Over the past month, U.S. President Donald Trump has shifted from misogynistic jabs to full‑scale performances of militarized authority, an evolution entirely consistent his political brand of hegemonic, martial masculinity. In late 2025, U.S. Chief of Protocol Monica Crowley announced that the country had entered “an era of real masculinity thanks to the bold, muscular leadership of President Trump and our Secretary of War Pete Hegseth,” contrasting it with what she called the Biden administration’s “destructive, stupid era of toxic masculinity.”

Militarized masculinity is not an innate disposition but a cultivated political identity, one that prizes physical toughness, emotional austerity, unquestioning discipline and a willingness to use force in the name of patriotism and security. It is produced by hierarchical, ultra‑nationalistic societies and reinforced through institutions that appear ordinary and apolitical: schools, media, government, religious bodies. Trump’s performances fit squarely within this architecture. 

For years, Trump has performed dominance by feminising or belittling other men as “weak,” “low energy,” “little,” “wimps,” while casting himself as the lone strongman protector. That logic now extends into the military itself, where his Defense Secretary has reportedly blocked the advancement of Black and female officers to preserve a vision of white, male martial authority. His degradation of women journalists snapping “Quiet, piggy,” “stupid,” “nasty,” “ugly,”is also part of the same script, staged to discipline women’s voices in a media ecosystem shaped by militarized nationalism. This logic is painfully familiar and not unique to the United States. A similar script played out in India last April.

In the wake of a deadly militant attack in Kashmir, a widow’s plea for peace exposed a deeper, more insidious violence: the misogyny underlying militarized masculinity. Militarism doesn’t solely operate through visible, physical force; it also controls women’s bodies, silences dissent and dictates who can grieve and how. This gendered militarism bleeds into digital spaces, where grieving women are vilified and their identities mutilated and mocked by trolls performing their own grotesque form of masculinity online dressed as patriotism.

On 22^nd April 2025, 26 civilians were killed in Pahalgam, a town in Indian-administered Kashmir. The perpetrators specifically targeted men, asking them to recite Islamic verses and executing those who failed. A woman who witnessed her husband’s murder begged to be killed as well but was told, “I won’t kill you. Go tell this to Modi.”

The attackers’ actions reveal how, within the phallocratic order, war becomes a gendered performance. Masculinity is affirmed through acts of violence that signal ideological and physical dominance, while femininity is assigned a passive, symbolic role as a mourner, witness, and messenger. The attackers’ decision to spare the woman, framed as an act of coercive mercy, displays the gendered scripting of conflict, where women’s bodies become conduits for political messaging and psychological warfare.

In the aftermath, Himanshi Narwal, the 26-year-old widow of Naval officer Lieutenant Vinay Narwal, who called for “peace and only peace and no violence or hatred against Muslims or Kashmiris,” was mercilessly trolled. In her first public statement since a video of her bidding an emotional farewell to her husband’s coffin went viral, she also demanded that those who had wronged them be punished. Her appeal for peace sparked a swift backlash when internet users who had initially mourned with her, turned on her with abusive comments and sexual slander.

The online trolls didn’t hold back spewing viciously sexualized lies, claiming Himanshi was ‘known for sleeping with her Muslim classmates from JNU,’ accusing her of sneaking into boys’ hostels at night and fraternizing with ‘Muslim boys’, and declaring that “Femi-nazi, JNU, Hindu Woke” women like her don’t deserve to be married, that she should have rather been shot, or that she got her husband killed by her Muslim boyfriend. They hurled accusations at her, labeling her “anti-national,” “sympathizer,” “pro-Pak,” and “Islamist apologist.” 

This continuum of violence extends from warfronts to comment sections, and reveals a persistent masculine entitlement over women’s bodies. It reveals how systems normalize misogyny as a form of control in both war and peacetimes. It is irrelevant whether women conform to or resist militarized masculinity; their existence is invariably objectified.

The newlyweds, who had been married only 7 days, were in the valley for their honeymoon. Immediately after the attack, she was initially the viral face of the feminized devastation, when she was photographed sitting motionless beside her husband’s murdered body wearing red bangles or the ‘chooda’ which symbolizes new beginnings and marital prosperity.

The same week a couple of my former classmates sent Instagram DMs chiding me for taking an anti-war stance on Pakistan which is “always the first aggressor” and “the country which harbors terrorists.” I heard what they believed were compelling arguments, but were in fact Islamophobic stances including the classic, “why is every major terror organization of a single religion,” an oft-repeated argument.

Another person explained the rise in attacks as a natural consequence of redeploying the army to the Line of Control (LoC), insisting that restoring the military grid in Kashmir is simply “the default.” Apparently, the only two viable options for Kashmir are a heavy-handed military presence or a return to the 1990s (mass exodus of Kashmiri Hindus). Either boots on every street corner or total collapse mark the limits of their political imagination.

Then came the familiar deflection: anyone who questions the government after a terror attack is accused of lacking “even an iota of concern” for the victims. What surprised me was also how quickly people began sharing posts and AI‑generated banners praising the military, fully accepting that a permanent, heavy militarized response is the only conceivable form of safety.

The violence of war is re-productive. War-honed masculinities, fueled by vengeance and a desire to protect, reproduce the logic of permanent militarism. This form of militarized masculinity requires war to continually validate its own strength. The imagination of security, then, is held hostage by hypermasculine symbols of power.

However, this is not just about individual men, women, or isolated incidents. It is the gendered order itself, predicated on authority, coercion, and the normalization of violence. That order bleeds into our civic life, our grief, our traumas, our debates, and our silences. It steals our ability to envision a different model of security while sowing fear and division.

What is terrifying is how easily violence is coded as protection. How swiftly grief reemerges as a tool of vengeance. How the language of national security becomes indistinguishable from that of patriarchal dominance. Himanshi’s refusal to perform state-sanctioned grief, my refusal to join the digital hatemongering, these are deviations from the phallocratic order, where masculinity needs militarization not just to thrive but to validate itself.

In a regime where war sharpens ethnic lines and refashions gender roles as producing ‘armed masculinities’ and ‘victimized femininities’, the continuum of violence does not stop at the LoC. It is alive and well in our inboxes, our comments sections, our dinner table debates. Peace becomes unimaginable because masculinity as we know it cannot survive without its ritualistic dominance. Until we stop confusing safety with violence and strength with silencing, we will remain trapped in a cycle where grief, must prove its loyalty to power before it is allowed to speak.