ICE agents aren’t masculine. They’re bullies.

I can’t stop thinking about this video of an ICE agent violently shoving a crying wife to the ground.

Here’s another video. In this one, an ICE agent slams a 79-year-old American business owner to the ground. For trying to show his workers’ paperwork, they broke his ribs and gave him head trauma.

Here’s a group of (masked, of course) ICE agents running after a guy on a bicycle because he said “fuck Trump.”

Here’s a journalist leaving in a neck brace after ICE agents pushed him to the ground for trying to cover proceedings at an immigration court in New York City.

I see all this and I think about John Wayne. Who, if I remember correctly, became a symbol of American masculinity for saving endangered women on-screen, not shoving them to the ground for crying too close to him.

If I were to steelman masculinity, I would say it’s a norm that directs natural male propensities for violence, aggression, risk-taking, and sex drive toward positive ends.

When researcher Michael Kimmel asked men to describe a good man, the answers included “integrity, honor, being responsible, being a good provider, protector, doing the right thing, putting others first, sacrifice, standing up for the little guy.”

How did we go from that to this?

“There is a dark fear among conservatives that America has been emasculated,” Ruth Whippman wrote in BoyMom. “America is becoming weak and effeminate (it goes without saying that effeminate is a bad thing).”

If you listen to conservative men, it’s all women’s fault. They say women are dominating institutions and feminizing society.

Three questions:

1. Which institutions are dominated by women, again?

2. If men still lead nearly every major institution, then who, exactly, “feminized” society?

3. In what reality is it masculine to blame women for the problems men created and steadfastly refuse to solve?

It’s men who are so afraid of exhibits on slavery at national parks that they’re forcibly removing them instead of, you know, making groceries cheaper. It’s men who are buying platforms to air their fears about invented genocides against white people.

It’s conservative men who, in 2025, are scared of (and I am not making this up) literal monsters under their beds.

Whoever has been feminizing society must be working hard to have gotten all the way to Jackson Country, Tennessee.

It should be said, if you have to group them this way, conservatism is feminine and liberalism is masculine. “A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop.” Chesterton’s fence. To be conservative is to fear change. To be liberal is to embrace freedom, progress, and risk-taking.

More importantly, however, shoving women isn’t masculine behavior. Nor is it masculine to put a journalist in a neck brace or chase someone who says something you don’t like. It’s not masculine to wear a mask when you’re at work because you are afraid that people will connect your identity to your behavior.

That’s bullying. That is taking what is male and using it for evil ends. It’s perverting your God-given size, strength, and stamina and using it to hurt the people you’re supposed to protect.

Maybe to some extent it’s healthy and natural for us to feel disgusted when we see men acting un-masculine. But we’ve gotten confused. It’s not bad when men act like women. It’s not bad when men demonstrate compassion and softness. It’s beautiful and healthy, actually. But it’s very, very dangerous when men act like bullies. That should provoke a disgust reaction. Because it’s bad.

Men act like bullies when their masculinity is threatened.

Men, much more than women, feel an unforgiving, unabating pressure to perfectly perform their gender.

When men feel insecure in their masculinity they’ll often go out of their way to “prove” to themselves and others that they really are super masculine. They lie about their height, along with how many girlfriends they’d ever had, how aggressive they were, their athletic ability, and even how much they preferred masculine-coded consumer products.

Authors Liz Plank and Celeste Davis have read the research and found that men who are unsure of their masculinity act more hostile. They commit more crimes. They’re more aggressive. They harass women and belittle other men. They victim-blame rape survivors.

“Men’s internalized belief that they do not meet society’s expectations for manhood can be a major cause of violence,” wrote Ruth Whippman in October 2024.

Researchers have found that men who suffer from more “masculine discrepancy stress” are more likely to commit almost every type of violent act, including sexual violence, intimate partner violence, assault with a weapon, along with many other risky behaviors. They have more sexual partners. They’re more likely to commit suicide.

Men under masculinity threat don’t act more like women. They also don’t act more masculine. They become bullies.

And they vote for bullies. Several polls and studies indicate that support for ‘traditional’ masculinity predicted support for Trump better than anything other than party affiliation.

And what is the bedrock of masculinity for modern American men? Breadwinning!

“Being a man is still almost exclusively defined by bringing material stability,” Fall told Plank.

You know what else predicted voting for Trump? Being a loser. Not having a degree or a job or a wife. Social isolation.

Davis pointed to an 85-year study on life satisfaction (the Harvard Grant study) which found that the most important indicator for lifelong health and happiness is the number and quality of a person’s relationships. It’s more important than money, diet, fitness, career, environment, or any other factor.

“But the closer a man adheres to rigid masculinity norms, the more difficulty he will have in forming strong, intimate relationships, the more he is cut off from the primary ingredient to life satisfaction,” Davis wrote. I also wrote about how gender makes boys and men lonely in Western masculinity as Chinese foot binding. In Feminine Men Are Raking It In Right Now (But I’m Not Supposed To Say It), Ossiana Tepfenhart wrote about how masculinity threat robs men of sex, dating, relationships.

Researcher Kevin L. Fall found that shame around not being manly enough leads men to a spiral of substance abuse and self-isolation that often ultimately leads to homelessness.

And it’s a big part of why men won’t go to therapy.

We raised three generations, at least, to believe that the most important thing for a man to be is masculine and the most important part of masculinity was breadwinning and now the latest generation isn’t making it happen and is ready to bully whoever they need to bully to shore up their fragile masculinity.

And that, my babies, isn’t masculinity. It’s pathetic, actually. It’s disgusting. It’s sad. And until we start raising our boys better, we’re going to keep raising bullies instead of raising men.