“Tofu Talarico.” “Six-Gender Jimmy.” “James Talafreako.” These are just some of the nicknames allies of Texas Republican Senate nominee Ken Paxton have levied against his Democrat competitor, James Talarico.
Paxton himself attacked Talarico as being “too low-T for Texas” in a campaign ad that accuses his opponent of being a “threat to everything we hold dear.” Now, by deploying these aggressively gendered lines of attack against Talarico, Republicans have positioned dueling definitions of masculinity as a key issue in one of the most combative campaigns of this election year.
‘Obviously coordinated and unusually overt’
Since winning the GOP Senate primary late last month, Paxton and Republicans have “pushed the issue of manliness and masculinity to the forefront,” said USA Today. Their push “encapsulates the broader thinking” in our “current man-o-verse of faux-tough-guy podcasters, politicians and influencers.” In this paradigm, men “are to be bold, dominating and aggressive” and “must mock other men who don’t fit their criteria.” The “explicit, sometimes vulgar emphasis on masculinity as an electoral argument” is “one highly visible way” of tracking Donald Trump’s political and cultural influence over the past decade, said NPR.
The GOP’s “anti-Talarico blitzkrieg” is both “obviously coordinated and unusually overt,” said The Atlantic. Talarico’s “aw-shucks niceness and youthful looks” is “reframed as the result of low testosterone,” while GOP attacks manifest as “99,999 dog whistles implying that he is gay.” The “obvious explanation” for the intensity of the GOP’s gendered attacks on Talarico is that “Paxton’s nomination has created certain challenges for Republicans,” given the attorney general’s many legal and personal scandals, said columnist Matt Lewis at The Hill. Conservatives must now “dirty up a squeaky clean seminarian who appears to be something of a Boy Scout.”
Any politician who can “discredit a candidate right out of the gate” by suggesting that they “don’t share the culture of the people” and aren’t “up to the task of representing a state like Texas” has ultimately won, said Southern Methodist University political science professor Cal Jillson at the CBC. The GOP’s masculinity attacks “wouldn’t necessarily work in places like California or New York, or possibly parts of the Midwest,” said Monika L. McDermott, the co-editor of the book “Masculinity in American Politics,” to the outlet.
’Rather strange vision of masculinity’
Conservative japes about Talarico’s masculinity “never come from a place of comfort or security,” said Dave Holmes at Esquire. Rather, the politicians and pundits attacking Talarico “fall short of their own definitions of masculinity, and it is killing them.” Republicans are working to “inflict a rather strange vision of masculinity on America,” said The New Republic. Theirs is “meant to look like a parade of Aryan Ubermenschen” but instead reads as a “depressingly absurd circus sideshow.”
Ironically, the “very qualities that make Talarico a ripe target today” — his relative youth, faith and vocal enthusiasm for “servant leadership” — were “once traits that many conservatives would have regarded as virtues,” said Lewis at The Hill. The “sad thing” isn’t simply that Texas conservatives are publicly questioning “whether these cultural signifiers say he’s a real man.” It’s that “it just might work.”