Cracks Are Showing in the Patriarchal Matrix of Power

The Pentagon recently announced a new policy of screening male troops for testosterone deficiency, using the slogan “High T Department of War,” to ensure, in Pete Hegseth’s own words, “that the troops have the right testosterone level to operate at [their] absolute best,” only to add, as if to preempt the impending rebuke: “It’s not about artificial enhancement. It’s about restoring and optimizing your natural capabilities.”

There is something truly revealing about the US military needing hormonal reassurance to biochemically assert its dominance and “restore” a competence it has presumably lost.

Patriarchy, when unchallenged, doesn’t require testosterone screening. It doesn’t need slogans about being “High T.” It simply operates as the unmarked default.

The fact that the most powerful military on earth now feels compelled to publicly measure and optimize the hormone culturally associated with masculinity only shows that the traditional attributes of male identity are being eroded and therefore are in need of defending, proving, and restoring.

Confident dominance doesn’t announce itself; anxious dominance does.

The “High T Department of War” branding is less a display of strength than a symptom of perceived weakness, an institutional performative flexing that would be pointless in an environment where male authority is the de facto, unquestioned norm.

It is evidence that the patriarchal status quo is increasingly being challenged, having now reached the highest bastion of male power: the military.

The signs are everywhere for everyone to see:

Women now outnumber men in higher education across most Western countries, earn the majority of advanced degrees. Notwithstanding a stubborn 32% gender pay gap globally, young women aged 25 to 34 have nearly closed the pay gap with young men in most large US metropolitan labor markets.

Traditional male-coded industries – manufacturing, physically intensive labor – have contracted while care work, knowledge work, and emotional labor have expanded.

Fertility rates are falling globally, decoupling masculine identity from reproductive-provider roles.

Suicide rates and depression among under-educated men, documented extensively in Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, are a clear warning that what ails men is deeply rooted in a cultural milieu that generates and perpetuates the suffering.

Meanwhile, cultural conversations about consent, harassment, and gendered power have made previously normalized male aggression and violence visible and contestable.

Toxic masculinity has become the battle cry to channel all the outrage, to expose all the inequalities, abuses, subjugations, enslavements that are the keystones of a patriarchy whose edges are starting to crumble.

Not one facet of modern society has been immune to the equal opportunity trend between the sexes, the army included, its utmost enduring stronghold of male dominance.

It is therefore telling that the Pentagon feels compelled to resort to scientifically dubious if not disingenuous policies to quell the invasive “softening” of masculinity in their ranks.

 

A Little Science, Perhaps?

The science is unequivocally clear: testosterone doesn’t directly produce aggression.

Rather, it motivates behaviors that maintain or achieve status within a given social context.

If a culture rewards status through violence, testosterone facilitates aggression; if status comes through generosity, cooperation, or intellectual achievement, testosterone facilitates those behaviors.

Elevating testosterone in a cultural environment that valorizes dominance, confrontation, and warrior identity is meaningfully different from elevating it in a context that rewards discipline, restraint, and cooperative problem-solving.

If the policy’s real goal is combat effectiveness, the science suggests the intervention is poorly targeted.

Tellingly, several studies, here and here, have suggested that the lowering of testosterone levels during military training is a direct result of chronic stress, sleep deprivation and calorie deficit.

On the other hand, cortisol management, sleep, nutrition, and a cohesive social environment have larger and more reliable effects on the same outcomes (mood, cognition, recovery, injury prevention) than exogenous testosterone in men with normal levels.

There is a genuine irony in the fact that the political constituency most animated by military strength is enthusiastically promoting a policy that, on the best available behavioral science, is likely to degrade military effectiveness against the actual threats it faces.

The threats from great-power competition are threats where cognitive style, institutional patience, coalition durability, and analytical excellence matter far more than the aggressive readiness of individual warfighters.

What the policy suggests, then, is that its actual purpose is not military effectiveness but cultural performance.

It is aimed at a domestic political audience for whom “strong military” is a symbolic rather than operational category, and for whom the visual and rhetorical performance of masculine strength is what “strong military” means.

This is why the branding matters as much as the medicine: the policy’s real product is the signal, not the outcome.

 

Testosterone Policy’s Cultural Subtext

Let’s examine what the policy accomplishes in the current cultural context.

It medicalizes a cultural grievance, translating “men aren’t what they used to be” from a complaint into a diagnosis with a treatment protocol.

This is powerful because it moves the conversation from contested cultural terrain – where feminism has substantial authority – to medical terrain – where hormones and lab values feel objective and apolitical.

It locates the solution in the individual male body rather than in the social structures.

If the problem is low T rather than, say, the challenges of renegotiating gender roles, then the solution is a prescription rather than a political or economic transformation.

This is characteristic of what is called the “biomedicalization” of social problems.

The policy conveniently aligns with the Robert Kennedy Jr. “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) health agenda.

It connects to Kennedy’s efforts to destigmatize Testosterone Replacement Therapy (TRT). This is part of a broader policy coalition promoting hormone optimization and a “vitality” framing of male health. The military becomes both a beneficiary and a legitimizing institution for this agenda.

It reclaims institutional space for an explicit machoistic ethos.

After roughly two decades in which militaries in liberal democracies expanded roles for women, integrated LGBTQ service members, and adopted more inclusive language, the “Department of War / High T” framing reasserts the military as a specifically male domain, valorizing traits like aggression, dominance, intimidation, that had been softened in official rhetoric even if they remained operationally present.

Identity Politics Disguised as Clinical Branding

The “High T Department of War” branding is not clinical language; it is identity politics.

It signals a deliberate cultural reorientation of the armed forces toward an explicitly masculinist ethos, coming after several years of contested policy changes regarding women in combat roles and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs.

It offers a coherent identity story at a moment when many men, especially younger men, are feeling adrift about what masculinity means.

The vacuum has been real, and figures like Elon Musk and Andrew Tate have filled it with their respective brands of misogynistic toxicity, aimed at reinforcing the sexist patriarchal order.

The state now stepping into this space with an official masculinity script is a significant development in the same direction.

What is at play is patriarchy’s performative reassertion through an institution that embodies “might is right” amidst the perceived weakening of its global standing.

It is a state-level intervention into male bodies, revealing that the state understands itself as having a stake in the biological maleness of its personnel, not merely their competence or discipline.

This is the patriarchy speaking the language of biopolitics.

The state doesn’t just want men in these roles, it wants sufficiently masculine men, and it will now measure and manage this at the endocrine level.

Historically, this kind of intervention has been most aggressive against women’s bodies with restrictive policies on reproductive rights.

Institutions that were previously constrained to speak the language of neutrality and equality are now free to speak the language of hierarchy and sexed identity.

This unabashed licentiousness is what patriarchy’s institutional resurgence actually consists of, more than any specific policy.

Contemporary autocrats and autocratic-leaning leaders across continents – Putin, Orbán, Erdoğan, Xi, Modi, and the current U.S. administration among others – have all made explicit appeals to traditional masculinity, restored patriarchal family policy, attacked feminist and LGBTQ movements, and cultivated personal images built around physical strength or virility.

This is not stylistic coincidence.

It reflects that authoritarian consolidation and patriarchal restoration are, structurally, the same project pursued at different scales.

The “High T Department of War” fits this pattern precisely.

It is not merely a defense policy; it is part of a broader authoritarian aesthetic in which the state performs its masculinity as a way of performing its authority.

The two cannot be separated.

The policy’s deepest limitation, and its deepest revelation, is that testosterone cannot actually resolve the underlying question.

Even if every eligible service member achieves optimized hormonal levels, this will not tell men where their place in a world is at a time when the traditional answers (protector, provider, patriarch, warrior against clearly-defined enemies) have become contested or obsolete.

Hormones can restore a physiological substrate, but they cannot restore meaning, and it is meaning that is actually in short supply.

That the state is reaching for a hormonal answer to what is fundamentally a question about purpose and identity says more about the impoverishment of its cultural relevance and its entrenched regressive views about maleness than about masculinity itself.

When a civilization can only imagine its men through their endocrinology, something has already been lost that no injection will ever recover.

 

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