Secretary of Machotude Pete Hegseth has decreed that all servicemen over age 30 will have their testosterone levels tested and, if low, supplemented, as a way of “restoring and optimizing your natural capabilities” and keeping the military’s “leading edge of lethality.” His new slogan: “The High-T Department of War.”
As you can tell from those quotes, testosterone can also make you dumb as a red brick, and anyway, how much do you need to guide drone strikes on a video monitor? Millions of pre-pubescent kids are training for that on video games even as you read this. I guess Pete hasn’t seen videos from Ukraine showing what drones do to individual soldiers, no matter how he-manly they are. If he had he’d realize we’re long past the age of hoplites.
And if he knew anything beyond how to order a double, he’d know that tales of warrior women are as old as those of martial men. The Chinese legend of Hua Mulan, for example, dates to the 4th century AD. She went to war in place of her father by disguising herself as a man – that right there is enough to give Hegseth the shakes. It also shows that people have been challenging gender roles for millenia.
The tale went through many iterations over the centuries before Disney adapted it as an animated musical in 1998. The songs were composed by Matthew Wilder, who had a hit back in 1983 with “Break My Stride,” with lyrics by David Zippel. “I’ll Make a Man Out of You” is sung by the character Li Shang, the leader of Mulan’s platoon, as he trains a group of raw recruits. Producers recruited Donny Osmond to sing it. As Li berates his charges like a drill sergeant, he exhorts them, Hegseth-style, to embody manliness, even as Mulan proves the qualities he espouses are not linked to the Y chromosome.
