Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, took the stage at the National Conservatism Conference yesterday to decry the war on men. In a long and meandering speech, he sounded the alarm about falling marriage rates and college attendance, and argued that more and more men are dropping out of the workforce and retreating into porn and video games.
“Responsibility is one of God’s greatest gifts to mankind, and men must be held responsible for their actions,” Hawley said. “Still, can we be surprised 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?”
Josh Hawley says more men today are watching porn and playing video games because their masculinity has been criticized. pic.twitter.com/R0eXdRSYNT
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) November 1, 2021
He went on to cite, as one example of this growing cohort of emasculated sinners, Jay Wells, an Ohio man who recently dropped out of a $US34,000 (A$45,233)-a-year college and told the Wall Street Journal in September, “I’m sort of waiting for a light to come on so I figure out what to do next.”
“I found the comment by one young man to the Wall Street Journal particularly evocative, and particularly heartbreaking,” Hawley said. Wells currently lives with his mother and delivers pallets of Coke in Toledo for $US20 (A$27) an hour. The horror.
Hawley ended his speech with a call to fight the war on men by increasing the number of manufacturing jobs in the U.S. and creating new tax credits for getting married. If successful, a record number of men might put down their dicks and virtual assault rifles to rejoin the patriarchy.
Not only is this far from the first time politicians have tried to foment a moral panic around Pornhub and Fortnite, it’s not even the first time they’ve blamed them for a hollowing out of the middle class. Senator Ben Sasse, Republican of Nebraska, laid the blame for fewer men working shitty jobs on video games as well in his 2017 book, The Vanishing American Adult.
“A staggering 5 million Americans — more than the combined populations of Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana — consume forty-five hours of video games per week,” he wrote in a section on “making kids softer.” Sasse didn’t cite where he got the statistic from, but it’s roughly in line with how much some people watch TV.
Studies have drawn correlations between the growth of video games and a drop in how many hours younger men spend working on average, but have attributed the shift to bad wages rather than a lack of religion or the rise of “cancel culture.”
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