When a word or phrase suddenly and (sometimes) unexpectedly hits our collective consciousness, you cannot stop hearing or reading it. Lexicon is The Ringer’s running guide to collecting and defining these terms, and sometimes tracing their origins. It’s a never-ending pursuit, but one we’re happy to entertain.
In 2013, conspiracy-theory shock jock Alex Jones addressed the followers of his radio and online show, Infowars. “They’re turning the friggin’ frogs gay!” he bellowed.
According to Jones, the government had covertly started a project to change the sexual orientation of foreign troops by intoxicating them with chemicals. This, Jones insisted, would make enemy combatants so lusty for one another that they would forget to kill Americans in the ensuing erotic haze. But, alas, these chemical “gay bombs” had seeped into the domestic water supply during testing and inadvertently homosexualized a bunch of frogs. Ordinary people, Jones insisted, were also at risk of government-plotted same-sex horniness.
One of Jones’s fixations is the idea that people, men in particular, need to be constantly vigilant about the government manipulating their bodies. He has made a fortune by selling gear that promises to protect or stave off bodily corruption, from potassium iodine pills meant to protect the thyroid from a nuclear disaster to an allegedly testosterone-boosting tincture called “Super Male Vitality.” He has also claimed that the government has biochemically engineered a larger gay population by dosing juice boxes with estrogen-mimicking chemicals. “After you’re done drinking your little juices, well, I mean, you’re ready to go out and have a baby. You’re ready to put makeup on. You’re ready to wear a short skirt,” Jones ranted in another 2013 video.
I was reminded of Jones’s obsession with the idea that chemicals could destroy heterosexual, macho manhood last week, when I read about a new insult favored by members of the far-right-wing online community: the “soy boy.” As journalist Will Sommer explained on Medium, the singsong taunt is based on the “scientifically dubious idea that soy products feminize men.” This scientifically unfounded anxiety is at the heart of the “soy boy” insult, which presupposes that eating soy will corrode manliness. The idea has gained mainstream exposure—Men’s Health, for example, claimed in 2009 that soy may “undermine everything it means to be male.” It is also perennially popular in alternative-health conspiracist circles, such as Jones’s Infowars.com and on the website of the bipartisan but perpetually paranoid wellness guru Joseph Mercola. But clinical studies have shown no “feminization” effect on men who eat large quantities of soy.
Still, the idea that soy will turn manly men into femmes has been popularized by Mike Cernovich, another far-right-wing conspiracy theorist. Like Jones, Cernovich is obsessed with the idea that the nation’s manhood is in utter peril. (He wrote a book of essays about “embracing masculinity.”)
“It strikes me that all the concern about essence and the protection of testosterone and bodily chi — think of the Proud Boys’ anti-masturbation strictures — speaks to the fluid borderless zones between the right and conspiracy theory culture. It’s a fluoride panic for the 4chan age,” Sommer wrote.
The Proud Boys, for the blissfully unfamiliar, are a nascent nationalist fraternity led by Vice founder Gavin McGinness. The xenophobic men’s group adheres to a bizarre set of rules regarding masturbation known as “no wanks.” While the group does not (yet) have a rule against consuming soy products, it is devoted to upholding a chauvinistic vision of the West, where women are best as housewives and men are dominant and unapologetic. In other words, it is anti–soy boy.
The far right’s obsession with soy’s danger is weird and deeply silly, but it is also symptomatic of its loose guiding principle: to regain dominance in an allegedly hostile culture. The “soy boy” gets mocked for allowing the outside world to make him soft and open. Jones and Cernovich bemoan outside forces that are supposedly trying to steal and weaken their male power, be it feminism or grilled tofu. They fear invasion, and so they fiercely protect and fetishize the things that make them feel masculine. The body becomes the safe space, one that must be rapidly protected from intruders or challenges. Their masculinity is as precious and fragile as a snowflake.