I just read the Financial Times Magazine article, “What Does it Mean to be a Boy Online in 2023?” by Henry Mance. The article gives an overview of the online habits of young males, searching for male role models on social media and Youtube in Britain.
Mance worries that young boys are looking up to the wrong adult men, observing that the majority of today’s role models are social media influencers whose soaring popularity is directly owed to algorithms provoking influencers to upload, because they lead their audiences to consume, only the most extreme content. Mance wonders what a healthy masculinity would resemble, in contrast to the proliferation of toxic masculinity. At the end of his article he assesses that the echochamber of communities of men makes it harder for boys to question their assumptions about male behavior, thus stunting their ethical development. I think that for his concerns about young guys, which I also share, he could do better to question his own assumption that men should have role models at all.
First I would argue that the “healthy masculinity” Mance is looking for is impossible, because masculinity is in itself a misogynistic social ideal rooted as much in negative valuations of women as male pride. Where does masculinity in the west originate? Chivalry. Quixotic knight errantry. But what is chivalry? It is as much men jousting and dueling over cultural abstractions like nobility and honor as assuming women cannot help themselves or make their own choices, thus men need to fight to the bloody death on women’s behalf, over women.
One absolutely absurd occasion of chivalry I witnessed has made an enduring imprint on my mind. I saw a man walk around to the passenger side of his pick up to open the car door for an apparently able bodied young woman who looked like his girlfriend. He opened the door for her, she climbed in the truck, and then he shut the door too.
What in God’s name is that, right? Perhaps he was her valet or something, but I don’t think so. It was one of the most demented things I’ve witnessed in the last few months. Though just because I find chivalry ridiculous, doesn’t mean I endorse leaving women to fend for themselves as some kind of libertarian conceit. Like at work recently, a short female colleague couldn’t reach something on a shelf, so she came over, interrupting me at work, and asked me if I would help her since I’m tall. I gladly went over and got the item for her. Then she apologized for distracting me from the other task I was doing. I dismissed her apology and assured her it was fair for her to ask me because if I wouldn’t help her, then who else would? If I wouldn’t be the tall guy to do it, then someone else who was tall, would have to be relied on—why shouldn’t that guy be me? —This is how I justify coming to the aid of women. It has nothing to do with being a man or some ridiculous chivalrous sense of entitlement to protect and defend women or some nonsense. It’s just a matter of my basic decency, combined with cold calculation or Thatcherian practicality.
So if I could respond to Henry Mance and the Financial Times, instead of pioneering a healthy masculinity, I think the better question is: why should we have masculinity at all? Forget about the right and the wrong role models, why should young men even have role models at all? Who needs a vulgar role model? As Mance worries online echochambers disincentivize critical thinking at the end—we might then ask what about the decline of critical thinking in general? This is a bigger problem than men without direction; to solve which might do the most actually to help them.
It’s not that people need the right inspiration now, but that people are way too inspired already by extreme content, not to mention our self-seeking permissive culture that encourages people to find and discover themselves (which preconditions the radicalization of today’s youths)—as if there were a true person inside each of us that in terms of our personal growth (as congresswoman AOC would call it) or spiritual journey, a final destination we could uncover with enough introspection.
Though it’s more convenient to blame social media for corrupting the youth, and toxic masculinity and malicious influencers, for all the social problems with young people, and men in particular—the crux of the issue is the mainly American culture, or cult should I say, of self-discovery. It is a essentially an immoral doctrine whose philosophical roots are in romanticism. Moreover it claims that whatever choices you make as a free agent are morally good, and above the judgment of others, just because it was your decision! For example, I was talking with this guy at work one day who mentioned another colleague was quitting and joining the police. I asked, why was he joining the police? An innocent question I thought, but this guy said to me, in a slightly defensive tone, “I don’t know. It was his choice. He had always wanted to be a cop.”
There was an emphasis, I can’t convey over Substack, that he put on the detail that it was our coworker’s personal “choice” to join the cops that somehow made the choice ipso facto unworthy of my inquiry as to why. Just because it was the guy’s choice that necessarily made it a good choice, or else not a bad one. This comes from left-leaning ethical sentiments, the same that underlie bodily autonomy, that sanction and make into a dogma an inchoate ideal of unlimited personal freedom; however one uses one’s freedom which, it is taken for granted should be above the scrutiny of other people.
That’s where the value nonjudgmental also comes from. However this isn’t only a leftwing phenomenon. I don’t know if it’s borrowed from the perceived success of the left’s ability to shape culture, or whether it’s an essential component of identity politics in general, or whether it has something to do with technology and how social media has given rise to an insufferable cult of the unbridled self (hence all that, this is me, this is you, this is us, this is so me bullshit), but a right wing self-absorbed fascination with arbitrary choice for the sake of choice has undoubtedly emerged too. Though there are political stakes in this universal fetishization of choice, agency, action, impulsivity, spontaneity, irrationality, and emotion, it’s not entirely political. A lot of it happens in a distinct self-contained cultural realm external to politics, which only has political ramifications after the fact, such as where Andrew Tate advocates owning women like property or something. This is simultaneously political reaction and cultural innovation.
Male social media influencers, Henry Mance worries, relish in the deliberately inconsiderate expression of male rage and primal aggression. Against presumably emasculating mental health professionals, feminists, democracy, etc. male influencers have made careers out of making shamelessness and indecency virtuous, honorable and/or beautiful. This is just another kind of romanticism. Similar to the kind that makes personal choice and bodily autonomy ends in themselves, this seeks to make men special through making random unpredictable anger powerful, because of the force of male anger unconstrained by the values of modern society. It needs no explanation, it’s absurd and ridiculous. It’s cultural with apolitical figures like Andrew Tate, but more frightening is that it has a political outlet. The male attraction to Donald Trump or Ron Desantis doesn’t have a little to do with this infantile fascination with arbitrary male whim.
The strategy for these angry men in the digital age is that if all the postmodern gender theorists got them beat intllectually—to the extent no one can beat a Marxist or a Freudian for that matter, intellectually—then men at least can take the power back physically through channelling their raw brutality, either by working out a shitton or just saying outrageous things hellter skellter. If women and ethnic and sexual minorities took too much power through politics, then these angry men can take the power back through sheer force of arbitrariness, blind whim and senseless rage. To the extent that the former and the latter are a response to a spiritual crisis of powerlessness—or perhaps too much power the result of too much digital self-expression—the problem to me is that the masses have chucked philosophy for spirituality. I think no one would either be so entitled or angry, not to mention no one would be half as annoying in the digital age, if only sober philosophy, not unhinged spirituality, moderated and guided people’s thoughts and actions.
Like I said in the beginning what the hell happened to critical thinking as an ethical value? Forget about role models in the first place. Perhaps role models and looking up to people is a big part of the problem. Henry Mance doesn’t discuss this, but I would argue there’s an issue with female role models now too. And bizarrely women have even borrowed from the arbitrariness-is-good male power strategy. I’m thinking about all these nihilistic superhero movies now with female superhero or supervillains rather featuring hardbody chicks tossing feckless dudes around like rag dolls.
Clay Enos Warner Bros Pictures
Laurie Sparham Disney
I find it a peculiar coincidence that movies like “Cruella” or “Birds of Prey” are coming out at the same time that we also have movies like “Joker.”
Or Punisher.
Jessica Miglio Netlix
Not just on the internet and in politics, but also in all these box office blowouts, over the last several years, we see this pattern of glorifying violence, romanticizing self-assertion for its own sake, rebellion, despair, self-pity, a fetish of criminality, a hatred of an unexplained status quo, and vigilanteism. And these nihilistic, and from a film critic’s perspective, dreadful movies as well, mirror our deranged politics in turn—with opportunistic politicians, like Ron Desantis (you might call him “the punisher”) Biden, or Trump (you could call him the Joker) or Greg Abbott, or DA’s Like Alvin Bragg—who willfully bend the rules to give more power to the allegedly oppressed “people.” A nihilistic cult of personal empowerment I would argue drives a politics which delights in debasing, provoking, bullying and shaming members of the other side—without recourse, nor even the pretense of a commitment whatsoever to the principles of western liberalism, the American founding, and constitutional law. Note all politicians and all parties everywhere are united in their opposition to judicial review and the law in general whenever it doesn’t go their particular way.
So look. We have bad male role models. We have bad female role models too. And there is far too much distasteful self-assertion. So why don’t we do away with role models altogether and stop looking up to people? How about we start thinking again instead, rather than resort to attention-seeking arbitrariness? What we’re seeing in France, and January 6th, is what we get for this cult of the self too. Especially in France we witness riots staged by a people whose perverse culture glorifies and sees beauty in spectacles of violent destruction and rebellion, for its own sake.
So forget about male role models Henry Mance. We’re not going to have genuine social progress until people relearn to use their brains, and stop fetishizing emotion and violence, and objectifying their bodies and physical strength.
In the article he says, an expert told him that men have started to value “retaliation” when one is insulted. Women in the Metoo era, looking for empowerment, are also obsessed with retaliation. Perhaps in characters like the Joker or Harley Quinn we’re seeing a cultural ideal of someone who doesn’t take shit from nobody. And I suppose this is the appeal of Donald Trump and Desantis, and that was definitely what January 6th was about. What Trump lost? No! It was stolen. Don’t take shit. Rebel.
To me on the contrary, real psychological strength actually does have to do with taking shit. I wonder whatever happened to taking shit in stride? Isn’t it a sign of maturity not to retaliate? Real strength has to do with having too much contempt than to retaliate. Who has the time of day to waste one’s energy for fighting one’s petty dignity whenever it feels threatened?
I think a lot of these aggrieved extreme far right men out there, looking up to misogynistic male influencers, have the wrong attitude about what scares them. Female advancement for example. Female advancement, that women are working more and having fewer kids, isn’t just good for women—I would argue it’s good for men too. When my grandfather was my age at 25 he already had to support multiple kids and a wife who made substantially less than he did, living in a society, where it was much harder for women to get ahead. That puts a lot of pressure on men to provide. I’m glad I’m not in that generation burdened with being a vulgar “provider.” While these losers on the internet all think it’s man’s status as a protecter and a provider that is a man’s crowning triumph as a man—for me it’s the opposite. Is it not a crippling burden to be forced by society to provide with the fetters of marriage and the social undesirability in the old days of divorcing, and the imperative to provide. That strikes me as not a lot of time for one’s own ambitions. I couldn’t spend so much time reading the Economist and the Financial Times, or Foreign Affairs, and I certainly wouldn’t have the time for this blog, were I enslaved with being a provider.
As usual I just don’t understand at all these people out there nowadays clamoring for respect. If you’re a young man or a young woman, and not married without kids, you’ve got it made. Even better for you I say, if you have no plans to have a family. You are living in the richest country in the world, with the highest standard of living, where you have the most options to choose how and where you want to live, and what you want to do. People are so ungrateful. I just don’t understand what, thinking rationally, there is to complain about.
Stop complaining.
— Jay