TOPEKA, Kansas — “Manhood,” the new book by controversial U.S. Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, features an extended chapter titled “Cheap Sex,” in which the Republican politician asserts, “Nothing could be more timid or weak, more sterile, than a man, alone, staring at porn on his phone.”
Hawley, who has long made anti-porn posturing a staple of his campaigning, shared his musings on how other men masturbate as part of “Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs,” his general treatise on manly prowess.
Released over two years after he was seen running away from the angry mob he had encouraged during the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election — the Kansas senator shares his surprisingly detailed thoughts on the ways in which men — especially single men — use their hands to achieve orgasm.
“There is no risk involved, no exposure to hardship or danger in the least” in masturbation, Hawley — who has no professional training in any discipline concerning human sexuality — rhapsodized.
Hawley quoted right-wing, anti-LGBTQ+ University of Texas, Austin academic Mark Regnerus, who referred to cheap sex.
Regnerus’ work has been a subject of inquiry by the Southern Poverty Law Center.”
Liberals 'Are Making People Watch Pornhub'
Hawley’s book was described by the Kansas City Star last month as “less of a manifesto and more of a sermon, or pep-talk, geared at inspiring men to refocus their lives.”
Hawley has previously blamed his political opponents for assailing American manhood.
“I think the liberal attack, the left-wing attack on manhood, says to men, ‘You’re part of the problem,’” Hawley told an interviewer in 2021. “It says that your masculinity is inherently problematic, it’s inherently oppressive.”
As XBIZ has reported, Hawley also claims that “liberals” push people to “watch Pornhub more.” When pressed on precisely what the left has done that has led to more porn consumption, Hawley cited a “policy of deindustrialization” that he claimed has left millions of men “idle” — presumably leaving their idle hands to do the devil’s work.
“You have 16 million men, Mike, who are idle, who don’t have anything to do,” he continued. “Partly that’s their own responsibility, but also it’s partly because jobs have dried up in many cities across America and rural areas, too. I think you put together lack of jobs, you put together fatherlessness, you put together the social messages that we teach our kids in our schools, and you gotta control that and its effects.”
Since 2002, however, both houses of the Missouri state legislature have been under Republican control, which would seem to lay responsibility for economic and education policy in his state — throughout the senator’s entire adult life — at the feet of his own party.
A Conspiracy of 'Epicureans'
In the book, Hawley repeats his long-held, eccentric theory that “Epicureans” — devotees of an ancient Greco-Roman school of philosophy that the senator interprets as foregrounding pleasure — are attempting to change Christian values.
“That is what porn leads to: men as androgynous consumers, beyond manhood, beyond sex even, staring at screens, alone,” Hawley theorizes. “It is no coincidence that even as men’s porn consumption explodes, family formation is collapsing. American men are simply having less sex in favor of the cheap, virtual substitute. The problem is, men like that aren’t really men at all.
“There is a nobility to be won in rejecting porn, and personal confidence too,” Hawley concludes, in apparent agreement with online communities that fetishize semen retention as a means of masculine self-improvement.
