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BBC Sounds
BBC Sounds Music Radio podcasts.
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Zoe Strimpel
You're listening to A Point of View, a personal essay from a leading writer. Here's Zoe strimpel.
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BBC Sounds
In the mid 2000s, during a stint as a dating columnist, I interviewed a pickup artist called Adam Lyons. He was one of the batch of young men following in the footsteps of Neil Strauss, author of the 2005 bestseller the Game, which instructed men who struggled to get so much as a glance from women on how to get them into bed and then reject them in favor of a new, even hotter conquest. I found Lions perfectly nice, but the pickup artist or Pua Creed was clearly bad news, a manipulative offshoot of modern masculinity that later in my career as a historian of gender and dating, I struggled to fit within a wider spectrum of masculinity. Yes, there have long been rogues, rakes and worse, but there was something sterile, angry and sheltered about these men that felt new. If the first flush of pickup artists represented a seedy new departure for masculinity, they presaged an even more concerning near future made unignorably manifest over the past few weeks in the person of influencer and self professed misogynist Andrew Tate. Tate is currently in custody in his adoptive home of Romania after being arrested on charges of human trafficking and rape allegations he has denied he is a figure bewildering in his reach. By last summer he was one of the most Googled men in the world and has become a cultish leader to millions of young men on TikTok alone. Videos with his name in them have been watched nearly 13 billion times. He also runs a series of courses via an online operation, Hustler University, which he says has around 100,000 paid subscribers, all hoping to learn from Tate how to get rich or at least get less broke and of course, score women. Constantly present in Tate's discourse is the paranoid notion of the Matrix after the cult 1990s blockbuster starring Keanu Reeves, which he says is the dreary, subservient Cage contemporary men are stuck in and that he will help them break out of. On arrest. Tate shouted at the cameras. The Matrix has attacked me. Tate demands attention. He has become essential viewing among many teenage boys across Britain, despite or perhaps in some cases because of his pornographically violent descriptions of his rough handling of women. Alongside such objectionable garbage is a cockiness, wit and boastful lifestyle of yachts, private jets and bugattis that also appeals. Much of what Tate says is shocking and works in tandem with other horrible corners of the so called manosphere, the growing bit of the Internet dedicated to allegedly disenfranchised masculinity, a hodgepodge of incels mgtoes, men going their own way, men's rights activists and pickup artists, all of whom blame feminism, sexual liberation, and the equal status and earning power of women for destroying their place in the world. Given the crudeness and violence of so much of their lingo, I find it hard to sympathize in any way. But in seeking to understand the appeal of the likes of Tate or others like him, such as Rush Velazadeh, an alt right pickup artist who ran a wildly popular website called Return of Kings, it is worth remembering that many of their fans came of age during the Great Awokening. And in the rush of suspicion about men that followed the revelations of the MeToo movement, many will have picked up the distinct impression that being a white, cisgendered male makes them the worst sort of person, a privileged hoarder at best, and very likely a predator too. The cultural hegemony of this sort of thinking has bred athirst, especially among young men, perhaps legitimately worried about their prospects for anti woke anti woman content. The response of a certain section of angry young men to their newly questionable status has been universally misogynistic, revolving around the weaponization of sex and the need to dehumanize their tormentors women and show them who is boss. It's all built around a myth of a past in which the male was a masterful breadwinner whose strength and purpose made him indispensable, even godlike, to whichever woman or women he chose to be his wife or lover. The idea of masculinity in crisis has recurred with frequency, at least since Durkheim wrote in 1893 about the suicidal enemy that appeared to have taken up residence in a new breed of rootless men in industrialized cities untethered by the bonds of hearth and home and enthralled to limitless appetites. However, instead of blaming women, Durkheim was interested in the changing social structures that accompanied industrialization. Suicide is still a problem among men in the UK Suicide rates are three times higher for men than for women, and men are more likely than women to be homeless. But whereas Durkheim took an analytical view of social change, the manosphere insists that men are victims of an actively hostile society that has left men behind. They also seem at sea in the possibilities and depthlessness of late capitalist consumerism. Instead of enjoying the opportunities for hardworking entrepreneurialism as a means for self betterment, they instead seem to feel furiously shortchanged and frantic for the trappings of the kind of masculinity advertised by influencers, revolving around an extremely buff appearance, the trappings of wealth and, plus a change, a model on their arm. Tate attributes his success to his message of what he calls real masculinity, and in this sense he is not particularly original. In the 1960s, the poet Robert Bly, who died aged 94 in 2021, was a keen anti war activist, imploring his fellow citizens to help young men flee the draft. But as the anti war scene began to lose momentum, he changed tack, picking up on the rush of anti feminist discourse that followed the women's liberation movement's heyday. By the 1980s, Bly, who went on to have four children and two wives, said he felt diminished by my lack of embodiment of the fruitful male. Bly was not unsophisticated or uncultured. A Harvard graduate, he espoused a coherent sociological theory that as marriage became more fragile due to no fault, divorce and sex lost its gravity for both sexes, boys were failing to receive knowledge from absent fathers about how to mature properly. Bly blamed the absence of male role models that had previously existed within a mythologized patriarchal past for rising rates of juvenile delinquency and poor leadership in politics and business. For his own sense of emasculation, Bly blamed overexposure to strong, angry women and a lack of time spent with fellow men. Men used to make models for what a man is from the Iliad and Odyssey in places like that, Bly said. Just like Tate, Bly ended up forging fame by appealing to men's most misogynistic impulses. But an interest in ancient texts, however wacky, at least lent his creed some substance. Tate, by contrast, belongs to a new era that judders between self hatred and hatred of women that is angrily programmatic, here's how to get rich and get chicks, and profoundly anti intellectual. Even if Tate, a keen chess player, would undoubtedly disagree, the contemporary manosphere doesn't appear to have any positive idea about what men should be apart from rich, pre epic and nasty. And within the long history of masculinity in crisis, this feels new. Most chilling of all, the new masculine role models goad men to believe they are in a state of misery and failure, not entirely without truth, given young men's problems with depression, suicide, homelessness, drugs and unemployment. But the role models go further, arguing that men's disenfranchisement is so profound that it must be a case of entrapment in the wrong universe. The Matrix do what they say. Take the red pill, just like the Chosen One. Neo in the Matrix and you will throw off the shackles of the old cage and break into a paradise full of subservient virgins, money raining down upon you. Modern sociology is founded on ideas of alienation, especially men's, so it is not surprising that that aspect of the human condition persists. But today's gurus of popular masculinity are potentially herding millions of young men away from real questions of society and history and into the yawning rabbit hole of conspiracy and bottomless anomie.