Vice President JD Vance was ridiculed on social media after he shared his perplexing ideas about “masculinity” during an appearance Thursday at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

During the sit-down conversation in Washington, D.C., with CPAC host Mercedes Schlapp, Vance was asked to share a message to young men. He spewed out several stereotypes about masculinity and so-called masculine urges — which, according to the vice president, has a lot to do with enjoying a beer with your buds.

“I think our culture sends a message to young men that you should suppress every masculine urge, you should try to cast aside your family, you should try to suppress what makes you a young man in the first place,” he said.

“My message to young men is don’t allow this broken culture to send you a message that you’re a bad person because you’re a man. Because you like to tell a joke. Because you like to have a beer with your friends, or because you’re competitive,” he continued as the crowd cheered.

Vance then claimed that there’s been a widespread agenda to turn everybody into “androgynous idiots who think the same, talk the same and act the same.”

“We actually think God made male and female for a purpose, and we want you guys to thrive as young men and as young women, and we’re going to help with our public policy to make it possible to do that,” he said.

He then emphasized that he and his guy friends like to “tell jokes” and that that’s an example of the “essence of masculinity.”

The former Ohio senator was widely mocked on X, formerly Twitter, for his beer-drinking, joke-telling definition of masculinity — which he suggested has been under attack in the media and in society as a whole.

“If your masculinity crumbles at the mere thought of gender rights, maybe you shouldn’t be lecturing anyone on what it means to be a man,” one X user wrote.

“No, our culture does not tell young men that they cannot be masculine,” wrote another X user. “But hopefully they are getting the message that that masculinity has to come with decency, compassion, generosity, and confidence that you can be all these things and that actually define real confident manhood. Real men don’t have to go around proving that they are real men.”

Another X user added: “When i think about the essence of masculinity it’s the antithesis of hyper insecure conservatives like jd vance.”

The “Republicans against Trump” X account described his comments as “beyond cringe.”

Vance and President Donald Trump boosted narratives and theories about what “real men” are supposedly like, as well as various toxic stereotypes about masculinity, throughout Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. MAGA fans have been referring to themselves on social media as alpha males, and Trump himself has called his adversaries “beta” males, much to the delight of his ardent supporters.

The president has also focused his attacks on gender identity and what he calls “gender ideology extremism.” Among the flurry of executive actions Trump has signed since he took office last month, he declared it official U.S. policy that there are only two sexes — rejecting that sex and gender can be viewed as a spectrum, and that gender is distinguished from sex.

Vance’s rhetoric that men are under attack is harmful, according to an expert.

Jillana Enteen, professor of instruction in gender and sexuality studies at Northwestern University, said that Vance’s remarks at CPAC telling men that society thinks they’re “bad” is “harmful.” And that it tells men that they are victims.

“I think it is very harmful for young men, or men at all, to be taking on the role of victimization,” Enteen said. “It’s interesting that when you do put these stereotypes — and the stereotypes are mired in this idea that either drinking beer with friends, making jokes and being competitive is under threat ... or masculinity or masculine ‘urges’ are under a threat ... [it] causes men all of a sudden to be in a special category and need protecting.”

“You’re making men defensive, you’re making men stereotyped — there’s a vast range of the ways in which masculinity is expressed worldwide,” Enteen later added, before emphasizing that the way we view masculinity has evolved over the years.

Enteen said that Vance’s rhetoric puts men in a “victim-protected category” and that contradicts the systemic and historic advantages that men, particularly white men, have had in the U.S.

What’s more, Enteen pointed out that Vance didn’t explicitly define “masculine urges” during his appearance at CPAC (besides drinking beer and having a laugh), and that the term may sometimes be associated with more negative connotations and stereotypes about men such as “violence” or an “inability to tap into their emotions.”

“You’ve kind of set young men up with an idea of masculinity that is harmful and one that is frustrating,” she said.

“It feels really harmful to start to calcify what young men are supposed to think of as their gender roles,” Enteen continued. “And that we have some fixed idea in society that masculinity is ‘this.’”

Enteen later addressed the Trump administration’s executive actions and ongoing rhetoric targeting transgender and nonbinary people, saying that gender identity is the “defining way to recognize what people are” as it relates to sex and gender.

“If we don’t recognize gender identity, then we don’t promote inclusivity and equity,” she said.