Their bluster may masquerade as strength, but Trump and Vance’s latest displays of insecurity on the world stage reveal a deep-seated fear of losing control.
Insecure men’s tantrums are becoming exhausting.
Actually, women probably found them exhausting before, but we were long taught to accept weaponized incompetence and inflated egos as normal. It’s a too-common, endlessly exasperating female experience. How many women have silently cleaned the kitchen or bathroom a second time after a man in her household begrudgingly performed a sloppy once-over for which he then demanded praise? I know I have.
“That’s just how they are, sweetheart,” my mother told me growing up. “Men are just not detail-oriented biologically. It’s the nature of women, not men.”
I’m skeptical, and I’ll use the medical field as an example. I’ve noted the gender divide in most surgical specialties: Ophthalmology is over 60 percent male; plastic surgery is 80 percent male. You’re telling me that men can skillfully operate on the most delicate tissue structures in the human body, yet not know how to wash a damn dish? They’re highly attentive to detail when they want to be.
But frequently, when faced with the facts of the female experience, a giant tantrum ensues. It’s a common experience for women who create spaces in which to commune over gendered experiences to have those spaces hijacked by an aggrieved man yelling, “NOT ALL MEN!” and complaining about man-hating feminists.
Today’s conservative voices frame feminism as an attack on men and on society at large. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) claimed causality between mass shootings, feminism and birth control. Conservative commentator Matt Walsh proudly labels feminism “self-centered, anti-man and anti-family.”
Explosive rage is often an expression of fear. This backlash screams insecurity. It’s just another man-tantrum.
Insecure Conservatism
Truly secure people have self-restraint. Their quiet presence is powerful, so they need not intimidate and yell to command respect. They don’t need to have tantrums to be heard.
The opposite is true for insecure people.
We’ve seen them on the world stage, with Vice President JD Vance’s appearance at the Munich Security Conference, lecturing Europe on its own values, and President Donald Trump’s recent meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
That combativeness is an unfortunate representation of our country on the world stage, signaling the insecure conservatism that has ostensibly overtaken U.S. government.
Conservatives are not a monolith; I was raised conservative, and the community has many different facets with nuanced values.
In one camp, you have people whose religious worldview comprises traditional gender roles and strict social mores. Antonin Scalia, whose devoted wife single-handedly managed their nine children, or Mike Pence, who won’t have dinner alone with any woman but his wife, land here.
In another, you have people who believe fervently in integrity, hard work and self-sufficiency. Many have struggled through immense hardship and pride themselves on their help-rejecting resilience, almost to a fault. My immigrant parents fall into this category. This group values higher education for social mobility and unwittingly raises outspoken feminists.
I’d call these two groups “secure conservatism.” They know what their values are, and they’re usually quietly dignified about them.
But in the camp of insecure conservatives, you find the worst—men who thinly veil their self-loathing, fears of inferiority and resentment of women with moral posturing and false religious principles. They follow a similar pattern. Socially stunted, often physically awkward, with profoundly low self-esteem, they overcompensate for their insecurities with shock value. They might make homophobic jokes, shout, “Feminism is cancer” or pull other transgressive stunts, reveling in outrage. It’s the mentality behind “owning the libs,” whose purpose is to appall and humiliate.
For all their posturing, however, these men are often truly lonely—because they neither relate well to people nor know how to meet their emotional needs healthily. “They think any attention is good attention,” we say in psychiatry about patients who act out similarly.
Unfortunately, the last camp appears to be running our country, and their shock-value politics invite misogynistic extremism as legitimate dialogue.
Trojan-Horsing Extremism as “Free Speech”
In Munich, Vance accused Germany of suppressing free speech by sidelining the far-right Alternative for Germany party. He reminds me of one of my high-school boyfriends who was something of a right-wing provocateur.
“He’s racist and sexist,” some had whispered about my boyfriend. That wasn’t accurate—but he thrived on people’s discomfort, a cocky, pseudo-intellectual adolescent who enjoyed attention. He’d wilfully instigate conflict designed to elicit an emotional response. A friend stormed out of my graduation party after my boyfriend mocked his service work in Nicaragua, claiming he was harming the community by making them dependent on foreign aid. The party ended poorly. My boyfriend found it hilarious. “What? I’m just asking questions,” he smirked. (When he wasn’t offending someone, he was annoyingly clingy, and he eventually trolled his way out of the relationship.)
My then-boyfriend offered a case study in insecure conservatism. I don’t believe he was “just asking questions.” I think he was trying to provoke and harass, with the same sneering bluster we’re seeing from today’s conservatives on the world stage.
He’d later comment that people were unwilling to engage with conservative perspectives, implying that this was undue censorship. Fundamentally, Vance made the same argument at Munich, attempting to force engagement with far-right ideas by claiming violation of free speech.
All perspectives aren’t equally valuable in all situations. A society that values ethics, morals and the humanity of all races should not validate a worldview that fundamentally rejects these concepts.
Although German and American voters alike have real concerns about immigration limits that should be discussed constructively, this can happen without legitimizing extremism reminiscent of the Nazi Party. The Holocaust and Unit 731 are grim reminders of human evil’s boundless capacity. The way to keep these atrocities from recurring is by conscientiously shunning the ideas that spawned them.
Who Hates Whom?
Extremism and misogyny have entered mainstream dialogue innocently disguised as “free speech.” We must distinguish between the constitutional protection that allows people to express their views without fear of government interference and giving extremists air by actively engaging with them.
And we definitely shouldn’t be giving in to tantrums meant to force compliance. Women are entirely too familiar with this kind of bluster, and we’ve had enough. The dominant manosphere narrative echoed in conservative spaces is that feminists hate men. We don’t. Women largely have responded to centuries of forced submission by sharing their stories, working towards independence and demanding accountability. Most women I know react to male violence by avoiding men.
Many men have then responded by reasserting their entitlement to women’s bodies: joking about or overtly promoting violence against women, proposing legal restrictions on women, insulting women who object as “anti-family” or “childless cat ladies.”
So who truly hates whom?
It’s one thing when weak, insecure men privately hold these views. (They are certainly allowed to hold them.) It’s another thing entirely to suggest they are serious ideas worthy of consideration on the national or world stage. The former is freedom of speech. The latter is state-sanctioned hatred.
Undoubtedly some will suggest that such men are actually victims. Even one of the doctors supervising me seemed offended that I want to build my clinical career treating female victims of intimate partner violence, inspired by my own history. “Men need help too, you know, even the abusive ones,” he chastised me peevishly.
But they do not inspire empathy. With the vitriol they gleefully cast out into the world, unapologetically targeting women, I have no space in my heart for them and I won’t be bullied into engagement with them.
I’d rather devote my time to their victims.
