By Michael Andor Brodeur

Andrew Tate on the “Anything Goes with James English” Podcast in 2021. Photo credit: Anything Goes with James English

Editor’s Note: It was the undoing of thirteen-year-old Jamie in the British Netflix crime miniseries Adolescence. Those incest brothers in The White Lotus’s third season gulped every drop of it in smoothies. And the MAGA party is pushing it as the baseline standard of what a “real man” is. It’s toxic masculinity, and a plethora of roided hucksters is hustling it on the manosphere. Culture critic and author Michael Andor Brodeur more aptly calls it broken masculinity. Why does this stuff work on very-online men young and old enough to know better? Brodeur asks this question in the following passage from Swole: The Making of Men and the Meaning of Muscle.

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These days there’s a guru waiting around every corner for young men to come clicking. They cover fitness, diet and nutrition, dating, politics, philosophy (however rudimentary), and, their favorite topic, masculinity—its dire state, its necessary preservation, its unlockable secrets, its bestowal of dominion. The difference between the manfluencers of old and today’s glut is that, because white heterosexual men now perceive themselves as having (so generously!) ceded physical, financial, professional, and cultural ground to women, people of color, and LGBTQ folks (i.e., everyone else), they’re doubling down on their occupation of virtual space. Unlike any other comparable Internet niche or eddy, the manosphere carries itself like it owns the place.

Manfluencers have ushered in a new era of rules, details, and suffocating boundaries of what “real men” are supposed to do, how they’re supposed to behave, what and who they are supposed to prioritize—and they’re as arbitrary and stringent as the finest and fanciest dining etiquette. Salad is carcinogenic. Straws are feminine. Washing your ass is gay. Manfluencers are selling a pinkies-out approach to perfecting the illusion of manhood.

Young men are especially vulnerable to these messages. Born into the chaotic marketplace of the Internet, staggered by its possibilities for self-definition and often opting for the path of least resistance, young men flock to their gurus like bugs to the indifferent glow of a zapper.

On his wildly popular podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience—which has accrued over two thousand episodes since launching in 2009—Rogan, the former Fear Factor host and sometime UFC commentator, has trafficked in anti-vaccination conspiracies, blurry anti-Semitic rhetoric, and heavy skepticism toward the trans community and virtually any other issue in which he’s uninvolved and uninformed but interested in “just asking questions” about. Some of Rogan’s more egregiously error-riddled ruminations find quick correction in his often smartly selected roster of guests, but most of his extemporaneous observations go unchallenged, quietly calling into question the true efficacy of the nootropic “Alpha-Brain” supplement he regularly hucks. In a January 2021 podcast, he cited an “amazing point” by British author Douglas Murray “about civilizations collapsing—and that when they start collapsing they become obsessed with gender, and he was saying that you could trace it back to the ancient Romans, the Greeks.”

Never mind which exact entire era of antiquity he’s referring to here, and never mind that the fifty-five-year-old Rogan’s own admitted use of testosterone and human growth hormone suggests more than a passing concern of his own with his personal gender expression.

Rogan, who routinely performs a public struggle with the navigation of pronouns and other considerations of gender identity, still manages to summon rambling defenses against the term “toxic masculinity”—a descriptor he inexplicably expands to mean “anything men have ever done.”

“That’s a hilarious expression,” Rogan says in one clip circulating around TikTok. “Because you need to thank ‘toxic masculinity’ for all the bridges all the fuckin’ . . . all the jets, all the rockets. Toxic masculinity? You break down all the things that men have invented, and that all these ‘toxic’ men have prevented you from being murdered, war and protected the country, and all the different things that you could attribute to ‘toxic masculinity’? Most of it is positive.”

(A side note on the topic of toxic masculinity: I’ve never understood why it was considered an effective deterrent to label masculinity gone awry as “toxic.” Branding corrosive ideas of masculinity as “toxic” is akin to pouring them into a gray plastic bodywash bottle—it makes them more appealing to men, not less. Among men, “toxic” has now become a byword for “badass.” I propose the more straightforward “broken masculinity” as a potential replacement primarily because it accurately describes what we’re dealing with—a model of masculinity that’s completely broken—but also because it’s less likely that men will walk around puffing their chests and declaring themselves “broken.”)

Rogan’s attempt at a point is an echo of a popular diatribe from recently decertified psychologist and ubiquitous manosphere fashion plate Jordan Peterson, who first tapped into the wild spirits of his expansive readership of disaffected men by giving them 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos—a seemingly well-intentioned and not a bit ironic rulebook that includes such guidance as “Stand up straight with your shoulders back” (a metaphor for the acceptance of “the terrible responsibility of life”); “Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world” (a patently ridiculous request to make of anyone contending against actual injustice); “Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them” (to which no other response is possible but “OK, Boomer”); and “Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t”—actual sage advice that Peterson assiduously avoids taking himself. This is especially clear in his continued ascent as one of North America’s leading (or at least most audible) anti-trans voices.

In a 2022 episode of his podcast dispatched in clipped form to TikTok, an earbudded and fastidiously outfitted Peterson winces with confusion when confronted with the imaginary prospect of freestyling social interaction with a hypothetical nonbinary person, and struggles aloud. “If I don’t know whether you’re male or female,” he crows in with ear-curling disdain, “what the hell should I do with you? The simplest thing for me to do is go find someone else who is a hell of a lot less trouble. Who is willing to abide by the social norms enough so that they don’t present a mass of indeterminate confusion on immediate confrontation.”

The grammar strategy here is interesting—the installation of the other as the direct object, always the recipient of the action. Not How do you prefer to be addressed? (the only question trans and nonbinary folks would like to be asked) but What should I do with you? Peterson’s solution does not follow his edict to “assume the person he is listening to knows something he doesn’t,” because he has no interest in listening—only responding.

The state of modern masculinity, to Peterson, is a human catastrophe and a financial jackpot, threatened at all times and from all sides by the tidal advances of inclusive language, politically correct rhetoric, and the ostensible Trojan horse of multiculturalism, which contains . . . I’m not sure what, exactly, apart from people of other cultures. The threat is real, and for Peterson, highly lucrative. (12 Rules has sold well over five million copies.)

In one highly clicked clip, a glassy-eyed Peterson, asked by an interviewer for a 2019 Dutch documentary if it’s “OK to be a man,” struggles against tears and embarks on a Trumpian slideshow of familiar man tropes: “It’s not ‘OK’! It’s necessary!” he admonishes his questioner. “What the hell are we going to do without men? You look around the city here you see all these buildings go up. These men, they’re doing impossible things. They’re under the streets, working on the sewers. They’re up on the power lines in the storms and the rain. They’re keeping this impossible infrastructure functioning, and often literally. And the gratitude for that is solely lacking, especially among the people who should be most grateful.”

Peterson’s skill with cultivating grievance, refining it to what seems like a point is one of his greatest skills as a manfluencer, matched only by his ability to forget that people of all genders perform each of the presumably man-specific occupations he lists.

The sense of perpetual unfairness that he grooms into young men’s understanding of their own place in the world is couched in a fraudulent nostalgia for a functioning but somehow abandoned order. He peddles an assurance of righteousness—that men’s suffering isn’t for nothing, that it’s actually all part of the master plan of manhood, an essential cycle of masculine pain. Sorry, he suggests, we don’t make the rules. (Except when we do, which is always.)

Peterson is correct when he asserts that the important and necessary role that men play in the world is not “toxic masculinity” (“that appalling phrase,” he hisses). But the reality is that men, instructed to stunt each other’s emotional growth, are routinely deprived of their ability to experience these roles as fully realized humans. Men learn to alienate themselves from their own feelings and turn their successes into subsets of vengeance.

Meanwhile, alpha charlatans like Peterson and Rogan, when taken together (as they often are), form a kind of brains-and-brawn team, chewing on current events with a numbing combination of obtuseness and obfuscation (Peterson) or blunted credulity (Rogan). Peterson, in ridiculous custom suits that looked pulled from the closet of a shelved Batman villain, plays the role in young men’s minds of the firebrand public intellectual. Rogan, with his stoner chuckle, big cigars, and straining performance T’s, represents the masculine urge to reduce complicated topics to insultingly simple terms, to deny reality in service of escaping “the matrix,” to reserve their curiosity for aliens and ayahuasca and their cynicism for anyone who hasn’t taken the “red pill.”

“Red pill” masculinity is at the heart of many a manfluencer’s core shtick. The term, a reference to the “red pill” in the 1999 sci-fi film The Matrix, denotes a man’s moment of revelation in which classic misogynist tropes about the place of women in society and the home are understood to be correct after all. The red-pilled reassert traditional masculine roles and almost cartoonishly celebrate patriarchal values, in terms so explicit as to make the whole thing seem almost like unwitting satire. (That so many red-pilled young men find unironic heroes in the fictional antiheroes of the past quarter century—from American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman to Fight Club’s Tyler Durden to The Sopranos’ Tony Soprano—lends credence to this theory.)

Perhaps the primary pharmacist in the red pill masculinity movement is former professional kickboxer and self-described “Top G” Andrew Tate—who at the time of writing is sitting in a Romanian jail cell on charges of organized crime, human trafficking, and rape. Tate rose to prominence in the manosphere largely on the back of his “Hustlers University,” a mailorder program for entrepreneurs that attracted over 100,000 subscribers at $49.99/month.

I have a whole stack of representative Andrew Tate quotes, but I only have room for him to park one Bugatti’s worth of his bullshit, so we’re going with this one: “When you’re a G”—a gangster—“you’re just accidentally like pimping hoes,” Tate said in one widely circulated clip. “Like, you go somewhere, there’s some bitch. She’s like ‘Hi,’ you’re like ‘Yeah, hi, I’m the man.’ Oops, you fuck her. Oops, now she’s in love with you and shit. The real G’s know what I’m saying. Like, you’re pimpin’ bitches, and you don’t even want to. When you’re pimpin’ bitches like me, it’s a fulltime job.”

Tate, whose lean body reflects his semi-successful kickboxing career but whose blank eyes betray an unknowable emptiness, has won thousands of impressionable acolytes over to his rank brand of unabashed dick-stroking rhetoric.

“You got convinced that being a strong man is toxic,” manfluencer and full-time debate-bro Sneako says to one of his millions of young male followers. “That being a natural man, acting on your basic organic desires is ‘problematic.’ You got programmed. That’s why your nails are painted. That’s why you’re 6’3”, 230 lbs. but saying [in a mocking voice] I think platforming these people is bad! A man shouldn’t sound like that. Why do you talk like that? What happened to you?”

It’s the kind of blank-eyed soliloquy that gently reminds you that, while recording, these phones turn into little mirrors.

On just a single casual scroll/stroll through the manosphere, I was able to pluck this bouquet of beauties grown in the wild: “Every man has a warrior inside of him; it must be accessed through continual delayed gratification.” “Do not give your strength unto women for those who ruin kings,” which is actually Proverbs 31:3. “A woman having an Instagram is 100% cheating.” “Chivalry is dead and women killed it.” “Modern women like to be cheated on.”

Another tried and true trope on TikTok is the “How did men go from This to This?” video, in which the first “This” is represented by grainy photos of troops in the trenches of World War II or furrow-faced cowboys squinting indifferently from a momentary pause in their grueling daily ranchwork, and the second “This” is, like, Harry Styles in a borrowed floral gown posing in a meadow or something. This simple juxtaposition makes an even simpler justification for rusty old arguments that “real masculinity” is facing (yawn) another existential crisis.

Why does this stuff work on men? For worse and for worse, the hole in men’s souls doubles as a gap in the market. And while the business of selling men their own manhood is as old as time itself, the current climate of hyper-individualism has driven American men into an uncanny variation on isolation—a population of loners created in each other’s image.

Manfluencers reinforce suspicions men have about themselves, hunches offered to them by their dads and older brothers and uncles and coaches and the men they see in public. They capitalize on men’s low self-esteem in order to sell them heroic comebacks acquired through workout programs, intermittent fasting, and mental focus (“grindset”). Manfluencers tell men they are unlovable, that they are only valued when they are of use to others, that their status is equivalent to their “body count” (number of sexual partners). Because men derive so much of their self-worth from external validation from other men, they eagerly glom on to preconstructed value systems that keep their power in place, while still making their success seem against the odds.

With its supplements and sales pitches, hucksters and gurus, and suffocating conformity dressed up as individual discovery, manosphere masculinity is, at best, a multilevel marketing scheme, and at worst, a form of crypto. Those men it lures invest everything into it. Their idealized notion of what makes a “high value man”—financially independent, physically fit, sexually successful—rests upon the mastery of an unstable infrastructure built upon a foundation of insecurity. Women are rated like commodities, and the chemistry of attraction is externalized as a system of market factors rather than a personal portfolio of desires. “Game” is essentially a transposition of sexual politics into the language and dynamics of economics. Guys trade tips and tricks to optimize their SMV (Sexual Market Value), a thing I swear I did not just make up. One YouTube video calculates SMV as a factor of height, facial features, body type, IQ, location, and several other factors—all condensed to a convenient something-point-something metric.

But masculinity as it is currently marketed to men—as a commodity, a program, a regimen of behaviors and attitudes, a pricey myth—runs counter to the true nature of the stuff, which can be inexpensively expressed through confidence, compassion, strength, and through the values we inherit from and bestow to one another. Indeed, the way each man defines our own masculinity may be the only truly individual thing about us—which sounds like an unbelievable idea.

About the Author 

Michael Andor Brodeur has been the classical music critic at the Washington Post since 2020. Previously, he held editorial and staff-writer positions at the Boston Globe and Boston’s Weekly Dig. His essays, humor, and criticism have also appeared in Nylon, Thrillist, Entrepreneur, Medium, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and other publications. He has also released five music albums under different monikers, most recently writing and performing electronic music under the name New Dad.