Trump’s adviser Stephen Miller has twice declared that Talarico is “transgender.” Right-wing media figures have referred to him as “Tofu Talarico” and suggested that he is “against meat.” That prompted the Talarico campaign to put out photos of the candidate eating meat, leading the Fox News host Jesse Watters to sneer that Talarico was “getting his hands on whatever meat he can.” Watters is 48 years old.Anyway, you get it. Talarico is gay or something, and for the GOP, there’s definitely something wrong with that. Its own candidate, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, is mired in allegations of corruption and infidelity, and is committed to some policies so extreme that, like Trump himself, they are unpopular even in deep-red Texas. Talarico’s choirboy looks and religiously inflected liberalism provide a stark contrast to Paxton’s hypocritical self-righteousness, and so Republicans are desperately trying to make those qualities seem like weaknesses.George W. Bush’s advisers snickered that John Kerry looked “French.” Trump, of course, is famous for put-downs whose cruelty is part of their appeal. But there’s something new about the attacks on Talarico. Calling a man “French” or “vegan” retains a mote of the old deniability. Calling Talarico “transgender” does not. The rhetoric resembles nothing more than the frothing tone of masculinity influencers in the online manosphere, with its strict but arbitrary standards for what makes a man a man. Although Republicans have devoted themselves to this type of marketing, parts of the Democratic coalition have an appetite for it as well—they’ve already face-Platnered at least once as a result.[Listen: When both parties try to out-macho each other]The Trump administration and the conservative movement seem to have taken this advertising strategy and transformed it into an ideology. The result is a secretary of health and human services who posts videos of himself working out in jeans and then presides over outbreaks of measles and explosive diarrhea; a director of Medicare and Medicaid who takes a break from stripping health care away from children to demonstrate how not to do a squat; and a defense secretary who interrupts his day job of starting and losing pointless, illegal wars in the Middle East to announce that he will force testosterone tests on service members. And Americans are supposed to be impressed by these overgrown children showing off their masculine prowess while failing at their basic adult responsibilities.Any man who goes online today is apt to come across content telling him that he will never find a partner who will earn him the respect of other men if he lacks money and connections, if he is not bodybuilder-fit with a full head of hair, if he is not more than six feet tall. Online influencers who push this narrative have products to sell. They want you to buy their workout apps, their advice sessions, their investment plans. That’s just how a lot of advertising works: It makes you insecure so you’ll pay for a product in hopes of temporarily silencing your gnawing sense of inadequacy.Ad campaigns have long preyed in this way on female insecurities, telling women how they are supposed to look and act. In her 1991 book, Backlash, the feminist writer Susan Faludi observed that the rise of women in the workplace was a boon for the beauty industry. Women were told they needed to buy more makeup because they’d been masculinized by having a job: “Professional progress had downgraded their looks; equality had created worry lines and cellulite,” Faludi wrote.That marketing, though, was designed to turn women against themselves; the manosphere now tells men to lash out at others instead. It encourages white men in particular, but not exclusively, to blame their problems on a society that has allowed their lessers to compete with them for employment, power, and prestige by removing the barriers that once kept them out. The heroin-chic era was destructive for women, but it didn’t result in popular media figures advocating for men to be stripped of the right to vote. Notably, tradwife content, the ideological companion to manosphere content, is mostly about how wonderful it would be to be a kind of slave.Social scientists have found that when men think their masculinity is being questioned, they may dismiss that challenge as irrelevant, they may quietly feel bad or insecure, or they may overcompensate by trying to behave in a more stereotypically masculine fashion. And that last reaction is where the dollars are. Be a man and buy a gun. Get the manly cereal for men. Wipe your butt with the wet wipes for men. Get the manly smelling deodorant. Eat the manly steak. It’s no coincidence that gambling apps and crypto companies have spent so much money on ads that make giving them your money seem adventurous.Just as the manosphere and its galaxy of hucksters want you to fork over your cash so you can feel better about yourself as a man, Republicans want to make you feel insecure about your masculinity so that you vote Republican. Masculinity, in this sense, is a lifestyle product: one that comes with a set of political beliefs predicated on the subjugation of women, minority groups, and anyone else who men are told are their inferiors.There’s inherently nothing wrong with masculinity itself. Boys and young men don’t seek out the manosphere “because they inherently hate women or think they are inferior,” the feminist writer Jessica Valenti has written. Rather, they “are desperate for community and answers in a confusing time of their lives.” When people are constantly told that the only way to be a worthwhile human being is to conform to gender norms, they will naturally strive to meet those expectations, even if it means being harsh to themselves or others. But the strength of those emotions is precisely what makes them so exploitable.Adam Stanaland, a psychology professor at the University of Richmond, told me that what’s concerning is when insecure men feel pressured to validate their manhood by harming others. Stanaland co-authored a study on “fragile” masculinity that notes that such men may compensate by endorsing “political bigotry, homophobia, sexual violence, and anti-environmentalism,” and that they are “more likely to endorse policies and politicians that disproportionately harm marginalized groups.”Stanaland speculated that for “white men especially, their masculinity is framed by this idea they must be at the top of not only the gender hierarchy, but also other social hierarchies, and so any kinds of threats to that positioning of them at the hierarchy could be responded to with these compensatory behaviors.” Sexist ideology nevertheless has a broader appeal. The former congressman Matt Gaetz, whose nomination for attorney general was derailed by allegations that he’d had sex with a minor (allegations that he denied), predicted before the 2024 election that “for every Karen we lose, there’s a Julio and a Jamal ready to sign up for the MAGA movement.”Ironically, some of the most prominent masculinity influencers are not themselves white. Andrew and Tristan Tate, who were recently arrested on rape and sex-trafficking charges after being spared from legal consequences for years thanks to interventions by the Trump administration, are biracial. This has not stopped the brothers from repeating racist far-right arguments that play well online, such as Andrew implying that Jews are “subverting western populations into mass genetic suicide.” This idea, known today as the “Great Replacement” theory, is a continuation of old-timey racist fears of “race mixing” (a common manosphere preoccupation)—and it’s a little weird to hear coming from a biracial man. One part of selling a product is knowing your customer base, I suppose.More than a decade ago, when I was first reporting on the manosphere, it was populated largely by middle-aged men, many of them divorcés, who retained a superficial concern for men’s welfare. They at least pretended that it was a normal political movement focused on issues such as suicide, rules disfavoring dads in custody battles, and male victims of domestic violence. They may have dreamed of forcing women back into traditional subservience—taking away female suffrage, repealing antidiscrimination laws, and making it harder for women to divorce—but mostly they avoided saying so out loud.Over the past 10 years, the misogyny of the manosphere has become more open and strident, but the big innovation seems to have been combining that conspiratorial misogyny with earnest self-help advice. Heartbreak and rejection leave people emotionally vulnerable, and the manosphere pitch often comes paired with benign advice about standing up for yourself, being mentally tough, or becoming physically active. But getting yourself together with the expectation that soon everyone you meet will be forced to respect you inevitably leads to disappointment.When that disappointment sets in, the manosphere has an explanation: Can’t find a girlfriend? It’s because women who make their own living can no longer be forced into marrying guys they don’t like. Can’t find a job? It’s because undeserving women and minorities are being picked instead of you, even though you’re better. Feel bad about yourself? It’s because our feminized society deprived you of a life of meaningful toil, military adventure, and elevated social status. It is a bleak view of the world, a kind of male doomerism in which a meaningful life can be found only in the domination and exploitation of others.The fact that none of that advice could ever help someone find real intimacy or success isn’t a problem for the manosphere hucksters, because those achievements would be bad for the business model. They prefer their followers to be tied only to them, forking over cash to be told they’re victims of one conspiracy after another. They’ll just tell you that women can’t be trusted because they are mere baubles to impress other men with, and other men cannot be trusted because they are the competition.There probably shouldn’t be a lot of overlap between religious-right leaders, government officials, and someone like Andrew Tate, who proudly describes himself as a “pimp.” Yet Tate’s belief that “society functions better as a patriarchy” is hard to distinguish from the views of Doug Wilson, the pastor invited by Hegseth to preach at the Pentagon, who thinks that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote. Pious or secular, these beliefs come down to the same idea: Men are people, and women are things.As my colleague Helen Lewis has reported, “Woman-bashing plays well on social media and sells lots of ads for crypto, sports betting, and supplements.” She adds: “You can make good money telling men that they’re the truly oppressed sex.”You can win a lot of votes that way, too.[Russell Berman: The return of the Democratic manly man]The logic of this male-doomer industry is to remove all unfair competition—from women, from minorities, from immigrants—by either disenfranchising or dispossessing them, and in this way reassert the dominance to which white American men are entitled. And even if you’re not white, wouldn’t it feel good to put all those women who don’t like you in their place?One prominent explanation for the resurgence of reactionary ideas about gender is that it’s a consequence of structural changes in the economy: Manly jobs such as manufacturing and construction have been lost, while feminine-coded service jobs such as caregiving have surged.This is an accurate description of what’s happened in the economy, but it’s not a sufficient explanation for the rise of extreme misogyny. For one thing, these economic changes are decades old. Faludi followed up Backlash with Stiffed, which argued that working-class American men were being deprived of work they could be proud of while still being expected to live up to a traditional idea of men as providers. Stiffed was published more than a quarter century ago.The theory also doesn’t necessarily line up with who is most likely to buy into what the manosphere is selling. “There’s this myth out there that the young men who are embracing this ideology and moving to the right in a coherent and virulent way are people being left behind by the economy,” John Ray, who does polling for the Young Men Research Project, told me. “Actually, a lot of the young men who have these more extreme right-wing views are more economically well-off than others in the sample.” The project’s polling, he said, has found that “young men who were more economically precarious, broadly speaking, were less ideological—one way or the other. It was actually young men that said that they were less worried about their finances who are more likely to have some of those right-wing views.”The modern data economy must play a bigger role. People spend more time than ever on their phones. Virtually everything you see while you are scrolling a social-media site is an advertisement—for a product, a lifestyle, or an individual feed. Social-media companies want you to be glued to your phone for as long as possible so they can sell you things or produce data they can sell to others. It doesn’t matter if the things you’re watching or reading are true or false, right or wrong.Extremism draws attention, so it’s not surprising that we’re seeing more extreme ideas about what it means to be a man. Yet when conservatives complain about diverse casting in movies, or romanticize the era of colonialism, or insist that women should be disenfranchised, this is more than mere trolling for eyeballs. They are telling you their policy plan. And they are using the psychological lever of male insecurity to win political support for that program.What kind of program has this internet-brain-rotted masculinity brought us? A public-health official who neglects fatal outbreaks of preventable diseases because he seems to believe that only the strong should survive. A Department of Defense, renamed the Department of War, that launches a needless war of choice in the Middle East. A government that props up the fossil-fuel industry (manly) while deliberately suppressing green alternatives (girly), leading to a catastrophic rise in energy prices when that war doesn’t go as planned. A president who imposed tariffs to bring back “manly jobs,” but only drove up inflation instead.It’s hard to see how any of this has made men’s lives better. But maybe making other people’s lives worse is enough.