Secretary Hegseth Doubles Down on his Culture War against Feminism

His “war on woke” is part of a broader male backlash against gender equity

From the moment Secretary Pete Hegseth announced a “meeting of the generals” in Quantico, Virginia on September 30, speculation ran wild among the commentariat about the rationale for the gathering.

Was the Trump Administration planning to make a major announcement, or release an especially dramatic foreign policy statement? But why bring in hundreds of incredibly busy people from all over the world if you could have done it on a Zoom call?

Pro-democracy activists worried openly that the White House would use the gathering to make a performative display of Trump’s plan to enlist the U.S. military even more directly in his authoritarian power-grab, and signal an acceleration of the ongoing purge of possible dissenters.

As it turns out, the major news that emerged from the meeting was 1) Hegseth’s comments about not tolerating “fat generals,“ and reinforcing the need for “male standards” of physical fitness, and 2) Donald Trump’s ominous statement that he wanted the military to use American cities as “training grounds” for operations.

That comment – delivered in the midst of a meandering and at times absurd 73-minute speech -- drew widespread criticism and notes of alarm from critics who warned that it would represent a dramatic, unprecedented, and unconstitutional expansion of the military’s authority.

Trump also made many silly -- and frankly embarrassing – comments to the highly accomplished military brass. Presumably, many of the generals and admirals had never attended a Trump rally in person, in which the commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces toggles between serious political pronouncements, random diversions, and tried-and-true bits of insult comedy.

Perhaps the most encouraging development to emerge from this debacle are the stories that continue to circulate about the ways in which the military leaders themselves showed clear signs of being less than impressed. We can’t read too much into this, because they‘re duty-bound to be apolitical.

But the generals, admirals, and senior non-commissioned officers (NCO’s) did sit largely stone-faced through numerous laugh lines in both speeches, barely cracking a smile at any of the secretary’s or the president’s jokes. And reporters who cover the Pentagon have struggled over the past ten days to find military leaders willing to say anything positive about the meeting.

As the novelist, journalist, and West Point graduate Lucian Truscott IV wrote, “I have concluded that today’s display of ego and bluster and falsehoods by Hegseth and Trump may have served a useful purpose after all. Every one of those generals and admirals and senior noncommissioned officers now has had personal experience with who they serve under.”

Truscott also highlighted Hegseth’s brazenly retrograde attitude toward women, and mused about how 21^st century military leaders must have felt about it.

“None of them,” he said, “could have missed the sexism in Hegseth’s speech when he told them that the military is ‘going back to male standards’ for combat soldiers. All of them know that female soldiers have earned Ranger status by enduring the exact same hardships male soldiers endure. All of them know that women fly jets off and onto the pitching decks of aircraft carriers in dangerous seas. The Coast Guard admirals know that female officers command the same rescue boats that go out in impossible weather every day.”

I’ll go a step further. Many of the generals, admirals, and NCO’s who sat through that speech (and the president’s) are men who have not only served with highly capable, talented and accomplished women; many of them have mentored and promoted them as well. They know how vital and indispensable women are to functioning militaries in the modern era.

I’m certain there were many senior military men in the audience who were embarrassed and offended by many of the Secretary’s comments.

“Male standards” is a euphemism for “(few) women need apply”

Secretary Hegseth’s speech was more than an announcement of new Pentagon priorities. It was, in many ways, a performative declaration of what is a much wider right-wing culture war against feminism (and other forms of social justice).

The “male standards” fiasco comes on the heels of a series of decisions about women military leaders by Trump and Hegseth since the start of Trump 2.0.

Consider their record over the past eight months. According to Tom Nichols in The Atlantic:

Trump and Hegseth have been on a firing spree throughout the military, especially when it comes to removing women from senior positions. This past winter, the administration fired Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first female chief of naval operations; Admiral Linda Fagan, the first female Coast Guard commandant; and Lieutenant General Jennifer Short, who was serving as the senior military assistant to the secretary of defense, all within weeks of one another.

I taught for many years at the U.S. Naval War College, where I worked under its first female president, Vice Admiral Shoshana Chatfield. In 2023, she became the U.S. military representative to the NATO Military Committee—and then she was fired in April, apparently in part because of a presentation she gave on Women’s Equality Day 10 years ago.

At this point, women have been cleared out of all of the military’s top jobs. They are not likely to be replaced by other women: Of the three dozen four-star officers on active duty in the U.S. armed forces, none is female, and none of the administration’s pending appointments for senior jobs even at the three-star level is a woman.

Some observers might see a pattern here.

It’s important to note that feminist scholars like Cynthia Enloe, the trailblazing political theorist and expert in international relations, have long maintained that efforts to restrict women’s leadership and other opportunities in the military matter – and should be opposed – not because “inclusivity” would solve all the military’s problems. Rather, they argue, sexism should not be allowed to stand in any institution, including deeply gendered ones like the military. Among other benefits, efforts to promote gender equity make the sexism of male-dominated institutions visible and open them up to critique. Enloe and others express caution, however, about merely “adding women” in ways that merely reinforce gender hierarchies and inequality, rather than dismantle it.

“Fat generals in the halls of the Pentagon”

Hegseth’s specific goal in Quantico was to lay out a series of directives to military commanders that included a re-emphasis on the physical fitness of the troops – up and down the chain of command. (Except, of course, for the commander-in-chief.) From this day forward, military leaders will need to shape up or ship out. Literally.

“We don’t need to see fat generals and admirals in the halls of the Pentagon,” he said.

Hegseth’s speech continued his ongoing critique of the military’s attempts, over the past generation, to bring the ethnic, racial, gender, and sexual diversity of the nation’s fighting forces and leadership more in line with that of the country as a whole, and to celebrate that incredible diversity as unmistakable evidence of the strength and vitality of the institution.

He has long mocked that notion, going so far as to say that “diversity is our strength” is the “dumbest phrase in military history.”

Hegseth pledged to “remove the social justice, politically correct and toxic ideological garbage that had infected our department, to rip out the politics. No more identity months, DEI offices, dudes in dresses. No more climate change worship. No more division, distraction or gender delusions… We are done with that shit.”

The philosopher Kate Manne called Hegseth an “angry little man” whose speech was “a performance of toxic masculinity so shameless that I blush to even recount it.“

The backward movement of the military under Hegseth -- which includes a scaling back of efforts to prevent military sexual violence under the pretense of “anti-wokeness” -- is disgraceful. But none of it should be shocking. One of MAGA’s animating passions is hostility to the gender equity gains of recent decades, a passion shared by unapologetic Christian nationalists in the Administration like Hegseth and OMB Director Russell Vought.

Pete Hegseth’s directives to the generals need to be understood as part of that broader right-wing project. Right-wing cultural populism in the 21^st century –- especially but not exclusively in the United States – seeks to reassert male power after several decades of feminist progress.

This progress — however uneven— has posed a significant challenge to male centrality, which accounts for the vociferous nature of the current right-wing backlash.

This explains – at least in part -- Hegseth’s emphasis on “male standards” in his directive to senior military leaders. For the past couple of generations, women have been challenging men with unprecedented success in areas like education, the professions, business, and politics.

But one area where men as a group continue to have an advantage over women is in physical size and strength. So for men seeking to take back control of the cultural narrative, guess what? The qualities of size and strength become more valued.

Think of it like this, from the perspective of a certain kind of traditional man:

Women might be competing with me in all those areas, and in some cases outcompeting me.

But they can’t do as many pushups as I can! In a one-on-one confrontation with the enemy on a hypothetical “battlefield,” I have an advantage over women due to my greater upper body strength!

You can see why it’s in the self-interest of men who are threatened by woman’s gains and strengths to emphasize an area — physical size and strength — in which men continue to hold an advantage.

This is consistent with the main thesis of Mariah Burton Nelson’s brilliant book The Stronger Women Get, the More Men Love Football, (1994). In that study, she argued that many men are especially drawn to violent contact sports during periods of feminist progress, in part as a tactical retreat into a hypermasculinity that places more value on men’s relative physical advantages over women.

Lessons from the Reagan era

The Trump Administration’s anti-feminism, and Pete Hegseth’s version of it in the Pentagon, are themselves part of a much larger history of male backlash against women’s gains. Hegseth’s directives might be disruptive and damaging, but they have important historical antecedents.

To be sure, there has never been an American president as reckless, destructive, and dangerously authoritarian as Donald Trump. As a pop culture figure, movement leader, and political figure, he is sui generis. But the backlash energies he has tapped into and channeled long precede him.

For example, Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again” was plagiarized from Ronald Reagan.

Another theme that Trumpism borrowed from Reaganism is the notion that a soft and feminized culture needed a “real man” back in the White House in order to restore national virility.

In fact, a key storyline in contemporary conservative mythology is that Republican Ronald Reagan –- an actor who had played cowboys in the movies -- rode in from the west (literally, on horseback!) to rescue a nation adrift and made vulnerable (e.g. the Iranian Hostage Crisis) by the folksy and weak administration of Democratic president Jimmy Carter.

Similarly, the right sees Trump 2.0 not only as a restoration, but a hypermasculine correction after what they regard as the feckless presidency of an enfeebled Joe Biden.

Trump’s core supporters are also deeply grateful to him for holding the line against the feminist threat by defeating the only two women (so far) who’ve had a realistic chance to become president.

Culturally, Reaganism was both a reassertion of whiteness and a project dedicated to reinvigorating American (white) masculinity. In her 1989 book, “The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War,” cultural critic Susan Jeffords argued that American patriarchy had suffered a major setback due to the loss of the Vietnam War, and that entertainment culture – especially certain Hollywood films of the 1980s – sought to reinforce and recover good old-fashioned American manhood after the defeat it had suffered in that tragic and disgraceful imperial war.

In her subsequent book, Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era (1994), Jeffords offered a detailed analysis of right-wing themed films like Rambo, and the ways in which they reinscribed (and in some cases, eroticized) the muscular, hardened male body that became a signifier for a defiant reassertion of male power after a period of feminist ascendance.

It’s obvious Pete Hegseth would never read books like The Remasculinization of America or Hard Bodies, but insights into his recent efforts to “remasculinize” the American military after the “forever wars” tragedies in Iraq and Afghanistan jump off their pages.

Gender and power in the material and symbolic realms

As some of you might know, my first educational documentary was entitled Tough Guise: Violence, Media and the Crisis in Masculinity* (Media Education Foundation, 2000). In that video, we included a sequence that showed the size of men’s bodies and guns steadily increasing in media representations over the past several decades, with men taking up ever more symbolic space.

At the same time, we showed images of women’s bodies getting thinner. This meant they were literally taking up less space, and thus representing less of a threat (in the symbolic realm).

The overarching implication was clear. Late 20^th and early 21^st century feminism posed a series of unprecedented challenges to men’s authority and cultural centrality, a threat that provoked an aggressive response that manifested itself symbolically in media depictions of the increased size of men’s bodies and capacity for violence.

And so it is today in the material realm, with the Trump Administration’s attempts to roll back gender equity gains in the military and elsewhere.

Let’s not forget that Trump was elected in 2016, and then re-elected in 2024, with a large majority of the male vote, especially but not exclusively the white male vote. This was after a campaign in which Trump made explicit appeals to young men through numerous photo ops at UFC fights and appearances on the podcasts of people like Joe Rogan, Theo Von, and the Nelk Boys, whose audience skews overwhelmingly male.

The campaign also featured the hypermasculine spectacle of the Republican National Convention, which felt more like a WWE Wrestlemania event than a traditional political gathering.

But this was more than simply spectacle and performance and entertainment. Once restored to the presidency, Trump and his team began to methodically dismantle policies designed to level the playing field for women and people of color throughout the federal government, including the military.

Elections have consequences.

Men, too, benefit in the struggle for gender justice

The Trump regime’s rollback of progress in gender equity hurts women and girls first and foremost, as well as LGBTQ people. But part and parcel of their rollback of gender equity is their effort to champion a certain kind of old-school masculinity that was, and is, profoundly damaging to men and boys as well.

Consider this from Pete Hegseth’s Quantico speech – a passage that’s drawn much less media commentary than other sections.

“We’re undertaking a full review of the department’s definitions of so-called toxic leadership, bullying and hazing, to empower leaders to enforce standards without fear of retribution or second guessing,” Hegseth said. “Of course,” he said, “you can’t do, like, nasty bullying and hazing. We’re talking about words like bullying and hazing and toxic. They’ve been weaponized and bastardized inside our formations, undercutting commanders and NCOs. No more. Setting, achieving and maintaining high standards is what you all do. And if that makes me toxic, then so be it.”

Was this an explicit call for a return to the kind of old school bullying culture that has caused profound harms to untold numbers of boys and young men going back not decades, but centuries? No. But is it possible that the Secretary’s words can be interpreted as a call for leaders in the military to retreat from a generation-long effort to reduce bullying behavior in the ranks?

It seems never to have occurred to Hegseth, or Trump, to consider how women’s gains -- inside and outside the military -- have benefitted men themselves. Increased intolerance over time for the bullying and abuse men perpetrate against each other, including sexual abuse, is just one of many examples.

Abusive behavior is often exacerbated in cohesive peer cultures like the military, sports, and fraternities, in which enforced conformity to group norms can be an extremely powerful force – and one that can easily be abused. That’s why efforts to reform those behaviors in those spheres have been an important part of societal progress since the 1970s.

To the extent that leaders in these subcultures relax enforcement of the rules against these sorts of abusive behaviors, men themselves are likely to be among those who pay the highest price.

Where does all this leave us? For the historic cause of gender equality, it’s a continual process of one step forward, two steps back, three steps forward, two steps back. On and on, ad infinitum. Forward progress in democratizing norms in the gender order are bound to face periods of resistance and pushback. We’re currently living through one of those periods.

For everyone working to build a more just, fair, gender-equal, and less violent world, in which everyone benefits -- women, men, and others -- the struggle continues.

* My colleagues and I are in the early stages of work on Tough Guise 3, due out sometime in 2026. I’ll be sure to let everyone here know when it’s released.