In 2023, Payam Moula, the chief philosopher at the Social Democratic think tank Tiden, attempted in Svenska Dagbladet to label me as “the left’s Jordan Peterson.” The reason—brace yourself now, Kristina Lindquist, because here comes the bragging—is that I bench press a hell of a lot. And we talk about it a lot, too. Perhaps a low-valued skill in the culture pages, but in Trump’s new world order—a potion brewed from the purest bro-science—it makes me a silverback alpha gorilla.
So I guess I have to see myself as some sort of self-taught expert in man vibes.
So let me mansplain. Masculinity is a tricky thing. A fragile flower. We’re having a tough time on Tinder, at work, in school. The flood of texts about our crisis has been flowing for at least a century. Our chest hair, together with the manufacturing jobs, has been shipped off to the third world.
But now, it finally seems like someone’s on the trail of a solution. According to journalist Batya Ungar-Sargon on Fox News, American industrial jobs are going to fix the whole thing. Chest hair and factory work have, as she puts it, been outsourced to hypermasculine immigrants.
When Trump puts his foot down with tariffs and deportations, he’s also saying a clear and firm no to a continued American testosterone crisis. It should feel good to feel good as a guy again.
“When you sit in front of a screen all day, it makes you a woman—studies show this,” sneered Fox News’ Jesse Watters, but seriously, and to roaring laughter. I suppose this is the kind of high-quality research Sweden can look forward to once the Tidö government has purged the woke left from our universities. There’s clearly plenty to learn here for the piglets in the Swedish government. Has anyone informed Carl-Oskar Bohlin, our Minister for Civil Defense? Can his horizontal figure-eight of estrogen-pumping screen time on X really be compatible with defending the nation? Smells beta to me.
“White Americans are going to love working in factories again,” cheers washed-up provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos—one of many right-wing guys in the cheering section who’s never done an honest day’s work himself. American men, he claims, will now produce things again, just like our creator intended.
There’s something wildly titillating about the idea that the solution to the masculinity crisis is factories. Like giant “raw man” institutes where our incels line up at the assembly line.
I, a man, am obviously in favor. Maybe this really is the only way to get us to do something productive with our time.
Guys who otherwise can’t even get up from their gaming chairs seem willing to do absolutely anything to reclaim their masculinity. From falling for outright crypto scams, to stepping into the “octagon” and fighting professional fighters at Andrew Tate’s Hustlers University, to whittling wooden penises in the woods with Alexander Bard.
That makes a factory floor sound pretty appealing.
But if you ask me, it’s a solution with some fundamentally Stone Age problems. Pretty quickly, the online debate about whether tariffs can turn nerds into steel men slides into horny fantasies about how collapsing world finances will send women back to the kitchen.
At its core, this is about guys who would rather see the global economy burn in hell than let women have a little fun.
“Tariffs or this?” writes vegan-hating author Max Lugavere, posting a viral TikTok of some annoying Gen Z girls dancing and goofing around in an office.
At its core, this is about guys who would rather see the global economy burn in hell than let women have a little fun.
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