There’s ‘nothing more timid’ than a man watching porn, Josh Hawley says in ‘Manhood’ book

Sen. Josh Hawley suspects that most young, unmarried men view watching pornography as an example of manliness.

But in his new book, the Missouri Republican says men who watch porn aren’t really men at all.

“Nothing could be more timid or weak, more sterile, than a man, alone, staring at porn on his phone,” Hawley wrote. “There is no risk involved, no exposure to hardship or danger in the least. It is, as [sociologist Mark] Regenerus calls it, cheap sex. And it cheapens everyone involved.”

Hawley’s opposition to pornography — and his call to men to resist the temptation to watch it — comes in the early pages of his new book “Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs.” The book, released Tuesday by Regenery Publishing, is less of a political manifesto and more of a sermon, or pep-talk, geared at inspiring men to refocus their lives by placing others before themselves.

Since a 2021 speech at the National Conservatism Conference, Hawley has been repeatedly mocked for his attention to pornography. Lucas Kunce, a Democratic candidate running to challenge Hawley for his Senate seat in 2024, has called Hawley’s focus on porn “creepy,” even making a digital ad focused around all the times Hawley has mentioned pornography on television.

But in the book, Hawley’s views on pornography are limited to a section where he stresses the value of marriage and relationships.

He claims porn is the only male-dominated activity that “Epicureans” — a reference to the philosopher Epicurus, who Hawley uses as a shorthand for people who put their own happiness above all else — approve.

“That is what porn leads to: men as androgynous consumers, beyond manhood, beyond sex even, staring at screens, alone,” Hawley writes. “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.”

Hawley characterizes pornography as a false sense of security, somewhere men retreat to rather than facing the challenges in their lives. He notes the popularity of porn and says it is one of the most searched terms on the internet in the United States.

He notes that married men and men of all ages watch porn, pointing out that 30% of men above 60 said they watched porn in the past week — citing a statistic from “Cheap Sex: The Transformation of Men, Marriage and Monogamy” by Regenerus, who is a sociology professor at the University of Texas.

Hawley then urges men to ditch porn to develop the qualities of a husband — someone who is willing to face difficulty to put another person ahead of themselves — because it represents a way of disciplining oneself.

“There is a nobility to be won in rejecting porn, and personal confidence too,” Hawley writes. “The data shows that men who view porn regularly are less satisfied with their dating partners and less satisfied with their sexual relationships; indeed, it shows they are less satisfied with life in general.”

The section comes in a larger chapter about how being a husband is a principle virtue of masculinity. Hawley writes that in entering marriage, a man fulfills a biblical responsibility to care for someone other than themselves. He uses the story of Abraham in the Bible as a way to talk about the virtues of marriage, because after God called Abraham, he gave him a wife, Sarah.

Being a husband is just one of the masculine virtues Hawley, 43, extolls in his 248-page book. He sorts the qualities of man into husband, father, warrior, builder, priest and king.

Instead of laying out a list of policy pronouncements, Hawley’s book serves as a religious pep-talk, calling on men to find God and in doing so, find the virtues they should possess to be better men.

Throughout the book, he uses an imagined liberal “left” as a straw man, saying their aim is to strip away masculine values from society. But aside from a few references towards transgender people, Hawley largely avoids the larger culture war issues of gender identity and sexual orientation.

His focus on masculinity is part of a larger conservative movement geared at guiding younger men who appear to be in a moment of crisis — they’re working less, have increasing mental health issues and aren’t keeping up with women when it comes to education.

But rather than focus on a type of tough-guy version of masculinity, the type shown by former Fox News host Tucker Carlson in a 2022 documentary about the decline of men, Hawley takes a softer approach. In the book, he criticizes Andrew Tate, an influencer popular among young men who was recently charged with allegations of sex trafficking in Romania, saying his version of masculinity is self-centered.

“Every man who has been in a locker room recognizes the type,” Hawley writes. “The fake bravado, the endless boasting. Those aren’t the words of a man; those are the words of a child pretending to be a man.”