Senator Josh Hawley on Monday suggested that men are viewing more pornography and playing more video games because of efforts to combat toxic masculinity that amount to attacks on “manhood”.

       Mr Hawley, a Republican who serves as Missouri’s junior senator, made the bizarre charges in a speech to the National Conservatism Conference in Orlando Florida, in which he offered no evidence or sources for his claims, but nonetheless suggested that “the left” is trying to bring about “a world beyond men”.

       “Can we be surprised that after years of being told that they are the problem, that their manhood is the problem, more and more men are withdrawing into the enclave of idleness and pornography and video games?” he said. “While the left may celebrate this decline of men, I for one cannot join them. No one should.”

       Mr Hawley also claimed, without evidence, that boys “are increasingly treated like an illness in search of a cure” by American culture, and for good measure took a shot at America’s film industry, which he said “delivers the toxic masculinity theme ad nauseum in television and film”.

       In addition to video games and pornography, the first-term senator – one of seven whose push to throw out the results of the 2020 election gave rise to the mob that stormed the US Capitol on 6 January – suggested that unemployment and people waiting longer to get married are the result of attacks on traditional masculinity, which he called “vital to self-government”.

       As part of his prescription for the problem, Mr Hawley and his wife are launching a podcast focused on family values. The senator received criticism for his tacit support of the 6 January demonstrators when the show was announced.