Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had stern words for anyone seeking to skirt the highest standards of fitness in the military Tuesday, as he announced a return to the “highest male standard” for physical fitness.

“If women can make it, excellent. If not, it is what it is,” Hegseth said about reinforcing physical standards for combat. “It will also mean that weak men won’t qualify, because we’re not playing games. This is combat. This is life or death.”

Hegseth’s words angered many on the feminist left because they know that nothing showcases a woman’s distinct abilities from men more than applying the same physical fitness standard to both sexes. The fact is, only a very small, very elite subset of women are able to meet all the physical standards of the military if applied consistently, as mandated under Trump in April 2025. That’s why “female standards” in the military even existed at one time. Hegseth’s command has functionally made the military all-male without saying so.

But it’s not just women who may find it more challenging to join the military under these reinforced standards. “Weak men” took a beating during Hegseth’s speech. In fact, no one should be angrier than weak men that elite fitness standards are the norm again in the military. Hegseth didn’t just make the military functionally all-male, he made it an exclusive club for only the strongest of men.

Weak men are the enablers and beneficiaries of feminist mediocrity. They are to blame for the fact that we even allowed standards to be lowered to meet certain quotas of gender equality. Indeed, no one wants a weak society more than men trying to do the bare minimum.

It’s not like these weak men were up to any good under Biden either. The U.S. Army launched an investigation in 2022 after an incident which USA Today describes as “male soldiers [photographed] in uniform, or parts of uniforms, wearing dog masks, leather and chains.”

The report continued: “Some of the photos depict poses of submission and sexual acts. Another photo shows a soldier in combat fatigues wearing the dog mask on an airfield.”

Just to make the absurdity more obvious regarding what weak men will do in a world with lowered standards of strength, Dr. Rachel Levine, a biological male identifying as female, was sworn in as an admiral of the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps in October 2021, becoming the first transgender four-star admiral in the nation’s history. It was a ludicrous situation, but all too normal in a country which had forgotten that men like Levine are not worth having in the military when their inclusion means capitulating to the lowest of feminine strength standards.

Effeminate men, especially under the auspices of the transgender movement, have long taken advantage of feminism’s penchant for extolling physical weakness to justify their own lack of strength.

We are caught in a vicious cycle. Weak men are counting on feminism to give them a free pass, while feminists defend our culture of mediocrity because it yields more “equitable” results. It’s a scenario where there are no long-term winners. In the military, it has yielded nothing but weak men: weak men pretending to be women, and women meeting lowered standards set by weak men.

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The republication of this article is made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal.

Image Credit: Flickr-U.S. Secretary of War, Public Domain