Last month, Mark Zuckerberg sat down with Joe Rogan, the king of the podcasters, and delivered a bold message: American business culture needed to regrow its manhood.
“The corporate world is pretty culturally neutered,” said Mr. Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta. “A culture that celebrates the aggression a bit more has its own merits.”
“Masculine energy, I think, is good,” he added.
In one sense, this was an astonishing statement. Mr. Zuckerberg — a man who has been caricatured as an liberal robot for much of his career, and who empowered Sheryl Sandberg, the country’s foremost advocate of corporate feminism, to run the day-to-day operations of his company for more than a decade — was proclaiming that his world had overcorrected toward the female.
But it was also a long time coming. For years, a masculinist current in American culture and politics has been rising, largely in digital spaces outside traditional media and entertainment. Now, it has flooded the banks of the mainstream.
Mr. Zuckerberg offered his paean to the male virtues just days before Donald J. Trump returned to the White House, where many of his supporters expect him to embody a similar energy. During his presidential campaign, Mr. Trump barnstormed through a series of podcasts with large audiences that skew heavily male — among them “The Joe Rogan Experience,” “Impaulsive” and “This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von” — in an effort to court politically disengaged young men.
The hosts of these, and similar, podcasts often appear on one another’s shows in a way that can lend the impression of a seamless ideology. The truth is more complicated. Like Mr. Trump’s own coalition, this world contains libertarians and authoritarians, empiricists and mystics, racial diversity and abject racists, jocks and nerds, hedonists and moralists. It has its themes — among them, self-improvement, self-control and independence of thought — but more than any one idea, it celebrates a kind of swaggering, often vulgar male speech, defined in opposition to mainstream discourse.
Since the election, many political observers have been grasping for language to talk about not just these podcasters but the resurgent masculine formation that they give voice to. “Manosphere” has become the most common shorthand. A term with hazy origins, it has come to refer to a wide range of media content aimed at men. At one end, it incorporates explicitly misogynistic influencers like Andrew Tate, who has said that women shouldn’t vote and that they bear responsibility for their own sexual assault. At the other, there is the YouTube channel of the self-improvement influencer and neuroscientist Andrew Huberman, who doles out advice on sleep hygiene.
This media content includes the wildly popular, the bafflingly insular, and everything in between, from Mr. Rogan’s most popular episodes, which reach tens of millions of listeners, to niche subreddits about achieving more masculine facial features.
The “manosphere” can seem, or be made to seem, as harmless as a hobby and as dangerous as a gun; as obscure as a trivial subculture and as encompassing as American manhood itself.
And it is more than just an array of websites, podcasts, social networks, message boards, group chats. It’s also a brash, boys-will-be-boys sensibility that can be felt far beyond its online proponents. It’s hard to imagine, for example, that Pete Hegseth, the newly sworn-in defense secretary, would have been asked how many push-ups he can do during his confirmation hearing without this outlook shading into not just the lives of ordinary men, but the halls of power.
Not long ago, the term “manosphere” referred only to the most extreme fringe of online communities. In these spaces, frequently referred to as “dark corners of the internet,” lurked “incels,” short for “involuntary celibates,” who believe they cannot find sexual partners and blame women for that fact; “PUAs,” or pickup artists, who trade strategies for manipulating women into sleeping with them; and members of the men’s rights movement, who believe that men are oppressed by women.
Clearly, no longer. The quasi-anthropological ring of the term “manosphere,” as if men’s media were a dangerous new field of scientific inquiry to section off and study in isolation, seems at odds with just how widespread this culture has become. How can one speak of a separate men’s sphere when its avatars have arrived at the focal point of the national gaze?
At Mr. Trump’s inauguration, guests included the mixed martial arts fighter Conor McGregor; the Ultimate Fighting Championship chief executive Dana White; the boxer and influencer Jake Paul and his brother Logan, a wrestler and influencer. Seated close to the president, with his fellow billionaires including Mr. Zuckerberg, was Elon Musk, whose social media platform X has become a homepage for this reinvigorated masculinism. These were luminaries at the most important ceremony in American politics, not men of the margins.
And consider the tableaux in D.C. from a longer view. A group of macho men gathered to witness the ascent of their leader: This is a scene that has been repeated endlessly in the span of recorded human history, sung in songs, celebrated in paintings and recorded in books. One might say, just a bit facetiously, that the real “manosphere,” strictly speaking, is Planet Earth.
A Backlash Cycle
The main subject matter of the “manosphere” — professional sports with a special focus on combat sports, gambling, weight lifting, drinking, drug use, women — is hardly new, with the exception of cryptocurrency. Nor is the unapologetic, jocular, a bit piggish attitude that defines it. The assertion of men’s energy and men’s interests is a recurrent feature of American life, one that ebbs and flows in response to the gains of feminism.
In her 1991 book “Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women,” Susan Faludi put forth the idea of a cycle of male revanchism against successive waves of feminism. “It returns every time women begin to make some headway toward equality,” she wrote, “a seemingly inevitable early frost to the culture’s brief flowerings of feminism.”
In other words, the current masculinist surge is the latest entry in a sequence that spans decades. To attempt a thumbnail sketch: After the emergence of “women’s liberation” in the 1960s brought demands to end discrimination against women in the workplace and on campuses, the men’s rights movement came along to argue that women controlled society and oppressed men through marriage, divorce and custody laws.
By the late 1980s and early 1990s, a cruder cultural response to the second wave of feminism was defining the mainstream. As American women entered the work force in huge numbers, courts and common decency alike challenged discriminatory codes of speech and behavior. In response, millions of fans gravitated toward voices like Howard Stern, the nationally-syndicated shock jock, who created new arenas for a kind of bachelor-party discourse no longer welcome in many workplaces. The idea was to create safe spaces for men who felt beaten back by feminism. Another shock jock, Tom Leykis, explained: “I say the stuff that guys can’t say,” he said in a 2000 interview. “They’re thinking it, but they can’t say it.”
This leering culture reached its height from the mid 1990s to the early 2000s, presaging much of the current wave of men’s content. On Comedy Central, “The Man Show” featured the “Juggies,” a troupe of buxom dancers who writhed in the aisles of a raucous, all-male audience. After the original hosts Jimmy Kimmel and Adam Carolla departed in 2003, Comedy Central hired a young comedian as one of the new co-hosts. His name? Joe Rogan.
Then came the internet, which trampled the barriers to participation in the national conversation, and connected audiences to writers — and to one another — like never before. Starting in the late 2000s, a new generation of internet-native feminist critics arrived. Women’s websites like Jezebel and Feministing built huge readerships and, like all blogs, rewarded provocative and sometimes hyperbolic opinions. Their writers popularized terms like “toxic masculinity” and influenced the coverage of gender issues in major news outlets.
“They pioneered a voice-forward, irreverent and acerbic take on news, culture and women’s issues, advancing a tone and vocabulary that would have been unthinkable in print media, but which were the lingua franca of the internet,” the critic Moira Donegan wrote of Jezebel in The Guardian in 2023.
As brands, celebrities and other mass media began to take up the mantle of feminism, crassly misogynistic figures retreated, and thrived, online. A blogger named RooshV, a common subject of feminist blogs, attracted a devoted following through his website Return of Kings, where he advocated a “neo-masculinist” vision through headlines like “3 Ways To Hypnotize A Girl Into A Sexually Submissive Trance.”
This cycle was supercharged by Mr. Trump’s 2016 election. Mr. Trump, who has been accused of sexual misconduct by more than two dozen women over the years, looked like the epochal embodiment of the misogyny women had learned to recognize in television and film, on magazine covers and in advertisements, on college campuses and in boardrooms. Suddenly sites like Return of Kings no longer seemed to critics like niche hide-outs for the self-described losers of the sexual marketplace, but symptoms of a national disease.
The sense that misogyny was omnipresent in American life culminated in the #MeToo Movement. Dozens of high-profile men were forced from the public sphere, at least temporarily, after they were accused of sexual misconduct. These ranged from serial rape to complicated encounters that didn’t slot neatly into the black-or-white discourse of the day.
In this outraged moment, male attitudes and appetites fell under a kind of blanket suspicion, subject at the drop of a tweet to a torrent of opprobrium. So it’s hardly surprising that content overtly targeted at what might once have been winkingly called “the red-blooded American male” now met with derision.
As this kind of entertainment lost its purchase in legacy media, it flourished online. Untethered from mainstream standards of propriety, Barstool Sports and “The Joe Rogan Experience” formed a mirror world to a mass culture attempting to purge itself of toxic masculinity. Cruder and nastier imitators sprang up.
The New Masculine Environment
As the “manosphere” enjoys its new status as the lifestyle media arm for Mr. Trump’s young supporters, and now wields political power of its own, many feminists and liberals are fearful. Alarmed at the rise of the “manosphere,” some have suggested that liberals need their own version of Joe Rogan, championed some politically palatable alternatives to Mr. Rogan, or written stranger-in-a-strange-land ethnographies of this world.
These efforts, while sometimes valuable, often seem to miss the point. That’s because the application of a single, divisive label to such a wide range of content may only intensify the escalating, social media-driven cycle of action and reaction in American public life.
It’s worth asking what people are getting so mad about in the first place. Take the comedian and podcaster Theo Von, who had Mr. Trump on his show in August, but who has also hosted in the past year Senator Bernie Sanders, Timothée Chalamet, Mark Cuban and Jimmy Donaldson, the YouTube personality known as MrBeast. (With MrBeast he discussed, among other things, acne, their respective travels to India and chocolate bars.)
Or consider Mr. Huberman, who is often described as “manosphere-adjacent” and whose most popular videos on YouTube include hourslong discussions of the effects of alcohol on human health, how to burn fat and how and why to stretch. Or Barstool Sports, which has come under intense scrutiny for the behavior of its founder, David Portnoy, but whose most well-known recurring feature is a series of pizza reviews.
Because the “manosphere” is not just a fringe that has become mainstream, it’s a mainstream that many liberals continue to treat as a fringe. Indeed, its popularity has resulted in part from its claim to territory abandoned by mainstream media and entertainment, whether it be because of shifting cultural mores, the decline of print media or some combination thereof: niche sports commentary, men’s health, fratty comedy, bikini centerfolds. Labeling the interest in this kind of thing as part of an objectionable extreme is likely to strike many Americans as absurd and, ironically, extreme.
Still, it’s no easy task to disentangle the parts of this culture that are malignant from those that are merely bro-y. Squint at some of the pranks and dares by the internet personality Adin Ross, who has had Mr. Trump as a guest on his online streaming show, and you might make out the innocuous, juvenile turn-of the-millennium antics of the comedian Tom Green or the cast of “Jackass.” Think: pretending to show his testicles to famous streamers or attempting to eat a spoonful of cinnamon. (Though, unlike “Jackass,” which came with a “don’t try this at home” warning before every episode, Mr. Ross sometimes promises his fans money to complete dares.)
And how different are the OnlyFans models he frequently hosts from the cover girls of aughts lad magazines like Maxim, Loaded and FHM? Just last December, Mr. Ross co-hosted a stream with Drake, as mainstream a figure as exists in contemporary pop culture. But the 24-year-old has also hosted Mr. Tate, the most openly woman-hating figure in culture today, as well as Nick Fuentes, a prominent white supremacist and antisemite known recently for the aphorism “Your body, my choice.”
Perhaps more difficult will be finding the public space to analyze this world dispassionately. There are incentives on all sides to keep anyone from trying. The “manosphere” built its audience in part by beating up on the mainstream media. And liberals may not want to attempt to understand this world in depth for fear of encouraging ideologies they consider dangerous. And, of course, some will argue that the bad and the bro-y are one and the same, or so close that it’s pointless to make a distinction.
For those who see nothing redeemable, or at least nothing to accommodate in the “manosphere,” it may help to keep it all in historical perspective. The — very male — braggadocio of some of its proponents can make it feel that we’re at the beginning of an entirely new era. In truth, any given moment is a point on a sine curve of gender politics that is in a constant state of flux. Without the distance of time, it’s hard to know how close we are to the peak of a wave.
The post The ‘Manosphere’? It’s Planet Earth. appeared first on New York Times.
