TOPEKA, Kansas — “Manhood,” the new book by the controversial U.S. Senator for Kansas Josh Hawley, features an extended chapter entitled “Cheap Sex” in which the Republican politician asserts that “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 activism part of his political posturing, shared his musings on how other men masturbate as part of his treatise on masculine prowess.
Over two years after being 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 offers in “Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs” some of his many thoughts on the ways in which men — especially single men — use their own 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, a group that focuses on political extremism.
Hawley claims that porn “cheapens everyone involved.”
Hawley’s ‘Manhood’ Obsessed With Others’ Masturbation
Hawley’s “Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs” 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 by placing others before themselves.”
As XBIZ has reported, Hawley claims that “liberals” push people “to watch Pornhub more.”
“What I mean, literally, is that 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.”
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.”
However, since 2002 — the senator’s entire adult life — both the Senate and the House of Representatives of the Missouri state legislature, responsible for passing laws concerning economic policy and education in his state, have been controlled by Hawley’s own Republican party.
A Supposed Conspiracy of ‘Epicureans’
In the book, Hawley repeats his long-held, eccentric theory that “Epicureans” — supposed devotees of an ancient Greco-Roman philosophy that the senator thinks foregrounds 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, agreeing with the online communities that fetishize semen retention as a means to masculine improvement.