Mark Dery of the LA Times thinks that USA suffers from a deadly fear of wussiness, where the strongest attack you can make on an opponant is to question his manliness. Fueled by homophobia and “femophobia”, politicians ”confuses diplomacy with weakness and arrogant rigidity with strength.” That can’t be good.

Doesn’t all this machismo and locker-room homophobia protest a little too much? What can we say about a country so anxiously hypermasculine that it produces Godmen, a muscular-Christianity movement that seeks to lure Real Men back to church with services that feature guys bending metal wrenches with their bare hands and leaders exulting, “Thank you, Lord, for our testosterone!”

The trouble with manhood, American-style, is that it’s maintained by frantically repressing every man’s feminine side and demonizing the feminine and the gay wherever we see them. In his book, “The Wimp Factor: Gender Gaps, Holy Wars, and the Politics of Anxious Masculinity,” clinical psychologist Stephen Ducat calls this state of mind “femiphobia” — a pathological masculinity founded on the subconscious belief that “the most important thing about being a man is not being a woman.”

Source: Wimps, wussies and W.