Last year, in an article for Eidolon, I suggested that both Trump and Alcibiades preyed upon their respective voters’ insecurities, revealing that when masculinity is in crisis, hypermasculine rhetoric will prevail, however irrational and ill-informed the speaker. During the Republican primary discussions of gender focused on Clinton, but the comparison allowed me — and hopefully my audience — to consider how gender, specifically masculinity, shaped Republican rhetoric.

In the time since, more and more attention was paid to Trump’s toxic masculinity, culminating in both a standoff between Republican primary candidates over hand (i.e. …

Gender has been a pervasive theme in media coverage of the Democratic primaries, as Kathryn Topper addressed in a recent Eidolon article. Less acknowledged, however, is the critical role that gender — more specifically, masculinity — is playing in the Republican race.

We expect candidates to trade policy-based jabs, yet lately their quips and insults sound like the stuff of reality TV: Rubio’s boots, called “cute” by Rand Paul, appeared in an attack ad sponsored by Jeb Bush’s SuperPAC. Rubio assured voters that, heeled boots aside, he is manly: after all, he bought a gun on Christmas Eve. …