Galloway — investor, entrepreneur, blogger, professor, public intellectual — is as inescapable now as Peterson was in his heyday. The Washington Post bills him as one of the people shaping American society in 2026. He rears his bald head often on Instagram and TikTok; his voice is a mainstay on the podcast circuit. “I’m good at being right”, he tells Chris Williamson on Modern Wisdom; “I’m not good at being effective”. Galloway was first propelled into the spotlight back when he used to teach a brand strategy course at NYU’s Stern School of Business; to become more effective, he has created a brand of his own.

Brand Galloway promises to make young men fitter, happier, more attractive to women. Indeed, his advice is markedly similar to Peterson’s: show up early, have good manners, be a protector. Rather, the difference between Peterson’s “clean up your room, bucko” and Galloway’s “get your shit together”, is one of tone, not substance. The difference reveals something interesting about the two sides of the American culture war: conservatives want their gurus to dress up their life advice in Jungian psychoanalysis and confused allusions to the Book of Genesis; liberals want theirs to be sweary management professors who speak in the language of McKinsey slides — hardly the stuff to keep kids flocking back over the long term.

Before Galloway was a lifestyle guru, he was a finance guru — and reviewing his career, one might reasonably ask why his advice now ought to carry much weight. After all, his knack for bad analysis once caused him to become the butt of the joke. A few years ago, some finance wags came up with the Anti-Galloway Index, allowing punters to earn their fortune by betting against Galloway’s predictions. Since October 2019, the Index tells us, “tech companies that the Professor has predicted would fail have outperformed the S&P 500 and seen a whopping 61.48% return”. The greater part of this was due to the continued growth of Tesla, on which Galloway’s powers of prediction are clouded by personal animus. Galloway believes, incidentally, that Elon Musk has locked him out of X.

Galloway has long presented himself as the enemy of Musk and his ilk. In The Four, published in 2017, he made the case for breaking up Big Tech. Today he speaks with revulsion about those Silicon Valley CEOs who’ve prostrated themselves before the Trump administration, and has launched a campaign against them, called “Resist and Unsubscribe”. Recently, he seriously weighed up running for the presidency.

Life advice is the continuation of politics by other means. Galloway’s tips are spliced with political calls to action — for free education, housing reform, even national service along the lines of the IDF. These are tucked away in his books, hidden beneath a pile of snippets of fortune-cookie wisdom. His works of self-help have big font on small pages; the chapter headings often take the form of equations, like “Credentials + Zip Code = Money”, or “Car < Lion” (which means that you should invest in experiences over things). According to Galloway arithmetic, “1 + 1 > 2”. Instead of just using the English language to tell young men to drink less, we get a picture of a martini = sad face emoji. Perhaps this helps the message stick in the minds of his audience. Peterson, it must be said, always expected slightly more from his readers.

Why, then, is Galloway so popular? Why, given he once said that “taking life advice from a depressed and insane professor may not make sense”, does he get feted by liberal stalwarts on both sides of the Atlantic? The answer is simple: for all the mockery he gets from himself and from others, in truth he is one of life’s winners. He looks and sounds the part. He’s six-foot-two, well-dressed and well-spoken. He has that air of competence. Plenty of his business ventures have failed, but enough of them have succeeded. He owns a townhouse in London by Regent’s Park, a home in Florida, and a sumptuous Manhattan apartment. He reckons his lifestyle costs him $350,000 to $425,000 a month.

Peterson’s earthly successes occurred after his pivot from academia to self-help; Galloway’s were present before. The point of Peterson’s “12 rules for life” was not that young men might, by adhering to them, become more like him (and, certainly, Peterson nowadays seldom takes heed of his tenth rule: “Be precise in your speech”). With Galloway, it’s different. His breezy references to his own personal shortcomings are part of that air of humility which successful people are expected to cultivate. He knows that young men would quite like to enjoy a lifestyle that costs $350,000 to $425,000 a month. The object of Brand Galloway is to mentor young men into becoming more like Scott Galloway. In this respect, his way of keeping his audience captivated has more in common with Andrew Tate than Jordan Peterson: he is selling them his own story, a story of success with money and with women.

His story is much enhanced by its rags-to-riches element. His parents got divorced and his mum was poor; he talked his way into UCLA, despite bad grades, where he smoked weed, memorized every line of Planet of the Apes, and “majored and minored in horniness”. When he speaks of his success, he is always careful to underscore — herein his woke credentials — that he won the lottery by being born a white heterosexual male in California, and that this allowed him, along with some good old-fashioned elbow grease, to climb up the ladder. He doesn’t drop his guard on matters intersectional: when expressing concerns about the plight of young men, he is eager to add that the issues and challenges that they face are “especially acute among young men of color”. He doesn’t believe in God, and therefore hasn’t followed Peterson down the torturous path of mystical and metaphysical speculation. Still, he prays as a mark of gratitude, especially for his mother and family. “The reason I am wealthy”, he recently told Esquire, “can be distilled down to one word: women“.

Galloway has thought hard about how his own successes can be translated into general life lessons. Everything in the Galloway universe exists to impart lessons; life is one grand preparation for that job interview where you’re asked about what challenges you’ve overcome. He pays his children to do chores, to instill them with a hunger for work; and then sometimes he mugs them on the way back to their room, “as that, too, is a life lesson”. Everybody in the Galloway universe speaks the way he does, in a series of catchy and obnoxious made-up names for complex human experiences. During the breakdown of his first marriage, he visited a counselor, who asked him: “What city do you want to live in, Marrytown or Singletown?”. This sparked an epiphany. He had already set up shop in Singletown.

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A tough-love tone permeates Galloway’s latest meditation on masculinity, Notes on Being a Man. “When Germans or Russians are streaming over the border or firing from the beach”, he declares, “big-dick energy isn’t just a nice idea; it’s fucking mandatory”. Peterson, of course, was never quite so crude. But more than that, Galloway’s point is undercut by a certain mawkishness: for it appears that one can grow one’s big-dick energy, according to Galloway, by being kind. Masculinity, moreover, is perfectly compatible with vulnerability. Like Peterson, and like much pop culture directed at young men in the last decade, Galloway is a passionate evangelist for crying. Unlike Peterson, however, he knows to hold himself together in public. It is hard, in fact, to imagine him crying, even though he says he does so often. It is so incongruous with what is ultimately a conventional, alpha persona.

And yet, despite the macho self-presentation, the title on the front cover of Notes on Being a Man appears in a noticeably feminine hand, with rounded curves and flowing loops. Here, perhaps, a clue as to how its publishers have imagined its typical buyer. “My biggest fans are young men”, Galloway tells Triggernometry; “my biggest supporters are mothers”.

The problem for Brand Galloway is this: young men do not want to read things their moms approve of. They would want to read Page 3 or Nuts Magazine, if only they still existed; nowadays they seem to content themselves with Clavicular, Nick Fuentes, Hasan Piker — and Andrew Tate, who Galloway so tentatively tried to mimic. Jordan Peterson could compete, for a time, but only because he was supposed to be subversive. It never mattered that he was telling young men what their moms were telling them already — clean up your room!; he was popular, in the end, because he was “controversial”, went against the current on trans and gender issues, and totally OWNED Cathy Newman. There was a certain frisson to Peterson at his peak, a frisson which Galloway is unlikely to match — whatever his current popularity with the Guardian or the The Washington Post. The lady in Adolescence was never going to direct the boy in her charge to 12 Rules for Life, but it’s easy to imagine her enthusing about Notes on Being a Man. Much of Galloway’s advice for young men is right, but, in the spirit of the Anti-Galloway Index, you should bet against it being effective. The liberal Jordan Peterson eluded us for so long because it was always a contradiction in terms. 

Being stodgy and conservative, I might have grumbled at this breach of Olympic decorum, but instead I laughed, indeed proudly, partly because this was a stunning performance from a young American athlete, but mostly because that was a totally Oakland thing to say. Facing fancier San Francisco across the Bay, Oakland is a tough city with a defiant streak, whose history is filled with Black Panthers, Hell’s Angels, some semi-famous Nineties rappers, and several notorious sports teams. I dislike its Leftist politics and poor governance and occasional lapses into criminal disorder, and yet I love this city. Being stodgy and conservative, I love it because it’s a place. Oakland is its own thing, with its own identity. There’s something masculine and a little retrograde in how it tends and propagates this identity, which might be the real reason I love it as I do. This vaguely macho and implicitly black civic identity draws in people of all types, from white writers who dislike other sorts of identity politics to petite Chinese-American women who are world-famous figure-skaters.

It’s easy to believe that our fancier cousin across the Bay is not such a place, not anymore. The history and civic identity of San Francisco often feel like they’ve been overrun and overwritten by the twin forces of tech money and homelessness. But maybe not entirely overrun, or overwritten. A notable feature of Young Man in a Hurry, Gavin Newsom’s surprisingly good new memoir, is the sense it conveys that San Francisco really is a real place, a great city with a real history, a vital lineage of contending groups and communal traits and great families. Whether one feels that sense when one visits or moves to San Francisco in the present day is an interesting question — I tend not to feel it myself, on my occasional visits across the Bay — but Newsom’s book brings the city and its brief history sufficiently alive to give the skeptical visitor a reason to look a little harder.

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Newsom — one-time mayor of San Francisco, and current governor of California, as well as the betting favorite for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination — spent much of the Seventies and Eighties youth not in San Francisco but in Marin County just north of the city, where his mother moved him and his sister after his father left the family. Still, as a Newsom, he is very much a child of the city. His paternal great-grandfather, an Irish immigrant from County Cork, “was a cop who walked a beat in San Francisco”. His paternal grandfather worked as the Irish arm of an Italian bank, extending loans to Irish immigrants in the city’s Mission District whose homes and businesses had been destroyed in the Great Earthquake of 1906.

Gavin’s father William, a well-connected fixer, judge, and socialite, was something of a San Francisco institution, but he wasn’t just some wimpy aristocrat, his son would have you know. Yes, he was a cultured lawyer who quoted poetry and read in several languages, but he was also a guy’s guy, part of a loyal gang of bachelors and divorcés who wooed the ladies and drank together at a rotating selection of old-fashioned San Francisco bars. Gavin’s frequent stretches staying with his father in the city brought him in contact with these local characters, who often took a more paternal interest in him than his own distant and damaged father did, and gave him a child’s-eye view of the city’s power structure.

Perhaps the most winning aspect of Young Man in a Hurry is the interest it takes in these and other non-Gavin Newsom characters. Sure, the ambitious politician tells a mostly (but not entirely) flattering story about himself, but in much of the book he exhibits an almost compulsive desire to tell you about all his weird and remarkable friends and relatives, and the fascinating people these friends and relatives were related to and friends with. This tendency to narrate friendships and family relations as a heroic saga of sprawling breadth runs through my own family, so maybe I’m overly vulnerable to its charms. But there’s no denying it makes for an unusually readable campaign tract, not least because Newsom has known and been related to a lot of interesting people, who knew or were related to a lot of other interesting people, most of them San Francisco machers and celebrities and eccentrics.

His father’s roster of friends is colorful enough to fill a memoir with rich stories, but the stories from his mother’s side of the family, though perhaps fewer in number, are even richer and weirder. His maternal great-grandfather was a groundbreaking medical researcher, and also a communist, and, not-coincidentally, a friend of Robert Oppenheimer. His maternal grandmother was also a communist. She moved to Stalin’s Soviet Union in the Thirties and stayed long enough that the Soviets told her she had to either go back to America or become a Soviet Citizen. His maternal grandfather was imprisoned at the Battle of Corregidor and spent several years in a Japanese POW camp, which left his psyche sufficiently mangled that, back stateside, he once got drunk and lined up his three daughters in front of the family fireplace and, holding a shotgun, openly mused about shooting them. This kindly grandpa committed suicide in his fifties. One of those three girls became a well-known Hollywood producer and agent. Another, tall and beautiful Tessa, became William Newsom’s wife, and Gavin Newsom’s mother, and then, fairly quickly, William Newsom’s ex-wife.

Still, the Newsom story is more central to Gavin Newsom’s biography, because it’s more connected to San Francisco politics, and one name looms heavily — Getty. The Getty family is as embedded in San Francisco history as the Newsom family, and so it’s not surprising that the two families grew tangled together. It’s well-known, at least in San Francisco, that William Newsom was a close friend and advisor of Gordon Getty, the brilliant son of oil magnate J. Paul Getty, who for many years ranked as the richest man in the world. (Gordon was briefly ranked as the richest man in the world as well.) From the outside, the Newsom-Getty story looks like one in which a less affluent family enjoys huge advantages from its links with friendly billionaires, but in Young Man in a Hurry Gavin Newsom tells that story from the inside.

Here the younger Newsom makes a clever choice, in both narrative and political terms. Without coming off as resentful or ungrateful, he treats the story of his own relationship with the Gettys as a low-key struggle for respect and independence. As he tells it, his father simply didn’t have a lot of money, despite the Getty connection. His law practice and judgeship were not lucrative, and much of his advisory work for the Getty family was unpaid. So the many gifts the Newsoms received from the Gettys — including a lavish trip to Spain, where Gavin and his sister met the Spanish royal family — expressed a very unbalanced status economy. Early on, Gavin was made to feel this unbalance, the bruising fact that, in their relationship with the Gettys, his father and he were something like the help, denizens of the “downstairs” in the human architecture of the Getty empire. Given the overbearing presence of Gordon Getty in his father’s life, and his father’s own ambivalence in his paternal role, Gavin’s inner struggle against the Getty influence starts to look sort of Oedipal after a while, and this gives the personal-history parts of his book the not-uninteresting feel of a Bildungsroman.

What makes this approach politically clever is that it positions Gavin in the story as a young man, mindful of the insult to his manly status entailed in this Getty-Newsom arrangement. Young Man in a Hurry is thus, one might say, a very gendered book. Like any politician, Newsom wants to sell himself as several different people, to satisfy the many constituencies he’ll have to win over if he wants to become president. His fairly convincing efforts to sell himself as a figure of conventional masculinity thus make it a fun book to read if you keep in mind the many influential figures in his own party for whom “masculine” is the same as “macho”, and “macho” is synonymous with “toxic”. Along with his quiet Oedipal rebellion against the Gettys, he becomes a big fan of Rocky. He stages boxing matches with his friends, where he learns “how to snap a punch without telegraphing it”. He turns into a very good basketball player in high school, and he’s good enough as a baseball player to win an athletic scholarship to Santa Clara University. This scholarship feeds into another story that gilds his manly persona, that of his dyslexia, which seems pretty severe as he describes it.

Thanks to this affliction, he’s able to portray himself as smart but not effete or bookish. His is a practical intelligence. And his efforts to survive school and life as a dyslexic allow him to present himself as an everyman, a “grinder”. Without the baseball scholarship, he says, he was just going to try a two-year community college. He had no other college prospects. Not even Getty money could make the words stop swimming around when he tried to read.

When he graduated from Santa Clara and started his adult life in San Francisco, his first steps were likewise those of a grinder. Unlike the Stanford or Harvard graduates he is often lumped in with by partisan enemies, he was not a candidate for McKinsey or Goldman Sachs coming out of college. His father’s many connections in the city sufficed to get him a job with a gruff baron of commercial real estate, who put him to work overseeing the same bunch of janitors he’d worked with when he was a janitor. But this humble job only reminded him that he was, in fact, ambitious. He wanted something bigger, something that put him in the action.

It is at the stage of his life, the future governor and presidential favorite fresh out of college and badly in need of direction, where my favorite detail from his memoir appears. Newsom briefly falls under the spell of Tony Robbins, the unnaturally tall and tanned self-empowerment guru from the 1990s. Robbins became a laugh-line among the smart set almost as soon as he appeared on the scene, and Newson notes that his own father “scoffed” at Robbins’s “nonsense”, but Newsom, who could have simply skipped over this brief episode of his young manhood, relates it with an impressive lack of shame or regret. He seems to have learned a thing or two from this figure of elite mockery. Besides, it’s one more thing that burnishes the bro-ish side of his persona. It helps us see Gavin Newsom as a regular guy, with regular guy friends and regular guy interests and a regular guy’s disinclination to do girlish things like read books, who succeeded in the regular-guy way of starting a small business and working his ass off to make it grow.

The prominence of this manly storyline in his memoir makes me think Gavin Newsom is as confident as the betting markets are about that Democratic nomination for president, because this stuff is clearly pitched to swing voters, people who think the Republican Party under Donald Trump has gotten too extreme but who also think the Democratic Party of Kamala Harris and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the progressive NGOs might be a little light in the loafers. For the progressive activists who vote in primaries and can’t abide toxic masculinity, and who might not find Gavin Newsom’s years as a high school jock and a manly capitalist super aligned with their social-justice values, he has only his whole political career to offer by way of reassurance.

It’s in the telling of this other story — Gavin Newsom fulfilling his family destiny and becoming a Democratic politician — that Young Man in a Hurry fulfills its own unfortunate destiny as campaign literature. These sections are animated by corny Hollywood scenes in which Gavin Newsom communes with the oppressed and stands up for what’s right against quailing backsliders and temporizers. Early in his term as mayor he goes to a basketball court in the San Francisco projects and gets into a game with the young black men who play here, where he’s told, “You still got it, old man.” Afterwards, he says, “Any time I lost my way, not sure why I was doing what I was doing, I’d head to the court at West Point and Middle Point and find my bearings.” My real-time response to this passage, recorded in the margin alongside it, was: “Ugh”.

Newsom’s grandest and most famous political gesture as mayor was his 2004 decision to start issuing San Francisco marriage licenses for same-sex couples, even though such marriages were not recognized at either the state or national level. He describes his inspiration for this move with the debased melodrama traditional in campaign literature. Gay marriage was creeping into the national conversation, and President George W. Bush used his State of the Union address, which Newsom attended, to renew Republican opposition to it. Afterwards, an angry Gavin Newsom “needed  a breath of fresh air”. He writes, “I kept walking and muttering to myself, ‘These are my people Bush is attacking. My constituents. My staff. My closest advisers’.” Later, when he’s on the cusp of this radical act of issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples, he’s confronted by an old-time San Francisco Democrat who thinks he’s moving too fast. Then the following scene supposedly happens.

Joe got right in my face. “Why are you doing this, Gavin?”
“I’ll tell you why I’m doing this,” I said defiantly. “Because it’s the right thing to
do.”
“[This] seemed to hit Joe, who’d made a career out of representing the
underdog, right in the gut.”

You can’t blame Newsom for giving this episode a central place in his political story, and for using it as a chance to take a victory lap (though I can still blame him for his kitschy way of relating it). The Supreme Court made gay marriage a constitutional right in 2015, and public national opinion came around to his way of looking at the issue. And so Gavin Newsom’s bold gay-marriage gambit in 2004 looks visionary today.

But this issue also reveals Newsom’s political vision to be pretty narrow. That is, same-sex marriage is now broadly accepted, but it’s also the kind of lifestyle politicking that really matters to affluent California liberals like Gavin Newsom. It’s on other such issues that Newsom is most comfortable holding forth. When you read him touting his “proud work on climate change”, it takes a second for you to realize he’s talking about his time as mayor. What kind of “work on climate change” can the mayor of a city of under a million people possibly do? The symbolic kind. But even symbolic and performative climate policies cost money. It is, again, affluent liberals who both value such gestures and are able to pay the extra taxes and fees they bring.

Newsom has pushed expensive climate policies as governor as well, which give his affluent supporters a good feeling about themselves but have helped make the state unaffordable for working people, and he’s overseen a brutal regulatory environment that hobbles small businesses in the state, which those feel-good climate policies only worsen. This policy record reveals both Newsom’s challenges as a candidate and what he might make of them. He is obviously a distinctive political talent, but he’s also a creature of the political worlds in which he rose — all-Democrat San Francisco, Democrat-dominated California. The policy concerns he’s been able to indulge are largely the concerns of those ideologically incestuous worlds. So his policy portfolio may serve him well in Democratic primaries, but he’ll have to rely on something else if he wins the nomination and finds himself fighting a Republican candidate for president.

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Young Man in a Hurry gives a hint of what that something else will be. Here and there in the book, Newsom tries to turn his thoroughly progressive surroundings to his political advantage, painting himself as a brave moderate resisting the powerful chorus of activists and fanatics who dominate politics in his city and state. Among other things, Newsom concedes something that is taboo even to mention among activists NGOs in San Francisco — that many of the homeless in the city are lifestyle tourists who came to the city from elsewhere, to make use of its generous public benefits and lax enforcement of various laws, as well as the non-profit and bureaucratic infrastructure that’s grown to make the lives of homeless people easier. He’s also angered anti-police activists by using state law enforcement to bolster police forces in, among other places, my town of Oakland, where they seem to have made a real difference. Newsom knows he’ll be striding onto the national stage as a California Democrat, with all the associations that come with that type, and he’ll embrace the few associations that might help him, and he’ll play theatrically against the many others that don’t.

The last full chapter of Young Man in a Hurry contains an astonishing account of Newsom’s relationship with Donald Trump that seems designed to drive home the point that, just because he’s from decadent San Francisco, he’s not some squishy Leftist of indeterminate gender. The central episode in this account is a visit to California that Trump made in 2018 to address the state’s wildfire problem, when Newsom has been elected but not yet inaugurated as governor. Trump and Newsom were trading insults over social media in the days and weeks before the visit, but when the President finally finds himself face to face with Newsom, he no longer acts as a political enemy but as a babbling man-crusher. This Newsom fellow is tall and handsome and commanding, and it’s well known that Trump often strains to impress such men when he’s with them. Newsom thus describes Trump trying for macho talk about the military helicopter they’re riding in, and cruelly belittling Jared Kushner in front of Newsom, as if they might bond over the humiliation of this wimpy son-in-law. Later Trump shows Newsom around Air Force One, pointing out the nifty gadgets and repeatedly asking Newsom when they reached the president’s in-flight lavatory, “You need to go to the restroom?” Newsom coolly declines this exclusive invitation. Then Trump shows Newsom the bedroom he shares with Melania on Airforce One, and winks.

Six weeks later, Newsom describes Trump’s White House as corrupt and incompetent in his inaugural address as California Governor, and Trump calls him on the phone, wounded by the insults. In Newsom’s account Trump says, “Gavin, hey, you know, I had to explain to Melania because she asked me, ‘Did you hear this?’ I thought that was a little tough. I thought you and I had something.” “I know,” Newsom says. “It was a tough line.”

In all these scenes with Trump, Newsom is a cool, slightly detached, effortlessly masculine but humane and judicious figure, and Trump is a desperate try-hard who cares about two things: looking good on TV and looking good to cool masculine dudes like Gavin Newsom. It’s anyone’s guess whether these Trump-Newsom encounters happened as Newsom says they did. They do sound like the Trump I’ve been watching and reading about for the last decade, but they also unfold as a too-perfect chapter in the story Gavin Newsom is trying to write as he pursues the presidency.

Even if they’re not exactly true, they show how Newsom sees his strengths as a Democratic presidential candidate, and by inference how he sees his weakness. His strengths are that he’s got more manly mojo than people associate with the Democrats these days. His big weakness is that he’s a Democrat, and not only a Democrat but a California Democrat, and not only a California Democrat but a San Francisco Democrat. He’s a talented politician, but this might be more than even he can overcome.

These authors draw on a rich literary tradition of women venting about parenthood and marriage.  This tradition includes such texts as Dana Spiotta’s 2021 novel, Wayward, the autobiographical work of Deborah Levy, and Rachel Cusk’s Aftermath, published in 2012, which Gould calls “the go-to literary divorce bible.” 

Few if any of these women claim to be suffering from evil or abusive husbands, or to be burdened by particularly egregious domestic toil. The sick-of-my-family genre is about having the bravery to blow up a normal domestic life in the name of the woman wanting something different for herself: mental independence and space to think, with time to focus on professional goals. 

Why, then, do we hear so little from struggling fathers on this question? Most of the well-known male authors one might cite — Knausgård, Updike — were unfaithful, divorced, or both. What about the fed-up fathers who are still hanging on? Can we express the anxieties and downsides of fatherhood, the ways in which it crowds out our independence and creativity, instead of blowing up our families for novelistic material? 

The answer is no, as I learned to my chagrin this month, when a chorus of disapprobation greeted a reflection I posted on the X app (formerly Twitter) about just this issue.

It began with my 4-year-old son asking me to play catch in the street. I was drinking my coffee, still waking up, but I said sure. I also posted to social media: “Playing catch with your son is supposed to be an iconic, peak experience.” But I wasn’t enjoying it, as I confessed in my post. I wanted to be drinking my coffee in peace. The truth, I said, is that I just don’t like being around my two little kids, alone, for very long. I asked the internet whether I was a monster, or whether my feeling was within a certain range of normality. 

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The post garnered more than 19 million impressions. Men, many of whom granted that my feeling was normal, accused me of being weak and unmanly for complaining in public. Women said I was pathetic: mothers spend so much more time with children, and yet I could barely endure 10 minutes before needing to complain. I hit back that contemporary mothers have no idea what it is like being a father today, and was called a misogynist. Both genders agreed that I was selfish and immature, focused on petty and short-sighted matters like having my coffee in peace or getting back to my work.

The truth is that fatherly pain is exceptionally taboo for a good reason. Contemporary fatherhood is a much darker place than mothers, maidens, and bachelors are ever supposed to know. And one of its proper responsibilities is keeping everyone else in the dark about male suffering. Despite the modern rhetoric about gender equality, women still require men to be strong and silent, as my social-media firebombing shows. Many fathers are so strong and so silent, I suspect, that women are unaware that they’re enjoying the benefits of the man’s protection, or that they require it in the first place. 

How can this be, in a world in which men and women are supposed to be equals? According to a contemporary ideal, men should be able to speak to women frankly, and shouldn’t need to protect them. But what we have in reality is a very unequal equality: men are expected to help out with domestic work and hands-on childcare to the best of their ability, while they are also expected to maintain all of the traditionally male responsibilities — not least, the responsibility to keep those responsibilities secret.

Consider time spent with children. Studies confirm it has increased dramatically: American fathers spent seven hours per week on childcare, up from about two and a half hours in 1965. Another study found that over the same period, fathers’ average daily childcare time rose to nearly an hour, up from about 16 minutes. That won’t sound like much to women. But given that there hasn’t been any corresponding relaxation of the exclusively male responsibilities, it’s nearly a full work day a week — a significant expansion. 

There’s also the question of what this childcare time is for. Biologically, men are not evolved to care for small children, and historically, men were rarely expected to be around for them. The argument that it’s for ethical reasons or child-development reasons seems a bit too conveniently correlated with women’s entry into the workforce. I find the amorphous nature of the rationale behind the demand especially frustrating, because it presents me with no way of knowing how much time is optimal, or even enough. The requirement becomes uncapped, all-consuming, and impossible to fulfill. 

But haven’t other male responsibilities been relaxed in our equal-rights modernity? We tell anxious fathers to worry less about money and focus on quality time with kids. But surveys find that in more than 50% of dual-income households (and in 90% of the wealthiest), husbands are regarded as the family’s “financial expert.” And even when wives earn more, men still carry the moral weight of ultimate financial responsibility. If creeping destitution or spiraling debt were to conquer, for instance, nobody would have any doubt about which of the two parents is most guilty. 

Thus, in many crucial ways, the “dual-income household” is a myth and doesn’t solve the economic anxieties of men; indeed, it makes them worse. Many women earn little more than the cost of childcare, which makes the woman’s work mostly for her personal edification or satisfaction. The man enjoys no such luxury. He’s also, whether his wife earns a lot or little, always calculating, behind the scenes, what he is going to do if and when she wants to stop working. Even if she said, before parenthood, that she planned to work until retirement, the husband knows it will fall to him to keep the family fiscally whole if she changes her mind. 

If I don’t prepare for that, I live every day at risk of disgrace. If I’m preparing, however, it might seem I don’t believe in my wife, or I might seem “not present” with my kids. Not to mention, if a man’s wife earns as much as he does, she may become accustomed to a standard of living that may not be sustainable once she taps out — but how can he say any of these things? This makes the burden of fatherhood much more difficult than it used to be, psychologically and  practically.  

Breadwinning, also, has become complicated in ways that have hardly been noticed, let alone understood. 

In terms of bringing in the money, most legacy institutions have declined in standards and vitality. Jobs don’t look the same as they once did, and they’re less secure. Many fathers today must become entrepreneurs, either by necessity because they can’t get stable employment; or to maintain standards or integrity in their vocation; or to protect themselves economically as a side hustle, in case their legacy institution goes sideways next year. We’re working more — much more — but getting less credit for it, and the childcare demands have increased, too. 

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By Patrick T. Brown

On a deeper level, securing an honorable vocation that does justice to a man’s gifts has always been a major requirement of a successful male life. The structures that made this possible have been so liquidated by modernity that it barely sounds like a reasonable aspiration anymore  — but we still yearn for it and hold ourselves to the standard. 

How much money is enough to have conducted yourself with distinction? We have no idea. Just recently, the writer Michael Green published an article arguing that $100,000 a year should now be considered the real poverty line, or perhaps it was even $140,000, once you update the old methodology for today’s costs. The argument was flawed, but it went viral, suggesting that  people really no longer know the difference between rich and poor. I might read up and form an accurate model of the economy, but if my mother, wife, father-in-law, and peer group aren’t reading the same material, then I can’t know whether I earn or possess enough money to be content. You can say that a father should use his own judgment, but for a good father, the only judgment is: I would kill myself to do right by my family, so if there is no shared standard, then I’ll just kill myself trying, just to make sure.

It was once the case that people from different classes and situations would settle into different occupations. Before capitalism, the options were more or less fixed: the cobbler’s son became a cobbler; the duke’s first son a duke. Today, there are no longer shared standards around meaningful work, vocation, or station (except for whatever money and internet clout measure). If you are a professor, does that mean you are a smart, thoughtful anchor of your community? It’s no longer clear. If you have a million followers on TikTok, does that mean you are successful or impressive? You could very well be a working prostitute, the canonically low-status occupation, and be very high-status indeed, depending on how you manage it. 

Under these conditions, the contemporary father can never “arrive.” No matter how successful he is in terms of money or clout, the father must bear the terror that perhaps he did not do justice to his gifts, or that he did not do justice to his family’s name. Whether his mother tells him that she’s “proud” of him means nothing; he judges himself in the agora. Now add to this bundle of anxieties, both material and psychological, the expectation to be ever more present at playtime. It’s maddening. And crushing.

There is another, deeper burden that is rarely spoken. For the man, having children is not itself a source of immediate joy or meaning in the same way that it can be for women. I chose to have children, and I have no regrets. And yet no man ever thinks to himself, “I would love to have two toddlers in the house because the presence of these two creatures would increase my own happiness.” Whereas for the mother, as the Bible, Nietzsche, and Freud alike taught, children are much more immediately meaningful. A man is more motivated by a larger sense of responsibility: to procreate, to give the world a little bit more life than he took from it, and to give his beloved wife something that is significant and meaningful to her. 

There is a meme about how a man, left to his own devices, will default to sleeping on the floor and eating canned beans every day in an unfurnished, one-room apartment. The image is typically invoked to roast the male sex for its barbarous nature, implying how much men need women to organize and beautify their lives. I’ve always thought this to be an outrageous misunderstanding. Instead, consider how much heroic effort the average father expends to provide his wife with things he does not need or desire himself. 

Those who find these observations outrageous, cowardly, selfish, or unrepresentative only display how little  can fathom the darkness of fatherhood today.

If a wife could see or feel her husband’s terror, she would hardly be able to function, let alone be a good wife or mother. We hide it out of love but not purely out of love: for a father to bear his responsibilities every day, he needs his wife to be happy, in part because he needs her to stay calm and be functional. If she falters under her own heavy responsibilities, he could quickly lose control of everything. “Happy wife, happy life” is a laughably sweet euphemism for the infernal fact that if your wife is not happy, there is no reason left to live. 

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This might seem extreme, but when a man builds a family, he voluntarily sets his own happiness to the side, which means the wife’s happiness is the only reliable daily indicator of success and reliable daily reward. So if the wife is unhappy, none of it makes any sense and nothing feels worth doing. As I write this, stoic silence is the only thing keeping millions of families on the right side of the precipice.

Before I got married and had children, I was horrified by the prevalence of fathers who walk out on their families. Today, I am no longer confused by the phenomenon. My own household challenges have thankfully never been so severe, but it is now obvious to me how even the normal challenges of the ordinary husband could lead a man’s life to spiral so far out of control that he breaks and leaves. The gap between my perplexity over this issue as a young man and my current knowledge is a reasonable index of how much darkness fathers hide from the world.

I spend many days and nights churning through these issues in mortal terror. My wife probably has a decent sense of how dark and lonely life sometimes feels for me, but that’s because I’m a little weak and I tell her too much, too often. And then I feel terrible about that, terrified that I might break her happiness and lose everything for the both of us. It is part of my job to protect her from all of this, and I can handle that, most of the time.

Most men do not want sympathy, and I certainly do not. There is no appeal, to my mind, in “rights for men” or any kind of ridiculous “men’s movement.” I only submit for the public record, once again and without fear, that if contemporary fatherhood continues to feel as impossible as it feels to me, it is better for a man to occasionally snap in a small way, rather than snap in the big and silent ways that husbands have too often snapped in the past. And perhaps the weaker, average fathers, such as myself, will take a few hits — or 19 million of them — for the team, so that the really great fathers can carry on, dutifully, in silence.

I would rather be scorned for revealing my weaknesses honestly, while holding myself and my family together, than be applauded for making art out of its destruction. Buzzy celebration simply for snapping is another one of the rewards fathers must be prepared to forgo.

But how convincing a patriarch is he, really? This week, he made headlines not for inciting misogyny, but for losing a fight. He was an MMA fighter long before he was an influencer or porn producer, and has always traded on his physical prowess. But this week, after a five-year break from the ring, Tate went up against the boxer Chase DeMoor in Dubai — and was brutally outmatched.

Taller, stronger, and 10 years younger, DeMoor taught Tate a lesson so conspicuously absent from Tate’s own brand of “patriarchy” as to disqualify it from being properly patriarchal. Namely: it doesn’t matter how aggressive you are, as a young man. Eventually you will get older and lose physical dominance, and you need a plan for holding onto power when younger and hungrier rivals come snapping at your heels.

In patriarchy properly understood, the core of this is “succession planning”, which is to say training a loyal heir. The 21st-century’s foremost storyteller, Taylor Swift, captured this dynamic in the recent song “Father Figure”, sung from the perspective of a mafioso-like patriarch:

I showed you all the tricks of the trade
All I ask for is your loyalty
My dear protégé

A patriarch may be an adoptive “father figure”, as in Swift’s telling, or else a literal father — as, for example, in historic royal families, or more recently the Murdoch, or Kennedy, or Trump families. Whether the family trade is running an organized crime network, a real estate business, a media empire, or a country, a patriarch of this kind will ensure his kids are taught to manage the empire. If he doesn’t have kids, successors will be identified, groomed, and in time granted power and responsibility.

In this spirit, Rupert Murdoch’s children have largely taken over from the aging tycoon. George Soros has handed over his global social-engineering activities to his son Alex. Trump’s offspring are often seen in his entourage, and play important roles in his commercial and political activities. These are all patriarchs in the old pattern. But where is Tate’s dynasty?

Reports vary on whether he has kids, or how many. But there are no reports of any family visits during his incarceration in Romania. The inference is that however many kids he has, they don’t live with him. This would make sense: it would, in fact, replicate Tate’s own upbringing.

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By Mary Harrington

When Tate mentions his father, the American chess player Emory Tate, it’s usually in admiring terms — for all that the anecdotes often describe what sounds like a cruel, violent narcissist. This determination to deify his father’s memory has always seemed piteous to me, for Emory abandoned Andrew and his siblings in 1997, just as Andrew approached adolescence. In their father’s absence, Tate and his siblings grew up in a single-parent home amid Luton’s grim, crime-ridden council estates.

Tate’s escape shows genuine grit and ability. It also sheds a light on how Tate’s own potential was crippled by his own father’s failings. But to grasp this, we need to bracket the assumption, axiomatic among the world’s Jess Phillipses, that “patriarchy” is bad by definition in all its manifestations. For while there are forms of patriarchy I would not wish to embrace, such as the kind that legitimizes child marriage or “honor killings”, some traits may have been decried as “patriarchy”, or even just “toxic masculinity”, that are better understood simply as average sex differences — and which come in positive, prosocial forms as well.

It is, for example, not an effect of “patriarchy” that on average boys are more willful, aggressive, and high-energy than girls. I’m not going to waste paragraphs citing statistics; naturally there are outliers, but on average this is simply true and obvious. It also has implications for the socialization of boys; implications that were well understood until about 10 minutes ago. Boys benefit from clear boundaries; plenty of exercise; and, especially as they get bigger and bolshier, authoritative older men to keep them in check. Among the kind of common-sense people who don’t generally get to write newspaper columns, this folk wisdom is amply conveyed by the phrase “Boys are like dogs”.

To be clear, I don’t mean this rudely: I like dogs, and I like boys and men too. But on average they’re not interchangeable with girls. In the case of both boys, and dogs, the liveliest ones need clear boundaries. Sometimes enforcing these requires someone big, strong, and authoritative enough to make those boundaries clear. And when we set about smashing “patriarchy”, one of the things that got smashed with it was a healthy appreciation of the contribution made by older men to this aspect of young male socialization.

Fathers are not all perfect, obviously, even when they stick around. But there’s plenty of evidence that their absence is a significant risk factor in young, energetic, willful men going off the rails. Prison Reform Trust data show that among young offenders, 76% report growing up with an absent father: a vastly more significant proportion even than those growing up in a deprived home (51%). There’s also, unsurprisingly, a strong link between fatherlessness and urban gang membership, as much in the USA as the UK, where one report showed that two-thirds of gang-involved young people came from lone-parent households.

Is this what happened (or rather didn’t happen) to Andrew Tate? A great many lone parents do their best in difficult circumstances, and this really isn’t to criticize. But I sometimes wonder how effective a harried, exhausted, full-time-working single mom can be at disciplining an adolescent son who is now a foot taller than she is and more interested in the approval of his new gang friends than her curfew.

In What Do Men Want?, the philosopher Nina Power argues that much of what the contemporary world decries as “toxic masculinity” is better understood not as patriarchy but its absence: a “regime of the brother” characterized less by orderly power structures than comparatively flat, sibling-like rivalries. We should understand the Tate phenomenon in this context: a kind of online Lord of the Flies fratriarchy, in which lost boys desperate for affectionate guidance from authoritative older men struggle to prove their manliness against one another.

And while Labour is obsessed with Tate as a vector for “misogyny”, really he’s more an accelerant than the cause. For in a “regime of the brother”, without well-defined male hierarchy, what’s the most low-risk way to perform dominance? You don’t attack your bros; you bond with them, by tormenting a group you can be reasonably sure won’t fight back: women. Tate is currently the subject of multiple court cases in relation to such cruelties, but the Tateosphere is hardly the only fratriarchy whose main social glue seems to be hurting women for fun and profit. From the Pakistani rape gangs to the Epstein network, such squalid brotherhoods use violence and sexual cruelty as a form of bonding.

To my knowledge there’s no research on the prevalence of fatherlessness among the boys and men who make up Tate’s fanbase. But I’d bet any money that boys from broken homes are over-represented. His fratriarchal message is perfectly calibrated for this group: emotional numbness and a kind of brutal, venal self-fathering, overlaid with contempt for and performative cruelty toward the women who care for but can’t control them.

But I doubt Labour’s strategy on “misogyny” will ever go there. Notoriously, where the rape gangs are concerned, Jess Phillips has as little as possible to say about male bonding through sexual violence, where this might offend her electoral base. But it goes deeper. The party is enthusiastic about tackling “root causes”, particularly where this can be parlayed into new funding for their favored NGOs. But addressing fatherlessness as an accelerant of adolescent male misogyny would require definitive, heretical admission that some family structures are better than others. Safer to stick to internet censorship, and tinkering with the curriculum.

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Ironically, then, Phillips really is doing her bit to destroy “patriarchy” — even if the fratriarchy now replacing it is even less to her taste. I suspect no one really likes it — not even the bros themselves, whose critical weakness Tate just demonstrated in a boxing ring in Dubai.

For where there’s no father figure, all you can ever be is chief bro. Tate is evidently not a family man but a chief bro. And the trouble with being chief bro is that eventually a younger, hungrier rival will come along. Then what? In Swift’s song, the mafioso father-figure sees off the challenge from his rivalrous protégé, because he’s long since parlayed physical dominance into subtler forms of power:

Whose portrait’s on the mantle?
Who covered up your scandals?
Mistake my kindness for weakness and find your card canceled

Tate, though, is not a boss on this model. He had no father, not even an adoptive father figure, to show him how to ascend from chief bro to patriarch. So when a younger rival beat him bloody this week, the reaction was the kind of scornful glee you’d direct at a sibling rival. It’s the brittle machismo of the fatherless: both a driver of misogyny, and also evidence of patriarchy’s absence.

Are you building the kind of empire that will outlast you? Or did you stake your reputation on staying top dog forever, and forget that everyone gets old? Tate’s tragedy lies not, or not only, in his noxious online output. It lies also in how his father’s failures blighted his considerable natural potential. He was bright, aggressive, able, and ambitious, but like so many other lost boys had no one to form him. No one to show him what to do, or who to be, so as to become genuinely admired and loved — or even to retain his position, once past his physical peak.

Now, he’s a bloodied loser. But there’s no portrait on the mantel, and no loyal protégé in the wings. His children will grow up as fatherless as Tate himself. There will be no “Top G” dynasty. Save a trace or two in historic UK PHSE curricula, and some Romanian court papers, “Bottom G” will leave no legacy.

This throbbing Johnson is the subject of a Netflix documentary released today; on the surface, he is a fitness influencer and food-supplement manufacturer. His myth, however, has outgrown these titles, and as such he has self-coronated as Liver King for his love of offal. He puts away around a pound of raw liver a day, coaching his fans (or “primals”) to slowly build up to his stomach-churning levels. His ethos, which he summarizes as “Why eat vegetables when you can eat testicles?”, is a grotesque literalization of the old “you are what you eat” mindset. Helped along by a “degree in biochemistry”, Johnson rationalizes that you can subsume a beast’s masculinity by consuming its balls: “Vegetables don’t have the raw material required to produce a healthy set of testicles. Testicles do,” he tells GQ.

His extreme lifestyle has reaped rewards. He hawks supplements which bring in an annual income of more than $100 million, according to The Guardian; unfortunately, as fellow sovereign Tiger King could have told him, allowing a Netflix documentary crew into your compound risks gaining you a little more exposure than anticipated. Predictably, the film promises to rumble Johnson’s ruse: alongside all the Nosferatu nosh, he’s been shooting up steroids. Loads of them, costing $11,000 a month.

It’s a shame really, as my mouse had been hovering over the checkout button for a box of LK’s “nutritional food bars” on Amazon. Who wouldn’t want to look, as my farming-stock family would put it, like an “upright bull”? Besides, his promises are borderline magical: beef liver products are “nature’s most nutrient-dense food” and they also happen to “taste like dessert”. Looking at the reviews, the “dessert” in question must be “dog food”, “sawdust” or “gasoline” — but no pain, no gain.

While today’s documentary might spell the end of the Liver King food range, his ethos, and the sanguineous slab of the manosphere he represents, is going nowhere. The bro-ification of food is after all a fascinating new dimension to modern masculinity, which has seen anti-vaxxer and “make America healthy again” evangelist RFK Jr and his Right-wing disciples settle upon Big Burger as an agent of national decline. “We are betraying our children by letting [food] industries poison them,” Kennedy told a rally in November; “sugar is poison”, he clarified last month. He has a point: American food standards are notoriously lax, and emerging evidence on ultra-processed foods, staples of the American diet, does suggest a high health cost to conveyor belts of the cheap and tasty.

In response, masculinity influencers have become crusaders against what they perceive as the worst culprits, with varying degrees of evidence: seed oils, pasteurized milk and “feminizing” soya milk, tipple of the breasted and much-detested soyboy, have all been in the firing line in recent years. But beyond semi-rational health concerns a much stranger and more ancient logic is at play.

At one point in the Netflix documentary, Johnson has his reluctant sons pluck fresh organs from a dying bull and devour them. It is a deliberate display of cruelty and domination, with a ritual component that reminded me of an episode of the podcast Agent Palehorse, about an undercover FBI agent compelled to participate in the drinking of a goat’s blood after it has been inexpertly felled by neo-Nazis on hallucinogens. That episode, which describes the cup of coagulated gore being passed around, imbibed and sometimes vomited out, crystallizes the point of all this killing and swilling: it is meant to be an ordeal, a test of mettle which separates the wheat from the rabbit-food-chomping chaff and indicates somatic self-control. It is a barbaric rite that goes back centuries, and which was perfected by the forefathers of today’s fine-dining world: the French.

Haute cuisine purports to be a reaction against barbarism. The French-Moroccan writer Hourya Bentouhami has compared the literal height of “civilized” Western meal-taking, at table, with the floor-based setup of many Eastern food cultures: distance between hand and mouth, food and floor, stood for progress. Liver King, then, would seem if anything to be a model of regression. And yet his aesthetic has a covert parallel with the stuffed and roasted menageries scoffed by Versailles aristocrats. Liver King and his ilk are doing something many more official kings before them have done to project status and influence: playing with their food.

Part of Louis XIV’s courtly project was to project the idea of Enlightenment domination of man over nature. The grotesque spectacles of the royal table were symbolic of this — not just in their extravagance and quantity but in their brutality too, with ducks, geese, chickens and capons sewn up into meaty monstrosities, or giant frogs’ legs plonked on vermeil plates. Elaborate dining protocols, involving armies of waiters and public spectators who bowed to passing dishes, were mere set-dressing for caveman culinary tastes: the Sun King himself eschewed golden utensils in favor of his fists. Meat was invariably the centerpiece: delicate sugared cakes were ornamental feminine flourishes, but flesh was enrobed in masculine myths about the “mastery of fire and technique”, Bentouhami writes. The figure of the cockatrice — a chimaera of pig and poultry molded in the form of a mythical serpent-bird — codifies this love affair between masculinity and meat: the cruelty and control is hyper-visible and elaborate. To have bizarre butchery at your table you needed money, discernment and a strong stomach, three qualities the Liver King himself would probably deem “alpha”. Ghosts of this association have persisted since in the culture of barbecue — the ritual of meat supervision has long been reserved for the suburban dad guarding the grill.

In the Liver King pantomime, cruelty becomes a way to intimidate and impress. His business model, like that of every influencer, is based on virality — a similar model to the trappings of royal courts, at which shocking displays of rarity or excess were used as projections of power. Modern fine-dining, particularly the descendants of Escoffier, retains the French court’s predilection for cruelty as a point of spectacle: canard à la presse — in which ducks are squished in great silver contraptions at prestigious Parisian restaurants — is partly a test of stomach for diners unperturbed by a ribbon of blood dribbling out into a sauce au sang. The dish has a strange provenance: Normandy farmers would hold ducks under their cloaks to shield them from wind and rain; those accidentally suffocated were snapped up by restaurateurs who found the blood retained in the carcass delicious. Today, avian analogues exist everywhere in la cuisine Gauloise: aside from the obvious — foie gras — the practice of eating a whole roasted ortolan with a serviette over your head (to hide the diner’s shame from the eyes of God, and their embarrassment at spitting out the tiny little bones) has been banned since 1995, but is still said to go on for diners with money and know-how.

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These little baked birds embody the same transgressive lure of the Liver King’s slippery mounds of offal: both suggest that the greatest indulgences are brutal, borderline disgusting and primal. The fairly unappetizing nature of these foods lends an air of discernment to the eater; fans of the ortolan have included François Mitterrand, António Egas Moniz (inventor of the lobotomy no less) and the food critic Craig Claiborne — who, upon winning an American Express auction in 1975, the prize for which was dinner for two at any restaurant in the world which took the credit card, chose Paris’s Chez Denise — and a course of ortolans.

It is not difficult to see the appeal of man and meat; the Liver King answers the needs of a slop-sickened American public which just wants a nice glossy coat. If you are what you eat, then ultra-processed foods must produce sluggish, hungry “ultra-processed people”. We are already trained on this formula: add the myths of gender, and you’ve got imaginative dynamite. Brian Johnson and his cult of “primals” are more than mere snake-oil evangelists: they are also inheritors of the brutal legend of Western food culture. He is not the first “king” to try to impress with fistfuls of flesh; King Donald, who is known for liking his own meat a little more well done, has done the same in his own special way with a White House table groaning under stacks of Big Macs.

As our political culture lurches back towards spectacles of omnipotence, perhaps we should expect the gutsy gastronomy of Liver King — and the Sun King before him — to return to mainstream conservative aesthetics. It was not long ago that Suella Braverman, then home secretary, was skewering the “tofu-eating wokerati”; elsewhere, a New York Times op-ed from 2016 boggled at Trump’s popularity among a public which was “used to seeing American politicians walk a careful line between red-meat populism and mainstream respectability”. Nine years on, red meat is fully back on the menu — and just like last week’s UK-US trade deal, which could see hormone-treated American beef hit UK shelves for the first time in decades, we have also imported Magaland’s bloody-minded populism. In this, the Liver King is prophetic: “To express your highest form, you gotta fuel like our ancestors… that’s the raw power our bodies crave.”

It’s not the act of reading I remember so much as an image and a feeling: a bald history teacher, who had seen me wearing an Anti-Flag T-shirt some weeks earlier and had since tried to become “buddy buddy” with me, now standing above me, looking down. I had the novel on my desk.

“Gatsby?”

I looked up: “Huh?”

“That novel has the best opening paragraph in all of American literature.”

I wanted him to go away.

“In my younger…”, he began, looming over me, looking directly at me.

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I was dismayed. What was happening? At first, when he got to the phrase “my father gave me some advice”, I thought that he was telling me about his own father, but as he continued, I realized that he was, in fact, quoting the aforementioned “best opening paragraph in all of American literature” from memory. I nodded, and he explained to me how important the concept of privilege was.

Gatsby lives on in the American consciousness in precisely this way: it is a high-school novel; a novel one is forced to read at a time in one’s life when one cares more about literally everything in the world other than classwork; and a novel one remembers very little of. It’s a novel about the terror of nostalgic longing, and the American Dream — the romantic delusion that you can become whoever you want, through sheer force of will — but it masks itself in our collective memory as a high-school meme.

My friend Kevin, who teaches high school in Dallas, has his students spend 10 minutes at the outset of each class reading silently. He gives them a list of books they can choose from, and he tells me that all the girls pick Gatsby. It’s nice to know that somewhere in at least one American high school, students are still reading novels. Kevin and I have an ongoing riff, based on a conversation he’d overheard between two students on the day of a quiz, during which one student asked another what The Great Gatsby was all about, and the student replied, “it’s about this guy named Big Joe Gatsby”.

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Over the phone, we concocted a scheme: he would ask his 12th-graders to write answers to the question: “How would you describe this book to someone who hasn’t read it?” Here are some of the answers:

“Gatsby is an interesting book with a rich + mysterious theme to it involving mostly Gatsby in that category.” “I would describe Gatsby as one guy crashing out and yearning for a married woman over 100 pages.” “This book is about wealth in society, new money and old money.”

Others identified the feeling of regret: “The Great Gatsby is a book full of the idea of ‘but what if they had just done this?’ As you read [it], you constantly find yourself in the position of asking, ‘But it’s so simple, just do it’.”

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Each of these contains hints of the double-motion of Gatsby in America: a hazy intuition of the classic American fascinations — wealth, envy, complicated romantic entanglement — and a barely literate initial engagement that degrades them over time into their simplest, most flippant form.

In 2013, two years after I graduated high school, a new major motion picture version of The Great Gatsby showed at the theater in my hometown in Ohio. It was the first movie I knew of that had 3D effects. I took pills and went to see it: something with the water — green light — wealth — romance; I remember money flying out of the screen into my eyes. The experience felt profoundly a-literary but also profoundly American — Gatsby no longer as novel, but as parodic, garish gluttony; seductive displays of wealth and a “conversation about privilege”.

In a culture oversaturated with discussions about privilege, some of the more obvious social “insights” of the novel fall flat today, but there are moments of phenomenological acuity, psychological precision, and descriptive defamiliarization — making the familiar strange to reveal it anew. These work to create a compelling portrait not so much of a country warped by wealth, but of a man possessed by nostalgia, and the dream of making and remaking himself.

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Jay Gatsby is nostalgic in a limerent, romantic way; he builds wealth, constructs his own identity, and turns his life into a performance for a memory. But when the fantasy becomes reality, in the face of Daisy, it crumbles. The real breaks through the dream, and Gatsby cracks.

Formally, the novel is less boring than I’d expected when I reread it recently. It produces textual nostalgia in the reader through its formal structure: Nick Carraway tells the story from the future, wistfully looking back on the time of the novel. Thus, as the scholar Niklas Salmose has noted, the reader experiences a kind of phenomenological nostalgia as he reads, which is part of the novel’s genius.

Like America, Gatsby is, in the words of the critic Gautam Kundu, “made gorgeous by the magic touch of a romantic imagination that nevertheless moves inexorably toward eventual disintegration and dissolution”; and yet we can’t help but be emotionally drawn into it, even as we stand at a semi-distance and watch with horror.

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Still, cultured people’s relationship with the novel borders on ironic, which is understandable. In 2014, my friend Adam Humphreys, a filmmaker, directed a six-minute film titled Baseball that also centers around a recitation of the first paragraph of Gatsby from memory. The protagonist, played by novelist Zachary German, is having an affair while his girlfriend is out of town. He is at his mistress’s apartment when his girlfriend calls and asks him to read the beginning of Gatsby, which she’d left on the bedside table — “Read from the beginning,” she commands him. “The part you always say.” After fumbling around at his mistress’s bookshelf, he can’t find a copy of Gatsby, so he stands upright and tries to recite it, pretending to read.

“In my younger and more vulnerable years,” he begins, “my father offered me some advice that I’ve been mulling over in my head ever since.” The camera switches from the mistress’s apartment to his girlfriend. “He told me there would be times in life when I would feel compelled to judge the actions of those around me, but that I should always remember that not everyone has had all of the advantages that I have had.”

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He takes a long pause; his girlfriend starts silently crying. “He told me that human goodness was not distributed equally, and that it would be unfair to act as though the alternative was true.” The camera pans to Singaporean baseball on TV. “This, giving the benefit of the doubt to my fellow man, has led me to a number of worthwhile moments.”

Today, I searched “Gatsby” in my Gmail inbox, and found: an interview with me that never came out, from 2013, in which the interviewer says that his roommate read What We Talk About When We Talk About Love after “having not read any fiction since The Great Gatsby when we were 16”; nine unopened emails from a rare bookseller; the word “Gatsby” in the Substack of a person whose name I don’t recognize and which I don’t remember subscribing to; The Great Gatsby on a list of Michael Clune’s “25 best American novels”; an email I forwarded to my now-dead friend Russell, who used to write college papers for a now-dead guy named Lucas, who I vaguely knew from Twitter, and for whom I edited the papers in 2015, for money; a screenshot of a one-star review of an apartment building called “Gatsby on Ross”, which ends, “The real Gatsby would be ashamed and horrified”.

“The real Gatsby” made me smile: Gatsby, the commodified literary object; Gatsby, clichéd symbol of wealth; Gatsby, phantom high-school impression; Gatsby, Leonardo DiCaprio; Gatsby, like all things in America, reduced to two opposites, always in tension with each other but unified in destroying every part of the culture they touch — worship of money and conversations about privilege; Gatsby, Big Joe Gatsby. The Gatsby we forget is the Gatsby we should most remember: a man possessed by a fantasy or fixation because his life has become devoid of spiritual significance.

It’s been 100 years since the novel came out. Much has changed, and much has stayed the same. Reading the novel today produces, at least for me, a slightly unrelated nostalgia for a time when American literature was more serious and more ambitious. But Gatsby also offers a timely exhortation to those who, giving into this nostalgia, wish to return to a past mode: nostalgic yearning is disguised, impotent pride. Many remain crippled by a kind of longing for an idealized past that never really existed, one that was empty in much the same way as the present, as an excuse for living impotently within the nothingness of modernity.

The Great Gatsby was a failure when it came out, but it is still worth reading a century hence. Its bleak, cynical view of self-determination was unpalatable to American readers then, and, as evidenced by the way culture has preserved it as a butchered meme, may still be unpalatable now. But it feels eerily relevant to today. May it become more than a nostalgic memory.

Welcome, dear reader, to the strange and warped online world of incels, where the fictional brutal murder of a girl is not a crime, but a punishment. Indeed, here is a society of boys and men where sexual failure is extolled as a virtue, sex is seen as contaminating and the real-life mass-killers of women are elevated to the status of martyrs.

Adolescence, Netflix’s much chewed-over drama is notionally about incels; Jamie, the disturbed boy at its center certainly sounds like one and murders a female classmate who contemptuously calls him one. While the show obviously wasn’t intended for incels — its target audience was the parents of teenage boys and politicians — many have watched it and have been avidly discussing its merits and demerits. Jack Thorne, who co-wrote the show with Stephen Graham, ought to listen up and prepare himself for some critical feedback.

For my sins, I’ve spent more time than I’d care to admit lurking on incel online spaces, in part out of a morbid curiosity to see what I would find there, but mainly because I want to better understand their political and intellectual culture — and because conventional writing on incels tends to be so phenomenally bad, with its sensational alarmism and self-dramatizing tone of moral shock (“I infiltrated the dark rabbit hole of incels and what I found there traumatized me to my core…”).

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In some ways, they (“involuntary celibates”) are boringly familiar: yet another victim group that defines itself in relation to an enemy (women) which it blames for all its problems. But in other ways, incels occupy a world that is as strange as it is unsettling, with its own folklore and incomprehensible vocabulary. “Foid” for example, is a derogatory term for a woman, while “Stacy” and “Chad” are two sides of the same reviled coin: respectively, a sexually attractive woman and a sexually successful man. Tyrone, Chadpreet and Chaddam are all ethnic variations on Chad, while a “currycel” is an incel from India. “LDAR” denotes “Lay Down and Rot”, “AWALT” means “All Women Are Like That”, “roped” refers to suicide and “mogging” is when Chads act in ways that threaten or diminish the masculinity of other men. Although Adolescence contains a brief reference to the “80/20 rule”, according to which 80% of women select from just 20% of the male dating pool, the show barely scratches at the surface of this subculture.

From what I already knew about incels and their contempt for “normoids”, I had fully expected that they would unanimously loathe Adolescence, if only because of the wave of adulation it had received in the mainstream media. But I was wrong: some actually liked it.

On one incel forum I found multiple discussion threads on the show. Traviscel* noted that although Adolescence was “blatant anti-incel propaganda”, it was nevertheless “psychologically accurate” in its portrayal of the killer, Jamie. “I liked how the kid had extreme body dysmorphia, and constantly fluctuated between being a troll, being a simp, feeling worthless, and easily irritated in his desperation for power”, he explained. He particularly liked the third episode in which Jamie is interviewed by a female forensic psychologist played by Erin Doherty. “The actress was amazing and so was the incel killer,” Traviscel continued, praising Doherty for her “skilled” portrayal of “a manipulative little whore” who entraps Jamie into confessing. As for Jamie, he was like “OJ [Simpson] in that he constantly denied he killed that bitch, despite getting caught red handed on CCTV”. “I liked how it had simple answers,” Traviscel concluded, which he took to be that Jamie was an incel because he was bullied and because “sluts” had rejected him. If Adolescence was indeed “anti-incel propaganda”, as Traviscel put it, it clearly had no effect in penetrating his breastplate of incel righteousness and self-pity.

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Many more, though, dismissed the show as unrealistic, “retarded”, fear-mongering and superficial. A recurring criticism centered on the casting of Jamie, played by the 15-year-old Owen Cooper. The broad consensus was that he was too good looking to convince as an incel. In a vote on “Would you let Jamie from Adolescence join the forum?”, over 80% said no, reasoning, as one commenter put it, “He’ll grow into a Chad.”

The other point of consensus, across all of the discussion threads on the show, was that the real victim wasn’t the murdered girl, Katie, but Jamie himself. Adamcel*, for example, confided that “I couldn’t see the perpetrator, a 13-year-old boy, as the villain in this, not even logically”, elaborating that Jamie’s violence was a morally intelligible, even excusable, reaction to being bullied.

Some incels were particularly scathing about how the show failed, in their view, to capture the complexities of the manosphere, ridiculing the scene in which one of the detectives working on the case speculates about the kind of mindset-material that might have radicalized Jamie. “It’s the involuntary celibate stuff,” Detective Sergeant Misha Frank says, adding: “It’s the Andrew Tate shite.” This, according to Dariuscel*, was to elide the “redpill”, which holds that women are superficial and only attracted to Chads, with the “blackpill”, which holds that incels, no matter what they do or how hard they try, will never find sexual intimacy or happiness with a woman. Tate, who is not only sexually successful with women but also potently shames other men who lack his confidence and “loverboy” skillset, is thus especially reviled among incels. “Andrew Tate,” Dariuscel clarified, “is a sex haver mogger masculinity coper that shouldn’t be associated with incels at all.” Tate, for his part, has distanced himself from incels, stating, via a spokesperson, that it is “unjust” for him to be made a “the scapegoat for complex problems like radicalization and violence”.

But what really got under their skin was how, as they saw it, the show had trivialized their ideological beliefs by suggesting that they had been brainwashed. Indeed, for incels, the idea that they have been tricked into their beliefs is intolerable, since it contains the fatal implication that those beliefs are untrue and can only be accepted through coercion. If incels believe that society is anti-male or that all women select men based on looks and status, it is because they really do believe this and because it captures their sense, however deranged it may seem to others, of how the world is.

In my brief trawl, I found that, unlike many other journalists who skirt around it, I didn’t want to cry or vomit or cringe in terror at what I saw and read. But I did feel an overwhelming sense of sadness at what a terrible dead end the subculture is, ensuring the self-damnation of so many of those who seek solace and connection in going there.

It also made me acutely aware of how fantastically naive Adolescence is in its exploration of how Jamie came to embrace incel beliefs and in its implicit assumption that if only Jamie’s parents had been more assiduous in protecting him from the manosphere he would have been okay. Spend any time lurking on incel forums and you come to acknowledge that many of these men and boys are there because they want to be there and not because they’ve watched some ridiculous piece of Andrew Tate content or because they’re the unsuspecting victims of a vast grooming operation. They are there because they find it cathartic to vent about their frustrations, because they want to be understood and because they can express outrageous thoughts and feelings that they would be unable to express anywhere else. And because they clearly take great pleasure in defiantly transgressing the civilized norms of a society that they feel has rejected them and because sacralizing misogynistic killers like Elliot Roger is meant to enrage the normies.

Had the makers of Adolescence done their own bit of incel-trawling before writing the show they might have come up with a story that better captured the appeal of an oppositional subculture for boys and men who are unable to form sexual relationships with women and who have come to see their lives as hopeless. Instead, they contrived to make a clumsy and reductive drama that has served to fan the flames of a moral panic that shows no signs of abating.

Of course the smug and self-congratulatory makers of Adolescence would no doubt insist that if there’s a panic about the scourge of violent misogyny then clearly this is all to the good. But the thing about moral panics is they often take on a life of their own and materialize consequences that their instigators hadn’t intended or envisaged. One such consequence is the mass stigmatization of young boys, which is all the more sinister for concealing itself in the benevolent language of vulnerability and safeguarding.

Another and perhaps more unsettling irony is that Adolescence, in trying to expose the dangers of online misogyny, has massively amplified the most extreme exponents of it, catapulting incels to the center of a global conversation about boyhood, masculinity and violence. In doing so, it has brought the most fringe of subcultures to the attention of countless numbers of young boys who might previously not have heard it or had viewed it with indifference. For some incels, all this sudden fervent attention is unnerving, while for the more ideologically strident among them, it is to be welcomed. As one poster triumphantly put it, “Good, that means inceldom is spreading. They can’t ignore it anymore.”

***

*Some names have been changed

The outrage was immediate. Flaubert was hauled before the courts on grounds of obscenity. His crime was rejecting idealism, showing life in its inglorious and alluring undress. But he was acquitted because the society he captured so perceptively was more guilty than he.

Post-Flaubert, many novels were written with righteous social purpose. Some, such as Zola’s Germinal and much of Dickens, brought about political change. Yet this movement, realism, was still an “ism” with the distortions and biases those prisms are susceptible to. It is still fiction. At its best, fiction is indeed the telling of lies to reveal deeper truths. What happens though if the intention to reveal a deeper truth is not present at all? What happens when we are swamped by fictions? In excess, any medicine becomes a poison.

The realm of politics is one beset by fictions — sycophancy, propaganda, spin, solipsism, the colossal distance between rarified worlds and street life. It has been ever thus. Yet the recent swerve of politicians into an infantilized Lalaland has felt particularly jarring. It now feels as if they actually believe the fictions they evoke and certainly expect us to. Earlier this year, the Labour MP Stella Creasy opposed changes to Home Office guidance on refugees, claiming, “Frankly, this process would deny Paddington Bear — he did the same thing, he came by an irregular route, but we gave him sanctuary.”

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In the US, this lapse into sentimental fabulism has been taking place for some time. For years, Democrats have clung hubristically to The West Wing, particularly Martin Sheen’s fictional President Jed Bartlet, like some alternative universe where Trump didn’t happen. There was more than a hint of the Kennedys to Bartlet, bolstering the “what could have been” Camelot myth that haunts American liberals. Once, there may have been a nobility to such legends, but The West Wing obsession merely revealed the smugness, complacency, denial, and callous aloofness of the Democrats that helped spawn President Trump. For when fiction becomes delusion, the comfort blanket becomes a straitjacket.

What’s needed then is a hefty dose of gritty uncompromising realism. A cultural reset by telling it like it is. The Netflix knife-crime drama Adolescence appears to be such a moment. It is well-shot, acted, the subject — in which a child is radicalized on the internet — is devastating, and it is generally superior by, admittedly low, mainstream standards.

Yet there is something off from the beginning, with the 13-year-old protagonist appearing more like the cherubic Pears Soap bubble boy than a murderous incel. Of course, physiognomy is deceptive, but the intention was clear from the beginning — our sympathies were being purchased on questionable terms. The implication is clearly, how could such an innocent doe-eyed boy do such a thing? This appeals to white liberal middle-class viewers, cracking open a bottle of white and penitentially subjecting themselves to an “important” series. It does so by chastising them, one of the bourgeois’ prevailing kinks, but also by terrifying them into a moral panic, and by providing a pat answer to a quagmire of a problem.

The response to the show has revealed how far we — and our leaders — have fallen down the fictional rabbit hole. It has been treated as if it were a documentary. In a more innocent time, this could be forgiven, but not now.

From behind the curve, Keir Starmer led the way, placing this work of fiction at the heart of the Government’s attention and proposed future policy. He has encouraged the series to be shown in schools and parliament, and voiced concerns of “a problem with boys and young men”. There has been no shortage of actual violence in society, its unpalatable realities demanding urgent attention. The figures for knife crime in the UK make for grim reading. Knife Crime Statistics | The Ben Kinsella Trust – over 15,000 in London alone in 2023/24. Yet Starmer and his administration have only been shocked into action by a fictional miniseries. As a result, they are now campaigning not against gang culture, Islamist radicalization, the collapse of the extended and nuclear family, the blight of fatherlessness, the economic deprivation that fuels crime, drugs and violence, the ghettoization of communities — but against the spectre of the online Manosphere. They have found a conveniently hateful hate figure in the guise of Andrew Tate, and a convenient stooge in the alienated white working-class boy, one of the few demographics it is now acceptable to deride and exclude.

There’s a cyclopean simplicity to Adolescence and its ilk: one explanation, one solution, one villain. This chimes with the wave of articles that fuel this moral panic. This is, accordingly, an apocalypse of young boys and smartphones, as if girls aren’t susceptible to social contagion. Regardless of the undoubted impact of being terminally online on young boys (or any of us), this stands as a monumental example of concern trolling. We know from previous moral panics (comic books, Mortal Kombat, gangsta rap, video nasties, satanic panic), it leads nowhere. Indeed, some (stranger danger, paedogeddon) have led us to our current dire situation: kids stuck indoors, stuck on parent simulator tablets and devices, with the added development gap of lockdown warping their pliant minds. Self-declared progressives now find themselves the inheritors of censorious “won’t somebody please think of the children” pearl-clutching. All of which is predicated on them hearing what they want to hear, rather than what they need.

The subtitle of Madame Bovary — “Provincial Manners” — is rarely mentioned but it is apt. For all their metropolitanism, elite liberals often live in villages within cities, celebrating multi-ethnic culture the way a visiting diplomat or an aloof travel writer might — the food, the music, the color. G.K. Chesterton shrewdly pointed out that this was a clique far more parochial than anyone from the “provinces”, where you are forced to be with people who are different. In wealthy parts of a city, you can choose circles of friends who think the same way, with the threat of exile for anyone who deviates from in-group conformity, which, unsurprisingly, is a collection of compelling fictions.

The other reason for the primacy of fiction is more insidious — control. The damage to free speech under specious weaponized hate-speech legislation is overtaken only by that done to equality under the law by the new sentencing guidelines in favor of ethnic, cultural or faith minorities. Those of us concerned about the Overton window crawling endlessly Right should recognize it is not some rebirth of fascism but rather the collapse of the liberal-Left into illiberalism.

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Few among us would lament Andrew Tate being ushered from the stage and therein lies the danger. Who is next after that fails to solve anything? The truth is such campaigns don’t solve anything but simply obfuscate and misdirect. Their quick-fix solutions will do nothing about the underlying factors, the soil of despair, alienation, rage. So, others will step in — Islamist mullahs, gang leaders, misogynists, groomers and grifters of various types. Andrew Tate is not the creator of the alienation and debasement, he, and his kind, are the exploiters of political and social failures. The red pill only works when boys are already feeling disenfranchised. Where the damage began, and who profited from it, will remain obscured and unchallenged.

For them, nothing will change because the political class will not change. It does not care that generations of working-class boys will emerge into a world that has no place for them, even as it relies on them materially. They face economic precarity, the dismantling of industries and trades, and are effectively locked out of creative industries monopolized by the rich. If non-white, their marginalization will be co-opted or treated as the sum of their existence. If white, there is the bonus of being discriminated against for their “privilege”. It is arguably even worse for girls, if grooming gangs and their cover-up is anything to go by. The aloofness of the powerful, snug in their own fictional world, sows a whirlwind for others, with the victims, and their stories, vanishing like the murdered girl Katie in Adolescence.

It’s scarcely a surprise, then, that those in whom society has no investment tend to reciprocate. And there is little to suggest that Labor will address any of the underlying economic causes of alienation, crime and violence. Taking phones away just isn’t going to cut it. Meanwhile, we are like Bovary, believing untruths. Until we face the true stories we do not want to hear and set aside our comforting fictions, others will remain locked in tragedies of our making.

But it stuck with me, because for a split-second something remarkable about social norms in my part of the British Isles felt very palpable: that in this country — at least, where I live — a woman can run for miles, alone, and know that the physical risk to her from male strangers is so low as to be negligible. And to a far greater extent than anyone seems to realize, we owe this extraordinary social achievement to an aspect of male socialization contemporary culture seems hell-bent on dismantling: male emotional repression.

Last week, everyone decided young men’s emotions needed another airing. The media class determined en masse that the TV drama Adolescence was actually a documentary, and that we need more internet censorship to stop boys’ feelings going wrong. Speaking at the Dimbleby lecture, the former England footballer Gareth Southgate popped up to lament the way young men are turning away from real-life mentors to “callous, manipulative and toxic influencers”, who teach boys that “strength means never showing emotion”. And, on cue, Victoria Derbyshire invited three young UK men onto Newsnight, where they discussed when they last cried. “Even Keir Starmer is worried.”

Two out of three could not remember; all agreed that there’s a general, culture-wide pressure on men to restrain their emotions. Implicitly, we’re to understand that this is A Bad Thing. And we might be forgiven for imagining that all these young men really need is Elsa’s message in Frozen: “Let It Go”. What could possibly go wrong? Watching that clip, though, I remembered the running club I encountered in the countryside a couple of summers ago. It struck me: are we sure we know which feelings men would express, and how they’d express them, if they felt truly empowered to Let It Go?

While there’s plenty of overlap between men and women, on several important axes the sexes are markedly different. These differences include physical strength, sexual aggression, propensity to violence, and normative approach to handling conflict. Violent aggression is much more common in men than women, and the difference between the sexes grows larger the more lethal the aggression. Men are also vastly more sexually aggressive than women: 98% of the individuals prosecuted in the UK for sex crime are men.

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The majority of victims of sex crime are women: one in four women reports having been subject to some form of sexual violence since the age of 16, while among men that falls to one in 18. 94% of survivors of rape or attempted rape are women, and within the UK’s legal definition of rape all rapists are, necessarily, male. Most murders of women are by men, and of female victims of homicide between 2009 and 2020 in the UK, most were killed by a man. In 87% of cases, the murderer was an intimate partner.

But this is not, or not only, a female victimhood story. The majority of victims of violent crime are men, and men murder each other far more frequently than they murder women. Between 2010 and 2024, 570 homicides were recorded in the UK, of which 156 were female and 414 were male: a male-on-male homicide rate nearly three times higher than for women.

Rather, it’s a story about male aggression. The asymmetry comes about because, as Louise Perry has pointed out, most men can murder most women with their bare hands, and the reverse is not true. For the sex difference in propensity to violence and sexual aggression is attended by a similarly marked sex difference in physical strength.

These days, for complex and mostly well-intentioned reasons, such differences tend to be downplayed. No one wants to be constrained by stereotype. This egalitarianism has been taken to some strange extremes, such as the tendency of fantasy-type movies to include fight scenes in which petite women trounce huge, hulking men. (Again in Frozen, at the end tiny Anna punches Hans over the side of the ship with a single blow.) Combined with shrinking families and changing social patterns, such pervasive movie falsehoods accumulate to mean it’s now possible for a woman, especially a middle-class one, to get all the way to adulthood before realizing how much stronger men are — let alone the subtler sex differences.

And where these differences are noticed, it’s often to get them wrong. One common stereotype across both sexes, for example, is that women are more emotional than men. Men tend to make this claim because they want to think being emotional is bad; women, conversely, because they think being emotional is good. But the claim itself has always seemed strange to me, because it fits so poorly with the evidence.

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As I’ve already noted, men commit the vast majority of violent and sexual crime. And these are offenses that tend, with the exception of the odd psychopath, to be perpetrated in a high pitch of emotion, whether anger, lust, or some other intense, irrational state. This isn’t to excuse violence, of course. But we might wonder whether it’s not so much that men are less emotional than women than that they experience a different and possibly more extreme spread of feelings.

This is not to assert that there are no quiet, gentle men who feel things deeply, or that there’s anything wrong with such a personality. Where people of either sex are unhappy, there’s often a complex mix of internalizing (that is, introspective or self-directed) behaviors, such as sadness or rumination, and externalizing responses, such as hyperactivity or aggression. And while there’s a great deal of overlap between the sexes, internalizing appears to be more common among women and externalizing more common among men.

The increase in public support for emotional expressiveness might well bring relief and reassurance, at least to those men who are more prone to internalizing. But what about those men — who are, remember, as a group far bigger and stronger than women — who feel intensely, but tend to externalize negative emotion? Which is to say: what about the men who have a propensity to respond to sadness or anger with violence or aggression? It strikes me that, among this group, a far more prosocial message overall than “Let It Go” might well be “Suck It Up”.

And this brings us to the real heart of the matter. If “Let It Go” is a risky message, at least for men who tend to externalize, “Suck It Up” is not much of an alternative — at least not on its own. It invites the question: “Why?” Why, that is, should men accept this demand for self-restraint? The question is especially mordant when both the aggression being restrained, and also the restraint itself, are denounced as “toxic masculinity”. You would need a truly inspiring reason to accept so bewildering an edict; and yet to my eye no such reason is currently on offer. (I don’t think being invited on Newsnight to talk about crying counts.)

In a culture that offers men no idealistic reason to suppress their baser instincts, then, those young men who don’t simply act out violently can perhaps be forgiven for adopting an individualistic one: honing their ability to control their own urges and feelings, then directing this capacity for self-mastery to purely selfish goals. This is the moral vacuum within which influencers such as Andrew Tate operate, teaching a value-free program of masculine self-control stripped of higher aims beyond individual wealth and sexual dominance.

But the core of the problem isn’t men being told to control their feelings. It’s the poverty of the ends to which that control is then ordered. Because even strength and aggression are not bad as such: both domestic public order and international freedom from conflict rest ultimately on a capacity for violence. But the kind of violence that upholds public order or defends a nation isn’t comparable to (say) that employed by the machete-wielding teenage gang members that crashed a birthday party in Essex over the weekend. On the contrary: the capacity of public-spirited individuals — almost always men — for controlled violence is what stands between us and that kind of chaos and fear. The willingness of a few good men to be prosocially violent in an emergency is the ultimate guarantor of the peace in which I can run alone.

Encouraging men to repress the extremes of their emotional range is not wrong or cruel. It’s civilizationally essential. But there has to be a why, or few will bother — and those that do will do so for purely selfish ends. And then, before long, you won’t have a civilization; just (at best) warring tribes, or (worse still) omnium bellum contra omnes.

Obviously things aren’t anywhere near that bad. If they were, I wouldn’t be betting only on advancing age to keep me safe on my runs. Perhaps instead of a Labrador I’d have a Rottweiler. Perhaps I’d have a running machine in my panic room. But if we don’t want things to get worse, we can’t go about encouraging men to “Let It Go”. With heartfelt apologies to the sensitive ones: overall, male emotional repression is good, actually. What’s missing isn’t more masculine emotionality. It’s honor, appreciation, and a more transcendent reason for sublimating aggression and sexuality than just being able to take selfies in a Lamborghini.

And knowing where your children are is little reassurance when the media they’re consuming represents something you’re certain is horrific, but don’t quite understand. I think that fear explains the avid response to Netflix drama Adolescence, which across four episodes, each filmed in real time and (audaciously) as one shot, tries to unpick the nightmare of a teenage boy (Jamie, played by Owen Cooper) who stabs a teenage girl to death. The motivation for the attack is initially obscure, but the investigation rapidly fixes on Jamie’s involvement in the online subculture known as the “manosphere”.

In the final episode, which focuses on Jamie’s shattered family, his parents struggle with their own culpability — the degree to which they should have known the path their son was on, and stopped him. His mom (Christine Tremarco) frets about all the time Jamie spent on his computer, unmonitored; his dad (Stephen Graham) remembers how he too has been pushed “incel stuff” while looking for workout content. The series ends with Jamie’s dad in his son’s disarmingly childish bedroom, sobbing: “I’m sorry son, I should’ve done better.”

The series deliberately resists offering backstory that might make Jamie more explicable. There’s no domineering father, no neglectful mother; nothing that might reassure the viewer that this could never be their family. Only a gentle-seeming boy who did well at school and caused no trouble before this one devastating act. Graham, who co-created the series as well as starring in it, says the series is a reaction to the spate of real-life, child-on-child knife crime: the intention was to “hold that mirror up to society and say, ‘Just have a look at this, because it is happening. It has happened.'”

He also says he knew nothing about the manosphere before he started work on this project, and you can tell. The world Jamie is drawn into is never shown on screen. Instead, it is represented through the efforts of baffled adults to understand an impenetrable language of emojis and posting (in one scene, a detective’s son painfully talks him through the meaning of “red pill”). Adolescence is unsettlingly realistic about, say, the simmering anarchy of a school full of teenagers, but when it comes to online, this is a boomer version of zoomer life. It can look at the symbols, but has no way of deciphering them beyond the inevitable cry: “Take away their phones!”

Confronted by something as shattering as children who kill, the only act that feels possible is witness. Adolescence shares a lot stylistically with Gus Van Sant’s 1999 film Elephant, which was his response to the Columbine massacre — the high school shooting in which Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris killed 13 and injured 23 (Klebold and Harris also killed themselves, and one of the survivors recently died of her injuries, bringing their toll to 14). Like Adolescence, Elephant uses a real-time structure and long, watchful camerawork; rather than being filmed in one take, it has a looping structure that brings together the last minutes before the atrocity from the perspectives of several kids.

Elephant‘s title was intended as a reference to the impossibility of comprehension. Van Sant told an interviewer he was thinking of the parable of the five blind men encountering an elephant: “One thinks it’s a rope because he has the tail, one thinks it’s a tree because he can feel the legs, one thinks it’s a wall because he can feel the side of it, and nobody actually has the big picture. You can’t really get to the answer, because there isn’t one.” The enormity of the event resists understanding.

A year before Elephant, Michael Moore had satirized attempts to find a simple, singular cause for the shooting in his documentary Bowling for Columbine, which was particularly scathing about media efforts to blame Klebold and Harris’s acts on the boys’ consumption of violent media.  Bowling for Columbine has aged badly for several reasons, not least its elevation of Marilyn Manson (the rock star who was erroneously blamed for inspiring Columbine) to the status of moral authority. Moore was correct that scapegoating movies and video games was inane, but he also deliberately overlooked the degree to which Klebold and Harris were immersed in the aesthetics of bloodshed.

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From the earliest stages of their plan, Klebold and Harris had seen their actions in cinematic terms. One of the missed warning signs of their plot was a senior-year film project they collaborated on called Hitmen for Hire, in which they played hitmen picking off fellow students. They left behind a cache of tapes (nicknamed the Basement Tapes) detailing their plans, and intended for release; these were later destroyed by law enforcement for fear that their circulation would inspire copycats.

And Columbine itself was planned for the cameras. Although the death toll was shocking (especially at the time, when a school shooting was a new phenomenon in America), Klebold and Harris intended it to be much, much higher. They had planted bombs in strategic locations with timers set to ensure maximum fatalities, and maximum publicity. These failed to go off, but journalist Dave Cullen (who has covered Columbine in more detail than probably anyone) describes what was supposed to happen:

“The cafeteria bombs would kill nearly 600 people instantly; what they called the ‘fun’ part would be shooting up hundreds of survivors; and the massive car bombs set in the parking lot outside were to be the coup de grâce. Those timers were set to explode 45 minutes after the initial blast, wiping out countless more survivors and first responders, live on national TV. The Columbine killers’ performance was staged as the most apocalyptic made-for-TV horror film in American history.”

Klebold and Harris had learned their sense of drama from the films they watched and the games they played. That doesn’t mean that media turned them into killers. (A folie a deux between psychopathic Harris and depressive Klebold probably did that, and Harris specifically may have been dangerous under any conditions. “If he had lived to adulthood and developed his murderous skills for many more years, there is no telling what he could have done,” writes Cullen.) But media profoundly shaped the kind of killers they became.

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The failure of Klebold and Harris’s bombs meant they did not achieve the total infamy they hoped for. But they achieved enough to have become cultural figureheads of a sort, to a certain sort of person. They wrote the script for the gun massacres that have since become regular occurrences in the US. At Cullen’s estimate, 54 shootings with 300 fatalities (and many more injured) have been directly inspired by Columbine since 1999.

In September last year, a British teenager tried to join their number: 19-year-old Nicolas Prosper executed his mother Juliana Falcon, brother Kyle and sister Giselle with a shotgun, then headed to a primary school where he intended to accomplish the “massacre of the century”. He was specifically obsessed with Columbine, making him one of thousands of “Columbiners”, as the Klebold-Harris fandom is known. To them, Columbine was an act of nihilistic heroism, and Klebold and Harris are idols to be emulated. With sad inevitability, there has even been at least one shooting in which Elephant was cited as an inspiration.

Few people have pushed back against Adolescence’s implicit thesis that tiny incels turn into killers. Those who did have not come from the Left like Moore (the Left allowed its free speech muscle to waste away during the 2010s, when it assumed that the right side of history had won and all that was left to do was gloat at the losers) but rather from the manosphere itself. Andrew Tate fans in particular seem to have been exercised by Adolescence, with some calling it a “character assassination” of their hero.

Unfortunately for the Tate fans claiming “moral panic”, it is only weeks since the conviction of Kyle Clifford for the rape and murder of his ex-girlfriend Louise Hunt, and the murder of her mother Carol and her sister Louise. At the trial, the prosecution revealed that Clifford had spent the night before watching Tate videos; the crown argued that Tate’s self-declared misogyny was a direct encouragement for Clifford’s abhorrent violence.

It is no longer particularly controversial to draw a line from what is watched and read, to what is done. That is partly because the escalation of user-generated content means that those with an interest in violence are no longer limited to material that might come under the definition of “art”. Van Sant had a reason for staging the high school massacre of Elephant, and his reason was to look at the nature of violence and the lives it scars. The Columbiners who make fan illustrations of Klebold and Harris are simply showing their admiration for Klebold and Harris.

Adolescence, notably, doesn’t explicitly show the stabbing that instigates the story. The emotional impact of the assault comes from watching someone else watching it: Jamie’s father is shown grainy CCTV footage of his son attacking the victim. Perhaps a judgement was made here that, in a drama leaning so heavily on the risks of media contagion, it would be hypocritical to offer anything that might gratify those attracted to violence.

For all Adolescence’s will to refuse pat answers, though, I suspect there is still a certain truth about violence that it is not willing to acknowledge. Children who kill do not have a single “type”, as the FBI school shooter threat assessment conducted after Columbine found. There is no checklist you can turn to that tells you who will or will not become a murderer. But there are commonalities among those who do: a history of psychological issues, tensions in the home, an obsession with death.

It was true in 1999 that it took more than a first-person shooter to make a massacre, and it’s still true if you substitute “incel TikToks” for Doom. A child like Jamie who appears to shift from “nice” to “vicious” with no outward signs is rare to the point of being mythical. Despite Adolescence’s meticulous verisimilitude, Jamie is a kind of monster: the ultimate distillation of those parental fears about what might become of your child, lost in the wilds of social media.

Duke’s election was an embarrassment for the Republican Party and was viciously opposed by its mainstream members. He had, however, successfully co-opted the aesthetics of that mainstream. Now, this dynamic is at play in the Republican Party once more, except this time those in power have discovered an unprecedented tolerance for extremists. Duke was quickly hustled out of political life, the centrist machinery cranking up to eliminate a poisonous anomaly. But in Donald Trump’s second term, the courting of those with extremist views has become not only accepted, but an asset.

The ultras need not hide anymore. Americans have surpassed the age of the “perfect media candidate”, of crisp suits and Persilschein; what they want now is a firecracker whose madness and badness is well and truly on display. This is how they ended up with the leader of a government department doing a Nazi salute, something Duke would never have dared — but with this new crop of Republican livewires, the volatility is the point.

Duke’s ascension had much to do with race — he stood in the dystopian-sounding District 81, where 99.6% of the population was white and many resented the black population of nearby New Orleans. Trump, conversely, was elected by a broad sweep of Americans, surprising commentators with his victory across racial lines. This time around the biggest zealots are the misogynists, and the divide is between men and women.

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So much of MAGA is about reclaiming masculinity, dusting off a Mussolini-esque credo of virility crumpled by decades of feminization. In practice, the population of the White House mirrors the generic high school cafeteria. Trump’s MAGA superpower is based on his embrace of three distinct “crowds”: the jocks, the nerds and the bullies. These are no easy alliances: Trump himself represents that first class, the winking American patriarch surrounded by blonde women and strapping men. His brand of masculinity is a departure from the patrician, family-man Reaganism; here is a president known, to put it generously, for his red-bloodedness, who has been caught on hot mic bragging about grabbing women “by the pussy”, and who told an Apprentice candidate that her offer to drop to her knees to beg judges would “be a pretty picture”. His is a Seventies sleaziness, that of an executive who gooses secretaries — and despite his advancing years and, well, job title, it shines through undimmed. So it is that he compliments Britain’s prime minister on his “beautiful wife”, adding that he is “very impressed” by Victoria Starmer. Props, dude — how’d you bag that! Trump, you see, is the quintessential jock.

But even jocks must sometimes associate with nerds. For the freakish excrescences of Silicon Valley, Elon Musk and his teen hacker henchmen at DOGE, have proved generally useful to Trump. These unsexy, unslick, and unelected neurodivirgins are the alleged brains behind the operation. But perhaps these bucktoothed mathletes might fail at slashing departmental spending. They might instead make a complete hash of it, as happened during Musk’s toe-curling admission that DOGE had “accidentally canceled” Ebola prevention initiatives as part of USAID cuts. But Trump’s assumptions about Musk within the mythos of the American high school make sense: accounts of Musk’s actual schooldays draw him as a member of the chess team, thrown down staircases by popular kids, put in hospital by the beatings of bullies. He makes a strange bedfellow of the macho MAGA crowd, one might think — but his presence makes sense when seen through the lens of Trumpian masculinity.

Burnished by their sudden importance as titans of social media, the nerds can for the first time bag all the babes and kudos they might once have dreamed of. Musk, a pronatalist father-of-14 with a herd of babymamas, has been linked to Talulah Riley, Grimes, Amber Heard and many more besides. His first wife, Justine, wrote in 2010 that she had been his “starter wife”; he told her, on their wedding day, that he would be the “alpha” in their relationship, and later that if she was his employee, he’d sack her. He banned teddy bears for his sons once they turned seven, and later on, he fathered twins with a mutual friend while the surrogate (who else?) was pregnant with his and Grimes’s third baby.

But he is no Andrew Tate; if manipulative, he is not honest about it, and this is no harem. Tate would not be caught telling an interviewer he was a “fool for love”. Instead, Musk is a romantic technocrat — that aforementioned mutual friend was not a lover but a woman, Shivon Zilis, in need of a sperm donor; “He really wants smart people to have kids, so he encouraged me to,” she told Musk’s biographer. “I can’t possibly think of genes I would prefer for my children.” Though Musk’s borderline incontinent fecundity might seem threatening to the conventional American family — modeled by Vice President JD Vance — it also helps his case as a nerd doing the popular kids’ homework.

On Trump’s other flank are the school bullies, of whom Andrew Tate is surely the meanest. Tate and his brother Tristan flew to Florida on 27 February after being released from house arrest in Romania, where they are accused of human trafficking, with Andrew also accused of rape. A video of a 25-year-old Andrew which purports to show him whipping and sexually abusing a girl — reports about her age vary — has resurfaced on X since his arrival in America; outrage has been expressed, but nothing, predictably, has been done about it. Tate’s MAGA links go way back: Musk restored his banned X account upon taking over the website in 2022; Trump’s son Donald Jr has referred to the brothers’ Romanian arrest as “absolute insanity”; the Tates’ lawyer responded to a question about whether the President had personally helped in their release by saying: “Do the math. These guys are on the plane.”

The Trump administration’s covert courting of the Tates is not just about them. It’s about a vision of violent masculinity — specifically of the self-made man, who climbs to the top on a pile of women’s bodies. The Tates embody this aspirational misogyny. Trump’s own track record has been conveniently forgotten, but let’s not forget that he has himself been found guilty of sexual assault. His defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, agreed a financial settlement with a woman who accused him of rape in 2017; Trump’s initial choice for attorney general, Matt Gaetz, was alleged to have “regularly” solicited prostitution, including from an underaged girl.

These are not coincidences: yes, gross men like company — but the implicit sanctioning of woman-hatred and abuse under the guise of swaggering machismo holds appeal for a generation of disenfranchised young men who feel hard done by with feminism and who split the Gen Z vote in November. These boys live in the ambient world of the podcast bro, with which Barron Trump encouraged his father to engage during his campaign. Almost all of the MAGA men, including Trump, Musk, and Tucker Carlson, have appeared, for instance, on the “Nelk Boys’” Full Send podcast, a prank channel-turned-Right-wing commentary hub. The show had Andrew Tate on last week, who bragged that “I would be in a jail right now” if Trump hadn’t won.

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Just like David Duke, bringing in Tate from the cold legitimizes repressed hatreds in voters, who feel vindicated in their resentment of a group (then, black people and Jews; now, women) by the presence of someone who has acted on that resentment in the most explicit and baroque way possible before shaking hands and smiling with the mainstream once more. Duke’s election is now looked upon as a dark period for the Republican Party; the MAGA associations with Sieg-Heiling Silicon Valley dork Musk and probable sex trafficker Tate may one day be viewed in the same way.

The alliance between the jocks, nerds and bullies of Trump’s new court may prove shaky. Elon Musk and Andrew Tate are dynamic disruptors of the type often seen in the early, anarchic stages of authoritarian regimes. But though united by “alpha” compulsions and trails of victimized women, they are not a natural union by any means. Either should expect a long knife in his back when he is no longer useful to Trump.

Until then, we must settle for the fact that we have lowered the accepted standards of public life beyond comparison, in service of a vision of masculinity which we know is already having real-life, and often fatal, consequences for women. The most frightening thing about this new crop of Trump-supporting men is that, rather than burying their radicalism in suits and euphemisms, they flaunt it — dog whistles have become overt provocations. MAGA machismo is about the spectacle of chaos and domination, a truly fascist vision of man. These acolytes’ raw unpredictability is their strength: it means nobody can look away.

Cue the scorn. The Left-leaning press has derided the shift as merely the rise of “toxic masculinity” and the hatred of women’s rights. The New York Times described something even more sinister, calling it creeping “hegemonic masculinity”.

This reflexive contempt may unintentionally provide an explanation for the reversal. Many young men believe they live in a liberal-leaning society that actively despises them, treating them with disdain rather than empathy as their struggles have mounted.

Imagine an 18-year-old voter filling out his ballot for the first time. Looking back over his childhood and adolescence, this young man would feel his cohort are far from oppressors. Instead, they are drowning in problems.

He would have reached adolescence as the #MeToo movement took hold globally. The legitimate castigation of high-profile sexual abusers would rapidly devolve into widespread call-out culture, in which boys and young men were suspected of perpetuating the patriarchy and rape culture. The ordinary clumsiness of youthful love and teenage romantic inquiry was transformed, overnight, into behaviours that were liable for disciplinary action from school administrators.

The start of high school coincided with liberal bureaucrats locking schools down during the pandemic. Left with no other choices, the youth languished at home with online classes and virtual socialising that amounted to little more than doom scrolling. Last year, a study found that two-thirds of young men believed “no one really knows me” and one in three young men had spent no time with anyone outside their household in the prior week. Surveys show that the number of young men who say they lack a single close friend has soared fivefold since 1990.

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As college approached, the women touted as the victims of society did not seem to be doing so poorly. The gap between college enrolment, which had been building for decades, exploded — 3.1 million more American women entered higher education than men by 2021. It’s not even just a yawning education disparity gap. In many American cities, young women are galloping ahead of men in terms of income.

And new vices seem to prey particularly among this crowd. The recent legalisation of marijuana and online sports betting in many states has fuelled a skyrocketing rate of young men addicted to high potency pot and app-based gambling. Other more traditional compulsive habits, such as video games and pornography, similarly afflict young men far more than women.

Wasted time and lost savings, compounded by a profoundly lonely existence, can also give way to deaths of despair. The young male suicide rate has tripled since 2000, according to a new study published this week. In some communities, the magnetic pull of nihilistic violence and gang crime has a particular allure.

In previous generations, young men yearning for transgressive content and open expression had plenty of safe options. There were endless sources of edgy magazines like VICE, or raunchy late-night comics poking fun at the double-standards and absurdities around us. That changed in less than a decade. VICE transformed into a liberal clickbait farm and then bankrupted itself as internal accusations of bigotry tore it apart, while comedians were cancelled over “problematic” jokes.

The search for verboten ideas and thoughtcrime discussions has shifted almost entirely to places like Joe Rogan’s podcast. It is now among the most popular broadcasts of any type in the country. With over 11 million weekly listeners, the show is where young men go if they want to hear critical discussions with independent-minded thinkers.

Not long ago, Rogan’s show was embraced by outsiders of all types. Having previously hosted Bernie Sanders for a thoughtful discussion about political corruption, Rogan soon after endorsed the socialist’s 2020 bid for the presidency.

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But the popularity of Rogan’s show angered the Left-leaning cultural order, which pushed to have him removed from Spotify and YouTube. Democratic politicians were warned to not appear over false claims that Rogan harboured racist views.

In this light, Kamala Harris’s refusal to appear on the show in the waning weeks of the campaign was more than a mere tactical mistake. It was an implicit endorsement of the cancellation campaign waged against Rogan — a dogwhistle for young men primed in the cancel culture wars.

And Harris’s rise may have reminded young men that they now compete in a world which at times seems stacked against them. As a presidential candidate in 2020, she received zero delegates, yet became Joe Biden’s running mate. And this year, she faced no competition for the nomination. Democratic powerbrokers, backed by billionaires and much of the party elite, simply coronated her.

On the other hand, Trump, for all his swaggering bravado, humbled himself with intimate, highly emotional appearances on podcasts favoured by young men — for example speaking with the comedian Theo Von about his brother’s struggles with addiction and depression before his suicide.

The Trump campaign, for what’s it worth, carefully cultivated the resentment brewing in this generation, keenly aware of the culture wars and its impact. Its closing television advertisement depicted an America silenced by false accusations of hate speech and humiliated into labelling its values as shameful. “Our patriotism was called toxic,” the narrator intoned. “Men could beat up women and win medals but there was no prize for the guy who got up every day to do his job.”

In many respects, young men have faced down a liberal cultural order that has reduced them to objects of scorn. For a majority of young male voters, the choice to send a message back was clear. Trump is perfectly suited as an avatar of defiance on the campaign trail.

Yet a more positive, policy-based agenda to shore up the material interests of young men may be more elusive. There are suggestions to reform Title IX, the civil rights code that has been widely accused of expelling men accused of sexual misconduct from college campuses without any semblance of due process. Any broad improvement in the economy can lift the economic prospects of young men. J.D. Vance, in particular, has called for the continued deployment of Biden-era spending programmes on chip factories and electric vehicle plants, albeit with stripping gender and race-based mandates embedded into the funding.

That may not be enough to soothe the souls of young men victimised by a pervasive media culture and academic ideology primed to see them as the enemy. A more fundamental change may require reform instead from the liberal coalition groups that make up the Democratic Party. The same activist class and foundation-funded world that decided to scapegoat men in the first place, now reeling from their electoral loss, must reassess the excesses of gender and racial identity politics.

How to champion the interests of women without seeing identity as a zero sum game in which lifting one group up must come at the expense of the other? How to extend empathy to both young men and women? If the 2024 election results are to signal a permanent realignment, such questions can’t simply be swept away.

Perhaps it’s all showbiz. Or perhaps all these putative messiahs are signs of the End Times. Certainly the idea that the American Republic needs rescuing at all — let alone with prayer — suggests there’s an apocalyptic mood afoot. Last Sunday, even Donald Trump — not renowned for his piety — got in on the game, posting the Catholic prayer to St Michael on X.

Beneath all the internet showboating, a deeper vibe shift is under way in the relation between men and religion. For a long time, this relation has been shaky, with the “feminisation of Christianity” a longstanding complaint and amid a deluge of books on why men are quitting church. Now, if St Michael is triggering controversy on Trump’s X account, this is part of a larger picture: the return of Christianity in a masculine key. And it isn’t just celebs and politicians: last week, The New York Times reported that young men are turning to the Christian faith in markedly greater numbers than young women, who are more likely to embrace the fluffier doctrines of progressivism.

What is happening? Is this just another aspect of the more widespread politicised sex war? Perhaps this contributes, but I think it goes deeper. Two interlocking patterns are contributing to the new macho Christianity: firstly, that the world in general is growing more disorienting, extreme, and uncanny. This is spurring a widespread sense of existential spiritual conflict, in which post-war Christianity simply doesn’t cut it any more. And, secondly, young men conditioned by video gaming to pour all their energy into dematerialised battles have responded to this new disorientation, by extending their interest in ideational war beyond gaming to the fabric of reality itself.

It was Friedrich Nietzsche who kick-started the modern backlash against Christianity, claiming in Beyond Good and Evil (1886) that it was a creed of slaves which exerted a stifling, feminising downward pressure on individuality, energy, and self-confidence. Three decades later, the First World War drove many ex-soldiers to agree with him that “God is dead”. But it wasn’t until 1945 that this germ of mass unbelief flowered in earnest, in the mushroom-clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki: world-shattering events that, as the Catholic writer Ronald Knox described at the time, felt for many like the decisive triumph of secular science and a Godless universe over the divine and loving order of Christian tradition.

If the atom bomb seemed, to Knox, an existential threat to faith, it also seemed for many to represent the end of war. How could war even start, between industrialised nations, when its conclusion might be another Hiroshima? Under the shadow of mutually assured destruction, then, both Christian belief and the value of “manly” courage and martial vigour came to seem as though they no longer had anything to offer the world. Amid the smoking civilisational rubble this left us, it seemed to many as though the only safe place for Christians to stand was not for anything that might raise an enemy against you, but on the side only of peace, welcome and safety, and the deification of “the vulnerable” and “the marginalised”.

The brouhaha over Trump’s post was partly in response to just how starkly the warrior archangel St Michael contrasts with this post-war sensibility. Most representations of St Michael show him subduing a dragon, understood to represent the Devil, while his prayer implores St Michael to “defend us in battle”, and to “thrust into hell Satan, and all the evil spirits, who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls”. This is a combative style of faith long deprecated by the modern Christianity of universal niceness.

And I suspect it’s returning for a straightforward reason: secularism as such is collapsing and everyone — even the avowed secularists — are already behaving as though we’re in a spiritual war. Even the objections to Trump’s post, for example, have this febrile quality of spiritual battle about them. One notable Trump hater interpreted the Michael post literally, as evidence that Trump views Kamala Harris as an evil spirit who needs to be “thrust into hell”, calling this “terrifying”. And a still more striking instance of the now increasingly pervasive post-post-religious weirding came from one of its most staunch opponents: James Lindsay. Lindsay, the co-author of a 2020 book critiquing “woke” academic theories as threats to Enlightenment values, worried that Trump has been manipulated into name-checking the Archangel Michael by “Operation Michael”. This, we are to understand, is part of an occult plan concocted by the Theosophists who run the UN and something called the Fetzer Institute, to channel the Archangel to bring about and control the next stage of spiritual evolution via something called Social-Emotional Learning.

The fact that even so staunch a defender of the Age of Reason is now mounting that defence in terms I can only describe as barmy suggests forcefully that his cause may already be lost. And this is thanks to our high-tech age. In part, as I argued last week, it’s because this teaches us to visualise complexity but not how to control it, encouraging a deification of natural forces such as “climate”. But it’s not just weather gods: it’s also those demons that might or might not be real, and which we meet in our own information machines.

Ideas, images, and even policies travel like lightning online, seeming to take on a life of their own. Groups of people define themselves through love or hate of any theme, idea, or individual you can think of. And sometimes an idea can appear so overwhelmingly powerful it seems to occupy everything and everyone at once: as though some ideas have us, rather than we them. Think of the weird way every alternative to lockdowns came to seem unthinkable, even evil.

And as we’ve grown accustomed to watching memes travel and mutate like this, across millions of individual minds, it’s become less eccentric to imagine them as more than the sum of their parts: as though they have a “spirit” and agaenda of their own. Some will say this is just an illusion; or that we don’t know but it’s a useful shorthand to talk about “egregores”, meaning entities composed of multiple consciousnesses. From there, though, it’s only a short step to saying ideas or moods are aware in some sense, with agency and their own plans; at which point we might as well just call them “demons”.

Do that, and the world is suddenly very much weirder, and very much more alive. This isn’t just my overactive imagination: the slippage between metaphorical and literal demons is widespread. All the way back in 2014 Elon Musk warned that with AI we are “summoning the demon”, while more recent reports of unsettling interactions with AI chatbots suggest some are already entertaining the possibility that we have summoned it.

And this isn’t just a superstitious reaction by techno-illiterates to new machines beyond our ken: far from being an island of reason, the world’s cutting-edge technologists seem aboil in occultism. According to the writer Rod Dreher, Blake Lemoine, the man fired by Google for claiming its LAMDA programme is sentient, recounted that he and his colleagues involved the machine in a ritual committing it to the ancient Egyptian deity Thoth. Another Silicon Valley venture capitalist, Dreher reports, tells him everyone he knows in the Bay Area performs rituals to enjoin “aliens” to supply technological wisdom.

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And the now rapidly-emerging new age of AI-powered robot swarms brings these ambivalent egregores-or-maybe-aliens-or-demons still more concretely, and terrifyingly, into the material world. Yes, drone swarms are (we are told) controlled by humans: but they seem powerful, unstoppable, and “intelligent” in wholly inhuman ways. Video footage attests that they aren’t just for making pretty lights in the sky, unnerving though these displays already are; they’re also for dropping explosives or killer robots on people, a power that shifts such technologies, and the alien-seeming “intelligences” that power them, decisively into the realm of cultural and political (even geopolitical) game-changers.

In those circumstances, it doesn’t matter what you believe: gods and demons might as well walk among us. There isn’t anywhere very rational left to stand – especially when trying to stand there means you sound even barmier than the believers. Even the erstwhile rationalists are peddling conspiracy theories, or ritually invoking Thoth. Given this, I don’t blame those young men who read the signs and portents, and conclude that the world really is stranger than the moderns thought and maybe gods and demons actually are real.

And if this is so, perhaps we really are in a spiritual war — and the only rational place left to stand is in a longstanding spiritual tradition, with a well-worked-out approach to demons and the uncanny. No wonder, then, that Gen Z men are returning to religious practice: with over 90% of them raised on video games, they are as primed for de-materialised war as for remote-piloting combat drones. All that needs to happen is for the field of conflict to expand beyond gaming to the whole world.

Are they right? Certainly between signs, portents, natural disasters, wars, and a proliferation of would-be messiahs, these are strange times. If I saw the angel with the key to the bottomless pit buying milk in Tesco tomorrow morning, I wouldn’t bat an eyelid. And if they get any stranger, one thing is sure: woolly inclusivity and a limp handshake won’t be enough. We will all need the Armour of God; and also, perhaps, the intercession of St Michael.

I think the spirit of this writing got inside them as they read and soon their own thoughts were infused with it, so that their internal monologues took on the rhythms and diction and authorial attitudes of William Faulkner. From this they came to believe themselves worthy of the great endeavour, to write at the William Faulkner level, because, simply in thinking their private thoughts, they already were writing like William Faulkner. Bits of their experience already were being milled into Faulknerian sentences, with which they would sometimes narrate their lives to themselves more generally, in paragraphs.

I was not in their heads and so I can’t absolutely confirm that this is how Cormac McCarthy and Don Delillo came to want to write their great novels, but both of them began to write seriously very soon after they began to read seriously, which suggests I’m onto something. And anyway, I was in my own head when the thing I describe happened to me. Like them, I read very little as a boy. I was physically restless and mentally scrambled, and also the third of six loud children born in an eight-year span to my poor mother. I lacked the cognitive and bodily inclination to read for pleasure, as well as a quiet place where I might try it, until I was done with college.

Or almost done. I was in my final term, student-teaching at a rural high school in Michigan, bored on a warm Sunday in a tiny village roughly 80 miles from both my home town and my college town, when I cracked open my gigantic literature anthology and began to read a short novel wedged, somehow in its entirety, amid the hundreds of poems and stories also gathered into the fat book. Yes, I was an English teacher at that country school, and an English major at my undistinguished university, and I’d liked the fiction I read for my classes, but not enough to read the stuff in my free time — until I opened my Anthology of American Literature, randomly as I remember, at the first page of Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth.

Unlike the novels of Faulkner, McCarthy, and Delillo, Roth’s fiction is not distinguished by self-consciously daring and luxuriant prose. What Goodbye, Columbus offered instead, to a reader like me, was voice, attitude, the funny and haughty and brainy commentary of its young narrator, Neil Klugman. Before I had even finished this little novel, my thoughts were taking a Neil Klugman or Philip Roth sort of form. I was describing things as they might. Of course I desired Brenda Patimkin right away. I also started wishing I was Jewish. And, almost immediately, I started wanting this new activity I was performing in my head, this mental making of Rothian sentences, to define me in some larger sense. I thought it should. From what I could tell I was really good at it. Reading Philip Roth I thought, I can do that.

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In other words, before I’d even finished the first “literary” novel I’d ever found myself reading merely because I liked it, I started thinking I could be a novelist. I don’t relate this to compare myself with McCarthy and DeLillo, but rather to illustrate how far down the ladder of literary talent this tendency can be found. I suspect that, for certain readers, perhaps especially reluctant or belated ones, the thrill of discovering a love of serious and stylish fiction translates very quickly into a sort of literary will to power.

It might be by accident or obligation that the type of person I speak of becomes a reader, opening a book because there’s simply nothing else to do on a Sunday afternoon, or dutifully doing the reading for a university course, but then continuing as an avid reader because reading now fuels his uplifting hubris about writing, because that one book he stumbled on got the stylish sentences going in his head. This sent him after other books that might do the same thing.

You’ll notice that I dropped the coy neutrality and started using masculine pronouns just then. The particular reader-writer, the “type of person” I’m referring to in all this, is a male type of person. I’m dealing in gender stereotypes here. This is a risky and suspicious activity, I know, but these stereotypes are so consistently affirmed in both my reading and my personal experience that I feel I can use them as a sort of crude literary sociology. And these stereotypes are consistent with a phenomenon that comes up a lot when people talk about literature and publishing, the fact that men read very little fiction anymore, and, when it comes to the publishing category called “literary fiction”, they read almost none. Some gloomy ironies attend this fact, which I’ll go into below.

In my gender stereotypology, the woman fiction writer has been reading her whole life. She read easily and prodigiously as a girl, consuming and then producing stories that grew in sophistication as she herself grew older. Thanks to her fast and effortless reading, she developed a capacious feel for the arc of character, the full span of narrative time, the novel as a single experience, a single order. Her mature writing serves these broader elements. It is thus less showy than that of her male counterparts, more story- than style-oriented. By contrast the male reader-writer in my scheme came to reading as McCarthy and Delillo did, fairly late, perhaps after finding reading unpleasant or difficult when he tried it as a boy. His reading, when it did begin in earnest, was spurred by encounters with novels written in daring or quirky prose or bearing some other bold stylistic signature.

This style aspect is key. The male reader-writer in my stereotype understands writing, when done by the masters he admires, as a sort of exalted mischief — like the laddish riffing of Martin Amis and that early Philip Roth, or Delillo’s droll tabulating, his deadpan dropping of synecdochal nouns, an uncanny comic method whose influence is obvious and everywhere among lesser (male) writers. Perhaps consciously but at least subconsciously, our reader-writer pursues his own fiction writing as masculine self-assertion, and also — in rough consonance with Harold Bloom’s famous theory — as a quest to commit a few Oedipal murders, to transcend and thus kill his literary influences with an even more daring, more excellent, more distinctive style.

There are of course exceptions to these gender stereotypes in current fiction. For example the best, most intoxicating novel I read in the last year was Lauren Groff’s Matrix, which — with its supersaturated prose and Bunyanesque heroine, a polymathic giantess who rules a surprisingly sexy medieval convent — calls to mind male novelists like David Foster Wallace and John Barth more than any prominent female novelist I can think of. By contrast, Jonathan Franzen’s intricate, stylistically modest family sagas code as fairly female in my scheme.

Still, despite their imprecision and offensiveness, these stereotypes have real descriptive value. Indeed, much feminist criticism of toxic and laughable masculinity in the worlds of writing and publishing seems to assume some version of them. The partly justified, often philistine, and increasingly pointless mockery of male literary striving that became popular in the 2010s — exemplified by the “Guy in Your MFA Program” Twitter account and subsequent book, and their many imitators — leans on and propagates categories that resemble mine, even as its adherents would surely repudiate my gender stereotyping on grounds that it’s gender stereotyping.

But I’m less concerned with the exalted strata inhabited by Lauren Groff and Jonathan Franzen, who don’t have elderly neighbours and helpful loved-ones suggesting that they “self-publish”, than with the lower levels where most male reader-writers read and write. Shouldn’t the final collapse of literary reading among other men be something of a bummer to them? Shouldn’t the idea that their potential audience has largely disappeared kill their desire to keep writing?

In these times of hegemonic psychotherapy, many educators and functionaries would answer “No! Of course not!” Writing is fundamentally a mode of self-expression, they believe. It should be an end in itself, its own reward. Teachers of writing, at every level from primary schools to MFA programs, often base their writing pedagogy on this assumption, implying or even stating that the point or goal of writing is “finding your voice”, which means that a writing effort could be considered successful if it resulted in this bit of therapeutic self-discovery and nothing else. But the male reader-writer wants something very different from this. He’s on a quest to kill his Oedipal fathers. He writes because he thinks he is, or might be, uniquely excellent at writing. His standard for success in a writing effort is having it read by people who agree that it and he are excellent. For him the truly therapeutic outcome is not him finding his voice but other people finding his voice, and then declaring in newspapers and magazines and end-of-year award ceremonies that it is the best voice.

But in order to do that he has to get published, and in order to get published he needs a publisher to believe he might have an audience. It’s true that, while male fiction readers rarely read female authors, women fiction readers often read male authors. So he has that going for him. Still, if our reader-writer is writing as a mode of masculine self-assertion, publishers are going to expect his audience to skew male. He surely wants women readers, but his paradigmatic reader is another man, if that man can be assumed to exist — and on this point the numbers are extremely discouraging. A statistic much-repeated is that women buy 80% of published fiction and men only 20%. And it is largely agreed-upon in the publishing world that the imbalance is even greater, perhaps much greater, when it comes to literary fiction — as opposed to other fiction genres such as fantasy, science fiction, and especially spy novels and military thrillers, which sunburnt men in Bermuda shorts can often be seen reading on airplanes.

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This is obviously a problem for publishers, who want all the genders shelling out for their books, but for some commentators it represents — as either symptom or cause — a moral problem. In two recent articles, male commentators agonise over the lack of literary reading by their fellow men. Writing in GQ, Jason Diamond confides that reading quality fiction made him a better person. He believes it might help other men gain “a better understanding of what drives… people to do terrible things” — the implication being that men who don’t read novels are perhaps at greater risk of doing terrible things themselves. In the Daily Beast, Jeff Hoffman offers a nearly identical lesson about men being at moral risk because they don’t read award-eligible fiction. Hoffman points to various small-n, non-randomised studies that claim to find an empathy boost from reading novels, especially for teen boys. The fake science is a minor problem, though. The more basic problem is that, for boys and men looking to enjoy and not just endure their lives, this eat-your-vegetables case for reading literature is more likely to stigmatise than encourage it. Of course, it’s easy for me to criticise such earnest wrestling with the issue, instead of offering my own suggestions. Then again, I’m not convinced it is an issue, and, anyway, I suspect my own case for reading good fiction — it gets the stylish sentences going in your head — has limited resonance in the larger world of men.

As to the supposed moral problems, I haven’t noticed any among men I know, but the statistics about women and men and literary reading are corroborated in my experience, and with almost total fidelity. Most women I know who went to university and maintain some cultural interests — women who see serious movies occasionally, who like the idea of museums and sometimes visit them, who are willing to converse about decent TV shows as a way to survive a dinner party — read at least a few literary novels a year. But, most of the men I know — men from my local parenting and social worlds, who have university degrees and respectable taste in television — read virtually no literary fiction, though some read sci-fi or detective novels. When my kids were little I met a fellow dad who told me (probably because I’d gone on at tedious length about the novel I was writing) that he had just finished reading a well-regarded recent novel. I thought, “Finally, a dad I can talk fiction with.” It wasn’t until several years later that he and I finally sat down for a cup of coffee. I started talking about contemporary fiction, assuming he was keeping up with literary things like I was, but it turned out that the novel he mentioned when we first met was the last one he’d read.

Conversely, when I do meet a man who’s an active reader of serious fiction, our conversation usually travels a familiar path. I learn that we like the same edgy, stylistically daring types of fiction, and that we’ve read many of the same recent novels. Sometimes the overlap in our reading seems quite improbable, given how little-known and low-selling these novels can be. A couple years ago a man I didn’t know mentioned to the group of people we were in that he was a huge fan of the Irish writer Kevin Barry. I’d just finished reading Barry’s brilliant, edgy, stylistically daring novel The City of Bohane. It was my new favourite novel! What a coincidence! But then, well, to make a long story short, this other Kevin Barry fan and I were eventually exchanging manuscripts, each of us reading the novel the other was currently “working on”. That’s right, we were both fiction writers, of the unpublished variety.

Further, on the rare occasion when I meet another man with a serious interest in literary fiction, I typically learn that he and I like many of the same edgy, stylistically daring writers, and, with absolutely zero surprise, I also learn he’s not just a reader. He’s a reader-writer. Like me he has at least one unfinished novel on his laptop. The identification I experience in these moments has become a little deflating, I have to admit, unflattering for both of us. Ruefully I consider this other reader-writer and think, “You too.” Even more ruefully, I think of the absurd ouroboros of literary creation and consumption that we reading-writing men make up — reader-writers writing for the small population of other readers who also write. The intimations of cultural glory I once felt while reading my literary heroes and thinking “I can do that” would have been much less seductive had I known my potential audience was, basically, me.

I felt this gloomy identification while reading those two earnest articles on the crisis of non-reading men that I cite above. I was mildly depressed but entirely unsurprised when, in each article, the author lets on that he, alongside his admirable, gender-atypical reading of literary fiction, is also a writer of it. “You too,” I thought, ungenerously. Still, I should give these articles a little credit. They don’t seem to realise it, but both authors have revealed the one reliable method for solving the urgent problem they’ve identified, the one proven way to create the empathic, evolved, morally enlightened type of man who reads literary fiction — convince him to become the grasping, vainglorious, most likely deluded type of man who writes it.

I like to imagine a similar exchange being inserted into David Fincher’s 1999 film Fight Club, with the same brassy blonde asking the question, but instead of Marlon Brando giving the answer, it’s Fight Club’s Edward Norton. “What are you fightin’ against?” the blonde would ask, and Edward Norton, looking even poutier than Marlon Brando but also sleepy and a little bruised around the eyes, would answer, “Well, a lot of things. For example….” Then, in his sad nasal voice, he’d start to list all the ways the imperfect world has wounded him and let him down and left him unfulfilled. On the beat where the blonde’s brilliant laugh is supposed to erupt there is no laugh because there is no beat, because Ed Norton is still listing his complaints. Then the movie cuts to where the blonde was standing but she’s not there, and so the camera whirls to the bar where, without waiting for Ed Norton to finish his list of complaints, she’s gone to get another beer.

In The Wild One, Marlon Brando’s Johnny is making a short declaration about himself — he’s rebelling because he’s rebellious. But in Fight Club, Ed Norton’s talkative “Narrator” is looking outward. He has a critique, of society. This distinction is pleasingly, neatly periodising. Brando’s famous response — hinting at violence and upheaval that he disdains to justify — is redolent of the early Fifties, when Sartre-style existentialism would have been circulating among the sort of people who wrote movies. On the other hand, the answer I’ve imagined Ed Norton’s Narrator giving in my extra Fight Club scene — which he does give throughout the actual Fight Club, and gives even more fully in the Chuck Palahniuk novel the movie’s based on — is so Nineties.

This year, Fight Club is celebrating 25 years as a box office disappointment that became a cult obsession for teenage boy and young men. That it came out at the very end of the Nineties is almost too convenient, making it not only a faithful document but also a consummation or climax of that decade.

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But I should start at the beginning, at the moment where our unnamed “Narrator” is battling a small handful of afflictions, both physical and spiritual, that seem to stem from his crushing insomnia, or that might be the reason he can’t sleep in the first place. It’s not clear. Mainly, he’s listless and disaffected at his white-collar job, which requires a fair amount of airplane travel. And he’s feeling cynical about the many material comforts this well-paying job has allowed him to assemble, instead of comforted by them. Other issues are probably festering below the surface, but these are the ones we know about when the Narrator visits a young doctor who, instead of handing him a prescription for sleeping pills, suggests he check out a support group for men whose cancerous testicles have been removed.

The Narrator finds this suggestion befuddling, understandably, but he decides to give it a shot, and he’s pleasantly surprised when it works. After sitting in the testicular cancer group, and other support groups for people with real afflictions, the Narrator’s insomnia dissipates completely. He’s finally able to sleep — until a raggedy beauty named Marla Singer (Helena Bonham-Carter) starts showing up to his groups. She’s obviously a “tourist” like him, not a true sufferer, and her presence in the groups destroys their healing powers for him. After a brief, sweet spell of sleeping like a baby he’s thrown into a new insomnia, this time with added bitterness at Marla Singer.

It’s in this bitter and bleary state, on an airplane during another work trip, that he meets the heedless and charismatic hipster who made this film into a cult object, the movie demigod whose name has echoed through one generation already and will surely echo into a next: Tyler Durden, played indelibly by Brad Pitt. On the night they meet, after they’ve been drinking in a bar, the Narrator and Tyler start fighting in the parking lot, more or less out of curiosity. Neither man has been in a fight before. When, on subsequent nights, they repeat these outdoor recreational fistfights, men start gathering to watch, and then some, and then a lot, of these men pair off to fight as well. The Narrator and Tyler thus expose two powerful forces working, hidden, among the sizeable population of men like them: a desire to fight, and a desire to join a club. Or, to put it less glibly, they discover that men like them carry a desperate hunger to learn something true and essential about themselves outside of their numbing and boring lives, even if this entails pain, injury and disfigurement; and they learn that, for these men, the best way to start on this path of discovery is in the company of other men.

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This message isn’t new, of course. For example, young men terrified at being shipped off to war have often missed it — the extremity of experience, the deep camaraderie forged in this extremity — once they have returned to the safety and comfort of regular life. Nor is Fight Club the first work of art to use this opposition as critique, to make regular life look false and decadent by comparison with pain and terror. When I say that Fight Club is so Nineties, I mean that, in both its content and its tone, its critical message expresses specific fixations that flowered in that decade and in some ways defined it. In the movie, these seem some combination of kitschy and stylish, silly and serious. Fight Club is cornier and more callow than an adult viewer should be able to tolerate, but, thanks to David Fincher’s genius at conjuring paranoia through image and action, and thanks to Pitt’s exhilarating performance, it carries a convincing suggestion of deep meaning and high stakes that transcends the period-specific details of its worldview.

In certain ways, these details are interesting precisely because of the fertile, frivolous decade they illustrate. Among the things the Narrator laments or derides throughout the novel and/or movie are: having a job, having a boss, the Ikea catalogue, having a wife, friends who got married, his table settings, rich people, his sofa, the contents of his refrigerator, his condo, his condo building, advertising, fathers, his father and risk analysis. Many of these minor beefs reflect the anxieties that congealed into popular form after the dramatic disappearance of Soviet communism, when the idea of nuclear war receded and, to young people in the affluent West, a perpetual peace of liberal capitalism seemed to spread like a fog in all directions. It’s fitting that the Narrator is portrayed as a budding bourgeois, with a university education and a desirable job managing abstractions. Unease with the new order grew most conspicuously among the affluent and well-educated, who stood amid the geopolitical calm and abundant opportunity and wondered, “Is this all there is?” And the Narrator’s attempts to cope with this ambiguous triumph through a sort of postmodern drollness about his own consumerism perfectly convey the knowing critical style of the time, when magazines like AdBusters and The Baffler went after capitalism by hurling irony and mockery against the symbolic worlds built by its entertainment and advertising subsidiaries. Even when the film turns more violent, and the fighters of the fight club turn into a sort of insurgency, their acts of mayhem generally have an ironic, symbolic, theatrical character. They are countering the spectacle of capitalism with spectacular gestures of their own. Again, all this is very Nineties.

What’s also very Nineties is Fight Club’s way of capturing the Narrator’s inner turmoil, the spiritual and emotional sickness that sends him and his followers on their quest for relief and redemption in the first place. This is where the film’s current relevance, the meaning it’s been given in the contemporary culture war, gets a little weird. Some conservative writers see Fight Club as celebrating the lost masculine virtues of warlike hardness and sacrifice, and offering a critique of today’s increasingly, oppressively feminised regime of public morality and political economy. The young men who turned it into the ultimate cult film have generally embraced it in this spirit. Given the masculine eros of the film, this is understandable. But Fight Club’s extremely period-specific understanding of what men are and what they lack makes it a strange candidate to play this culture-war part.

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Why, for example, can’t the Narrator sleep? What does he need? What he needs, apparently, what his culture won’t let him do, is to cry. He’s been holding it in, but now, thanks to his attendance at the testicular cancer support group, he can let it all out. Once he cries, he sleeps. At the brain parasites group, he learns to identify the “power animal” — a cute penguin — that lives deep inside his mind, perhaps frolicking there with his “inner child”, which he seeks and finds in testicular cancer and brain parasites, until cursed Marla shows up and blocks his inner-child access. This all expresses a particular Nineties therapy culture that has been left behind in its particulars, for the most part, but that is an obvious precursor to the therapy culture shaping the human spirit today. In other words, the therapeutic schema that informs Fight Club’s view of the male psyche is a close ancestor of the outlook that reluctant men are now cajoled and hectored to get on board with. In Nineties psychotherapy, the emancipatory metaphysics of the Sixties counterculture gained new power thanks to this figure of the inner child, and to the therapeutic dispensation that encouraged patients to blame everything on their parents, even if they had to invent memories to make their case. These tropes are so ubiquitous in Fight Club they function as a sort of anthropology.

It’s not just the sad-sack Narrator. When floridly macho Tyler shows up and starts riffing on what’s wrong with the world, he sounds the same themes that the Narrator does, though in his brasher and more buoyant tones. When at one point he declares, “We’re a generation of men raised by women”, it sounds like a call to arms in the battle of the sexes. He seems to be naming the torment of today’s men — their subjection by women. But neither he nor the Narrator ever actually criticise the influence of women. Tyler’s declaration cuts against a different villain — men.

Or, more specifically, fathers. The generation of lost and yearning fight clubbers was raised by women because those women were abandoned by their husbands. The Narrator and Tyler weren’t stunted in their incipient manhood by tyrannical women. They were wounded, their inner children are wounded still, by their feckless fathers. Assuming the diseased testicle thing is supposed to be a metaphor — it’s both too on-the-nose to assume it isn’t and too clumsy, too obscure in its culprit, to be totally sure about — the testicle problem with Fight Club’s men isn’t that they’ve been castrated by women. It is more likely that they were left emasculated, or un-masculated, by the flight of their male role models. As an illustrative side-note, I’ll just point out that Chuck Palahniuk’s Wikipedia page says his parents split up when he was 14. I’ll also point out that one thing both the Fight Club novel and the Fight Club movie seem to carry on every page and in every frame is the sodden mess of feelings of a teenage boy whose parents just split up.

The idea that a man needs to be able to cry sometimes, to rage a little at the injuries that the world has inflicted on his inner child, to punch and be punched as a way to feel his emotions in a world that denies validity to those emotions might, indeed does, help fuel the melodrama of a fun movie like Fight Club, but it doesn’t fit very well into any Right-wing critiques that I can think of.

By this point, some readers may have thrown up their hands in exasperation because I’m taking the movie literally, because I don’t realise the film is really a critique or even a satire of the Narrator’s tale of manhood lost in the Nineties and redeemed by masculine camaraderie and collective violence, not an endorsement of it. This is the sophisticated liberal’s reading of the movie. For example, popular liberal writer Matthew Yglesias makes fun of “the guys I knew in college who thought the point of Fight Club was that launching fight club was a great idea”. “[I’m] begging everyone,” he goes on, “to pay more attention to what’s happening in this movie!” He’s confident that, if people would only pay more attention and remember that (spoiler alert) the fight club devolves into a terrorist cell that blows up a bunch of buildings, they’d realise… what? That the whole thing was a prank? That the film’s masculine pathos is an aesthetic ruse, and that anyone who felt it unironically as they watched the movie missed the real, anti-masculinist messaging?

A rather simple response to this is that it’s totally possible, even common, for a movie to portray a course of life as genuinely motivated and powerfully appealing that eventually goes astray or goes too far without ironising or satirising or repudiating the genuineness and the appeal. Life is complicated. Things often go too far precisely because the motivation behind them is so organic and potent. There are human passions that would grip a movie audience as true and beautiful even as they began pointing at bad results, after which the movie audience, instead of repudiating their sympathetic identification with the people who took things too far, would be reminded that life is complicated, and movies are movies. For example, they might sympathise with a movie’s portrayal of male lostness and thrill to parts of its portrayal of male solidarity and also leave the theatre unshaken in their belief that blowing up buildings is bad. This doesn’t inevitably trap them in some kind of paradox they can only resolve by retconning the movie into a critique of the things they were just grooving on. Even the juiced-up teenagers and Right-wing agitators who swoon at Fight Club’s melodrama of empowered machismo don’t go on to blow up buildings — despite the fact that some of them actually started fight clubs.

But there’s an even simpler response, which gets much closer to the true, unironic appeal of Fight Club as both a movie experience and a cult fixation, that revises the thing Francois Truffaut supposedly said about anti-war movies: “There’s no such thing as an anti-war movie.” In case it’s not clear, Truffaut (supposedly) meant that war is unavoidably thrilling on screen and so even anti-war movies end up glorifying war simply in portraying it. Fight Club is the most powerful, most incontrovertible evidence for my altered version of Truffaut’s saying: There’s no such thing as an anti-Brad Pitt movie.

In other words, the idea that David Fincher cast Brad Pitt as Tyler Durden in Fight Club, and had Brad Pitt give the performance he gave in Fight Club, so as to simply discredit the values Brad Pitt’s character embodies and the things that come out of Brad Pitt’s mouth is not just hard to believe. It’s hilarious. Pitt’s charisma in that movie is so ridiculously powerful, his performance is so infectious, that, even if he were saying and doing patently odious things the whole way through, the odiousness would still have an aura of sexy persuasiveness around it. Rather than a totally superfluous critique or satire of odiousness, we would have what the fancier critics call “moral ambiguity”.

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But Brad Pitt’s not even praising odiousness, for the most part. He’s lamenting feckless fathers. He’s denouncing the spiritual pathogens of spectral capitalism. He’s mounting a critique of inauthentic living. These aren’t profound positions, but a director would take their appeal to a movie audience entirely for granted, especially if the coolest, most charismatic movie star in the world, in the most magnetic performance of his or maybe anyone’s career, is expressing them in beautiful bursts of physical movement while wearing retro fashions and wraparound sunglasses.

In one account of the making of Fight Club, Fincher is quoted as saying, “We were making a satire.” The account’s author and others are eager to take this claim at face value. After all, it’s Right-wing Neanderthals and teenage boys with distasteful urges who are turning the movie into a movement. It’s wise to make up a satire alibi that establishes some hygienic distance from such losers. But pretty much everything else that everyone involved in making the movie — the screenwriter, Pitt, Palahniuk, Fincher himself — says about the source material shows that they found the Narrator’s story of men adrift extremely powerful and relatable. It resonated, unironically, with their own lives. If, like those teenage boys and Right-wing Neanderthals, they also understood the Narrator’s sad story as valid, and the need for a remedy like fight club as thus real, what, exactly, is Fight Club a satire of? Blowing up buildings?

Pointless as that would be, Fincher indicates that the film’s final violent act really is the thing he’s satirising, but he says it in a way that totally confuses the issue. Fight Club, he says, “is as serious about blowing up buildings as The Graduate is about fucking your mom’s friend”. As a guy who saw The Graduate in his late teens, I’m tempted to take this statement literally, that is, as meaning that Fight Club is totally down with blowing up buildings. But I think he’s trying to say something else. He’s trying to say that if it’s Brad Pitt dressed in disco polyester telling people to blow up buildings, you’re gonna have to count on those people to understand that it’s a movie and to make the right decisions when it’s over, despite the strange attraction that blowing up buildings suddenly has.

Dry Creek is one of many such content creators who — mainly in the manly haven of YouTube, shielded from TikTok’s distinct girliness — have become icons of Mountain Man straight-talkin’, tonics for city boys strung out by modern masculinity. His videos vary from day-to-day instructional content (“Three things I’ll never do to my horse again”) to the philosophical. In one, he discusses feminism. He regrets that modern women must “go out and lord it over men” with big-shot careers in order to be respected; he laments the way society “belittles” mothers, and how “men stopped being men and women stopped being women”. While a little dated, there is no straight-up toxicity in his philosophy: he’s a harmless old-timer, and his shtick is nostalgia, positing himself as a substitute gramps for deracinated young men.

But the longer one spends with the wild men of YouTube, the stranger and more extreme they become. Before long, you’ll happen upon Bjorn Andreas Bull-Hansen, a novelist and bushcrafter from Norway with nearly 700,000 subscribers. Similarly to Dry Creek, his format is based on vlogging time spent in the wilderness while offering philosophical titbits. But his titbits are made of much stronger stuff. Standing by a beautiful lake in the still-light middle of the night, Bull-Hansen tells us why so many men are single. Women are less attractive now because of “things such as obesity”; they have a “face covered in piercings, blue hair and a strong, independent woman attitude”. The incel alarm bells go off. “The high-value man will probably not be attracted by that.”

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Bull-Hansen is dealing in a conceit which has been hugely successful in the manosphere in recent years: shoehorning redpill advice into content about rugged, natural masculinity. Of the marriage between the two, he says: “Nature is beautiful and brutal, but mostly beautiful. Everything here is as it should be, and as it has always been, and I like that.” In the mind of the anti-woke Mountain Man, the natural world is unapologetically aligned with the values of tribal patriarchy: it is a sphere where men can escape debilitating metrosexuality. Away from the deceptions of cities, this world is “real”. Standing pensively in the rain, Bull-Hansen denounces men “sitting looking at a screen, in a city apartment”. Being in the wilderness is a departure from Sodom, a return to the greatest and simplest conflicts not of man vs woman, but man vs nature, and sometimes man vs God.

It is not difficult to see how a casual viewer might become radicalised by such content. In one excruciating “comedy” video, he whittles a fake Covid passport out of wood. In another, he takes his son camping and rants about “disgusting” child custody arrangements controlled by vindictive mothers. He discusses how m-pox will provoke another worldwide lockdown, and has unsavoury takes on the UK riots. There are countless other creators doing similar things: one channel sees two men bro-ing out around a campfire, talking about “their masculine journey”; one gifts the other a knife and a waterproof Bible. Another channel urges men to “reject phone addiction and embrace nature” — but keep watching my videos, obviously — and to “train your body in the elements to mimic our ancestors”, with a clip of a hairy man screaming as he looks at the sky.

From where does this obsession with the wilderness, and the supposedly “sigma” philosophy of the Mountain Man, spring? The original Mountain Men were North American fur trappers — lone operatives or brigades venturing out west in the mid-1800s, setting up trading routes and dealing in lucrative beaver pelts to satisfy the desires of refined Europeans for fashionable waterproof hats. It was a tough life: they trekked about in hardened deer skins, setting their own broken bones and withstanding miserable winters. But there is a nobility in this suffering in the popular imagination, an almost Christ-like rejection of modern comforts, which persists in survivalist YouTubers of today. The Revenant (2015), in which Leonardo DiCaprio faces off with the Mountain Man’s great enemy — the Grizzly bear — is based on the experiences of the fur trapper Hugh Glass in 1823, and is shot through with Biblical themes of forgiveness (he is left for dead by his hunting party) and revival. In this sense, Mountain Men slot neatly in with fundamental visions of masculine virtue.

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Since then, the spectre of the mountains has saturated American culture, and become a mythical site of communion with “reality”. In 1956, the writer Jack Kerouac spent 63 days at a fire lookout in the Cascades. The experience, which he described as a rite of passage for men, meant “finding himself depending solely on himself and thereby learning his true and hidden strength”. But Kerouac’s is not a masculinity in defiance of the feminised modern world; it is instead an opportunity to savour simple pleasures and seek transcendence. In Alone on a Mountain Top, he recounts his daily routine, including an endearing breakfast scene: “I’d make delicious pancakes, eating them at my little table that was decorated with bouquets of mountain lupine and sprigs of fir.” True Mountain Men aren’t afraid to be sentimental.

Pop culture is flooded with allusions to this noble alliance of manliness and Mother Nature, so that even — or perhaps especially — metropolitan males are compelled to spend their leisure time barbequing (the ancient dance of man and fire) or axe-throwing in depressing central London bars. There are two great idols within this philosophy, and adherents’ obsession with one or the other reliably predicts how extreme their views are. First, the cowboy: there is something winkingly good-natured about these Western-flavoured content creators, a sense of fun. Second, the Viking — the particular fixation of our flowing-haired friend Bull-Hansen; this idol lends itself to the most poisonous elements of the manosphere, providing a stronger racial angle (and, y’know, the raping and pillaging one). It is much less fun, much more self-important.

In both instances, these creators deal in performances of authenticity, down to ASMR campfire noises crackling along with the audio. You might think influencers selling fantasies of the wilderness to city folk is a strange, new tumescence of social media culture. But a century ago, an Englishman from Stratford-upon-Avon by the name of Nello Vernon-Wood was doing precisely that. In 1906, he reinvented himself as Tex Wood — apocryphally related to the Texan chaps he bought to disguise his genteel Englishness, a quality hiring ranchers were not warm to in the tough Canadian Banff. He forged a career playing the role of a true Mountain Man, writing short stories for The Sportsman and Hunting and Fishing that were gobbled up by their moneyed East Coast readers. They are all about the virtues of rugged, honest, wild masculinity — but with a pantomime wink to the performativity of the writer, a ramped-up version of Tex himself. He had a stint as a Hollywood animal handler on the 1935 film The Call of the Wild, before trying his own hand at selling Disneyfied wrangling experiences to tourists as a guide. It is from this persona that the stories come.

Tex Wood’s work is a charming portrait of mountain masculinity, in which he is far from a simplistic manly ideal, but always seems to come out on top. He admits, in his characteristic ersatz lingo, that he’s rather a weed: “Nobody’s ever complimented me on my figger; in fack, I got to stand twice in the same place before I throw a shader.” His writing is a constant analysis of class and physicality, where well-to-do poseurs “just out of Yale or Harvard or some one of those seats of learning Down East” suffer pratfalls and can’t hack the terrain. Tex deals in the same metrophobia as modern YouTube videos, showing disdain for soulless city types. He delights in taking the piss out of effete English “pilgrims” (customers), his own countrymen, who “bathed, shaved, massaged, and had a little tonic on their hair … and went into conference to decide what rifle, knife, field glasses etc., was the de rigger for that day”.

Within Tex’s masculine codes are gentlemanly values: he won’t kill an animal for a trophy, but will use the whole thing up; he is restrained and unflashy, and generally kind to women. How different from the Viking brutality of YouTube’s Wild Men. His writings are about simple pleasures, hard-earned achievements: of a beast’s head hanging over his fireplace, he writes: “Personal, I don’t give three whoops in Sheol if you or anyone else has a bigger one.” And he is ready to accept women as Mountain Men in their own right: in one story, a haughty client, Mr Van Dieman, stalks off to town (“he got to ghost dancing about what the market was doing”) and his wife and three daughters are left in the wilderness. “The oldest one beat the skin off me at shooting,” Tex writes, and later that evening they “danced us bow-legged”.

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There is a profound lesson in the forgotten writings of the un-Googlable Tex Wood (be prepared for a surfeit of flooring). The bardic wink to performance, the gender-bending antics of hardy female guests, the gentle philosophising is not unlike the writing of another, better-known son of Stratford. For Wood, masculinity in the wilderness is about something entirely different from realising your alpha potential or resisting the encroachments of feminism. It’s about a self-knowingness, a communion with both the vicissitudes of the natural world and the ironies of the modern. His writing is so prophetic because of its awareness of the artifice of mountain values: Tex is himself a tourist, and is reliant on magazines and poncey East Coasters for a living; likewise, the Mountain Man YouTuber encourages a detachment from technology and industry while beaming directly from it.

The true nobility of the Mountain Man, embodied by Wood, is in his whimsy and gentleness and the unflashy, straight-talking values he lives by — not unlike our cowboy vlogger Dry Creek. There is nothing noble about launching an assault on feminism from a tent, but sentimental indulgence in nostalgia and a retreat from the swirling pressures of modernity is really not a bad thing, and feminists should resist pathologising or ridiculing a male yearning for a bit of mud (particularly as we are so jealous over our own feminine fantasies, such as astrology).

It is a shame that the tentacles of the manosphere are curling round the harmless tradition set by the likes of Tex Woods, and a little tolerance for the hokeyness of the genre is really the best antidote to the spreading poison. By remembering the fundamental values of the Mountain Man — hardiness, humour, kindness — men can reclaim him from the clutches of woman-haters and restore his original charm as a form of escapism, and of meaning. After all, a misogynist can stuff raisins down ‘em all he likes, but they’ll always be horse apples.

Let’s start with a simple fact: testosterone levels in men have been declining for decades. A man aged 60 in 2002 had about 85% of the testosterone level of a man the same age in 1987. Even more alarmingly, we’re seeing a 20% deficit in testosterone levels in adolescent and young adult males. This isn’t just a matter of feeling less manly — it’s associated with a host of health problems, from obesity to diabetes. After all, as well as regulating libido, testosterone is crucial for building bone and muscle mass, distributing fat, and producing red blood cells.

For many men aged between 45 and 50, testosterone replacement therapy (TRT) could provide significant health benefits. When properly monitored by a physician, TRT can improve mood, increase muscle mass, reduce body fat, enhance libido, and even help with cognitive function. And yet, instead of treating this as a normal part of ageing care, we’ve stigmatised it, driving people to seek dangerous alternatives or suffer in silence.

This reluctance is rooted in misconceptions about the risks of testosterone therapy. Yes, like any medical treatment, it has potential side effects, such as increased blood pressure, cholesterol, and stroke risk. But these more remote dangers are often exaggerated, while the immediate and obvious benefits are downplayed.

I speak from personal experience. In March 2022, at age 40, I tore my left pectoral muscle. Coming on the heels of two decades of “clean” lifting, this injury led me to explore testosterone replacement therapy under the supervision of a physician. My regimen consists of weekly doses of self-injected testosterone cypionate, with regular blood work to monitor my health. The results have been significant: my testosterone levels have increased from 600 to around 1,000 nanograms per decilitre, with no increases in bad cholesterol or other negative side effects related to liver or kidney function. This hasn’t made me into any sort of superhuman — and I’m still nowhere near as ripped as I was in my late twenties — but during this period, I squatted 600 pounds and deadlifted 700 pounds for the first time in two decades of strength training.

Of course, for every story like mine, there are others that are far from successful. Indeed, just as with every case of stigma, the misleading debate around steroids has created an environment ripe for charlatans and unsafe practices. Just consider the case of Brian “Liver King” Johnson, who built a fitness empire on the claim that his muscular physique was the result of eating raw organ meats and following “ancestral” practices. When it was revealed that he was actually spending thousands of dollars a month on steroids, many were shocked. But should we have been? From “natural” bodybuilders who are anything but to supplement companies peddling magic pills and boilerplate “customised” workouts, the entire ecosystem is built on a foundation of lies. It’s a classic case of prohibition creating more problems than it solves.

So, how do we remedy this? Most obviously, we could bring the subject out into the open, creating the space for better regulation, education and safety. This could start with the acknowledgement that there are legitimate medical uses for steroids and hormones beyond just athletic performance enhancement. Their therapeutic potential in treating conditions like muscle-wasting diseases, severe burns, and hormone deficiencies is well-established, but is often overlooked in the moral panic about “cheating” in sports.

This is, of course, as much a marketing problem as a medical one. The distinction between “natural” and “enhanced”, for instance, is often arbitrary and inconsistent. Over the course of a two-decade career in marketing, I’ve been paid to promote everything from stem cell injections (even getting them myself and making a documentary about it) to kratom powder. Most of us don’t bat an eye at these unconventional treatments, much less caffeine use, nutrient supplementation, or even cosmetic surgery. We accept that a 70-year-old woman might take oestrogen to alleviate menopausal symptoms. Yet the moment someone mentions testosterone for a man the same age, people react as if it’s fundamentally different.

This inconsistency extends to how we regulate these substances. Current laws and regulations around steroids are often not based on sound science. In 1989, against the advice of the American Medical Association, then-Senator Joe Biden led the charge to classify anabolic steroids as controlled substances. This decision, driven more by sports moral panics, has caused more harm than good by driving usage underground, where users resort to unregulated black market sources, underground labs, and dangerous self-experimentation.

Biden’s crusade against steroids is a perfect example of how hysteria can lead to bad policy. In 1989, as he led the push to reduce access to steroids and increase penalties for their distribution, he claimed: “The illegal use of steroids is a major drug abuse problem in this country. Steroids are dangerous drugs that threaten the physical and mental health of hundreds of thousands of young people.” There was, naturally, no mention of their potential benefits when used under medical supervision. Indeed, in 2004, when the Controlled Substances Act was made even stricter by removing the requirement that an anabolic steroid classified as a controlled substance had to actually “increase muscle growth”, Biden was that bill’s sponsor, too.

More than three decades have passed since then, and the current system treats them as if they’re nearly as lethal as opioids. This, despite the fact that you can’t overdose on testosterone the way you can on fentanyl. Yet possession of anabolic steroids can lead to hefty fines and even prison sentences — punishments that far outweigh any potential harm caused by the drugs themselves.

So, what’s the alternative? Well, imagine a world where, instead of being ashamed to discuss declining testosterone levels with their doctor, men viewed hormone check-ups as a routine part of health maintenance, like checking cholesterol or blood pressure. The fact that vanishingly few men know that the normal range for male testosterone levels falls between 300 and 1,000 nanograms per decilitre is criminal; such information should be as widespread as awareness of normal blood pressure. This is more than a matter of virility: low testosterone is associated with a host of health problems, including increased risk of cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis, and cognitive decline. By addressing hormone imbalances early, we could potentially prevent or mitigate these issues, improving overall health outcomes and reducing healthcare costs in the long run.

There are also problematic double standards in how male versus female hormone therapies are regulated and perceived. Women’s hormone replacement therapy is widely accepted, while men’s is often viewed with suspicion. Or consider the case of transgender individuals. Here in the United States, if a transgender man is prescribed testosterone (a controlled substance), the physician must hold a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) licence in addition to being registered with the relevant state medical board. The quantity of the prescription is strictly controlled. However, when a transgender woman is prescribed oestrogen, these stringent controls do not apply. This discrepancy is difficult to justify on medical grounds and seems to stem more from cultural biases about masculinity and femininity.

A more rational approach to hormone regulation could also help tamp down some of the hysteria associated with gender transitioning itself. Today, hormone therapy is treated like some radical act that has to be shouted to the heavens. But if we normalised the idea that hormones are just another tool for optimising health and well-being, it might take some of the charge out of these debates: turning them into discussions about identity rather than simply chemical imbalances.

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Hanging over all this is the need for a more evidence-based approach to steroid and hormone regulation. This means several key changes in our approach. First and foremost, we must decriminalise personal use and possession of steroids. Treating steroid use as a criminal issue rather than a health issue has been a costly failure, driving users into the shadows and preventing many from seeking proper medical guidance.

We should also regulate steroids like other prescription drugs, not as controlled substances. This shift would allow for better quality control and medical oversight, ensuring that users have access to safe, pharmaceutical-grade products rather than potentially dangerous black market alternatives. Encouraging more research into the potential therapeutic uses of steroids and hormones — something long championed by the likes of Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban — is also crucial. However, as Cuban told me when I interviewed him and his research team in 2020, the regulatory environment as it currently exists makes it difficult to conduct large-scale, publicly-funded studies on the long-term effects of hormone optimization. By easing these restrictions, we could gain valuable insights that would inform both medical practice and public policy.

Finally, we must address the root causes of declining testosterone levels in the population. This could include research into environmental factors, dietary changes, and lifestyle interventions that might be contributing to this troubling trend.

Imagine a future where hormone optimisation is viewed as a normal part of health maintenance — and where following the best available science might mean most men starting TRT as they enter their mid-forties, if not earlier. A future where athletes can be open about their use of performance-enhancing substances, allowing for better monitoring and research. Where men don’t have to suffer in silence as their testosterone levels decline with age. Where we can have rational, nuanced discussions about the role of hormones in gender identity that are fully divorced from performative partisan politics.

This future is possible, but only if we’re willing to step out of the shadows and confront our societal hangups about hormones and enhancement. It’s time to clear away the smoke and break the mirrors. As I’ve learned from my own careful experimentation, the future of health is one of normalisation, not prohibition. Let’s embrace it.

Yet by the end of the Fifties, Eisenhower was rejected by the nation’s tastemakers as dull, doddering and spent: Ike, they said, played golf for eight years. As the GIs were domesticated by middle-class life in the suburbs, there came a new hero to behold: JFK also fought in the war, but his distinguishing traits were youth, manly vigour and an irrepressible sense of hipness, which had special appeal for those born after the war — the “Baby Boomers”.

Responding to this air of expectation was Norman Mailer, the enfant terrible of the literary world, who in both his novels and his personal life exuded machismo: an angry undercurrent of male alienation that flowed just beneath the surface of the reigning suburban culture.

Weeks before the 1960 election, Mailer wrote his first political essay. Published in Esquire, his aim in “Superman Comes to the Supermarket” was not just to boost Kennedy as the hero Americans needed, but to attack and discredit everything the Eisenhower era represented: its deeply “square” ideas of manhood — arising from notions of duty, responsibility, self-control and an engrained respect for authority — sounded almost Victorian to Mailer’s ears. “A tasteless, sexless, odourless sanctity in architecture, manners, modes, styles has been the result” of Ike’s leadership, he claimed. In place of the conformist “organisation man” of the Fifties, Mailer envisioned a new and vital masculine archetype for the Sixties, someone who can “touch depths in American life which were uncharted”.

Holding up JFK as the vessel, Mailer hoped that politics could be fused with the “underground river” of the American psyche — the unconscious realms of myth, art, instinct and aesthetics — and thus turned into an arena for limitless self-expression. His vision was a potent expression of the Sixties ethos, predicated as it was on the individual’s restless spirit of rebellion against the institutions.

Though that decade saw the rise of feminism, a no less important but overlooked development was the change in the dominant models of masculinity. The old masculine archetypes — the GI, the pioneer, the sheriff, the crew-cutted astronaut — represented the austere vanguard of modernity which heralded the arrival of civilisation and progress. The new male archetype birthed by the post-Boomer pop culture — the long-haired rock star, the brooding beat poet, the hippie wildman, the Third World guerilla, Mailer’s own “White Negro” — were sensuous rebels against modernity, who sought to topple the structures of civilisation in the name of a heedless and undefined freedom.

This permissive cultural emancipation of the Sixties after Kennedy was then enlarged by the neoliberal economic emancipation of the Eighties under Reagan, which entrenched the new moral status quo, or what may be called “the Boomer consensus”, based on the formula of hedonism plus markets. This dispensation was embodied in equal part by the two dominant Boomer politicians of the Nineties, the liberal Bill Clinton and the conservative Newt Gingrich, who both expanded the reach of unregulated markets, shrank the size of the state and subjected US politics to their boundless egos and libidos.

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Three decades later, the results of this social revolution for each of the genders are clear enough: women have made great economic and cultural strides — a welcome development — but the opposite sex appears to have faltered. On a host of metrics, from educational achievement to economic performance and career advancement to life expectancy and cultural prestige, men are shown to be either falling behind women or underperforming relative to previous generations of men. Yet structural explanations and conventional policy prescriptions have little resonance among today’s “angry young men”. They have, instead, turned to far more radical answers.

Enter the rise of a revanchist masculine identity politics on the online Right, where “vitalist” movements call for the overthrow not just of liberalism but of the pre-modern Christian foundations of Western civilisation. Inspired by Nietzschean thought, they seek the revival of a pagan morality that glorifies primal ideals of strength, beauty and sensuality. The most prominent expositor of this view is the pseudonymous “Bronze Age Pervert” (BAP), later unmasked as one Costin Alamariu. They are distinguished by their fondness for bodybuilding, eccentric natural lifestyles and garish aesthetics, conveyed through homoerotic imagery and classical art. Throw in racist and misogynist “shitposting” that playfully straddles the line between irony and sincerity, and one gets a fuller picture of their sensibility.

Among competing narratives around male decline, this has garnered the most widespread following among a certain class of ambitious, educated, intellectually inclined and highly online professional young men. Scouring the ranks of Congressional staff offices, Ivy League schools, conservative think tanks, as well as the worlds of tech and finance, may reveal sizeable cadres of “Bronze Age” followers, who will reveal themselves when they are “in front of the control panel”, as one such devotee put it to The Atlantic’s Graeme Wood — that is, when they are ready to seize power.

For all their frightening and exotic “reactionary” flairs, however, these currents are best understood as inversions of the Sixties countercultural Left, sharing its militant subversive and anti-institutional dispositions. All that’s really happened is that it has come full circle: this sensibility began on the far-Left but has now migrated to and metastasised on the far-Right. And just as the original counterculture was easily co-opted to serve neoliberalism (“woke capitalism”), so too is the online Right — with even less resistance — being made to prop up the same, with the emergence of “based capitalism”. This is shown by Alamariu’s rambling endorsement of Javier Millei and his attempt to sell an ideology of Aryanised Reaganism on steroids to impressionable followers: by dressing it up with edgy memes, he has essentially found an ingenious way to make neoliberal policy attractive to discontented youths, who would otherwise have turned away from the GOP’s free market dogmas. (He is thus revealed to be little more than a “red-pilled” Paul Ryan.) BAP and the online Right now amount to a Millennial mirror image of Mailer-ism and the Boomer counterculture. It matters less that Mailer was an idiosyncratic Marxist or that Alamariu is a would-be race warrior, for the result is the same: hedonism plus markets.

Indeed, as adjacent influencer “Zero HP Lovecraft” admitted, they aspire to “a precise mirror of the world in which we live today”, only with all the progressive slogans and aesthetics swapped for reactionary ones, but with presumably the same malfunctioning economy and decaying infrastructure left in place. Such statements reveal the inherent limitations of this movement, which deals in memetic forms of discourse that discard all programmatic content in favour of pure subjectivism and impulse: a “vibes-only politics”. Consider BAP’s fixation on looks as a political criterion; or more troublingly, his giddy glamorisation of violence; or his disdain for family life, which supposedly dilutes the male spirit (all things he happens to, in varying degrees, share with Mailer). Vapidity, nihilism, and cruelty are the whole point. And for all their apparent dislike of legacy conservatism, this is what allows these reactionaries to be repeatedly co-opted into some variant of neoliberalism.

If today’s dissatisfied young men want to achieve greatness, they can do so not by trying to rehash the failed faux-radicalism of the Boomers, Mailer and Alamariu, with its degenerate libertinism and contempt for institutions, but rather by rediscovering the non-reactionary masculine ethos of the Eisenhower era. Far from being stale or parochially conservative, the Fifties were actually a time of great institutional creativity and innovation as embodied in post-war mixed-economy industrial capitalism (the antithesis of neoliberalism); this was, after all, the decade when the mass-middle class was forged, a status and standard of living which many Millennials and Gen Zs have been denied.

This will require rejecting romanticism and personal liberation in favour of a different value set for young men, one that: abides by the logic of institutions rather than that of aggressive individualism (even as they seek to reimagine and reform their institutions); realises the need for rational, long-term plans of mass coordination as a means of steering society at the level of both state and market; and accepts reasonable limits on personal autonomy in the name of these larger national goals and imperatives. This is, in other words, the same disciplined high modern ethos that made D-Day possible — that won the Second World War and built the greatest economy in all history — after the preceding era of institutional collapse in the Thirties necessitated renewal. For this generation, masculinity was forged within and through institutions rather than against them: the family, the army, the state, the corporation, the union, etc. The very things Mailer and his like have railed against as tyrannical and effeminising were in fact the bedrocks of American strength. To restore that order and dynamism that were Eisenhower’s legacies, young men must dam the “underground river” and re-establish boundaries between the mythic-aesthetic and material-political dimensions of civilisation, lest they be constantly seduced and intoxicated by the former, as they are now, while losing sight of the latter. For the true rebirth of vitality in the West will not come from a miserable narcissistic dictatorship of bohemians, dandies and aesthetes — of the kind that Mailer and BAP would revel in — but from practical feats. The matchless heroism of D-Day, when free men fought and triumphed against barbarism, stands as just such an example: one more encapsulation of what is missing in contemporary masculinity, and of what may yet be regained.

Many view the co-existence of these two economic characteristics as, if not a paradox, a cause for concern. Indeed, a number of observers, from Left-leaning policy wonks like Larry Summers and Richard Reeves to Right-leaning US senators such as Josh Hawley, appear terrified of its implications. In March, for instance, as the Nasdaq soared to new records, the rate of prime-age labour force participation fell for men, despite rising for the population as a whole. So, what’s driving this, and how is it remaking the relations between the sexes at a time of escalating gender conflict?

Here, my friends could spare the social-policy establishment some man hours: they are a microcosm of a cause-and-effect relationship that ties together two trends. Among the surest ways to cause people to work less is to make them wealthier. When you have wealth — accumulated money and assets — you can afford to rely less on income from paychecks. “A larger bribe,” as one Harvard professor puts it, “will be required to convince a wealthier person to enter the labour market.” And a defining characteristic of the US economy in the 21st century has been an explosion in household wealth. In 1999, on average, the American household had $661,000 (in 2023 prices). By 2023, this had exploded to an average of $1.15 million. By historical standards, this is a mammoth gain: in the four decades before 1999, the increase in average household wealth was just $358,000.

Much of this wealth, it turns out, has accrued to men. “Although the gender income gap has narrowed,” according to a 2022 publication by Harvard’s Angela Lee, “the gender wealth gap has widened from the mid-Nineties to the mid-2010s.” The numbers are stark. “Women’s median wealth as a percentage of men’s median wealth dropped from 90% in the mid-Nineties,” Lee reports, “to 60% in the mid-2010s.” Why was this? The straightforward answer is that men were probably bigger asset-holders to begin with, and have historically tended to earn more money from their jobs and to work longer hours than women. Financial markets also reward bigger risks with bigger rate of return and, on average, men have tended to make riskier investments.

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Other sources of wealth data tell the same story as Lee’s study. According to the US Census Bureau, the average man aged 25-54 who’s left the labour force now reports 21% more in income from investments than one with a job. The surprise, then, would be if America’s men were not choosing to work less.

So deeply has this trend become entrenched that it appears in one of the oldest and easiest to measure vectors of privilege: height. A population’s average height is a barometer of its economic status: it is economics’ equivalent to psychology’s “the body keeps the score”. The skeletons of the mummified elite in ancient Egypt are, on average, 3.6 inches longer than those of its commoners. The aristocrats of late-18th century Germany were 5.2 inches taller, on average, than its peasants. Data from the 20th century confirm this isn’t down to genetics. When South Korea grew rich while North Korea fell into the abyss, despite sharing a genetic pool, men in the south became three inches taller.

In terms of average height, America’s non-working men were once the commoners to its working pharaohs. For all intents and purposes, they are now eye-to-eye. In 2017, America’s prime-age men out of the labour force were 0.1 inches taller, on average, than those with jobs. This was the first time since the relevant CDC data begin in 1976 that they could look down on the working men. Back then, America’s prime-age men with jobs were 0.7 inches taller. That difference trended up until 1985, peaking at 0.9 inches before dropping back towards the convergence that prevails today.

Such biological analysis might suggest a wholesale economic revolution for American men. But, despite all the fretting about the number of drop-outs and a crisis of masculinity, this isn’t a society-wide issue. It is barely in the double-digits: the percentage of prime-age men who have left America’s labour force now sits at only 11%, up from 5% in October 1975. And this is because this isn’t a story about the male population, but about a sub-population of men: a class we might call the petit-aristocracy.

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Like the aristocrats of the pre-industrial world, this group’s economic existence relies on assets. In this case, they were produced during the 21st century’s wealth explosion. And this species of aristocrat is petit not in height, but in consumption. Many maintain relatively modest lifestyles to be able to live without a steady paycheck. Some will work jobs for brief spells, however, if necessary. Their ephemeral imprint in the jobs numbers has even led to “in-and-out” becoming a term of America’s labour economics jargon as well as its fast food.

Though currently small, like America’s gross wealth and the number of people who own part of it, this petit-aristocracy is set to grow. Neither the dot-com bubble nor even a financial crisis changed the upward trend in the US wealth-to-income ratio that started around 1999. Because modern assets are not finite like land, today’s petit-aristocracy can grow its ranks in a way that land-based aristocracies couldn’t. Nor is the decision to drop out of the labour force purely a function of wealth. The allure of leisure relative to work matters, too. And if past is prologue, improvements in leisure technologies, such as video games, will increase leisure’s allure in ways that appeal particularly to men.

Where does this leave America’s women? Thanks to the liberating effects of household technology and changing gender norms, a “quiet revolution” has taken place, to the point where women now almost outnumber men in the workplace. And their readiness to work is what has facilitated men’s exit (without women, the gross national product would have collapsed). But they do not enjoy the same benefits of this position that men did in the 20th century. Women lack the financial power over men, now wealthy, that men once had over women, when gender norms locked women out of the labour market. And as they take over the job market that men are vacating, they’re not finding that jobs pave a path to happiness. “Female well-being appears to be compromised (or male well-being enhanced),” according to one representative study, “by high female involvement in gainful employment”.

The effect of this is to tee-up a clash of biblical proportions between men, women and norms about work. In Genesis, as humanity’s original punishment, God effectively hands the labour market over to Adam, and condemns Eve to live in the household. At least some men and women have long wanted to escape each of these settings. Now, each finally can. But will humanity’s technological and financial escape leave anybody, men or women, happier than they were in the divine prison? It’s unclear.

As Oscar Wilde said, there are two tragedies in life. One is not getting what you want. The other is getting what you want. The challenge is that the social norms about the importance of work that increasingly satisfy men or women increasingly dissatisfy the other. Men out of the force would benefit from norms that facilitate their finding of purpose, identity, and flourishing, without jobs. The ancient Greeks, who viewed the enablement of leisure as the purpose of work, offer examples. And the obsession of manosphere activists with the Stoics, who lived before Christianity dominated the Western mind, is revealing in this regard. Women, meanwhile, would benefit from the social veneration of paid jobs associated with Weber’s Protestant Ethic. After all, abandoning the Protestant Ethic now, once women have finally entered the labour force, would be devaluing a social currency as soon as women start to acquire it.

This is the economic backdrop that today’s gender wars are playing out against. Men, despite growing wealthier, feel increasingly alienated by a society that still views a job as an admission ticket to polite society. Women, despite breaking ground in the labour market, sense that their gains have failed to turn into the lives of empowerment that they expected them to. What comes next is unclear — but it will certainly open a new chapter in the social history of Adam and Eve’s descendants.

Trump’s acolytes compare him to Jesus Christ, and he’s fine with that. In fact, for quite some time he has been leaning into psychological, aesthetic and commercial identifications with a wide variety of heroic avatars: from George Washington crossing the Delaware in the bitter winter cold, to Superman and an NFT Supertrump — not to mention the bizarre stereotypes depicted in Trump Trading Cards, from Donfather to Trumpinator. Such deific representations of the otherwise mortal Donald are worth noting, if only because a great part of Trump’s political success has been due to his preternatural ability to align himself with our collective imagination of the hero, the warrior, the king.

And Trump is not alone. The resurgent power of masculine myth has helped to create a generation of macho social media influencers, from MMA fighter Andrew Tate (presently detained in Bucharest, facing criminal charges of human trafficking), to steroid-jacked Alex Jones of InfoWars infamy (still liable for a $1.1 billion defamation bill), to the black-gloved American Senator Josh Hawley (author of Manhood). These are the titans of what has come to be called the Manosphere — a bevy of pseudo-self-help gurus and outright hucksters that now includes eminences such as “Liver King” Brian Johnson (2 million Instagram followers) and “Carnivore MD” Paul Saladino (500,000 followers on YouTube, another 500,000 on TikTok). On the throne of this virtual realm sits Donald Trump, unfortunately stuck in that cold courtroom, where on the first day of his historic trial he promptly fell asleep.

It is a puzzling phenomenon. Journalists and academics have long pondered how this particular specimen of American manhood — the meticulously coiffed disco-dancing nepo baby who skipped military service in Vietnam — could ever have become a model adult, much less a modern incarnation of Hercules. And the key to his particular brand of potency, it turns out, has little to do with any of the products collectively known among e-commerce retailers as “alpha-male bromeopathy”. Trump’s appeal is more ancient and instinctive than spray-tanning and chest-waxing; he stands at the end of a long-neglected, long-ridiculed and long-dismissed archetypal lineage, a genealogy of mythic manhood fully articulated a little more than three decades ago in a best-selling book written by the sage of American manliness, Robert Bly.

Bly was an educated and erudite man from the American heartland. Born in Minnesota in 1926, he attended Harvard and the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop, then went on to win a Fulbright, a National Book Award and the Robert Frost Medal for poetry. But all such honours and achievements pale next to the extraordinary impact of his 1990 book, Iron John, that retells a story first set down by the Grimm brothers more than 200 years ago, a narrative that Bly asserted “could be ten or twenty thousand years old”.

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It is a fairy tale about what it means to be a man. More to the point, it is a fairy tale about what it means not to be a man, as Iron John was one of the first books to articulate what was soon to become a ubiquitous lament among modern manfluencers: manhood had been lost, and now must be regained. “The warriors inside American men have become weak in recent years”, wrote Bly, and such decay could only be remedied by getting in touch with the “ancient hairy man” within — a man both primitive and sexual, a man beset by danger and risk. A man, to risk stating the obvious, with lots of hair.

A man like Donald Trump.

In the age of anti-hair-loss potions Finasteride, Minoxidil and Nutrafol, it is the mane of the “ancient hairy man” that has persisted as the key signifier. Scoff as one might at Bly’s vision, it is to his eternal credit that he foresaw modern man’s quest for the hero with the “golden head”. And as patently absurd as such pseudo-profundities may appear, Iron John was met by stunningly positive reviews — the work was “remarkable”, “powerful”, “deeply moving”, “extraordinary”, and “ground-breaking”. Translated into dozens of languages, the book spent 62 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Bly became an instant celebrity, masculinity’s first post-modern guru.

Bly organised manly retreats in which he played the bongos amid middle-aged, back-office accountants doing their best primitive dance routines around the raging fire, followed by lots of hugging and weeping. In the last decade of the 20th century, Bly had not only articulated the problem but had begun to enact the solution to the enormous daddy issue now known as the men’s mythopoetic movement, which in no time would go off the rails and transmogrify into the Men’s Rights Movement, with its emphasis on anti-male discrimination, false accusations of rape and reparations for the mass atrocity of circumcision. Overnight, the tyrant king who the “femi-Nazis” (to use Rush Limbaugh’s infamous phrase) had sought to suppress came out of the closet in the guise of a vengeance-bent, AK-47-slinging, buffed-up bro on a paleo diet convinced of a global conspiracy to turn him into a cuck.

Seen in the light of Bly’s take on anthropology, history, myth and literature, Trumpism is not entirely Trump’s fault. In the Eighties and Nineties, just as Trump skyscrapers and Trump casinos began to darken the horizons of Manhattan and Atlantic City, all the world was filled with hairy wild men deluded into believing in their own sacred kingship. Such would-be cowboys ruled the American imagination, from junk-bond dealers to rock stars and high rollers surrounded by pole-dancing hookers, snorting lines on private jets high above the realm of crack addicts, the homeless and other fatherless men who were their twins in the dark mirror.

With such lines of descent in mind did I return to Iron John, hoping to find some deeper understanding of the present manly mess, only to discover how deeply unoriginal were the present crop of alphas. Way back when George H.W. Bush was president, Bly had already made it clear that there was nothing about manliness that hadn’t already been espoused by Hopi and Seneca wise men, Pan the goat-man, Humbaba the Babylonian giant and George S. Patton.

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Just as these mythic male heroes appeared like emanations from a world beyond, so the Trump plane materialises as a speck in the sky, growing ever more epic in its approach. From this chariot of fire the hero descends to the land of mortals, radiant in red, white and gold — as Wordsworth said of the just-born child, “trailing clouds of glory”. His hair is gold. Now Trump stands before them, “part human, part god, part animal”. He dances the ritual dance — what Bly called “macho strutting”, similar to the rhumba of the heron and white-tailed deer. In short order a plane hangar in Pittsburgh becomes Bly’s “Ritual Space”, where “a turn of phrase or a turn of a symbol replaces the turn of the sword”.

Bly said that the child must abandon his first father in order to find a second father, the “second king”. While the first king was the dad who didn’t come home from work, who was an alcoholic or abusive or distant or who just outright upped and left, one consolation of MAGA was that the second father would always be there, a constant in the feed — begging, cajoling, cursing, raging. If the sin of the first king was remoteness, the second king won’t leave you alone.

Such are the satisfactions the golden-haired one offers as he rains radiance down upon generations of men jacked up on the vision of glitter and money and success; but otherwise disaffected, apathetic, uncomprehending, disenfranchised and ashamed of all they have not accomplished. Once the damaged male has experienced such grandeur, observed Bly, he will “want to have it all the time”. And so his initiates drape themselves in Trump garments, they ape Trump language, they wave Trump flags. Through their intercessor they will find solace for their wound — and learn to wound others.

Trump delivers one aggressive cliché after another, that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts”, that his followers must “fight like hell”, that he will be their “retribution”. He invokes the apocalyptic “Storm”, wherein all enemies shall be rounded up and summarily brought to the gallows. His dark joy knows no bounds as he reiterates his favourite themes: the invasion of rapists and murderers from barbarian lands, and the catastrophe that awaits us all if Joe Biden is re-elected. In short, American carnage.

The hero, Bly insisted, must lead us into such a descent into darkness, and it was Bly’s advice to embrace that darkness. “In every relationship something fierce is needed,” he wrote, declaring that ritual violence was an essential element of the initiation of “the warriors inside American men”. In Bly’s mind, the male species’ natural love of guns and violence was proof positive that the problems of manhood began with childhood, that it had been a fatal mistake to repress boyish desires for an idyllic youth spent playing cowboys and Indians, shooting arrows and BB guns, blowing the heads off rabbits and squirrels (and, perhaps, torturing an insect or two). How gratifying, then, are the images of Don Jr kneeling in Zimbabwe, grinning alongside a menagerie of bloody elephants, bears and giraffes.

While Bly tells us that in order to mature we must return to origins, Trump simply asks us to regress. For it is not the lawgiver who rules the manosphere, but greedy child-men. Thus do infantile archetypes loom large in Iron John — and endure in the myriad of “Baby Trump” memes — Trump in diapers, Trump throwing a tantrum, tiny Trump cradled in Hillary Clinton’s motherly arms, Trump as the miniscule “MAGAlorian”. Such memes underscore one of the most harmful misunderstandings that set the modern male on his toxic path: Trump wants his followers to remain children — for children aren’t particularly interested in reasoned arguments, nor easily swayed by them.

Nor are they known to be particularly moral beings. This partly explains Trump’s blatant display of grift, an element of his charisma that has perplexed many otherwise astute observers. Here again, Bly provides an explanation. His study of ancient myth revealed that in order to re-capture the power of the long-lost psychic origin of masculinity, the child-man initiate must first find the “key” — a key that, according to all the cross-cultural narratology, must be stolen. In the felonious tradition of Hermes, Loki, Odysseus and Wily Coyote, the successful initiate must prove himself to be a capable trickster. And Trump is the Trickster in Chief — the thief who lies about election theft, the plutocrat who couldn’t afford bail until an IPO on the Nasdaq stock exchange came just in time to increase his paper wealth by several billions on the back of a company, Truth Social, that boasts sales on a par with a used car dealership.

“My power is great, greater than you believe, and I have gold and silver in abundance.” That was Iron John’s promise to his acolyte. It is also Trump’s promise to MAGA and the manosphere. Thus do hordes of Redditers, Snapchatters, Xers, Instagrammers and sundry other amo-packing denizens of incel message boards feel the pain of the billionaire who now stands trial for hiding hush money payments to a porn star. And here, too, Trump will rely on truths Bly articulated decades ago — that much like infants, his followers will “refuse to remember ugly facts”, that they will “look away from disorganisation, abuse, abandonment”.

After all, this is precisely what Trump hopes the jury will do when at long last they will be asked to return a verdict. At which point Zeus himself won’t be of much help, not to Trump or any of the rest of us. And we can’t say we weren’t warned. As Bly noted long ago: “That golden head is going to be a problem.”

But that was 30 years ago. As a relaunch is prepared, the publicity makes it sound more Women’s Weekly than Fear and Loathing. Apparently the all-new online loaded will “give members an edge, helping them live their best lives, keeping them connected to interesting stuff, fun people and awesome experiences”.

Back in the heady mid-Nineties, no one connected to loaded would have been seen dead trying to live his best life — not unless that life involved hijacking a passing army tank under the influence of class As. In fact, antics at the magazine would have been too ludicrous even for Raoul Duke. One regular correspondent would roll dice to determine what self-destructive act to commit next, and then to write about. Actions of his while on the payroll included buying and consuming five speedballs from a “filthy bloke in a filthy pub in Hastings” and cruising for gay sex, all because the dice told him to.

Another writer related how, in search of a story, he had “streaked at a women’s football match, been blown up in a car, set on fire by stuntmen and starred as a circus knife-thrower’s assistant”. Elsewhere, the same bloke described how a “top-heavy blonde” called Moira once performed a consensual sex act on him as he reported on an orgiastic Scottish Association of Young Farmers disco in Perth Town Hall. (A spokeswoman for the association later pronounced herself happy with the piece, noting  — with no pun presumably intended — that the public image of young farmers “used to be all tractors, wellies and checked shirts”, and that she was “pleased” that the article “has blown this out the water”.)

Perhaps needless to say, feminists absolutely hated loaded at the time. Their still-canonical history of the title says that, once upon a time, there was a backlash against the progressive gains made for women in the Seventies and Eighties. The dashing young blade of the Nineties was fed up with being expected to be a sensitive “new man”, and was looking for an outlet for his aggression, stupidity, misogyny, and lust. Along came loaded to fill the niche, its virulent sexism barely suppressed under a clever veneer of jokes and approachable blokeyness. The lads’ mag was born, along with its concomitant social construction, the “new lad”; and from then on, it was a race to the bottom, both metaphorically and literally.

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In the decade that followed, the market became flooded with improbably pneumatic babes in g-strings talking about how much they did or did not actually enjoy sex on the beach. Rival titles FHM, Maxim, Zoo, and Nuts took a cue from loaded and grabbed their own handfuls of silicon-enhanced flesh. Pithily summarising what was assumed to go on in the brain of the average male reader, industry insiders variously described the emerging business model in the 2000s as “birds not words” and “tits and lists”. Having ushered in this brave new era of woman-hating, loaded eventually threw off its ironic fake moustache and became the visual fleshpit it had secretly longed to be all along, occasionally interspersing images of naked women in patent leather handcuffs with football banter or aspirational stories of Mexican drug cartels.

Eventually third-wave feminists arrived, accusing lads’ mags en masse of fuelling violence against women. In 2013, they managed to get the magazine sold by some retailers in “modesty sleeves” on the top shelf. An incoming editor promised under pressure that there would be no more nipples; and since the copy had only ever been the pretext for soft-porn consumption, already dwindling sales slowed to a trickle. By then, more hardcore stuff online was all the rage anyway. The gateway drug of the lads’ mag had served its sinister purpose.

Or so the well-known story goes. Recently though, there are signs of a thawing in progressive attitudes towards loaded in particular, as commentators look back with something like nostalgia for the title’s comparative moderation, cleverness, and wit in its early years, relative to the humourless internet depravity we see now. This month, the Guardian of all things did a largely affectionate piece on “the legacy of lads’ mags”, with Nineties loaded featuring heavily, and described by former female employees as a “brilliantly supportive environment” and “mind-blowingly fun”.

Much tends to be made of the quality of the writing at that point, before it later went tits up, quite literally. One enthusiastic blogger describes it as “swashbuckling, provocative, exciting writing … aimed at men, but not in a patronising, lowest common denominator way”.  (Inspired by loaded, he also describes himself as having gone on “to create the gonzo school of property journalism during my time at Estates Gazette”.) A defiant Brown, meanwhile, stresses that for the first few years, it was mostly male stars on his covers and not half-naked females: “We could sell a third of a million copies with Harry Hill sitting on a stuffed badger.”

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The main appeal of early loaded, viewed retrospectively, was its construction of masculinity — at least, in comparison with some of the awful options we see now. For a good while, for instance, we have been stuck with the wheyfaced, ponderously self-regarding backlash to the new lad — the new new man — whose current iteration lectures women about what a woman is, organises teetotal vegan supper clubs in Hackney, and possesses a moustache like that of a zookeeper. Faced with this horror, was the Nineties loaded lad so very awful? You wouldn’t catch him waffling on about the importance of intimacy or the prioritisation of self-care — all his anecdotes involved being lost for five days after a bender on the way to Malaga airport.

A different contemporary totem of masculinity is the Andrew Tate type, and again here, in comparison with Tate’s bombast and prickish posturing, the Nineties loaded lad looks preferable. There was an emotional vulnerability about him that was under-appreciated at the time. He admitted when he was frightened, made jokes at his own expense, and presented himself as a sometimes unwitting and confused passenger in his own life. And he also could see the funny side of failure.

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Despite or even because of the smutty winks, references to bashing one out after failing to chat up a bird, and so on, arguably the magazine bestowed a lightness and fun upon sex talk that has gone from the public domain, possibly forever. What pop star these days could say in an interview, as Damon Albarn did in 1994 just after the release of Blur’s Parklife, that his favourite sexual position was “the French Maid” — involving “for the benefit of the uninitiated, a fair bit of bending down and picking up imaginary feather dusters”?

Irreverent jokes and banter are what both pious and macho male types tend to lack. And contrary to the original feminist analysis, the use of humour, irony, and silliness in early loaded was not there in order to cunningly disguise darker violence and misogyny; it was a sign that such forces were mostly absent. Mockery of the opposite sex is not toxic in itself. In fact, it was only after the writing stopped being funny that things got really ugly, and that’s not a coincidence.

In getting rid of the Nineties loaded lad, we did not get anything much better in his place. The arc of masculinity, it turns out, does not always bend towards justice. Instead, the pendulum swings erratically; or if you prefer, what we end up with is determined by a roll of the dice. If the new editors of the revamp have real ambition, they’ll try to load the dice by hiring bright young things fed up of current masculine archetypes, giving them freedom to be outrageously rude and anarchic in creating something new. But — a bit like Moira of Scottish Young Farmers fame, perhaps — I won’t be holding my breath.

Ryan acknowledges that his decision to pay £25,000 for a surgery that was pioneered to help soldiers recover from battlefield injuries might seem irrational. Now in his late 20s, he worked extra shifts as a waiter and freelance writer to help finance the operation. “A normal person would think you were crazy,” he says. “But I was at breaking point. If you lived in my head for the last five years, you’d understand.”

Despite having an outwardly confident exterior, Ryan’s height-related insecurity began at around the age of 16 while he was still at college and started to notice that younger friends were outgrowing him. “I remember feeling significantly smaller than my classmates, as if I was underdeveloped. There was a sense that I didn’t matter as much as the others and that there was that something missing.”

Although he was never bullied, Ryan found the long-term cumulative effect of occasional height-related digs corrosive enough to lead from low self-esteem to anxiety and depression. “You realise that there’s something about you that’s outside the standard deviation of people that you’d meet — and then you realise you can’t do anything to fix it. It was definitely a contributing factor to a lot of the mental-health difficulties I had during my late teens and early 20s. It sort of consumes you.” Even close friends had little sense of the extent of his despair.

Ryan remembers reading that cosmetic limb-lengthening surgery had been pioneered in the United States. But at a prohibitive cost of around £125,000, it was too remote a prospect to ever entertain seriously. And then he became aware that, by outsourcing post-operative care and physical therapy to a non-clinical setting in hotels, providers in Turkey were offering several versions of the same procedure at more affordable rates.

At around £45,000, the most expensive package there replicates the higher-tech version of operation available in the States. By implanting an extendable nail in the bone cavity, and then using magnetic sensors to lengthen it by remote control, it does away with the need for a bulky metal external fixator while also speeding up recovery and reducing the likelihood of infection, nerve damage, blood clots or the possibility of the bones not properly fusing.

However, younger patients on more limited budgets like Ryan, tend to opt for the lower-tech Lengthening Over Nail (LON) method that costs between £25,000 and £33,000 Unfortunately, LON does requires require the bulky external fixator, which is wrapped around the leg externally and attached to the bone through the skin with pins, making scarring and infections more likely. What’s more, LON patients are required to lengthen their limbs themselves, by manually twisting a key in the metal fixator on four excruciating occasions throughout the day.

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By the time Ryan was ready to outline what the LON procedure would entail to his girlfriend, he had sunk further into his depression. Although she was initially horrified at the idea, she came around when she realised that the risks of doing nothing outweighed those from the surgery itself. Therapy had been repeatedly tried and had failed to remove Ryan’s crippling insecurity.

“She could see that I was at breaking point and that I’d already made my mind up, so she supported me throughout the process,” he says. After undergoing surgery 18 months ago, Ryan remained in hospital for five days on a cocktail of strong painkillers, morphine, antibiotics and blood thinners before being transferred to the hotel.

Today, Ryan claims he was one of the lucky ones because he always found the pain manageable; he remembers mind-numbing boredom being the biggest challenge. Robert, also from the UK, is there now and has not been so fortunate. When I spoke to him, he was halfway through the three-month lengthening process and still in very obvious discomfort. On the rare occasions that the pain subsides, Robert, an IT developer in his late 30s, can work remotely. “The pain is constantly there so I’m using painkillers. It stops you from doing anything like reading or watching films, but I sometimes manage to do some work on the laptop.”

Relentlessly, every six hours without fail, Robert turns the key in the external fixator that lengthens the legs by 0.25 mm. Invariably, the pain intensifies 10 minutes later as the muscles, and nerves stretch to accommodate the adjustment. ‘’It’s a serious procedure and being trapped in a hotel with such limited movement is obviously a very unusual situation.”

When I ask him why he’s putting himself through this, Robert cites a lack of confidence and a general sense of never quite being able to live life to the full. “Being taller has always been at the back of my mind — a sort of secret wish. You do feel as if you’ve missed out on certain things. And of course women desire taller men compared to themselves.”

By the time he returns to the UK in around six weeks, Robert is hoping for 8cm of growth (from 167cm to 175cm). While he still needs a wheelchair to get around, by then he should be able to manage on crutches — although a full recovery will probably take nine months. He has no plans to broadcast where he’s been, but if close friends expressly ask him where he’s been or notice the change in his appearance, he plans to confide in them if they promise to be discreet.

Back in Istanbul, Makbulijana Haruni, the patient welfare coordinator at the Iwannabetaller clinic, remains inundated with dozens of enquiries about limb-lengthening each week. She explains that most requests are rooted in the desire to project more confidence, power and status at work. “We see a lot of businessmen who say I’m in a senior position and need to lead teams of people but with this height I’m not able to do this,” she says. People believe that if they are taller, they will be heard more or more likely to be considered for promotions because they’re taken more seriously.”

As a patient welfare coordinator, Haruni comes as part of the package. The clinic has the capacity to operate on 80 patients each year and Haruni works with her team to screen out patients with body dysmorphia — a serious mental-health condition where sufferers obsess over flaws in their appearance. She acknowledges that patients with body dysmorphia can be treated more effectively by therapy and antidepressants; surgery would be futile. Patients have to pass a pre-surgical psychological assessment to be eligible for the operation.

However, according to Haruni, not all of their competitors are quite so scrupulous. You only have to type limb-lengthening surgery into a search engine to see the proliferation of the procedure with clinics popping up in health tourist hotspots Mexico, India and even Iran. It’s an entirely unregulated global market where orthopaedic surgeons promise simple surgical solutions to complex problems with far too much gusto and entrepreneurial flair.

“Around the world, orthopaedic surgeons have clearly realised that they can make a lot of money in this way,” Haruni says, before adding that the hype is clearly fuelling unrealistic expectations. She increasingly has to reason with patients demanding growth of more than 6-8cm from the procedure, even though that escalates the risks of potentially life-changing complications.

But what is driving such international demand? When the American sociologist Saul Feldman popularised the term “heightism” in the Seventies, he identified an insidious unconscious bias that’s hiding in plain sight. “American society is a society with a heightism premise: to be tall is to be good and to be short is to be stigmatised,” he wrote. And to combat the last socially acceptable form of discrimination, he called for a “sociology of stature”. Over the past half century, researchers have been amassing an imposing body of research, with international studies showing that being tall correlates not just with enhanced educational outcomes, social mobility, romantic success, and acquisition of leadership positions, but a better quality of life in general.

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Elsewhere, anthropological studies across cultures consistently show that taller stature is linked to increased social status. Although the reason why is unclear, there is a lot of evidence to support the interpersonal dominance theory — that we’re more likely to defer to the judgement of taller people because they are more likely to win a physical confrontation. When, for instance, the journalist Malcolm Gladwell was researching how we unconsciously form erroneous first impressions for his book Blink, he found that 58% of the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies were above 6 feet even though only 14% of men in the general population were that tall.

Does this mean that heightism is hardwired into our consciousness as an insidious prejudice? Taken in the aggregate, the evidence for the existence of the so-called “height premium” is certainly compelling, to the extent that limb-lengthening surgery starts to seem like the extreme end of the cosmetic-procedure continuum: how different is it to transhumanist endeavours such anti-ageing biotech or biohacking?

Viewed in this way, Turkey’s nascent limb-lengthening industry feels like an unnerving glimpse into that biomedical brave new world where status itself is a marketable commodity. A tummy tuck or nose job might give you confidence and change the way you feel about yourself, but it can’t re-engineer the invisible power dynamics in every room that have been crafted by millions of years of evolution in the way a “height transplant” can.

Eighteen months on from his surgery, and three inches taller, Ryan has transitioned from just below average height to just above, and is perhaps uniquely placed to comment on these new power dynamics. “I just feel that I’m a default person now with my own attributes who can no longer be as easily dismissed,” he says. “It forces people to engage with me for who I really am.”

Lifelong sufferers report dysphoric levels of internal torment. Christopher, now 62, started shedding when he was 28. “I was so proud of my thick hair, but it just got thinner and thinner,” he says. “It changes your image of yourself fundamentally, at least it did for me. Because my hair was so thick I never thought it would, and then I just thought, ‘Oh fucking hell. I’m going to be one of those bald guys.’ I’m not exaggerating — it robbed life of any pleasure. Just looking in the mirror became a torture. And I already drank a lot, and I started drinking really heavily after that. My drinking took on a really dark turn after the hair loss — it just poisoned everything.”

Christopher had five hair transplants over a couple of decades, and the final one “took” completely, leaving him with a full head of hair. But he tells me about a friend who started losing his as a teenager. “I know that it destroyed his self-confidence,” Christopher says. The friend, now 70, neither treated nor shaved it, persisting with “combovers and things like that”. “He would say, ‘Once you go bald, your looks are gone and you’re always going to have to accept second-best in terms of a wife’… I know it ruined his life.”

In an age of technologically compelled self-obsession, a version of this fear is already filtering down to my own age group. Having barely achieved the quarter-century, friends are inspecting their family trees for evolutionary disadvantage, peeling back fringes to reveal widow’s peaks and Eiger foreheads. It is now more than common for my social reunions to begin with an update on the loosened thatch — stories of smoothing back your rug only to find yourself with furry fingers, and of showers that seem uncomfortably akin to shaves. These anecdotes find plenty of statistical company. A quarter of men who develop hereditary male baldness (“androgenic alopecia”) see symptoms before the age of 21; by 35, two-thirds of men have lost at least some of their hair. 

Such is the potency of this fear that young men try to palliatively anticipate what’s to come. Ben is 29, and has been using medicinal treatments for hair loss for two years. “It was like a preventative thing,” he says. “I don’t like to think of myself as someone who is vain. But I don’t really exercise, and if I were to lose my hair, I’d basically just become my dad… It’s almost like a psychological thing where, if I take this pill, I’ll keep my hair. It’s like an anxiety deferred.” But he’s sure this is more prevalent among young men than it used to be. “If I was a 30-year-old man in the Seventies, and I was going bald, no one would care. Something has happened in the last 40 years.” And he’s right. For most of human history, however miserable it made them, men could do nothing about their condition. But now an entire male baldness industry has arisen to simultaneously nurture and service their fears. 

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The gold standard is, of course, the transplant, a treatment which sprouted onto the British male psyche in 2011 when Wayne Rooney explained: “I was going bald at 25 — why not?” In response, millions of men must have thought: if a guy who’s been turned into a Shrek doll by his own fans can have a decent head of hair, why not me? Other celebrities followed suit (“Rio Ferdinand shows off his new hair and beard transplant,” as the sidebar of shame had it last month) and now a £1.5 billion transplant economy has now opened up, headquartered in Istanbul. Nor is the trip necessarily a fool’s errand. For the scale of change possible, observe the stunning transformation of Arsenal defender Rob Holding from tonsured no-hoper to barbershop pin-up.

Though increasingly popular, this is still the expensive option, costing thousands in Turkey, and tens thereof in England. For those of leaner means, or whose condition is not yet so severe, there are alternatives. An entire fleet of companies has surfaced: Keeps, Rogaine, Happy Head, Scandinavian Biolabs, Sons UK, Numan, Unthin, Manual and Hims. If you haven’t heard of them, check the social media feed of any man you know. You’ll find their before-and-after adverts squatting there, admonishing and inviting. 

For around £20 a month, you’ll receive a mixture of topical and oral treatments (pills, shampoos, serums and sprays) which make use of two main chemicals, minoxidil and finasteride. The first came about by happy accident. Minoxidil is a vasodilator (a drug used to treat high blood pressure) originally developed in the Seventies. But when it was tested, doctors noticed that it also stimulated hair growth (exactly why is still somewhat unclear) and it was directed towards hair-loss treatment in 1986. Finasteride, meanwhile, is a “preventer”. The drug stops testosterone from turning into dihydrotestosterone (DHT), a male development hormone, and was first developed to treat enlarged prostates in 1992. But, since DHT also stops hair growing, reducing its presence in the body can slow hair loss, including after it has already begun. The product joined minoxidil in a different section of the pharmacy in 1997. As cosmetic treatments, neither is available on the NHS for hair loss, though they have been available from private pharmacies for years. 

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In this way, these companies are effectively pulling off a marketing trick more than a medical miracle: they offer the slickness of a “telehealth” service, employing online physicians to validate prescription-subscriptions which are then sent out in the mail. And in this digital setting, a distinctive, millennial tech start-up aesthetic emerges: gorgeous websites, pastel colours, and stylish, sans-serif fonts. Hims is most typical, and like any modern company worth its screentime, offers a philosophy as well as a product. “Hims is about personal wellness,” its website boasts. “You should look and feel your best all the time. Our job is to make that easy and affordable… We hope to enable a conversation that’s currently closeted. Men aren’t supposed to care for themselves [we’re too often told]. What a load of bollocks.”

This is the language of wellness, of looksmaxxing and personal optimisation, turned into breathy corporate advertising copy. The packaging of Hims’s bottles and pouches is of a piece — beige, clean and minimalist. Manual, which Ben uses, does the same: “You get a little box, and it’s very cute, and it’s like you’re opening a present… It’s almost like they’ve managed to remove all stigma around what is essentially a pharmaceutical product, and it just becomes another thing that you take alongside your vitamin D and vitamin C tablets.” Much like the supplement industry, they are marketing hair regrowth as a route to the giddy state of “self-care”. And not just hair regrowth — several (but not all) of these companies offer other optimising pathways to spot-free skin and top-notch sexual performance. In this context, hair regrowth becomes just one waypoint of many along the road to total masculine performance. 

But obviously there is a catch. For a start, none of these treatments is guaranteed to work — and certainly not to levels of reforestation depicted in the adverts — while the hair that grows can be thin, and disappointingly downy (“peach fuzz”, Christopher calls it). The drugs can also take months to have any effect, which, for all the many happy customers, will see many men paying for weeks’ worth of ultimately useless brew, while (unlike transplants) any improvements will disappear the moment you stop taking them. And, frequently noted in manosphere-adjacent corners of the internet, finasteride especially can have some worrisome side-effects: depression, loss of libido and erectile dysfunction. Which makes you wonder if Hims were onto something with the specific combination of treatments they offer.

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Nevertheless, men are flocking to these companies. While there’s little evidence that hair loss is statistically more prevalent today, the psychologists’ verdict is that social media has made millennials and Gen Z more “hair aware”. Popular Reddit threads such as r/tressless and r/HaircareScience provide a platform for tens of thousands of young men to trade tips on courses of “min” and “fin”, and share their own progress, uploading dozens images of their gradually thickening scalps. Even those who suffer the side-effects shrug them off: “Had a couple of days of ball ache and I don’t get morning wood anymore,” one user told me. “But fine. Satisfied with the results.”

Another man in his 40s making use of finasteride explained it “has had some psychological effects such as moderate depression that I have recently mitigated via antidepressants”. But, not to be deterred, he’s just starting using minoxidil too. Ben, meanwhile, used finasteride before minoxidil, and reported a plunging period of depression. “I was taking actually a very small dose, like half the dose I was recommended, and I just felt dead inside… It’s actually really disturbing that you can send off for something on the internet which can put you in such a dark place.” (Manual lists “low mood, depression or thoughts of self-harm” as very rare side-effects on its website.)

This is not exactly the relationship one might expect between a health supplement and its consumer, and it’s quite self-evident what all this really adds up to. In his 1958 book The Affluent Society, John Kenneth Galbraith attempted to clarify the phase of late capitalism that had established itself in the post-war United States, based around the marketing of luxury and consumer goods. Many had been retailed through what he called “the dependence effect”, by which consumers’ “wants are increasingly created by the process by which they are satisfied”. Frequently, producers may go as far as to “actively create wants through advertising and salesmanship”. In the Fifties, this meant white goods and General Motors. But now individual happiness is found in the mirror, much as it was once found in things. 

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Since then, with nowhere else left to colonise, capitalism has begun to cultivate the interior self, as it once did the fields and forests. And, it should be noted, this follows a strategy that has already been tried and tested to tremendous effect on at least 50% of the population. Women, for whom the scale of personal refurbishment demanded by society was always greater, have long been sold the language of optimisation and tweakments. It is part-and-parcel of existence as a female citizen-consumer, but also of a feminist discourse that has been critiquing the relationship of the cosmetic to the political for decades. 

The old stereotype of male insouciance when it comes to appearance is equally now long dead. A brave new world has crept up to replace it: of hair regrowth, breaking your femurs to gain a few inches in height, chin implants to achieve a squarer bone structure, and penis-enlargement surgery. But this is all about as liberating as the first appearance of Botox, another very 21st-century promise of cash-for-youth, cash-for-looks. It is another patch of the private realm swept into the orbit of commerce and checkout, a demand that may be exploited, but is ultimately unsatisfied.

Schwarzenegger can legitimately call himself a self-made man. He came to the US with no money and an unpronounceable name and a skill that was barely viewed as a skill and had no obvious practical application: what are you supposed to do with biceps the size of watermelons? With fanatical discipline and a lot of personal charm — along with the benign bullshitting the Austrians call schmäh — he parlayed his skill into movie stardom and eight years as the Governor of California; he wasn’t that bad a governor, either. If the US had a different Constitution, he might have become President.

If you watch the 1977 documentary Pumping Iron, the movie that first introduced Arnold to a mainstream audience, it’s clear that even as a neophyte he viewed what he did as self-construction. He compares himself to a sculptor. “You look in the mirror, and you say, ‘Okay, I need a little bit more deltoids, a little bit more shoulders,’ so you get the proportions right. So what you do is you exercise and put those deltoids on, whereas an artist would just slap on some clay on each side. And, you know, maybe he does it an easier way. We go through a harder way.”

Schwarzenegger’s gift for canny, accessible analysis is no doubt present in his new self-help book Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life. Judging by the book promo, the tools are rooted in common sense. Have a vision of what you want to achieve, work hard to achieve it, promote yourself whenever you can, reinvent yourself. I wouldn’t argue with any of this (well, maybe the self-promotion), and especially not the last. If Arnold is anything, he’s a dedicated reinventor. Consider the penitential regimen of exercise and nutrition needed to transform a more or less ordinary looking adolescent (he began body-building at 15) into a hybrid of animated athletic trophy and anatomical illustration. Then consider what it took to transform such a person into a movie star.

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In this regard, much of his success came from his embodiment of masculinity, or a particular kind of it. Given Schwarzenegger’s staggering proportions, the great knotted wedge of his torso, the arms like thighs and the thighs like trunks, the jaw that might have been designed to crush bones, we should speak of hypermasculinity. The actors who embodied manhood from the Forties through to the Seventies were physically ordinary or extraordinary only in their beauty, such as Paul Newman or the young Brando. John Wayne and Jack Nicholson were actually kind of dumpy. Jimmy Stewart was a weed. It’s true that bodybuilders before Arnold became action heroes — notably Steve Reeves, who played Hercules in low-budget spear-and-sandal pictures — but they weren’t stars. They were barely actors.

If Schwarzenegger began his career as a growling, jut-browed human tank processing over the rubble of his adversaries, he learned to work his size and menace more agilely. Then he learned to work against them. His best acting is in comedies such as Kindergarten Cop, Twins and Junior, in which his character becomes pregnant via an experimental drug. His comedy is the comedy of masculinity placed in milieus where masculinity has little use, and is even a disadvantage. How is a little kid likely to react when a man Schwarzenegger’s size and with Schwarzenegger’s accent asks him “Who’s your daddy?” It’s the comedy of a giant trying to repair eyeglasses with the tiny screwdriver and even tinier screws that are sold as eyeglass-repair kits.

This gameness and deftness with which Arnold parodies his masculinity — maybe all masculinity — actually makes him more masculine. In a post-Freudian, post-feminist age, we’ve learned to be suspicious of men who make too big a deal of their manliness: they’re either closet-cases or sociopaths. Maybe what I mean is that we’ve learned to be suspicious of men who are humourless about it. And, as my wife pointed out, humour is one of the ways men have always made themselves attractive to women (and perhaps to other men). If a couple of guys are chatting up women at a bar, you can tell which one is dominant because he’ll be the one to crack a joke.

It turns out that Schwarzenegger also trained to make a butt of himself. In a recent interview, he reveals that his tutor was the veteran comic Milton (“Mr. Television”) Berle, who bullied him through take after take of a single joke and called him “Nazi”. It is indicative of the humour that offsets Schwarzenegger’s tendency towards self-promotion. (From the same interview: “There’s a schmäh with everything. Sometimes people take schmäh meaning you’re lying, which is not what it is. It’s kind of like, you wrap it up in a more attractive package. In order to sell something you have to have the schmäh”.) But then self-promotion is inherent in the self-help genre. Why would you take advice from someone who isn’t great at what he does — great at life — and how do you know he’s great unless he tells you, over and over and over?

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Schwarzenegger’s self-promotion has always seemed heaviest when he is talking about his political career — though, unlike other political self-promoters, he actually matches his claims with political action: see his fleet-footed response to the 2007 wildfires that swept Southern California. Other times, it’s not clear what the didactic purpose of his political career is. Consider his decision, against medical advice, to be sworn in for his second term as Governator with a broken femur. I wouldn’t listen to anybody who told me I should attend a long public ceremony while standing on a recently broken femur, even one that had been bolted back together. To his credit, I don’t think Schwarzenegger has ever said that. But I also don’t think Tony Robbins actually said that his fans should walk on fire, yet it was something he did at his “seminars”, and a number of attendees tried it. (They sued him after they were badly burned.)

But who hasn’t made a few mistakes? If you want a self-help book written by someone who hasn’t made any, that leaves you with the Bible, the Qu’ran, the Vedas, and the Buddhist sutras. And look how well people follow their advice.

Judging by the material already published, I suspect the contents of Be Useful will be unexceptionable, and probably as good as any advice can be that isn’t given in person, by somebody you know who isn’t a god or a saint (or maybe a chatbot). Yes, we’re talking about an actor who became famous for wise-cracking as he pounded someone’s face to jelly and, before that, for declaring (in Conan the Barbarian) that the best thing in life is “to crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women”. But we’re also talking about a tough but warm-hearted gym trainer who reads Nietzsche and the Stoics. He’s demanding. If your reps are half-assed, he’ll make you redo them. But he understands failure; he probably even sees the value of it. “Good job, dude,” he’ll tell you. And you’ll be grateful.

Sometimes his leniency is frustrating. I’m thinking of the speech he gave to the American public after January 6. It was an affirmation of American values and a warning against fascism, delivered by someone whose own father had fought for the Third Reich. That’s what makes it so moving. The speech, however, was notable for its refusal to denounce individuals apart from the coup-leader-in-chief. To me, that’s its one failure. The violence the former president inflicted on our nation was abetted by thousands of allies and followers. They should have been called out. But I’m writing as someone whose father was driven out of Austria following that country’s annexation into Greater Germany. Schwarzenegger’s father may have been in the crowds that cheered Hitler as he entered Vienna; he would have been wearing a swastika armband, since he belonged to the SA.

But Schwarzenegger’s forbearance may speak to an essential sweetness of character. A man can have such a character even if he makes a fortune playing a killing machine or sexually exploits women. Maybe what I mean is really childlikeness. The Governator (one can’t really speak of him as the former Governator, can one? It’s unlikely there’ll be others) gave his January 6 speech using a prop that he invoked as a metaphor for democracy. It was the sword from Conan. In a recent promotional video, he uses the same sword to slice open a carton of the new books. Even grown men love their toys. And as schmäh, it’s priceless.

So the cognitive dissonance was palpable when the country’s first Rajars-style consumer survey of podcasts was published last week, offering the best snapshot yet of what Britain listens to. Much of the top 25 paints the UK as essentially and irredeemably twee. No Such Thing As A Fish — gadzooks trivia from high-end neckbeards. Off Menu: whimsical comfort-eating celeb fodder. The Therapy Crouch: Peter Crouch having a mind-numbingly pleasant chinwag with his missus. Shagged Married Annoyed: exactly what it says. The Rest Is Politics: a show built around the heartwarming premise that the last 20 years can be neatly scooped up and packed away.

But at the top of the charts were two shows that pointed towards something hiding in plain sight. A missing market: the market for men. Podcasts are a confessional booth medium, after all. Up and down the train carriage, no one knows what’s in anyone else’s earbuds. As economists would put it, they are an example of “revealed preference” as opposed to “stated preference”. What you actually want, rather than what you think you should want. And by their mass adoption of Rogan, it seems that what men want is the old tradition of the men’s magazine, continued by other means.

At the start of the 2010s, the last of that old world — the shining city on a hill of Arena, Select, Nuts, Jack, Loaded — finally fell away. We were told this was because there was a new lad in town. Softer, kinder, he could “do better”, if he avoided his inherent “toxicity”. He had the feeling of inevitability that all modern archetypes take on. Vice threw off its buccaneering spirit, and actively mocked its old ways. Even LadBible, once at the end of a scale that could genuinely be termed toxic, has reformed itself into the doughy shapes of the maaate cultural revolution.

The message of the new man was gynocentric: by 2013, the conversation among women had begun to guide what men’s interest media looked like. Men took note of this important new datapoint: they softened their image, nodded along. Then, as the podcast charts show, secretly went back to listening to bodybuilding tips, insane stories of shark attacks, reasons why the pyramids were built by aliens, how fugitive Nazis founded actual colonies in South America, what it’s like to kill a moose, and what Tim Dillon thinks of twerking children. In short, they went back to what men’s magazines had always been about. Not connecting with a sort of soft Jeremy Corbyn vibe. Not trying to figure out complex relationships.

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If Rogan is the pure Gen-X vision of masculinity — basically every self-educated stoner at a 1999 house party, who has that old-school vision of hating both the military-industrial complex and political correctness — then the second-most listened to podcast in Britain is his Zoomer cognate. Steve Bartlett is a marketing entrepreneur who flipped his social-media agency into big money ($660 million at its apex valuation) by the age of 25. This earned him a chair on Dragon’s Den. Now, in his twilight years (30), Diary of a CEO is solidly wedged at the top of younger listeners’ (17-34) playlists, as the Edison Research survey confirms.

First listens don’t immediately reveal its appeal. Like many other podcasts — The Lex Fridman Show, Sam Harris’s Making Sense, Hidden Forces — it takes the format of “slightly naive guy interviews top experts about big picture stuff”. Bartlett is obviously likeable. He comes across as humble, genuinely curious. He’s marketed the show well, and curated his guest list better. They all come with their A-game. Information, certainty, high performance. It’s not a giggly show for kicking ideas about: it’s an earnest attempt to mine their life’s experience for info nuggets. How to get your brain off porn. When to double-down on a job and when to quit. How to build resilience. Being consistent.

In DOAC’s world, almost every insight is usable; no part of the buffalo is wasted. The past decade has seen an explosion in media-savvy self-help gurus, whose profusion has sparked a quantum leap in just how well-adapted and productive the average person can be. Bartlett is at the forefront of that codifying impulse — the urge to absorb all of it. He has that kind of mind: the stone-cold work ethic of someone never truly at rest. The very first episode describes his entrepreneurial origin myth: aged 20, living in the worst area of Manchester, working every hour, so poor that he resorted to pinching food from empty tables in pubs.

Bartlett is unique in many aspects of his back story (he was born in Botswana to an illiterate mother, for a start), yet he also sums up a particular Geriatric Zoomer/Young Millennial way of engaging with the world. He’s the avatar of what they call hustle culture: the obsession with putting in the hours in your own business or scheme. Here, the ultimate aim is to achieve a kind of earthly perfection that previous generations might’ve looked at as square. This is the New Man. He’s neurotic but well-adjusted. He works hard. He does not play all that hard.

Bartlett’s “internet entrepreneur” origins speak to the core of that hustle culture identity. He’s literally on the board of Huel, the makers of a wildly popular Soylent-style meal replacement. The “complete nutritional shake” is fast becoming a lifestyle in itself to a certain kind of 20-something man, and for boys whose bedroom furniture comprises a single pair of dumbbells. They are the ones filing life down to a smooth nubbin, until it doesn’t contain anything that doesn’t add to some personal P&L account.

This, young men often mistakenly believe, is how you get girls. Being industrious. Having your shit together. Making it. In reality, this sort of monoculture is an instant turn-off. But the task of living fully can seem so daunting that it’s easy to double down on an internet grab-bag of tips and tactics and sheer Nietzschean will. Cannily, Diary of a CEO also styles itself as the antidote to the problems of this way of life. In his origin myth, Bartlett “thought he would figure it out” when he made his first million but he “quickly realised he knew nothing”. So it’s a show as much about how to sustain relationships, how to re-examine your old ways, how to work around the dreaded Mental Elf.

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There are many overlaps between how Gen X men view the world, and how the younger generations do. Both Rogan and Bartlett believe religiously in self-improvement. Both think that life is a hackable system, and delight in finding the short-cuts. But Rogan’s top paradigm is still open-loop. It’s ultimately a shrug. Did the Mafia kill Kennedy? I dunno, but it’s fun to think about. Can the sulforaphane found in young Brussel sprouts reverse the aging process? Well that would be cool.

With Bartlett, there is a sense that he does still feel there is an ultimate answer out there. That you can clock life. It’s an almost spiritual impulse, a syncretic belief in something better. All this hustle, it’s just got to add up to something. And in the absence of greater meanings, many are working out at a gnostic temple of the perfectible self. Overall, it might be nice if the world knew what to do with its biggest audio show.

The idea that “we the people” condemned the “Nasty Noughties” and its toxic men to the trashcan of history is a top-down reading that doesn’t stack up. In truth, the bits of masculinity we’ve suppressed are just living in a thumb-necked mixed martial artist’s basement in Texas. And the bits of masculinity we can still tolerate are on Diary of a CEO. With the blizzard of entertainment options, “water cooler moments” in media are supposed to be over by now. But what the success of Rogan shows is that there is actually a giant water cooler out there, that is accessed by millions each week, who try not to talk to strangers about it. Somewhere, there is a fusion position.

Which is an odd regression, because we used to know him so well. Long before we delegated mediating this crisis to Caitlin Moran, the wretched young man had his own literary genre: the late-20th century young man’s novel. It was born, loud and cocky, in the Sexual Revolution decades. Spurred on by the general loosening of mores and laws around the depiction of sex on the page, male writers started to compete with each other over who could depict the arrival of sexual maturity in the most appalling, hilarious detail. They would write about themselves at school, themselves in the bedroom and, most perversely, themselves in the bathroom.

As Kingsley Amis later reflected, in the Fifties “to utter or write a swear-word, as they were called, counted as a small act of revolt, the breaking-out of a miniature Jolly Roger”. And at the start of that decade, we had The Catcher in the Rye, a novel which set the thematic tramlines for what was to come (angst, alienation, youngsters vs oldsters). But Holden was a good kid really, his deepest moral sin nothing more than a brief and ultimately chaste parlay with a prostitute. He was overtaken by far meaner younger brothers and, by the end of the Sixties, Philip Roth had produced Portnoy’s Complaint, an unsparing exposé on the dangers of rabid self-abuse. But the greatest and most summative achievement of the lot, arguably retiring the genre in its unstinting imposition of the nastiness, arrogance, misogyny and truth of male adolescence, is Martin Amis’s The Rachel Papers, published 50 years ago. 

When Amis died in May, there was much handwringing over exactly what order of talent was being commemorated. A virtuoso stylist, certainly. But a serious novelist? A mere literary comedian? James Wood leant towards the latter, bafflingly labelling Amis our latter-day P.G. Wodehouse. And some dedicated fans simply threw out the fiction in frustration, trusting that the true talent had found its way into the memoir, the essays, the journalism. Quite an insult to the author of 15 novels, and quite misguided, too. Obviously, Amis’s true métier was as one of our great novelists of masculinity — specifically, its most resentful, female-fearing and insecure aspects, exactly those which trouble us about our young men today.

It’s there from the opening lines of The Rachel Papers — “My name is Charles Highway, though you wouldn’t think it to look at me” — that special brew of what, on the next page, Charles calls “all the self-consciousness and self-disgust and self-infatuation and self-…you name it” that is essential to this species of male adolescence. It is the eve of Charles’s 20th birthday, an occasion which is vital for the novel’s plot: a moment of metamorphosis, a simultaneously elevating and enervating release of “teenage” anarchy, to be replaced with “that noisome Brobdingnagian world the child sees as adulthood”. Charles spies an opportunity for self-inspection, even amid the self-absorption. And what follows is his account of the love affair that he believes has marked the last months of his youth, his relationship with Rachel.

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What follows is a triumph of stylised solipsism. Charles has kept detailed notes on Rachel (as he does on everything else, from his reading for Oxford entrance to the no less scholarly Conquests and Techniques: A Synthesis). He has analysed seduction like a lepidopterist and places Rachel under a romantic siege-surveillance, pursuing her with all the sleuth and sociopathy of a lusty Sherlock. She is run through a gauntlet of on-the-cuff speeches, calculatedly accidental meetings and pre-prepared gallery visits (Charles goes the day before, to pick out and make notes upon the most aphrodisiac paintings). And this doesn’t let up at the bedroom door. Amis’s sex scenes are pure adolescence: choreographed accounts of first-person pornography, studies of athleticism and repertoire. 

“I threw back the top sheet, my head a whirlpool of notes, directives, memos, hints, pointers, random scribblings,” Charles tells us. “Foreplay included ear-jobs, bronchitic sweet-nuthins, armpit-play (surprisingly good value in this respect), and a high-jinks of arse and thigh work.” Charles (and obviously Amis) recognises that this is something new, an attempt to establish a new kind of sexual frankness that will drain any romance from the act. Post-Chatterley, post-Portnoy, no chastity belt may remain locked and no modesty curtain undrawn. Charles, as Amis himself noted, is scholarly about sex and sexual about scholarship. Intimacy is reduced to: “Thus, I maintained a tripartite sexual application in contrapuntal patterns.”

But even more gleefully described is what Charles calls his “adolescentiana”. Asthmatic and scrawny, Charles suffers from a debilitating physical and mental self-consciousness, and regards his body with outright disgust. The Rachel Papers is among other things the great novel of catarrh and phlegm, a tribute to hawking, yacking and barking, of lungs filled with “liquefying gook” and needing to sleep “on a pillow of tissues”. But this doesn’t stop at the bronchials: we hear all about Charles’s “marathon craps”, we see him “peeing lava” after contracting an STI. He shows us his spots in the mirror, cataloguing his “Big Boys” and one “fine double-yolker” frying between his eyes. We even witness him lie “immobile in the bath, like a dirty old alligator — not washing, just steaming and planning”. “Nice things are dull, and nasty things are funny. The nastier a thing is, the funnier it gets,” Charles and Amis declare around halfway through — a literary self-justification. In the quest for comedy, Amis would shamelessly throw all his poetic might at the most shameful, revealing scene.

It is this aggressive frankness that immediately and irrevocably landed the novel with the charge of misogyny. A fair accusation — an older Amis would archly claim that his early novels were written in his “pre-feminist” period. This is Charles on his mother: “What a heap. The skin had shrunken over her skull, to accentuate her jaw and to provide commodious cellarage for the gloomy pools that were her eyes…” On it goes. And it is difficult for the reconstructed reader to know what to do with passages like this, so articulate and so unfunny. Especially since Amis gives Rachel the same attitude towards women over 35: “Scaly faces. Figures go, hair gets matty and dry… it’s good that they can have families.”

Amazing to think that 50 years ago, this was Amis’s ticket to glittering prizes and public acclaim (of a punk-ish, countercultural sort). If this writing is going on now, it’s utterly marginal to publishing, taking place on dubious Substacks, in the far-off terra incognita of the literary manosphere. There is one possible defence here, hanging implicitly and obviously in the air, which is that Charles has to be misogynistic because nasty young men so frequently are, too. And Charles is a monster born of that caste, cranked by his creator into a Hogarthian triumph of high-art cartoonery.

But Charles is vulnerable, too. He’s revolting, and he knows it. And he’s more than capable of devolving into an anxious wreck, crying down the phone when Rachel briefly gets back together with an American love rival, and plagued by “cosmic angst, metaphysical fear, a feeling both claustrophobic and agoraphobic, the teenager’s religion”. The Rachel Papers is too often remembered as a freewheeling carry-on, a snide pamphlet stuffed with lit bro in-jokes. But if Amis grants Charles some of teenagehood’s fleeting highs, he forces him through some of its most punishing lows (one section of vegetative, alcoholic despair is simply referred to as “The Low”).  

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The disappearance of short-arsed priapics from fiction has not disappeared the aspects of male adolescence they used to satirise. If anything, it has forced them underground, and allowed them to become the blazons of a far darker masculinity. Part of the reason that the manosphere claims its initial sway over young men is by affirming their instinctive (and misogynistic) priors, seizing upon their sensitivities to matters of physical hierarchy and female conquest. These are gendered instincts that our political age is rightly hostile to. But we haven’t examined and disposed of them, only thrown them onto the furnace of the Online Right wherein they are actively stoked and vulcanised. 

One of the tragedies of our masculinity crisis conversation is that it is currently brokered only by cold-blooded sociologists (whose books no young man will ever read) and raving internet gurus, whimpering over their wounded pride. One can look over jealously at the sophisticated conversation the girls have on offer — their platter of dislikeable protagonists, dirtbag Fleabags and sad-girl lit. The boys could do with some of their own bad-boy lit. Not delivered with the insouciance of The Rachel Papers — a fresh and chastened perspective is certainly required. But with its daring determination to plumb the grubby lower consciousness of young men, parsing exactly what about it is noxious and what is pitiful (and what is funny) within the uniquely ambiguous field of fiction. And once that is done, perhaps we can trace our way out of this gender animosity, not with a map we have redrawn but one we have reminded ourselves how to read.

These are not excerpts from an ill-advised Church of England youth outreach programme. These are some of the 250-odd “Lad Commandments”, upon which the blokey media empire LadBible was founded in 2011. Lad culture had passed out of its Nineties pomp by then, but it remained potent. The Sun was still publishing topless models on Page 3. The Inbetweeners had shoved words like “clunge” and “minge” into the public consciousness. “Proper Moist”, a comedy song about girls “walking like Robocop” after a night of lovemaking, reached number 15 on the UK singles chart in 2014.

It was a time when Facebook was filled with teenagers rather than pensioners. I was one of them, sharing the now-antiquated memes — “one does not simply walk into Mordor” — that Elon Musk still finds funny. LadBible’s Facebook posts, which mainly concerned hot women, were ubiquitous. The last item of 2011 is a poll of words for breasts: “melons”, “jugs”, “fun bags”, “barrys”, “tats”, “boobs” and “chebs”. In 2012, one post asks: “What do you think of Miley Cyrus’ Side boob lads?” (Side boobs, being titillating but non-pornographic, were a major preoccupation.) Other features included the self-explanatory “Bumday Mondays” and “Cleavage Thursdays”.

Browsing through those early Facebook posts today is akin to wading through hastily shredded documents in an abandoned embassy. The images don’t load properly; the links direct to a page on its website which reads: “Sorry, this content isn’t available right now.” Around 2015, LadBible cleaned up its act. Co-founder Alexander “Solly” Solomou redefined the lad as “someone who spots a grandma crossing the road with heavy shopping, someone with manners, who is polite, who can be a hero”. He didn’t regret the earlier material but described it as a “learning curve”. Misogyny had become a commercial drag: “We realised that certain things needed to change if we wanted to compete with those guys in the States.”

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This proved to be correct. In December 2021, the controlling LadBible Group floated on the second tier of London’s stock market at £360 million. It now has multiple brands and boasts of “a global audience approaching 1 billion”, of which 40% is female. The focus is on less controversial, more easily monetised content: “Man goes on Antiques Roadshow with Ark of the Covenant from Indiana Jones”; “Seven signs you have a work husband or wife”; a video of a guy trying, and failing, to jump across a canal.

The chauvinistic weekend warrior was not just a limited audience but a shrinking one. After MeToo, lad culture lost its virility. The original lads grew up and settled down. Now they prefer weightlifting to binge drinking, and their wives tick them off if their banter goes too far. Gen Zs use second-hand drag slang — “it’s giving”; “throwing shade” ­— rather than patter like “reem” or “mint”. Lads thought girls were “gagging for it”, but today’s male contestants of Love Island handle the sexual agency of women with Clausewitzian levels of strategic delicacy. Modern footballers are upstanding, campaigning public figures rather than vodka-chugging louts (Jack Grealish the honourable exception). There is, of course, still plenty of grim sexism about, but misogyny no longer has a winking cultural ambassador to egg it on.

In truth, LadBible was driven by a different, more durable male archetype: the hardscrabble Thatcherite entrepreneur. Consider Solomou, a Stockport grammar-school boy who traded clothes on eBay in his early teens. In 2012, while studying business at Leeds University, he came across the embryonic LadBible and bought it from its creator, Oxford Brookes student Alex Partridge, for a reported £300. Arian Kalantari, Solomou’s childhood friend, came on board, and the duo’s knack for clickable content drove a breakneck expansion of the brand’s social media presence.

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In 2018, they took over their competitor Unilad in a distinctly sober bit of manoeuvring. Unilad — a similar proposition to LadBible — was founded by Partridge, too, but he was forced out by his partners, leading to a lengthy legal battle after which the company was ordered to pay him £5 million. As Unilad struggled with debt and tax issues, the pair acquired the £5 million liability from Partridge, helping them swallow their rival outright. (Solomou is now the last man standing: last month, Kalantari left the company to pursue “new challenges and new adventures”.)

Similar commercial realism has spurred LadBible’s high-profile good works. In 2016, it launched a men’s mental health campaign called UOKM8?, which it reprised in 2018 and 2019. (It’s currently involved in Sadiq Khan’s “Maaate” campaign against sexual harassment.) And in 2019, Unilad set up an “illegal” blood bank for gay and bisexual men to protest a now-abolished law banning them from donating unless they refrained from sex. This, from a brand which temporarily shut down in 2012 after a piece remarked: “85% of rape cases go unreported. That seems to be fairly good odds.”

Whatever their industry, blue-chip firms are far more likely to work with media organisations that say men should open up than those that make rape jokes. And a smartened-up LadBible has built a prolific sponsored content operation: it leverages its audience for branded campaigns with the likes of McDonald’s chicken nuggets, John Lewis, Nando’s, Google and Durex (who “came to us to kick start the conversation” around different condom fits).

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Yet it is LadBible’s zeitgeisty mental health drive that is most revealing of its evolution. Brands that sell stuff to men — such as Nivea, Lynx and Gymshark — are now very interested in how those men are feeling. You can even buy a £795 jacket from Frahm which has “don’t keep it buttoned” stitched into the lining. (“Could this jacket help prevent depression?” asked the FT.) For his part, Alex Partridge, who presumably had some role writing or publishing the Lad Commandments, now posts on LinkedIn about his ADHD and #neurodiversity.

Many companies have gone on a similar journey to LadBible. Lynx, for example, used to make adverts about how its deodorant was irresistible to women, a quality touched upon in one particular Lad Commandment: “Thou shall always wear Lynx deodorant, as it is the deodorant which rakes in the pussy.” But as lad culture started crumbling, they enthusiastically began assembling their new ideal consumer: a soft, sensitive geezer who finds it okay to say he’s not okay.

This is a convenient customer to have. For one thing, he is happy to blame his problems on himself. The corporate vision of mental health is distinctly individualist: you’re sad because your brain isn’t quite right, so exercise consumer choice and get online therapy with BetterHelp. The alternative vision — that being miserable might have a lot to do with external things, such as economic rot and a loss of status in a post-patriarchal world — points to collective political action, and maybe higher taxes on those firms that seem so concerned about us. This scenario is clearly less appealing.

Yet while the lad has had his day, something worse might have taken his place. The popularity of Andrew Tate has proved that misogyny, though mostly cleared from the public sphere, is still widespread in young men. The vacuum left by the original LadBible was ripe to be filled. But while Tate is a sexist, he is not a lad — he is an individualist, with a lonely, materialistic vision of alphadom that offers a warped counterpart to the cuddly mental health discourse about working on yourself.

Perhaps the only redeeming feature of lad culture was its camaraderie. What is “bros before hoes” if not an uncouth expression of male bonding? Lads are surrounded by their mates. Tate is surrounded by his Bugattis. Lads bunk off work. Tate sees wealth as the making of the man. How ironic, then, that as it has transformed its brand in the name of profit, LadBible has hemmed far closer to Tate’s view of the world than that of its one-time audience. Behind the beer goggles was always a cold, dead-eyed stare.

On Saturday night, as police patrolled and harassed residents, Exodus, a local collective, put out the message that a rave was taking place outside of town, hoping to lure the rioters out of Marsh Farm. “It looked like Vietnam,” one of the organisers tells me, “and we wanted to fix that.” And, by and large, they did. Just before sunrise on Sunday, he received a call to say that Marsh Farm had gone silent, but for the birdsong and the shuffling of riot police on empty streets.

“It was beautiful,” he says. The ecstasy of the rave had soothed the disorder. Marsh Farm had been saved. But after the party, the comedown.

By the time Andrew Tate moved to Marsh Farm from Chicago aged 11, it was the “worst area of the worst town” in England. He has spoken about his “brokie days” on the estate: about growing up on welfare with his newly divorced mother and two younger siblings; and about defying the odds to become a millionaire kickboxing champion and “the most Googled man on the planet” (he’s eighth). If Andrew Tate has an origin story, it starts here.

Today, the self-styled “King of Toxic Masculinity” is in Romania on house arrest, charged with rape, human trafficking and forming an organised crime group to sexually exploit women. To many, he is the man who said that women should bear responsibility for being raped. To his legions of young, male fans, though, he is a Nietzschean superman whose journey — and success — is the ultimate lesson: understand his self-discipline, drive and ambition, and learn how you, too, can become like him. For them, his biography is gospel.

“English people are the most violent people in the world,” Tate said in a video last year. And Marsh Farm lends itself to violence. Tucked away on the margins of Luton town, the sprawling estate, now home to around 10,000 people, is dominated by three 15-storey tower blocks, their residents watching over a disproportionately deprived and unemployed warren that stretches for almost a mile.

“Crime was just an everyday occurrence,” someone who grew up on Marsh Farm at the same time as Tate tells me. You had no choice but to accept it. “If the other residents thought you were a grass or too nosy, you would be burnt out. Your car would be burnt. Your property would be burnt. You would have paint put on your house saying ‘grass’.” I’m told it was completely normal for petrol to be poured through someone’s letterbox and lit with a match.

Marsh Farm’s Lea Manor High School offered little respite. When Tate arrived there in 1997, the school was in special measures and due to be closed.“It was mayhem,” says one of his former classmates. In one incident, a boy stabbed another with a pair of scissors; during another, pupils set fire to the art department. If their behaviour was brazen, that’s because they knew they could get away with it. “Students would drive to school in stolen cars — and then drive on to the sports fields and start doing handbrake turns during school hours.”

Where was Tate during all this? “Andrew,” the friend explains, “would be a part of the crowd that was the furthest away and closest to the exit.” He was, as he adapted to life on Marsh Farm, a shy, unassured child: “He was quiet”; “he wasn’t like he was now”; “I wouldn’t call Andrew a geek, but he wasn’t in the cool group.” Back then, he found comfort on the fringes, content with playing with his Pokémon cards and keeping away from the chaos for as long as possible, which wasn’t very long.

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“He had this American accent,” the friend continues. “And everyone would take the absolute piss out of him all the time. He always used to say ‘Oh my god!’ in a really strong accent and everyone would go for him.” Then, after a few months, a boy started to tease Tate in science class — and he flipped. “I remember Andrew giving him a few punches to the face,” the friend tells me. “Everyone was like ‘Fucking hell! Andrew has lost it!’ After that, Andrew started to behave like a different person. He became a rebel and that made a bit of a cred for him.” Another classmate describes how he remembers Tate swearing at a teacher. “He knew that was how you get respected,” he says. “That’s when the change started. If you can talk the talk and walk the walk, that’s when success comes.”

So Tate learned to swagger. He often describes how, when his family moved to England, he became the “man of the house”. Clinging on to the high of that first fight, he decided what kind of “man” he wanted to be: one who gets what he wants. His friends describe how, at around this time, they used to wistfully watch other residents driving through Marsh Farm in Lamborghinis and Ferraris, desperate to join their ranks. “However, as we got older,” one explains, “we found out it was bullshit. It was just people renting the cars for weddings and whatever else.”

Unlike the others, though, Tate clung on to that dream, partying hard but also working hard to drag himself up. He worked on a fish stall; he sold windows and solar panels; he even returned to Lea Manor High, working as an IT technician before being fired after having sex with the Head Girl.

He thrived, meanwhile, in Luton’s kickboxing rings, a sport he’d taken up in 2005. There, he was King Cobra, who within four years was ranked number one in his division in Europe. But success in the ring wasn’t enough — unless it was garlanded with some sort of status symbol, it was meaningless. “I still remember the day when he bought his Aston Martin DB9,” a friend says, after Tate won £10,000 in a fight. “That was when we started to call him ‘Top G’ [“Top Gangster”]. Because here was a Marsh Farm guy who was renting a one-bedroom flat with his brother — and now he was driving an Aston Martin. He was just starting his businesses and he wasn’t doing fantastic, but he wanted that look. And that is exactly what he got.”

For many, this is where Tate’s first chapter ends and the next begins. And if the first was about aspiration, the next was about escape. He launched a lucrative cam-girl business; he became a four-time kickboxing world champion. When he appeared on Big Brother in 2016, his biography said: “Andrew believes that a man should be able to sleep with as many women as he wants to, but that does not apply to women.”

He then moved to Romania, a place where “corruption is far more accessible” and the #MeToo era had not “destroyed the safety of men”. There, in a warehouse outside of Bucharest, he built a palace and filled it with women, supercars and dumbbells — a monument to his belief that, regardless of where you come from, self-belief and conviction can make you a God. Tate founded an online university where he preached his message. “You are either a disciplined individual or undisciplined individual,” as he would say. “You’re a G when you suffer.” That is the gospel, according to TikTok.

But is it true? What about those boys left behind in Luton? Well, many of them suffered but few became Gs. Tate was “one of the lucky ones”, his childhood friend admits when I ask about the rest of their class. He wasn’t drawn into petty crime. He left. And the unlucky ones? Some are unemployed; others sell drugs for a living. Others were snared by the sordid Carson Grimes.

“Everyone knew about that guy,” Tate’s classmate tells me. “He didn’t actually live in Marsh Farm, but he was the man you went to with stolen goods.” Theft was the least of it. What a handful of local boys knew then, and everyone knows now, is that Grimes was also a modern-day Fagin; a serial abuser, groomer and rapist.

The majority of Grimes’s victims were boys aged between 10 and 14, already lured from broken homes into the peripheries of Luton’s underworld. From there, Grimes drew them into his vortex, promising gifts of money, food and a home that was safe. They were given alcohol and cannabis, and then crack and heroin — it was intended to make them weak; to numb them. Like Tate, these boys were trying to escape. Perhaps, for a moment, they thought they had.

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“Andrew and I were in year seven or eight, and it was mainly happening with the year 11 lot,” the friend says. Whether they knew it or not, they would have known at least one of Grimes’s victims; one schoolmate at Lea Manor who remembers Tate only recently told his family that he had been abused. Twenty years later, he is an alcoholic and suffers from severe depression.

Grimes was at his most predatory in the early 2000s, yet was only arrested in 2018. He was jailed in 2021, convicted of 36 offences against nine children: “class-based stereotypes and prejudice” had “deprived his survivors of justice for many years”, said a detective on the case. Their murky pasts — addictions, criminal records, spells in prison — made them unreliable. Would a jury believe them? And so the authorities looked at their bruises and looked away. Since Grimes’s conviction, at least 11 more victims have come forward. Few doubt that there will be more.

Today, Grimes still haunts Marsh Farm: in both the lives of his victims and the malign current that crackles through any defiled community. Yet when I ask residents if they remember him and his house of horrors, they often look confused: “Which one was he?” One man starts telling me about the paedophile living a few roads away. Another mentions a man who stares at children on buses.

“Women and children can’t walk through the woods at night because of all the stuff that goes on,” says a mother waiting to pick up her 10-year-old daughter from school. “A woman got attacked by two men near here a couple of months ago.” One of the teachers tells me she is hoping to leave the area: “I don’t want my child growing up around here.”

It’s not just that the estate is unsafe, she says, but that there is no community. “People are no longer organised together,” one resident tells me. Even in the Nineties, another explains, “if a woman was being attacked, every man would beat up that person”. Today, “the first thing someone would do would be to pull out their phone and film it”. And this sense of societal breakdown is now built into Marsh Farm. Five years ago, the only pub on the estate was replaced with more council housing; a small shopping centre and market were also knocked down, while almost every parent I speak to bemoans the absence of a community centre for their children.

Amid such fragmentation, criminal activity on Marsh Farm has become more atomised, too. Gangs still operate, but mainly fight with rivals on other estates. Occasionally, Marsh Farm is targeted: cars are still burnt and gang shootings still take place in broad daylight — the most recent in April this year. Unlike in the Nineties, though, the daily outbursts of violence have been replaced by the anomie of low-level crime; adults offering you drugs; children offering you drugs; someone who has just injected themselves with drugs. Their pain is self-inflicted and aimless. A world of rioting has become one of withdrawal.

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On Marsh Farm, this is the comedown that followed the rave. Little has been done to remedy it. In 2011, an old microwave factory on the estate was turned into a police station, but there is no front desk for people to report crime. Residents complain it is just for show, and almost everyone points out the miserly police presence on the streets. One shopkeeper across the road from the station tells me that, after his shop was robbed during the middle of the day, it took three days for the police to arrive. When I visit the terraced house where Tate grew up, and where his mother Eileen still lives, the road is empty, apart from a topless young man speeding a dirt bike up and down the cul-de-sac. “He’s always doing that,” a neighbour grumbles.

I later knock on Eileen’s door, though she doesn’t answer. Instead, her neighbour thrusts her head out of a window and demands that I leave. She tells me that Eileen doesn’t want to speak to journalists who “twist” the truth about her sons, so I post a note with my phone number on it. A few days later, a representative for Tate gets in touch to explain that he doesn’t want to comment.

Should we be surprised? Why challenge the gospel when it’s already been handed down? Andrew Tate escaped Marsh Farm; that’s all you need to know. His story is about how to escape — not those who can’t: those former schoolmates, the victims of a paedophile, or the five lost boys I find skulking around one of the estate’s parks. 

The youngest of them looked 13; at least one was high. When I ask them about Tate, they laugh uncontrollably, almost competitively. “Top Geeeeeee,” croaks one. “He’s just saying it how it is,” says another. “He’s just doing his own thing,” adds the croaker, before trying to sell me some drugs.

What does Tate’s gospel have to teach them? These lads spend their day staggering around Marsh Farm, looking for trouble and occasionally finding it. But that’s about it. Not a single Lamborghini or Ferrari drives past — and if one did? Like most of those boys before, they would gawp and croak, and then go back to doing nothing. There is no ambition. There is no hope. They are would-be rioters turned into zombies.

It is hard to imagine them being radicalised by Tate, let alone following him out of their estate. He is not their Pied Piper and they are not his rats — just boys paralysed by neglect. A lost generation, perhaps, but one that has no interest in being found. If Marsh Farm is where Tate’s gospel started, it is also where it ends.

Called AITA for short, this enormously popular sub-Reddit — which celebrates its 10th anniversary this summer and now has more than nine million subscribers — describes itself as a “catharsis for the frustrated moral philosopher in all of us” and a “platform for moral judgement”. Its stated purpose is “to assign blame”. Anonymous posters describe the tortuous ins and outs of disputes with loved ones, friends or co-workers, soliciting judgement from strangers. Readers gleefully weigh in with “YTA” (you’re the asshole), “NTA” (not the asshole), “NAH” (no assholes here), or “ESH” (everyone sucks here). Those browsing are encouraged to upvote responses they like. As is probably obvious, the site is based in the US.

Most of the conflicts described on AITA are no less ferocious for being deeply trivial. As I write this, the stories at the top of the page include a man who told his wife on their wedding day that her make-up looked weird; someone who refuses to eat any food his cousin makes for him because she once tricked him into eating cottage cheese; and a husband who unfolded all the clothes his wife had just folded for him, because she hadn’t rolled them the way he likes it. (At the moment, the dominant verdicts are YTA, YTA, and YTA respectively.)

The site is sometimes touted as a tool for “conflict resolution”, partly on the basis that those who receive a YTA judgement sometimes come back to explain how much they have supposedly learnt from the process. As a profile of the site from 2020 put it: “It’s a place where accountability actually exists… It’s also a place for growth.” It’s really not, though. It’s a place where people get to feel good about themselves by judging and scolding others. It’s great fun, but nobody here is going to get a Nobel Peace Prize.

As with the current vogue for podcasts and programmes about relationship counselling, one motive for browsing AITA is the enjoyable glimpses it provides into the fantastic dysfunction and pettiness of other people’s relationships. Where else could you read about a woman being passive-aggressive because her sister refused to get the “family tattoo”? Or about a man intentionally ruining his wife’s favourite Garth Brooks’s song because she didn’t like his preferred rap music (“I pointed out that the song That Summer is about an old woman taking advantage of a 19-year-old virgin”)? Or how about a woman telling her future sister-in-law that the she had inadvertently chosen a song about genocide as her first wedding dance (“Carrie was livid, screaming that the whole family would think she was a white supremacist”)?

A lot of the commentators seem intent on getting revenge for their own past emotional scars by castigating anyone who vaguely resembles a real-life foe of theirs. Whether the majority verdict on a post is YTA, NTA, or ESH, there is always an asshole around somewhere, upon which to project one’s situation and so get cathartically self-righteous. Harassed wives queue up to snark at hopeless-sounding husbands with just a little bit too much enthusiasm. Those who must secretly think of themselves as perpetual doormats respond to tales of freeloading friends with DIATRIBES IN CAPS. People with mummy issues take the side of daddy, and vice versa. “No Assholes Here” is everyone’s least favourite and most anti-climactic verdict.

And as for the motives of those offering up their own behaviour to scrutiny — for many of them, it’s apparently a desire for vindication rather than for self-improvement or reconciliation. (One imagines many a fight escalating rapidly with the fateful words “I asked Reddit who the asshole is, and they said it’s you!”) Skilful authors know how to craft innocent-sounding narratives putting their antagonists firmly in the wrong. The outcome is resounding validation from commentators, to whom the thought of unreliable or partial narration hardly seems to occur. Less adept and more hapless posters can seem almost masochistic in their inability to tell a sympathetic story about themselves, and get treated brutally as a result. (Ironically, these are probably the more honest and reliable contributors, though they receive no credit for it.)

Villainous stereotypes change from era to era. We used to have cads, bounders and knaves, and now we have assholes. But what exactly is the difference? Looking at AITA on its own, it’s tricky to pin down a systematic profile for the modern-day asshole. The term seems to be used there as a generalised synonym for wrongdoing. Males and females alike are dismissed with a YTA, and for no particularly distinctive reason that I can discern.

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Away from the site, though, it is hard to escape the conclusion that the stereotype of an asshole is a mostly male-associated one. These days, society always seems to be finding new ways for men, in particular, to be assholes — whether it’s by mansplaining, manspreading, staring at women on the tube, or bantering in an off-colour way. (Indeed, the founder of AITA, Marc Beaulac, has said he started the site as a way to work out whether he was mansplaining to some female coworkers.)

Philosopher Aaron James, author of the improbably titled book Assholes: A Theory, agrees: “assholes are mainly men”, he says, and are “overwhelmingly distributed among only one-half of the human population”. He defines an asshole, somewhat over-technically, as a person who “(1) allows himself to enjoy special advantages and does so systematically; (2) does this out of an entrenched sense of entitlement; and (3) is immunised by his sense of entitlement against the complaints of other people”. (This is not, we are told, the same as being “a jerk, a boor, a cad, a schmuck, or a mere ass” — though these too all sound distinctly male-coded).

James’s explanation of why more men than women are assholes, in his sense, is that our culture is “gendered” — by which he means that men but not women tend to be encouraged by society to act in overly entitled obnoxious ways. This is a familiar enough feminist complaint, aimed not at combatting seriously anti-social or violent male behaviour, but at policing relatively small-scale behavioural infractions, or at least perceived ones. The implication, often taken on board by cue-responsive liberal men like James, is that men could do better if they tried. I’m not so sure it’s that simple, though.

An alternative explanation is that — to put it bluntly — the whole thing is a bit of a set-up. The bar for what counts as pro-social, non-assholish behaviour is now placed at a point where more men are more likely to fail than women, for reasons they can’t particularly help. To take just a few examples: from one perspective, mansplaining is the favouring of knowledge-driven, fact-filled conversations, which many men tend to do in single-sex company anyway. Manspreading is accommodating the shape of the male pelvis, and avoiding crushing your testicles when sitting down. Staring at women on the tube is, at least sometimes, a harmless attempt to flirt with the opposite sex — which, moreover, we had better hope young men don’t stop doing altogether, if only to save our pensions. Acting “out of an entrenched sense of entitlement”, as James might put it, is — at least sometimes  — confidently owning and prioritising your own projects and decisions, defending them from criticism, and not collapsing in a gibbering wreck of self-flagellation and apologies, as per the present feminised ideal.

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In the 18th and 19th centuries, bounders and cads — that is, lower-class social climbers — could exist as comprehensible social types, only because the default moral ideal was the well-bred “gentleman”. With the welcome loss of the gentleman as an archetype also came the loss of cads and bounders as social possibilities for men. Such categories make no real sense in the modern world any more, unless they are characters being played on-screen by Hugh Grant.

Analogously, my suspicion is that, when “being an asshole” isn’t just being used as a generalised shorthand for irritating behaviour, it gets its particular male-associated flavour because the opposing moral ideal is feminine, understood in a particularly boring, passive, and self-abnegating way. The suffocating wave of “kindness” and “inclusivity” that has washed over many institutions in the past decade has left many ordinary male behaviours stranded on the shore.

If I’m right, then this is bad news for men. But actually, it’s bad news for everyone. Excessive passivity and self-abnegation are not particularly good for women either. There’s a sense in which it is totally healthy to think your personal projects and decisions are more important than other people’s — they are yours, after all. Thinking this way doesn’t automatically make you a solipsistic asshole. It would be a strange and self-defeating attitude to constantly treat everyone else’s interests as exactly equal to yours, and nobody should do it, male or female.

What counts as “entitled” behaviour, then, perhaps ought to be recalibrated back to something more obviously dysfunctional. Maybe we could even allow both men and women, if they so wish, to mansplain, manspread, and stare at each other on the Tube. In life if not on Reddit, sometimes it’s ok to aim for YTA.

In his review of a 1993 book on the history of masculinity by one E. Anthony Rotundo, Christopher Lasch writes that boys “challenged each other to spontaneous feats of daring and agility, acted out stories of heroic adventure and collaborated in the enforcement of an informal code of honour that stressed courage, loyalty and stoic endurance of pain”.

Such patterns of self-directed activity persisted into young adulthood in informal associations such as debate societies. “The clash of wits between friends recalled the physical combat of loyal playfellows in boyhood… mixing affection with attack.” Such associations could serve as a substitute for college. “We educated each other by criticising and laughing at each other,” one informant recalled.

But by the end of the 19th century, such autonomous organisations of young men were fading away. “Education was increasingly confined to the classroom, agonistic rivalry to the playing field. Formal pedagogy replaced spontaneous play and self-culture.”

Lasch continues: “The expansion of extracurricular activities, at every level of the school system, reflected the expansion of pedagogical authority over young people formerly left to their own devices. The dead hand of the educator reached deep into childhood, redesigning life as a “learning experience”.

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This was part of a larger pattern in which previously unsupervised domains of life were subject to systematic study and control. The domains of women were no less subject to this process. It was an era that saw the birth of home economics, sexology, the academic study of childhood development, social work, and professionalised training in the new sciences of pedagogy. The intimate and the spontaneous became subject to therapeutic mediation in the service of various social goods.

If the “life-world” means the background patterns of life that are taken for granted, within which one can dwell unmolested, here was a new determination to leave nothing taken for granted, nothing unstudied. What this meant in practice was the colonisation of the life-world by organised expertise, corresponding to institutional money and power.

Life under these conditions feels a bit off — like the opposite of vitality. One’s own powers of making sense of the world are somehow disqualified. These are powers that develop naturally through action in the world. As the legitimacy and confidence of common sense is eroded, the field of meaningful action that is open to an individual seems also to shrink. Action is reduced to making choices from a menu of presented options, as in shopping, as opposed to a generative activity by which some mental conception of one’s own is brought forward into the shared world. The shared world is already saturated. It is fully known and mastered; your task is merely to get yourself properly aligned to it.

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Some of us chafe against this, and I believe this is the subterranean source of an ornery political energy that we call populism. Populism often states its opposition to power in epistemic terms, as sceptical hostility to experts. What gets lost in all the screeching is that the basic impulse at work here is a positive one.

Lasch writes that the new patterns of administered life at the turn of the century were experienced by many as “subjection to routines that drained the joy out of work and play and wrapped everything in a smothering self-consciousness”.

Taking issue with the interpretation offered by Rotundo, Lasch wrote: “Surely it was this feeling of suffocation, much more than the need to prove something about masculinity, that explains the idealisation of the strenuous life at the turn of the century: the attraction of imperialism and war, the longing for wide open spaces, the new interest in the primitive and exotic, the nostalgia for simplicity and lost innocence.”

Those restless adventurers of Teddy Roosevelt’s time had no idea how far the colonisation of the lifeworld had yet to progress. With Covid, we acquiesced to an extraordinary extension of expert-like supervision into every domain of life.

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But I think it would be a mistake to focus only on such episodes of heavy-handedness. In his book, Little Platoons, Matt Feeney details the workings of institutions that cluster around the family and feed off it, turning our most intimate loyalties to bureaucratic purposes while reshaping parents and children alike into compliant drones. To take one example, the college admissions process in America has extended its poisonous reach deep into childhood (apparently it starts with getting into the right pre-school) for the upper-middle class, requiring children and parents to collaborate in the crafting of a particular kind of self — one that will appeal to admission officers.

“Holistic admissions” downplay grades and test scores to make room for intangibles, so it is the whole person that is laid bare to the scrutiny of bureaucrats steeped in the moral vapours of their own professional formation. They sift through stacks of applications seeking people who have demonstrated… what, exactly? To begin with, a willingness to shape themselves to send whatever signals are wanted by those with power over them. To know what is wanted takes a certain intelligence. At stake is the question of whether Johnny will be able to afford his own house one day. Thus is the professional managerial class (PMC) formed into a posture of complaisance.

But nobody likes to think of himself as a cipher. The young man’s (or woman’s) complaisance is overlaid with a compensating view of himself, made available to him by the simple fact of his having passed the gatekeeping: he adopts an identity centred on his smartness or knowledgeableness. The content of the knowledge that marks one as part of the PMC consists of the organised expertise through which money and power extend their dominion. They do so by seeking out those remaining pockets of the lifeworld where unselfconscious, vernacular practices may persist. Such un-mined pockets offer opportunity for further systemisation and profit — if they can be brought into the fold of expert-like supervision. “There’s an app for that.”

In certain red-pillish-tending pockets of the PMC, there seems to be a growing awareness of and unease with their role as agents of this push. The shakiness of various systems of organised expertise, and the enforced character of the “consensus” that they are used to anchor, has grown more apparent as the system flails against populist challenge. This can lead to nagging questions of a cui bono nature, which may reflect on the young man’s identity as a “knowledge worker” (to use a term from a more innocent time when these ideological structures were more secure). If we may put this in the vernacular: the young man may begin to feel that his bullshit job is not only parasitical on the real economy, it is part of a system of social control that is basically anti-human. In retrospect, the long process of sitting in school (against his own nature), forming himself into something pleasing to those college admissions officers, may take on a different look: it was a process of paying for the privilege of making himself an instrument of power. This is serious alienation.

Lasch rebuked Rotundo for injecting the question of gender into his discussion of vitalism, which Lasch insisted was a unisex, human response to the over-administration of every aspect of life. “The rationalisation of daily life had similarly depressing effects on women, even though it was often held up as the means of their emancipation from domestic drudgery.” (For a compelling brain-centred account of why this emancipation from household labour can induce depression, see the psychologist Kelly Lambert’s work on “effort-driven rewards”.)

The imperial presumptions of moral-therapeutic supervision are more advanced today than they were in Roosevelt’s time, and Lasch is surely right that you don’t need to look on the contemporary landscape with a hyper-vigilant concern for emasculation to see that the human spirit is in danger of being smothered to death, for men and women both.

But in fact, the therapeutic para-state is today staffed disproportionately by women and routinely addresses its expectations to us in gendered terms, sometimes casting dissent from the programme as an expression of toxic masculinity. So it is to be expected that such dissent will likewise make the legitimacy of the male a thematic concern. To paraphrase Trotsky, you may not be interested in a sexual holy war, but the sexual holy war is interested in you.

Daily life is shot through with an ambient pedagogical project that works to create the modern subject, a creature who internalises the social discipline required by the modern state. In one of his choicest formulations, Michel Foucault referred to “the minor civil servants of moral orthopaedics”. They are found in corporate HR, the Office of Student Life in universities, mandatory “Relationships and Sexual Health Education” in schools, lifestyle magazines and countless other sites of adjustment. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 71% of human resources managers are women. In the University of California system, to take one example, 70% of non-academic staff are women, and in American universities generally, the ratio of administrators to faculty has nearly doubled since 1990. Sixty-seven percent of those who hold a journalism degree are women. In psychology, female graduate students outnumber males by about three to one, and have done so for more than a decade. Seventy-seven percent of sociology majors are women, and women have received about two-thirds of all masters degrees since the early Eighties. If the norm-setting, psyche-tending, world-describing, and narrative-generating professions are staffed predominantly by women, does anything follow from this fact?

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Why Progress isn't feminist

By Mary Harrington

It does if you grant that there are such things as male norms and female norms, as social psychology indicates there are, and if you further grant that this difference must show up in the flavour of institutional life. Jonathan Haidt says that among women you get “a different kind of conflict. There is a greater emphasis on what someone said which hurt someone else, even if unintentionally. There is a greater tendency to respond to an offence by mobilising social resources to ostracise the alleged offender.” This concern with offence, which tends to maintain social cohesion, also tends to come detached from the question whether the hurtful thing said was true or not.

This introduces an element of arbitrariness, an invitation to caprice. Notice that in this dynamic, a “hurt” may be attributed, a victim identified, as an act of aggression against the putative offender. The great majority of women do not seek power within an institution under the banner of woke activism. But most of those who do seek power in this way are women, Richard Hanania observes. More broadly, due to important asymmetries between male and female modes of conflict, “women’s tears win in the marketplace of ideas”. Such winning often results in the further extension of bureaucratic supervision into realms where harms might be found.

I believe one reason the feminine mode of competition has become so prominent in institutions is that it is in harmony with our overarching political frame. Earlier I referred to a particular kind of “modern subject” that is required by the modern state. Who is this character? We get some insight from a recent article by the political theorist Mark Shiffman. He offers a re-interpretation of the “state of nature” myths that ground the liberal doctrine of rights, turning its basic logic upside down. In doing so, he casts a clarifying light on the present: “It is not the case that because [by nature] we have rights to protect we are potential victims of their violation. Rather, the myths cast human beings in the position of victims and deploy the rhetoric of rights to capture this sense of violation in a way that simultaneously points to what we ought to hope for from the modern state…. Liberalism is premised from its mythic beginnings upon victimhood.”

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The Taliban's lessons in masculinity

By Mary Harrington

If I may extrapolate from Shiffman’s argument: unless you can identify with some “vulnerable population”, you are not a full citizen. (Allyship would seem to express an anxious recognition of this fact.) That is, you are not the type of subject upon whom the authority of the state rests. Such is the underlying logic of Leviathan, fully realised only with the advent of the civil rights regime of protected classes. This logic has lately achieved a kind of totality in its reach, precisely because it has devolved from the state proper. It is expressed in the vigilance in detecting harm that holds sway in the public and private bureaucracies that make up a kind of sprawling para-state. These take on the task of cultivating and managing the “identities” that serve as markers of oppression in designated client groups, requiring moral orthopaedics for all.

Today’s Leviathan conceives its subjects as fragile beings afloat in a field of incipient traumas. Such a governing entity will look with suspicion on the unsupervised play of boys who “challenged each other to spontaneous feats of daring and agility, acted out stories of heroic adventure and collaborated in the enforcement of an informal code of honour that stressed courage, loyalty and stoic endurance of pain”.

That is not at all what is wanted.

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The Conservative case for revolution

By Mary Harrington

What is at stake here is the conditions for the possibility of achieving adulthood, for men and women both. The process of development from childhood to adulthood requires departure from the safety of parental protection and affirmation, through confrontation with hard reality. It is through such confrontation that a person escapes the solipsism of unearned self-esteem, enters the world of objective standards, and begins to develop competence in some field of endeavour.

If it is to be an adequate response to the forces of infantilisation, today’s vitalism will have to go beyond the boyish rebellion of the online Right and articulate a positive picture of what it means to be an adult. Even, dare we say, what it means to be a man.

Whatever else it means, being a responsible man today would seem to involve a tricky double task: to be respectful and protective of women in private, and to confidently disregard women’s tears in public. This would be made easier if women — the silent majority of them who probably value self-reliance — did likewise, forming an alliance with men against a metastasising force of moral orthopaedics that diminishes us all.