Cockburn woke up this morning to a good laugh over his coffee when he saw that British prime minister Boris Johnson had attributed Putin’s invasion of Ukraine to “toxic masculinity.”
Johnson, the Conservative PM of the UK, told German broadcaster ZDF, “If Putin was a woman, which he obviously isn’t, but if he were, I really don’t think he would’ve embarked on a crazy, macho war of invasion and violence in the way that he has.”
He proceeded to say that the war is a “perfect example of toxic masculinity,” urging more countries to have “more women in positions of power.”
While Putin’s bare chest on horseback may be the source of endless memes, Cockburn believes Johnson is focusing on the wrong things here.
Johnson’s statements can’t help but come across like actress AnnaLynne McCord’s slam poetry, in which she urged the Russian president, “Dear Mister President Vladimir Putin, I am so sorry that I was not your mother,” and said the invasion of Ukraine would not have happened had the actress raised Putin.
Why do Western figures keep thinking they’ve got Putin nailed down? Johnson is hardly in a position to accuse Russia of toxic masculinity, when the Scotsman newspaper reported that he told the Malaysian prime minister in 2013 that Malaysian women go to university because “they’ve got to find men to marry.”
Cockburn thinks that maybe instead of opening his Freud, Johnson should pay more attention to the ongoing NATO summit in Madrid. And instead of joking with Justin Trudeau about showing their pecs at a photo-op, he should show some real muscle after cracking open an international relations textbook or two.
