John Wayne > Jesus: The post-religious masculine right

Ted Bauer
4 min readSep 12, 2021

I’m a dude, but not a super masculine one. I work out (periodically), I make money (same), and I generally have a nice, OK life. But am I some kind of warrior? No. Now, I do write about masculinity a lot, with different measures of success — such as whether we need a new definition for it, toxic masculinity at work and at home, and how much modern masculinity can sometimes suck. Just a couple of days ago, actually, I wrote about “the assumptive masculinity box.”

This is all a long, link-moderately-heavy way of saying I think about this stuff a lot, even if I don’t live it as a warrior day-to-day, so this article from The Daily Beast was interesting to me. It’s about bringing muscle to school board meetings, which is a notably 2021 thing to even have to type. The article mentions this February 2016 — pre Trump even winning the Presidency — tweet from Ross D. of The New York Times, and wow, has this thing held up well:

The article has a few other slappers, including:

There are a couple of disturbing trends at play here. One is the increasing…

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Ted Bauer
Ted Bauer

Written by Ted Bauer

I write about a lot of different topics, from work to masculinity to relationships and social dynamics, I.e. modern friendship. Pleasure to be here.

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