Let’s stare into the hard-on of darkness… picture a disgruntled man in 1930s Europe, anxious about keeping a roof over his family’s head and also, frankly, anxious about keeping his family his. Now picture that same man being promised a return to traditional order: jobs for all, respect on the street, and the guarantee that real men will be in charge again. It sounds like a political pitch, but there’s something almost Freudian lurking under the hood. Several thinkers, from psychoanalysts to pop culture satirists, have long noted an uncomfortable liaison between fascism and sexual anxiety. In plainer terms, behind the jackboots and rallies, there often lies a fear of emasculation, impotence, or just not measuring up (socially and, yes, sometimes below the belt).
This idea might prompt a raised eyebrow. After all, fascism is usually discussed in terms of economics or nationalism, not bedroom angst. But as we’ll see, the link between authoritarian politics and sexual insecurity has been observed in everything from historical propaganda to Fight Club. The notion isn’t that every fascist is a sexually frustrated man (plenty had active love lives, for better or worse), but that fascist movements often channel a society’s gender and sexual anxieties into political fuel. Let’s dive, carefully, with a sly smile and lots of fact-checking, into how twisted gender roles and male inadequacy have flirted with fascism through history, pop culture, and our present moment.
It’s only fair to start with the original Freud-influenced firebrand on this topic, Wilhelm Reich. In 1933, as jackboots echoed across Europe, Reich published The Mass Psychology of Fascism, arguing that fascism was basically sexual dysfunction writ large. He treated the rise of fascism as a mass sickness of sexual repression, inhibition, and anxiety. Reich, a student of Freud and a Marxist, believed that when healthy sexual expression is stifled (by puritanical morality, patriarchal family structure, etc.), those repressed energies get diverted into authoritarian, militaristic fervor. In his view, a society full of pent-up, frustrated people was a tinderbox that demagogues could ignite by promising a return to order and purity.
Reich’s ideas were controversial even then. Critics accused him of reducing complex political phenomena to what basically sounded like blue balls. And indeed, not everyone buys the notion that goose-steppers just needed, well, a good goose. Yet Reich wasn’t alone. Members of the Frankfurt School like Theodor Adorno later explored the “authoritarian personality,” noting a link between sexual prudishness and fascist sympathies. Adorno’s famous F-scale, F for fascist, even included questions about whether young people should suppress their sexual urges, positing that those who agreed were more likely to harbor authoritarian tendencies. In short, a pattern emerged in early research: rigid gender roles and sexual norms tend to go hand in hand with fascistic politics.
Perhaps the most vivid and unsettling analysis came from literary scholar Klaus Theweleit in the 1970s. He studied the diaries and pulp novels of World War I–era German Freikorps soldiers, the proto-fascist militiamen who later fed into Nazi ranks. Theweleit’s two-volume Male Fantasies concludes that fascist men fear women and women’s bodies and wish to destroy them. He found these men saw femininity as a kind of swampy, liquid force that could drown their tough male identities. Their writings were full of nightmares about a “feminine flood”—images of engulfing mud, blood, and chaos—which they equated with everything they hated or feared, revolutionary mobs, foreign enemies, their own inner vulnerability. To Theweleit, this misogynistic horror was central to the psychology of fascism: build a cult of hyper-masculinity to dam up the feared feminine flood. His analysis is extreme and not without its skeptics, but it strikingly literalizes the idea that male sexual anxiety, fear of women, fear of inadequacy, can curdle into political rage.
Even if one remains skeptical of the deep psychoanalysis, it’s hard to ignore how obsessed with gender roles actual fascist regimes have been. Across the board, they exalt a return to “traditional” arrangements, typically a patriarchal fantasy land where men are mighty providers or warriors and women are dutiful mothers homemakers. Any deviation from that script tends to be condemned as a sign of societal decay. As Yale philosopher Jason Stanley observes in his study of fascist tactics, “In a patriarchal society, the man runs things. Any outside threat to traditional male roles undermines the fascist vision of strength.”
Stanley notes that fascist propaganda repeatedly portrays the other, the out-group, as sexual invaders. In Nazi Germany, for example, Hitler whipped up fear with lurid warnings of Jewish and black men defiling German women. He infamously railed against the “Black Horror on the Rhine,” claiming Jewish cabals were behind black French colonial troops fathering children with German women. This toxic stew of racism and sex panic was not incidental; it was core to Nazi propaganda, casting the targeted group as a threat to the purity of our women and the virility of our men.
Even today, we see echoes of these themes. The rise of the “manosphere”—online communities of disaffected men, including so-called involuntary celibates (incels) and other misogynist subcultures—has demonstrated how male inadequacy and rejection of modern “feminized” life can slide into organized destructiveness. The alt-right has weaponized sexual anxiety through phrases like “cuck” to mock men they deem weak. Even contemporary political figures stoke this fear—whether through attacks on LGBTQ rights or rhetoric about immigrants raping “our women.”
It might seem ironic to end an analysis of fascism and sexual anxiety on a hopeful note—but let’s recall that the point of examining this dark connection is to prevent its worst outcomes. Yes, history shows how twisted knots of fear in the human psyche can unravel into jackboots and persecution. But it also shows those knots can be loosened by enlightenment, empathy, and sometimes just plain old love.
A society that embraces affectionate joy and respect in human relationships leaves little oxygen for the fires of fascist fear-mongering. Knowledge, in this case, truly is power—the gentle, liberating kind that outlasts the saber-rattling of insecure men. Let’s choose that power and leave the hard-ons for war in the past where they belong.