The “Crisis of Masculinity” Crisis

1. Podcasts

In the dark-brown tones of the Tucker Carlson Show’s high production value, there they are: Nick Fuentes, an extremely twenty seven-year-old best known for his old-school anti-Semitism and white-nationalist content, a self-described incel whose gender is streamer with a thumbnail of a smile. And Carlson himself, all Platonic hair transplant of a shape-shifting conservative, who often goes “wow” at the depth of his own questions, amazed by the wrongness of the world. Two hours into an episode that aired in October, after comparing their anti-Semitic tropes like Pokémon cards supposedly meant to “disrupt” MAGA on Israel, they begin to talk about young men.1 Porn, weed, video games are ruining them, obviously, turning them gay, even trans. “I’m sorry I called you gay by the way, I think I’m just too old or something,” Tucker offers, after having dismissed Fuentes as a “weird little gay kid in a basement” three months earlier. “I just don’t understand … Why aren’t people married?” Fuentes, who has in fact been cultivating his alleged gayness for years, ignores the apology. He replies, “It’s the women,” only to explain that “feminism” has made it not just impossible but undesirable to be properly heterosexual in the current conjuncture. By feminism, he seems to gesture towards something like what conservative political commentator Helen Andrews has recently called the “Great Feminization.”2 On the far right, feminism becomes a short-hand for the economic upheaval sometimes referred to on the left as the “care crisis”: the undermining, and at the same time the proliferation, of those forms of labor, of life, that were previously considered feminine. Carlson and Fuentes clearly have contradictory genders, and yet their encounter, the scandal of which reverberated through conservative institutions for weeks after, is orchestrated in the name of young men. This is what Tucker will later say to defend his interview: All he wanted was to understand what had led them here. “Crisis of masculinity” talk becomes the necessity for Tucker to renew his commitment to fascization, to broaden the content niche he envisions as a coalition. 

Chasing the libidinal pull of such soundbites has become a hallmark of contemporary writing on the far right. They’re fun. Collecting the anecdotal evidence of, in Alberto Toscano’s coinage, “late fascist male fantasies” almost feels too fun. If in his study Male Fantasies sociologist Klaus Theweleit once consulted the autobiographical writing of Freikorps soldiers from the interwar period to conceptualize “soldierly” masculinity, the far right male unconscious of the moment seems to congeal in the form of group chats, live streams, and perhaps most of all, podcasts. In the flat dramaturgy of endlessly meandering Joe Rogan Experience–shaped formats, every snippet of Hitler praise can be exactly as extreme as it sounds and also just a bad joke. While drowning out the workday, the dullest parasocial bro-down becomes a site of antagonistic thrills. And yet, analyzing these masculinities into an actually existing psychosocial structure might already risk conceding the depth these men so desperately long for, falling for their engagement bait. To what extent does the “crisis of masculinity” describe something they have in common—besides them all saying it does? Almost anything that encodes an escalation of what scholar Emma Heaney calls “cisness”—of naturalized reproduction via racialized hierarchies—into a grand narrative of decline can pass for a cure to the “crisis of masculinity.”3 Even where the middle managers of the masculinity crisis—from Andrew Tate (who Fuentes hates) to the Bronze Age Pervert—overlap (on misogyny and transphobia, though their commitment to race war is a little more contested), their wounded attachment to masculinity seems improvisational and open-ended rather than referential and, narrowly speaking, conservative.

Tucker Carlson interviews Nick Fuentes, 2025.

As with so much of fascist politics, the internal contradictions are part of the sex appeal. As they rally the consumers they fashion as troops around birth rates, testosterone levels, and rape fantasies, Carlson and Fuentes’s exchange makes clear that late-fascist sexual politics do not directly translate into any personal requirements for men, but rather into a moodboard of entrepreneurial belonging. This is perhaps why all these “media personalities,” especially but not only on the US far right, are so extremely camp: Their over-the-top self-reflexivity, the permissiveness with which they let their incoherency unfold, passes for a degree of sexual freedom. To merely dismiss this as trolling would be to underestimate what these podcasts also clearly offer: violent consolation. And the protagonists are clearly having fun. For all their somber notes of declinism, their glee conveys a surprisingly intense attachment to sexual politics, the cruelest of optimisms. Tomorrow, when the Great Replacement is defeated and the order that never was is restored, sex will be good again.

2. Male Fantasies

On the left, the idea that there is a particular fascist psychodrama of masculinity that needs to be analyzed is often connected to Klaus Theweleit’s 1977 two-volume study Male Fantasies. After Fuentes delivers a sharepic of a Spengler quote, Carlson finds himself agreeing with some of the misogyny: “Women are a 100 percent never embarrassed by bodily functions. Men are so squeamish.” This is where the ghost of Male Fantasies appears, as the study is particularly famous for its attempts to trace right-wing anxieties around feminized bodies and, specifically, bodily fluids. The thousand-page montage of protofascist tendencies, glued together with paper and scissors during an early heyday of West German “theory” culture—it was a bestseller at the time—remains a trip of a reading experience: as interestingly seductive in vibe as it is limited in scope. With its jovial tone and para-academic zest, Theweleit’s insular work never quite caught on in either “masculinity studies” or materialist analyses of fascism, and yet, as the male question becomes increasingly threatening, Male Fantasies is receiving renewed attention. Even where its shortcomings are obvious, it seems to haunt contemporary critiques of far-right masculinity.

Male Fantasies—in large part a close reading of autobiographical literature from the interwar period—is most of all eerily thrilling. Heroically unarmed with Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, dubiously feminist cultural histories, and the defiance of a reformed German man, Theweleit wades through the fixations of what he calls “soldierly masculinity” to wrestle with a genuinely unusual question at the time: Where and how did men feel fascism in their so-called bodies? Seeking to outsmart—or rather, to outfeel—what he perceives as both orthodox class reductionism and self-righteous Frankfurt School cultural pessimism, Theweleit traces the excitement that might have been experienced between the boundariedness of military drills and the blackout moments of the Freikorps’ killing sprees. Where he stays close to his archival materials, his mapping of the sexual politics that preceded historical fascism is counterintuitive. A veteran of the sexual revolution of his own day, Theweleit registers how openly his subjects prided themselves, not unlike Fuentes, on rejecting even the most basic norms of heterosexuality—how the protofascist intensification of martial asceticism could sound fresh, even disruptive, in their letters and journals. When he tries to elevate his findings to an etiology of seemingly all-encompassing scale, however, he falls into thin generalization.

Male Fantasies hoodie by Maggie Dunlap, 2024

Male Fantasies includes explicitly anti-feminist sleights of hand, colonial blind spots, and relative uninterest in the material conditions of its mostly petit-bourgeois subjects. The most limiting factor of the book is perhaps its theoretical scaffolding, a weary makeover of the repression hypothesis. The Freikorpsmen, Theweleit argues, are not even repressed. (This might resonate with the contemporary liberal fantasy of Trump not having an “inner life.”) In a baffling and reactionary leap, he builds on the psychoanalyst Margaret Mahler’s work to read fascist men as psychotic children who have never successfully detached from a supposedly symbiotic relationship with their Wilhelmine mothers. “Not-yet-fully-born” but “beaten into life” through military discipline, they armor their bodies against the feminized disintegration that the “red flood” encapsulates, desperately trying to keep even the faintest shape of an ego in place. Ultimately, Theweleit turns his anti-oedipal ambitions into a linear developmental scheme. Even if, read generously, Theweleit doesn’t necessarily frame this argument as normative, its shape reflects the contemporary right’s own self-theorization: In both cases, the abandoned young man—and his potential for fascism—emerges from a failure of gendered differentiation and a lack of proper heterosexuality. Theweleit’s implication, barely disavowed, is that these men needed successful sex—“real” straight pleasure—to inoculate them against the Korpsgeist. If only they had been gendered enough to renounce their repudiation of womanhood, then fascism might not have gotten to them. Take this passage, the book’s perhaps most explicit outburst of Reichian commitment:

Unlike that between the classes, the contradiction between the sexes is not intrinsically antagonistic (meaning, among other things, that a man has more free play for his behavior than a capitalist does). The phenomenon of the orgasm is probably adequate proof of that; no orgasm has ever taken place as the result of two classes embracing each other. Here, contradiction seems less likely to be resolved by a “battle of the sexes” than by the desire to create situations that make human orgasms possible. Oppression is not necessarily contained within every communal enterprise.4

Dagmar Herzog has identified Male Fantasies as a distinctly post-’68 book: “Theweleit’s book, in short, was in its own way an effort to recapitulate and retrieve much of 1968’s original impetus and to reestablish a strength of connection between sexuality, leftist politics, and the Nazi past that had started to become frayed.”5 Theweleit seems to be able to trace some right-wing fantasies precisely because he frantically tries to salvage sexual optimism through the study of a new object. But his analysis remains constrained by what it cannot let go of in the disappointment of the mid-seventies. Paradoxically, while Theweleit vividly describes the oceanic feelings that electrified the Freikorps, he always hastens to add that, whatever these men might have felt, it could not have been proper sexuality. From there, Male Fantasies ultimately bottoms out into a crude dichotomy: here, the hardened, stiffened Freikorpsmen; there, a feminized image of sexuality unbound. (Sometimes, Male Fantasies sounds like a caricature of queer theory.) On many flanks we seem to have renounced this, in Theweleit’s case, already deflated and sardonic but ultimately straightforward sexual optimism; to a degree, however, it might still reverberate precisely in contemporary analyses of the “crisis of masculinity” crisis. The fascination with far-right men still functions as a container for a disavowed sexual optimism on the left. That’s partly what makes Male Fantasies such a page-turner (well, for a few hundred of its thousand pages). In most other contexts, the idea that personal transgression directly mirrors political gains would seem anachronistic, macho, and trite. In the context of the killers in Male Fantasies, it suddenly reads as measured and timely. If a sexual revolution is not on the table right now, partly because many of us fear it has already happened, can we at least have a sexual recent past that would protect us from late fascism’s worst impulses? That’s the hope seemingly implied in some of the telediagnoses of “backlash” and loneliness epidemics. A certain investment in the ambivalent historical advances of emancipatory movements is crucial, but misconstruing them as if they were stages of psychic development means losing sight of their own sex appeal.

3. Sexual Optimism from the Right

The question of sexual optimism driving our critiques of right-wing gender ideas is especially pertinent now that it’s becoming ever more obvious that fascists have been developing their own pastiche of post-’68 sexual politics: an expanding range of brutal gender identifications, and “creative” attacks on trans people as libidinal team-building exercises. Take the AfD-adjacent social media campaign that in the summer of 2023 sought to capitalize on Pride month’s social media presence. During Pride month (“Stolzmonat” in German), right-wing internet users were asked to post a flag that diffracted the German national colors into a rainbow-like spectrum, complete with a National Socialist brown tone. Here too the “crisis of masculinity” that the right imagines as symbolized by Pride becomes a loophole through which more overt fascism reenters the frame. The far right’s Facebook-compatible edginess follows an underlying logic: They aren’t rejecting the liberal embrace of sexual fluidity so much as they are appropriating it for nationalist ends. (This is in fact how marketing talent Maximilian Krah described the right-wing Stolzmonat strategy on a podcast.) Pride is cartoonishly repurposed in the name of völkisch self-actualization. Most bizarrely perhaps, in Sezession, a journal associated with AfD-aligned party pseudo-intellectuals, Martin Lichtmesz writes: “Human sexuality … is an electromagnetic energy that can be both creative and destructive, which can be channeled into paths that can stray very far from ‘nature.’” What reads as a Male Fantasies LLM rip-off is supposed to be an indictment of Pride’s alleged rigidity. Rather than actually raging against “gender ideology,” the right is cobbling together its own through “masculinity.”

Berlin Pride, 2023. Photo: Lucas Werkmeister. License: CC BY 4.0.

In Late Fascism, Alberto Toscano describes the formation of the ideology of historical fascism as an opportunistic scavenger hunt. What these contemporary appropriations—and the transnational army of right-wing online small-business owners, like pickup artists and podcasters—manifest is neither just sexual repression nor unleashed drives but a competing vision of the sexual (double) freedom that neoliberalism enforces. Scholar Robyn Marasco has described the promises of the “female antifeminism” of the far right as a “degraded version of having it all, where instead of the corporate career and the heterosexual reproductive family, women can have combat training, AR 15s, polyamorous sexuality, conspiracism, and, above all, a semblance of power that substitutes for the real thing.”6 Political theorist Felix del Campo has put it succinctly: “Tradwives and bodybuilders are the cultural manifestation of the neoliberalism of the far right.”7

Rather than a psychosocial structure with a discoverable etiology, masculinity functions here as a symptom itself. A symptom in a profoundly psychoanalytic sense: the trace of a cultural form through which people bear their contradictions, emerging from but not reducible to their material conditions—nor, in our case, to the care crisis. The “crisis of masculinity”—the right’s obscure name for this—is not the failure of a structure but the mobilization of this symptom. The promise that “everything will go back to the way it has never been” becomes radical precisely through its intensification of neoliberal logics: the self-optimization of a jawline as racial and/or national duty; the tradwife influencer fantasy of housework as entrepreneurial media grift; gender identity as natural fact requiring constant supplementation. What Fuentes and Carlson offer is not a rollback but a doubling-down on cisness in the face of its heightened contradictions. Even on the left it is often said that men have “lost” something—privileges, job security, role models, etc. But, consciously or not, men like Fuentes and Carlson sense that there is no actual historical past they could revert to—that, per scholar Miri Davidson, it’s impossible to “split off one kind of capitalism from another.”8 The mythic object of this loss will have to be carved out, just like the testosterone levels that will have to be artificially supplemented so that order is restored. The counterrevolution will be injected too.

What would it mean to more deeply and aggressively work through the repression hypothesis in the analysis of far-right politics? To accept that neither gender diversity nor sexual freedom in their actually existing forms inherently “drift” left without us turning them, like porn supposedly turns young men trans? To attend to desire, beyond truisms of relativistic acceptance and queer utopian prefiguration? In defending Fuentes’s appearance on his podcast, Carlson identified an apocalyptic turning point in the “crisis of masculinity”:

Why are [young men] misogynists? Maybe because you told them the hormones they were born with were toxic. What are they supposed to do with that transition? Well a lot of ‘em did, cut your dick off, the ultimate sign of bowing before authority … But what about the ones who didn’t wanna self-castrate? 

Men, destabilized by not being able to afford a home in their thirties, either go fascist, or they transition. This is, as usual, the distorted image of a historical moment: As the neoliberal order morphs into something worse, as the contradictions of what sustains life under capital intensify, you can either exacerbate what’s left of sex—or transform it. Here too of course there is always a slippage between the far right straw woman of trans contagion and Islamo-gauchiste gender ideology, against which the “crisis of masculinity” unfolds, along with the sobering reality of our politics. We can’t recover a “Joe Rogan of the left” from beneath the crisis, and perhaps no “positive left-wing vision of masculinity” either—not because we lack imagination, but because where we don’t escalate the violence inherent in the status quo, our content won’t be as sexy, as consoling. Rather than from its conceptual provocations, the most instructive cue of Male Fantasies comes perhaps from its stylistic daring, the prompt to have fun with our disappointment. Perhaps we can find ways to be more aggressive about the fact that our famous pronouns, too, emerge where the current mode of reproduction leaves us wanting. If fascist masculinity glosses over a lack of sexual optimism, ours is a sexual optimism not of Theweleit’s heterosexual union, but of lack. Rather than trying to merely fix sex, we’re trying to change it.