ORLANDO, Fla. — Senator Josh Hawley told a Florida audience gathered at a conservative conference this weekend that a supposed attack on traditional masculinity from “the Left” and feminism has resulted in “more and more men” consuming porn.
The Missouri Republican was addressing the National Conservatism Conference in Orlando, Florida.
“Can we be surprised that after years of being told that they are the problem, that their manhood is the problem,” Hawley harangued, “more and more men are withdrawing into the enclave of idleness and pornography and video games?”
“No one should,” the 41-year-old senator admonished, according to a report by The Guardian.
“While the Left may celebrate this decline of men, I, for one, cannot join them,” added the proudly religious conservative, who has argued that “separation of church and state” means that the state may not prevent churches from acting in politics.
As The Guardian pointed out, Hawley “did not cite sources for his belief that men were watching pornography more frequently.”
Hawley’s tirade included several statements about a supposed plot by “the Left” to “give us a world beyond men.”
“The Left want to define traditional masculinity as toxic,” Hawley complained. “They want to define the traditional masculine virtues — things like courage, and independence and assertiveness — as a danger to society.”
His speech was republished today by right-wing news and commentary site The Federalist.
For much of 2021, Hawley has kept a relatively low profile in the wake of his controversial actions during the January 6 insurrection. Prior to that, however, he had established himself as one of the GOP's most vocal anti-porn crusaders.
As XBIZ reported, during his brief stint as Missouri attorney general in 2017, Hawley even blamed the sexual revolution of the 1960s and ’70s for “human trafficking.”
“We have a human trafficking crisis in our state and in this city and in our country because people are willing to purchase women, young women, and treat them like commodities,” Hawley told a right-wing Kansas City evangelical group in 2017. “There is a market for it. Why is there? Because our culture has completely lost its way. The sexual revolution has led to exploitation of women on a scale that we would never have imagined, never have imagined.”
