Andrew Tate, a social media influencer and the so-called “king of toxic masculinity,” kicked off 2023 by getting arrested in Romania for allegations of human trafficking, immediately after getting into an online tussle with Greta Thunberg over car emissions (and getting bodied by Thunberg). While Tate himself is an interesting microcosm of Internet culture, what I personally find more interesting is the associated discussions surrounding the manosphere, and left-wing masculinity, or lack thereof.
I’ve long believed that Hillary Clinton losing the 2016 presidential election catalyzed the feminist regression we’re currently in for a number of reasons, and for one thing, I just don’t believe it’s coincidental that all these alt-right influencer types have gained so much prominence in the last 6 years. I don’t know if I’m the right person to unpack this, but what I do know is that while the right-wing is obsessed with masculinity to the point of hilarity, it’s equally true that the left-wing media apparatus and associated groups seem genuinely daunted by the very idea of masculinity.
It’s just very obvious to me that the general “left” finds traditional masculinity to be actively frightening if not an outright anathema. I’ve talked about it before in different contexts (I enter at about 25 minutes in) but the issue is manifold. For one thing, stereotypically masculine activities like sports and fitness are often maligned in left-of-center circles due in part to the loudest voices in the left-wing commentariat finding those entities and the entire concept of American masculinity alienating, sometimes justifiably so. Extrapolating from my own experiences of being made fun of in school, if I was made fun of for not being athletic as a kid or having artistic, literary, and otherwise “sissy” interests, when I was an adult, I would do my utmost to create a power structure where the entities I viewed as oppressing me weren’t heavily weighted in popularity and the game of life, so to speak.
Moreover, some of the most historically powerful patriarchal institutions, the police, the military, and religious organizations, while still extremely popular on a national level, are somewhat less popular among young millennials and Gen-Z, at least in their traditional forms, and often justifiably so.
This picture of Kamala Harris with a group of young soldiers garnered significant traction on Twitter, with many people rightly dunking on the original tweet since yes, it’s a very dumb tweet. A lot of people are unaware that the United States military is extremely racially and socioeconomically diverse, not least since it’s also a major means of class mobility, but I think people are missing is that for many right-wingers, their imago of the military and its Commander-in-Chief (and his Vice-President) is polar opposite to this photograph, and they’re reacting violently to what they perceive as a challenge to their world order.
As Daniel Cox details in his newsletter, “American Storylines,” young people are becoming less ostensibly religious in that they go to church (and temples, mosques, and synagogues) much less frequently than in previous generations, but I’d also argue that people are still looking for a religious order and something to affiliate with even without a devout belief in God, which is also how we get crazed celebrity fandoms (@ Swifties). I believe that since an increasing number of young people aren’t developing their moral compasses and formulating their definitions of right and wrong based on religious dictates, they turn to public figures like Andrew Tate or Joe Rogan or like, weird trads on TikTok who wear a lot of milk-maid outfits and/or get their buccal fat removed to tell them how to be the ideal man or woman in our world.
One point that’s often forgotten when talking about a deluge of male role models among the current group of young men is the Obama Factor: millennials grew up with Barack Obama as a role model. He was cool, young, and traditionally masculine while also being upstanding and respectable and a devoted husband and father, and Gen-Z doesn’t really have that figure. Obviously, there’s Joe Biden, who’s very traditionally masculine without the toxic elements, but Biden is old, and while I personally think Biden is cool and I’d love to get ice cream with him (since he doesn’t drink), many people of my generational cohort disagree. I think this lack of dominant male figure in the zeitgeist sort of created a vacuum where much more toxic influences like Tate and Joe Rogan and their ilk could attain dominance.
That said, while I agree that many young people are uniquely isolated and men might face unique problems that some women don’t face, I reject the notion that men as a collective are uniquely impacted or oppressed by contemporary society at large in a way that women as a collective are not, and I resoundingly reject that this sentiment is women’s fault as a group.
Don’t get me wrong: individual women can and do deeply wrong individual men, and gender essentialism, just like all forms of standpoint theory, is total and complete bullshit. But, in this tweet for instance as well as the user’s other tweets on the topic of masculinity and dating, who is the “we” in the “We need to be more compassionate to them?” Is it we as a collective and we as a society or is it directed at women? I personally feel like it’s the latter, and I reject that notion.
I personally have no idea what it’s like to feel completely alienated from my peers, to not be able to get a date or have sex with someone I find attractive when I feel like it, but that isn’t a universal experience for all women. For every man who struggles with romance or achieving social standards of attractiveness and adhering to stereotypical masculinity, there are many women struggling with corresponding if not identical issues, and unlike men, their struggles are often invisible because well, to adopt an old adage, men hurt out and women hurt in. Women are socially conditioned to suffer in silence, and become the butt of jokes when they are deemed to old/fat/unsexy to find love, but God forbid they ever complain about it publicly. I’ve honestly seen more vitriol and disdain directed at women who read romance novels, which are fictional words on a page, than at men who consume pornography, which is a real-life industry rife with rampant exploitation and violence against women.
The reality is that yes, there should be healthy models for masculinity on the Left so young boys don’t fall down the rabbit hole, but I don’t think it’s the responsibility of women to prevent this phenomenon when they’re often the first victims of men who are radicalized in this way, and especially when the people antagonizing these boys and dragging them down the rabbit hole are almost all men. To the overwhelming detriment of our society writ large, the unfortunate reality is that masculinity and violence enacted unto others, namely women and children, have become strongly correlated. That is why this thread by Twitch streamer Vaush really frustrated me.
Are the leftists who are okay with the popularity of incel ideas because it confirms their pre-existing biases against men in the room with us right now? What pre-existing biases is Vaush here referring to? The fact that while the racial demographics of school shooters in the United States roughly correspond to the racial demographics of the country at large, shooters are about 98% male? The fact that 1-in-4 women are sexually assaulted? Those aren’t biases I’ve haphazardly constructed in my feeble female brain, they’re objective realities. Nobody with any sense is saying that little 10-year-old boys who come across an Andrew Tate video are responsible for all the world’s evil, but I find it really grating when men talk about “preexisting biases against men” when the biases in question are like, “Men as a group are more violent than women as a group.”
If you don’t believe me, look at what President Obama and the Boss himself, Bruce Springsteen had to say about the development of contemporary masculinity (and for an actual healthy example of masculinity, check out their podcast, Renegades and its companion book):
I think it’s worth discussing how the Left can nurture boys to grow into men who are worthy of emulating but as Springsteen notes, it’s impossible to extricate masculinity from violence, and the victims of that violence are first and foremost, women and children. As someone pointed out on Twitter, misogyny and conservatism are often appealing to young and impressionable boys and men because those things benefit them in material and philosophical ways, and the Left, which is by definition focused on the liberation of marginalized groups, including women, can’t compete with that.
So what’s the solution? Personally, I think that we on the left should actively work on redefinining American masculinity for a new generation, because if we don’t, the right-wing will co-opt masculinity, and they’ll unceremoniously make things worse for everybody that isn’t a straight, white man. But also, we as a collective need to be more open to condemning toxicity and misogyny, as well as logistical inconsistencies and fallacies, within our own ranks, even if the accusations come from people we deem cringe and the perpetrators are particularly esteemed in left-liberal circles.
I don’t know if this is a satisfying or resounding conclusion, but it’s all I have for you.
"Personally, I think that we on the left should actively work on redefinining American masculinity for a new generation, because if we don’t, the right-wing will co-opt masculinity, and they’ll unceremoniously make things worse for everybody that isn’t a straight, white man."
--- It will make it worse for men in general because women will simply refuse to have anything to do with them. Already Gen Z women are saying no to dating and sex. Why do you think conservatives are whining about "the male loneliness epidemic"? And "the sexless generation"? Which is a funny twist considering that for decades prior we had to hear conservatives whine about "out of wedlock birth rate" and "teen pregnancies". Now that that teen pregnancies and out of wedlock birth rates are going steadily down, down, down, you would think they would be happy that unmarried young people are not having as much sex as they used to and when they do, are practicing safe sex. But no, somehow it's now a national crisis.
So let them keep passing their backwards draconian laws. They will witness massive population decline as a result.
You make some strong points, and this is a needed long-form contribution to the Twitter masculinity discourse, which can at times get exhausting. But I feel like you actually agree with Sid here, who in my reading at least argues that the Left, not women specifically, need to advocate for new forms of mainstreamed masculinity rather than accepting the right-wing framing.