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Alex Schwartz
Hi, it's David Remnick and I've got some news for you. We're headed to the Tribeca Festival for a special live taping of the New Yorker Radio Hour. We'll be doing a one night only show at the festival's 25th anniversary, so come out and join us on Wednesday, June 10th at 8:15. Tickets are available now at tribecafilm.comaudio that's tribecafilm.com audio.
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Nomi Frye
I'm Nomi Frye.
Vincent Cunningham
I'm Vincent Cunningham. Each week on this show, we make sense of what's happening in the culture right now and how we got here. The question of today's episode, it's a big one. Perennial even. What's going on with men? Are they okay?
Alex Schwartz
Men?
Vincent Cunningham
What do you guys think? Are they?
Alex Schwartz
I don't think anyone is okay.
Nomi Frye
Yeah. Yeah. Like, it's not just men, Vincent.
Vincent Cunningham
Are they okay relative to other categories of being?
Nomi Frye
No.
Vincent Cunningham
We hear all the time about this idea of men being in crisis. I'd love to. What are some of the data points that are floating around in the culture.
Nomi Frye
I mean, you know, so much talk about toxic masculinity that it's almost become a cliche at this point.
Alex Schwartz
There are many statistics that show that men are falling behind women in grade school, that they enroll in college in lower numbers, that their career prospects are dwindling, that their lifespans are shorter than women's lifespans. And on top of the stats, we're seeing a very distinctive cultural moment that's been going on for a little while, but is worth highlighting, which is the world of the manosphere, Men who traffic in an aggressive misogyny, and the idea that masculinity is directly about suppressing women, subjugating women, and maximizing their own sexual worthiness by all kinds of cosmetic interventions, surgical interventions, hormonal interventions. This has become a huge part of discourse around masculinity, and I would totally argue, probably not alone, a big part of what is going on wrong for men right now.
Vincent Cunningham
Yeah, the men, they're not doing great. And as we said, this is a concern that's ongoing. We even touched on it on more than one of our episodes. We've gone down this road. It comes up a lot. But we're doing this episode now because discourse about masculinity has hit a sort of fever pitch. There are very different ideas about what is the nature of this crisis, how you might resolve it. And all of these ideas are being kind of modeled, tested, portrayed in the culture.
Nomi Frye
What are we seeing in terms of culture right now? I think what we are seeing is two roads diverge in a wood vibe situation.
Vincent Cunningham
Yes.
Nomi Frye
On the one hand, we have cultural texts. For instance, the new HBO show Half man, created by Richard Gad.
Alex Schwartz
I couldn't get out of my mind
Vincent Cunningham
your words, your violence. Don't talk like you're better than me.
Nomi Frye
Not after what you did. Really Leaning into violent aggression of the kind of alpha male and kind of investigating where that comes from and the consequences of it and so on. And on the other hand, we have the other road. You know, we can talk about heated rivalry, for instance.
Vincent Cunningham
It's not just me, right?
Alex Schwartz
Not just your work.
Vincent Cunningham
You feel it too, don't you?
Nomi Frye
Which is kind of like, can men get back in touch with their softer side? You know, like, what might be available for them emotionally? You know, do boys cry, et cetera, et cetera? I think this is kind of what we're dealing with in culture right now.
Vincent Cunningham
So today, on that note, we're starting with Half man and then broadening out to talk about how these shifting Notions and portrayals of masculinity are taking shape and coming forward through the culture. And one question, at least that I have is, you know, how truly new is all of this? Masculinity has been portrayed as being in crisis for as long as I think I've been alive. And I'd love to know what these new portrayals have to do with this long running discourse that's today on critics at large. Where do men go from? All right, men, before we get too far, we're cycles deep into this conversation in the culture about masculinity. What do you remember, at least in the recent past, as the beginning of discourse about problems with masculinity?
Alex Schwartz
I would take it back, honestly, to the feminist movement.
Nomi Frye
Absolutely.
Alex Schwartz
We are still in the midst, not even close to the tail end of the backlash that came around as a result of the women's liberation movement of the 70s, where men felt not all men. Not all men. This episode should very much be called Not All Men. It could be, but some men felt overlooked, felt oppressed, felt very disturbed by this recalibration of gender roles and gender responsibilities and gender identities, really. And then out of this grows a men's rights, men's pride agenda. And when I think about that, I think about a fictional character from the late 90s. I think about Frank T.J. mackie from Magnolia, Respect the Cock, Paul Thomas Anderson's 1999 movie. And Frank T.J. mackie is a men's rights advocate who gives seminar performances at which he rises up before a group of frankly, lame dudes and joins them too. As Nomi said, respect the Cock. I have a whole clip I can play if we want to pause for this, but we can also keep on moving, please. Do you guys want to see the beginning of Frankie's. It's so good. So this is just Tom Cruise pumping his arms in a kind of gladiatorial slash Christ like gesture, it seems to me. And behind him unfurls a banner that says, seduce and Destroy. Respect the cock and tame the cunt. Tame it. Take it on head first with the skills that I will teach you at work and say, no, you will not control me. No, you will not take my soul. No, you will not win this. Because it is a game, guys.
Nomi Frye
You guys are such a good.
Alex Schwartz
It's ingenious.
Nomi Frye
Yeah, it's amazing. I'm thinking about another movie from the same year, in fact, Fight Club, David Fincher's Fight Club, which treats the crisis in masculinity kind of like less from the positioning of kind of being cucked by women and more in the sense of kind of the softness that capitalism has begat.
Vincent Cunningham
God damn it. An entire generation pumping gas. Waiting tables.
Nomi Frye
Slaves with white collars.
Vincent Cunningham
Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can
Nomi Frye
buy shit we don't need and has made men kind of like softened cucks. And the way to confront that is, of course, by going to the underground fight club where like, you know, a fist hits the flesh and the blood spurts and the man feels alive and regains his lost powers that, you know, the kind of late 20th century has sucked out of him.
Vincent Cunningham
Yeah. Thinking about, like, you know, when did this start for you? At least in my lifetime, I think Fight Club is such a great mention because that Same year in 1999, that was the year of the Columbine shooting.
Nomi Frye
Absolutely.
Vincent Cunningham
And it's funny, because the discourse in my lifetime over mass shootings has now become almost wholly about guns and gun control, gun violence, et cetera. Rightly so. But at that initial moment, it was a lot about young boys and bullying. The sort of cruelty of young boys on one hand, on the vulnerability of them. I was part of this group in my high school. I got all of my community service hours by being a part of this group that was called End Team Cruelty. And it was started by this woman who was a psychologist and wanted to train kids to sort of defuse bullying. And it was almost explicitly about how to combat intra masculine violence. It was a big discourse in my childhood. And you mentioned this thing that you set up earlier, Nomi, like this kind of two sides thing. You could see it even in media, they're popped up. Instead of the sort of relatively sophisticated presentation of men's magazines like Esquire and gq, all of a sudden there was Maxim, and all of a sudden there
Nomi Frye
were these lad mags, the lad mags of the aughts. You know, girls, Joe Francis and Girls Gone Wild. I think the second wave feminism of the 70s, since then, this pendulum swing right between what is acceptable, not acceptable, in terms of, like, the way men are and specifically the way they relate to women, has swung from one kind of side to another. And I think all of this is the prehistory to the moment we're in today.
Alex Schwartz
Yeah, I would say two huge things happen. One is the Internet and one is maga. You get all this stuff migrating online. You get people posting message boards, people spreading this, the word, the good word about aggressive masculinity. And then you get maga, which finds a way to take a bunch of disaffected, angry, upset men and channel them into a political movement.
Vincent Cunningham
That's right. So with all that in mind, let's turn to Half Man. Half A Man. Now, this show is, in a lot of ways, the occasion for this episode. It's another florid exercise in violence and tortured sexual neurosis by Richard Gad. It was made for the BBC and hbo. Gad, as many listeners will know, is the creator of another polarizing show, Baby Reindeer. Nomi. Would you like to sort of set this up? Give us a sort of synopsis, at least, of the setup of Half Man.
Nomi Frye
Okay. The curtain opens. Boy does it on a group of chorus line dreamers. No, I'm kidding. So, okay, here we are. It's the 80s. We are in Scotland. We are in the working class. Okay? We have two boys, two teenage boys. We have Niall, a kind of twitchy, fidgety, probably closeted gay boy of about 16. His rough and tumble mother is a lesbian who has a girlfriend. And along with a girlfriend comes the girlfriend's son, Ruben, a hunky hunk of beef, but also a violin criminal type.
Alex Schwartz
Look, I'm sorry, okay? I should have told you. And keep him with the theme of surprises. He's moved into your room.
Vincent Cunningham
What?
Alex Schwartz
No way. What did you think that second bed was for? We were almost begging you to ask. I thought it was for guests.
Nomi Frye
He is a guest.
Alex Schwartz
No, he's not.
Nomi Frye
He's a psycho.
Alex Schwartz
He bit someone's nose off. I've seen the guy, too. It's horrible. His wife left him and everything.
Nomi Frye
This is the setup.
Alex Schwartz
Remember me, Bambi? Last time I saw you, you were about yay high.
Nomi Frye
We have these two boys.
Alex Schwartz
You've got the exact same size head, though.
Nomi Frye
Creeping me out a bit. As they grow up, Ruben becomes both a tormentor of Niall and a protector of Niall. You know that the hateful but yearning erotic tension, at least from Niall towards Ruben cannot be denied. They are brothers. They are blood brothers. And yet he is a violent monster. The first kind of, like, traumatic event, I guess, that we are privy to is Niall is on the verge and uni on the verge of exploring his homosexuality with his flatmate, Alby. And Ruben, like, loses it and, like, pummels Alby into the ground, almost kills him, goes to jail. Okay? And there's a lot of that happening over the course of the show. Basically, it's about Niles.
Alex Schwartz
She's got it. I love it. Tell us what it's about. I'm like, what is the show? About.
Nomi Frye
So this show.
Alex Schwartz
It's so hard to say.
Nomi Frye
It's so hard to say. I know I always say this, but Every episode is 9,000 hours long. Okay. I mean, they are like, technically speaking, slightly over an hour long each. And it's six episodes, but it's glacial. Vincent, you said Florida. I could not agree more. This is like some, like, Fringe Festival shit. Like. Like long, long, long scenes overwrought. Just like the trauma, the pain, the completely inexplicable connection between these characters, who, in fact, are, like, incredibly thinly drawn.
Alex Schwartz
Sounds like you loved it.
Nomi Frye
Once again, you guys, I'm a hater.
Vincent Cunningham
There you go.
Nomi Frye
I'm a hater. I'm sorry. I wish I could give a better. It's hard to. Synopsis.
Alex Schwartz
No, I wasn't laughing at you. I was laughing at the fact that the show repeats itself so many times that once you start engaging with it in its plot terms, you are just gonna find yourself in a loop that you keep going up and around and up and around. Cause that's the point of the show. The point of the show is about cycles that can't be broken.
Nomi Frye
Yes.
Alex Schwartz
And the cycle that can't be broken is the mutually intensely destructive relationship between these two people. I think the show is set up with a rather simple idea that each can be the other's savior to some extent. Certainly that's what their mothers want for them. They want the tender one to show the mean one some feelings, and they want the mean one to kind of help the tender one stand up for him and walk through life a little bit taller. You know, walk like a man, talk like a man. That's. That's. And instead they just end up in a kind of prolonged, lifelong wrestling match where they can't quit each other.
Vincent Cunningham
That's right.
Alex Schwartz
Vincent, you're a man.
Vincent Cunningham
Yeah, I am a man. I am a man. And I'm proud of you.
Alex Schwartz
What did you make of this?
Vincent Cunningham
You know, I don't think of myself as a Niall or a Rubin. I'm somewhere in between. But I liked it slightly better than you have described. I definitely. There is a kind of patina to the Richard Gadiverse of. It's like. It's like a. It's high polish menace, you know, in a way that it doesn't. Even though many of the situations are very gritty and dark, it does still have this kind of sparkle in its eye toward the viewer. It's very self conscious of the way it's being watched.
Nomi Frye
It's theatrical.
Vincent Cunningham
Maybe theatricality is the Way to talk about that. But I did like the extent to which these characters become in some way, to your point, the moms want them to help each other. They do become in some way codependent and maybe even parasitic on one another. If we talk about this idea of two roads, as we mentioned, you know, are you gonna toughen up and be the right wing psycho or are you gonna be, you know, whatever, pathetic nice guy or something like that?
Nomi Frye
I don't know.
Vincent Cunningham
Here it says, what if you actually, you know, two roads diverged in a yellow wood and sorry, I could not travel both and be one traveler. This show's like, I am gonna be one traveler. I don't have to choose. What if I could be the nice guy but also have a psycho alter ego? Well, it's very fight club. This is why. It's very fight club. At some point, kind of, again, unsubtly, a character says, what do you mean you're like him? To Niall, he says, you guys are about as much alike as Jekyll and Hyde. And that's kind of the thesis statement of the show. It's somebody trying two people on some level, trying to have it both ways. And so it's not, for example, it's not a mistake that. And this is what I think is kind of interesting psychologically about the show. It's not a mistake that Ruben shows up. You know, Niall has sort of escaped the home situation and he. At a moment of panic when he's worried about the developing relationship with this Alby, that's when he calls Ruben and says, I need you, man. And then he comes and Niall realizes this might be irreversible, the violence that is about to be visited upon everybody that I live with. But he's the one that made the decision because of his uncertainty about masculinity. So he's sort of deploying this dark corner of his own psyche in the person of his brother from another lover, as they're always saying. Yes, that aspect of the show I did really kind of think was psychologically acute and interesting as a sort of paradigm of how these two ideas about masculinity, or choose one, can actually be a kind of end run around a, you know, total loop. Critics at large from the New Yorker will be right back.
Alex Schwartz
Fear is the virus is trending on TikTok. Vaccines are poison. Then your yoga teacher says that sex trafficked children are being sacrificed by satanic liberals.
Vincent Cunningham
But it's all okay.
Alex Schwartz
The great awakening is coming. What is happening every week on Conspirituality Podcast. We explore the fever dreams that suck friends, family and wellness gurus down the right wing cult spiral in a search for salvation.
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Alex Schwartz
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Vincent Cunningham
Before we get back to the conversation listeners, it's that time again. We're working on another I Need a Critic episode. We've come to really love this series because it gives us a chance to hear from you.
Alex Schwartz
Oh yeah, you all know the drill at this point, but for anyone who doesn't, don't fear. All you have to do is record a voice memo on your phone or with a specific cultural question that we can help you with. Maybe you're looking for the perfect book to read after you just had a baby and you have no attention span or time. Maybe you want to know whether book clubs are actually helpful. Maybe you want an example in media, the movies, what have you of an actually happy relationship.
Nomi Frye
I mean, who can Tell really what you come up with, and we can't wait to find out. You've got questions, we've got answers. Hit us up. Send your voice memos, as always to themalewyorker.com with the subject line critics. And now back to the episode.
Vincent Cunningham
So Half man is this very dark portrait of masculinity, but like we've said, these depictions are kind of going everywhere and maybe pointing out two different lanes. So what's the other side? If Half man, half is the dark side of this yin and yang, what can we point to as the polar opposite?
Nomi Frye
I mean, okay, well, we've talked about our beloved heated rivalry, which also takes place in a highly masculinist world of professional sports. And the sports. Professional sports sphere in which it takes place allows for a kind of like, old school closetedness that creates kind of plot possibilities and tonal possibilities. And these two characters, Ilya and Shane, should by all rights be expected to be Ruben. Right? To be these killers who cannot kind of accept any sign of kind of like softness or weakness or anything that diverts from kind of alpha masculinity, hyper straight and so on. And yet the show shows them exploring exactly that and shows the joy that they find.
Vincent Cunningham
Enough for what questions. You have too many of them.
Alex Schwartz
I'm sorry.
Vincent Cunningham
It's okay. I wasn't clear. I'm sorry in advance for tonight's game.
Alex Schwartz
We're gonna destroy you guys.
Vincent Cunningham
Oh, so you are the asshole. Oh, it's still you, Mom.
Nomi Frye
No, it's not me.
Alex Schwartz
You're the asshole. Everyone must know this.
Vincent Cunningham
Everyone.
Nomi Frye
Shane Hollander is an asshole and are able to create a version of masculinity that is not Rubenesque. Rubinesque.
Alex Schwartz
Rubenesque.
Vincent Cunningham
Little Angels.
Nomi Frye
Yes.
Alex Schwartz
Or more to the point, not nihile esque. I think the thesis of heated rivalry is that you need to let the sun shine in, that you need to expose. You need to be living in the open. Let the world catch up with you. Take the risk. It's worth it not to feel the degrading shame that comes with living in the shadow in the closet.
Vincent Cunningham
Yeah, yeah. And then also we had adolescence a couple of years ago, also from the uk, about a young man who has, spoiler alert under the sign of bullying again, has committed a heinous crime of killing his female classmate who's a little girl.
Nomi Frye
Is she. Who's dead then?
Alex Schwartz
Why would you ask her?
Vincent Cunningham
Hmm.
Nomi Frye
Is she?
Alex Schwartz
Well, yeah, she is. We think you know that. So it's really clever of you to
Vincent Cunningham
ask the question if that is the case.
Alex Schwartz
Anything? Careful, D. I Bascom.
Nomi Frye
Okay, then I'll tell you what.
Alex Schwartz
Describe your friendship to me.
Vincent Cunningham
Adolescence is another one of these things that it maybe isn't as it's not light. It's not the opposite of Half Man. But it was by situating the problem among children, I felt that it kind of had this ray of possibility that it could be otherwise if only we would all change or something like that.
Alex Schwartz
I think that was very much the point of adolescence. Adolescence, which was created by Jack Thorne Structure has been shown in schools in France, in the Netherlands, in the uk, I believe as a kind of educational text and as a way to make the youth aware of toxic masculinity, so to speak. I'd be very curious to know how that's worked out. I would not recommend making art in the service of educating basically anyone, and certainly not the youth. I respect the youth too much for that. It's a very. Adolescence was riveting and it also is didactic. And the same is true about Half Man. There was actually a columnist, a female columnist in England who said she thought this should be shown anywhere men are gathered. Strong disagree, like, what's that gonna do here? This doesn't make any sense to me. You're gonna see the results of your actions and feel so horrified that you change your ways. And who are you? Even? I find this to be such an irritating approach both to men and to art. Like both deserve better than that. In terms of the other ways to be a man that we're being shown right now. Another show we've talked about is DTF St. Louis. We didn't talk about this aspect of DTF St. Louis when we did our episode. But I could not stop thinking about its depiction of masculinity after we wrapped. To the extent that I wrote a piece about it, a wonderful piece because
Nomi Frye
check it out, listeners, I've just never
Alex Schwartz
seen a relationship between men quite like the one depicted on DTF St. Louis, which to me is almost science fictional in how it posits a future for men. If we're talking about this kind of realism taken to a macho extreme, taken to an almost like steroidal extreme in something like half man, DTF St. Louis posits a world where there kind of is no shame around things that traditionally men would find shame in, like homosexuality. This is a show in which two straight middle aged men who are both are in a total rut in their lives and in their marriages, form an intense bond with one another to the point where they act like lovers and look like lovers. But aren't you loved him? Yes. But you loved her.
Vincent Cunningham
Yeah, but I loved him more. I would never hurt him. Loved him how? Like you love something like this sun when you're cold, Like water when you really need water.
Alex Schwartz
I don't understand, like, sex?
Vincent Cunningham
No. Or I.
Alex Schwartz
I love Floyd. I found it totally fascinating and beautiful and also totally tragic because the show, of course, does not. None of this works out well for the men in any of these shows.
Nomi Frye
Right. So. Right. I wanna ask you, Alex, like, but these men, they're also kind of presented as losers, are they not? Right.
Alex Schwartz
But no one is presented as the cool alternative. There's something very. Are they losers? They're kind of average, I think, is the idea. The whole thing about the show is there is no such thing as a loser. Like the kind of. The phrase that keeps getting tossed around from the show is no one is normal, just looks that way from across the street. And again, the problem for these guys is that, particularly for the Floyd Smyrnage character, the one played by David Harbour, is that he cannot find a degree of self acceptance which has very much to do with the body. It has to do with feeling too fat, too old and having a weird, crooked penis. And he just thinks those things. He can't surmount those things.
Vincent Cunningham
And they're not losers, but they are very lonely and very desperate. And so I think they are brought to the threshold of some of these questions about sexuality, about intimacy. They're brought there by their desperation. So it's not like it is. I understand what you mean. This sort of science fictional openness, but it's almost like the portal into this other world does have to be some amount of suffering.
Alex Schwartz
Yes, that's right.
Vincent Cunningham
And I did think that DTF was. If there was something very open about it, it was about an open portrayal of deep suffering. I'm still thinking about it. I thought it was really well done.
Alex Schwartz
And maybe the issue at the heart of that, which is kind of at the heart of all of these things we're talking about with that are about these texts, these TV shows, whatever, that are about men and boys, is there a sense, there's a sense of being profoundly misunderstood by the wider world going on in all of these. And I think that stems from the very idea of archetypes, that if you don't subscribe to a clear archetype and make yourself very legible to the world at large, you won't actually be seen. But if you do subscribe to one of those Archetypes, you're not gonna be seen anyway because your individuality is gonna be completely scrubbed. That, I think, is the kind of rub of masculinity that keeps coming back and back and back in these different things. You can turn yourself into a character and into a superhero or into the exact opposite, but the individuality part gets lost in the wash. Nobody sees it. Nobody sees it.
Nomi Frye
But, Vincent, you watched another show, right? Another recent show, a new adaptation of Lord of the Flies on Netflix.
Vincent Cunningham
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so it is a miniseries Based on the 1954 novel by William Golding, Lord of the Flies, also a BBC product, not brought to HBO this time, but to Netflix. And I really like this show. First of all, it tempts us to be. Strangely, the story is. A bunch of schoolboys have survived a plane crash and are lost on an island. They don't know where they are, and they, very quickly, speaking of archetypes, fall into roles and try to build a kind of society. Almost the first thing that happens is we need a chief. He's right, though.
Nomi Frye
We do need to make some key decisions. It seems to me we ought to have a chief.
Alex Schwartz
More important important is to find out
Nomi Frye
exactly where we are. A chief will decide that.
Alex Schwartz
I can be chief.
Nomi Frye
From chapter chorister and head boy. I can sing high C sharp
Alex Schwartz
almost
Nomi Frye
in favor of me. I think we should have more than one consideration if a chief is to
Alex Schwartz
be decided,
Vincent Cunningham
and it goes from there. All the skirmishes that are sort of maybe proto political in nature is the real brain of the show. But in the meantime, though, there's a lot of quiet walking through this maybe initially prelapsarian jungle. Lots of shots of birds overhead as if to show the kind of impassiveness of nature as all this human drama plays about. I think it's really well shot. It makes really good use of the fisheye lens, which I usually. And each of the episodes sort of is focalized through the point of view of one of the boys. And it's made by Jack Thorne, who is also the creator, director, visionary behind adolescence. Did either you guys watch any of these?
Alex Schwartz
I didn't, but I have a question about it. The thing I'm curious to know is Lord of the Flies, of course, as you said, came out in 1954 as a novel, and it's since become just a byword for a Hobbesian environment in which boys cobble each other to the death. I mean, the demise of Piggy, I can't even tell you when I read it 30 years ago. Traumatic. Absolutely traumatic. Little piggy, they smash his glasses. You know, horrifying.
Nomi Frye
Not the glasses.
Alex Schwartz
So is this version of Lord of the Flies, do you think it's been updated in some way to speak to the issues we have today? Or is it trying to take a very classic adaptation of the text or. Or what's going on there? Why now for Lord of the Flies?
Vincent Cunningham
I do think that there is using from my memory, which is, you know, not sterling anymore, I guess, but it seemed to be very. There are lots of very close kinships with the original text. But there did seem to be an emphasis on the society from which the boys come. Ralph, who is the one who is named chief, he's always talking about. And we get this from the beginning. My father's in the Navy. He's an admiral first class. His kind of leadership rival, who is the head of the. He's come with his, like, school choir and becomes the head of the hunters, who become this, like, sort of rogue fascist paramilitary. He talks about. My father is a spy. And so a lot of their ideas about government, it's interesting. Like, when I was younger, I did think, okay, this is about how human society develops without the sort of civilizing hand of the law, government institutions. But today, though, this time around, I would say in this adaptation, it's much more about what young people, what the young glean from the political structures in which they are raised. What is the father like? How does a man behave? What is leadership? What is toughness? These are ideas that were traveling in that plane, and although the plane crashed, the plane did not survive, but ideology did survive. And so I do think that there is a dimension of received ideas. And how early, perhaps, is the thesis of this adaptation these ideas are transmitted and how fatally they are?
Nomi Frye
I was thinking about another. I mean, to go to a different genre altogether, about another example of kind of like the roads diverging for men and how the pendulum moves from one side to another. I recently wrote about the newest season of Vanderpump Rules. Oh, man, the Bravo.
Vincent Cunningham
What are those kids getting into?
Nomi Frye
Reality show. So, okay, so here's what happened. The show ran for 11 seasons. It got tired. There was nowhere else to go. The storylines weren't storying anymore, et cetera, et cetera. Especially after Scandival, which if you know, you know. Oh, yeah, big stuff. And so then they went on hiatus and repopulated the show. So it's a new cast. It's the same gambit of, like, we have bar keeps, bartenders and waitresses at the Sexy, unique restaurant, Lisa Vanderpump's West Hollywood establishment. And so we have a new group of kind of 20 somethings, right. And I was struck by how much more, at least on the face of it, that's how they present themselves on the show. In touch with their feelings. The men are. They're still assholes. There's still drama. There's, you know, probably gonna be like, cheating and kind of hurt.
Vincent Cunningham
How else would you have a TV show?
Nomi Frye
Exactly. And yet the way they speak about things and their relative openness about their own possible failings, you know, maybe their sexual shortcomings. One of them, like, needs to use Viagra because he has, like. And he talks about this openly, you know, And I was thinking about how, you know, the show, the first iteration that started in 2013, I don't think that would have been possible with the guys, you know, who grew up in the 2000s, you know, who reached their masculine prime in the days of Joe Francis. And yet for this new generation, I was really struck by how much that was the case. And I thought that was a really interesting example of kind of like the roads diverging and, you know, going in that direction. Not the manosphere direction, at least not in this group of people.
Vincent Cunningham
Not yet.
Nomi Frye
Not yet.
Vincent Cunningham
It's a long season.
Nomi Frye
It's a. You know what? It's a long season. You're right. You're right.
Vincent Cunningham
So we've talked about these two paths for men. In a minute, we move from cultural depictions to real life. Critics at large. From the New Yorker will be right back.
Alex Schwartz
We are in uncharted territory.
Nomi Frye
Staff writer Evan Osnos on the New Yorker Radio Hour.
Alex Schwartz
I think all of us right now are trying to make sense of an avalanche of news every day.
Vincent Cunningham
And there aren't very many places where you can go and understand how something looks in the grand scope of history and context.
Alex Schwartz
That's what I come to the New Yorker for. I'm David Remnick, and each week my colleagues and I try to make sense of what's happening in this chaotic world. And I hope you'll join us for
Vincent Cunningham
the New Yorker Radio Hour.
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Alex Schwartz
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Vincent Cunningham
So we've been talking about these depictions in largely popular art, but of course it's also happening in real life as portrayed to us by the media. These ideas about masculinity and the broader culture. Alex, maybe to start to tease that out. I know that you watched an interview with a certain man whose name is Clavicular, and I would love to hear your what your analysis of Clavicular and his fellow travelers in the minds of looks maxing.
Alex Schwartz
So Clavicular is a name that I would say I had never heard before. I wanna say, like March 20, 2026. And since roughly that date, I've heard it between three and 400 times. Clavicular's real name is Braden Peters. He's 20 years old. He's from Hoboken, New Jersey. These are some facts about Clavicular.
Vincent Cunningham
Just like Frank Sinatra.
Nomi Frye
I didn't realize he was a Hoboken boy.
Alex Schwartz
See, I knew I'd be dropping things that you had not yet known.
Vincent Cunningham
There we go.
Alex Schwartz
From Hoboken. Deed you probably don't know he's from Hoboken because his whole brand is Miami. Everything about him is I now live in Miami.
Nomi Frye
It's Florida to the max.
Alex Schwartz
It's Florida to the max. So he has come to prominence through TikTok and kick, a platform again that I was not aware of before Clavicular brought it to my attention for looks maxing and for some people who listen to the show will know exactly what that is. I suspect others won't. Basically, it means for men, improving your physical appearance to a point of perfection through cosmetic surgery, through taking things like peptides, which are amino acids that you can inject and are readily available on what some people call the gray web. Fair enough, fair enough.
Nomi Frye
Turn you gray of a gray you.
Alex Schwartz
It's not like getting bricks of heroin from Silk Road, but nor is it like ordering Tylenol from Amazon. You know, it's somewhere in between the peptide business. Yeah. Clavicular has, as I learned from listening to his interview on impaulsive. Logan Paul's podcast has been on testosterone since he was 14 in an effort to, as he says, puberty maximum. Because clearly this young man wanted to make himself into the most, to his mind, masculine person. He could. He is all over the Internet tapping on his face with various hard objects, including hammers. But also I've seen a kind of like, it almost looks like a little league trophy, a baseball thing that he's just smashing on his cheekbone with so that he can create micro breakages and regrow his jaw in a more masculine way. He's called Clavicular because of the breadth of his collarbone. I have not yet seen any reporter actually measure this thing, but his own measurements are out. You can choose to trust them or not. And I. Yeah, long collarbone. That's what I mean. He's a nice clavicle, I guess. So Clavicular was doing this interview with Logan Paul and his co host of his show. They asked to be rated by him on his personal scale of sexual attractiveness. One of them is rated a 3.75. A devastating sexual attractiveness rating.
Vincent Cunningham
Yeah, yeah. Can you tell us why? So, yeah, mostly cause his anterpupillary distance, so, like, how close that his eyes are. And also the long, longer mid face would be the main.
Alex Schwartz
The seriousness with which clavicular approaches this task. It is as if he's, you know, a jeweler examining them under a mic to tell them about the flaws in the diamond. And it's just a fact. Physical perfection is of the utmost importance. And I find that interesting for a few reasons. One is that I do think in, like, traditional ideas of masculinity, that stuff was not supposed to matter. That was girly stuff like, oh, you're gonna spend all this time, like, I just rubbed some Irish Spring on my face and I'm out the door being a lumberjack. That was a version of masculinity that was around for a very long time. What are you doing with your ointments and your potions? How feminine to pursue physical beauty through all of these cosmetic and surgical means. Now men are there. So, like, women didn't climb out of that freaking hole. Men just, like, dove right down into it.
Nomi Frye
Welcome. Welcome, boys.
Alex Schwartz
Welcome. It's Helen here. This is a fascinating thing to be reckoned with. Like this kind of world of ratings and scales that used to be applied by men to women and now are applied by men to themselves and to women. And to women, of course. Of course. Goes without saying.
Nomi Frye
Well, I think it's interesting, the thing about, like, the violence that is being turned inward, you know, we can't also forget the violence turned outward in this kind of manosphere environment. You know, someone like Andrew Tate, who is being investigated in the UK for rape, sexual assault and human trafficking and in Romania on a host of similar charges.
Alex Schwartz
Right. And we should say that he has denied all of these allegations, of course.
Nomi Frye
But you know, the respect the cock thing. Respect the cock and tame the cunt, which was obviously kind of a, you know, a satirical over the top depiction in P.T. anderson's Magnolia. This is like the tip of the iceberg of what we're hearing right now.
Vincent Cunningham
But it does seem, yeah, it does seem that there is this resurgent reactionary notions just of what gender is. I mean, you see it, there's always these two sides of the coin where this focus on the male body. I at least, and it's probably because all of my apps know that I'm a man am inundated by ads, especially when I watch sports, but not just then for dick pills, hair supplements. The company hims, which already is talking about these things in the construct of gender, his and they have hers. There seems to be just a total upswing in the number of these things. And of course then you look on Hollywood runways and you see that there is, it seems to me, an increasingly violent and punishing return to ideas about the female body. You know, I mean, we can talk about all the reasons for it. Ozempic might be one. But it's not just that these aesthetics of extreme skinniness are back and so the body starts to write these scripts that we've seen again. But I'm wondering, it's interesting because yeah, there are the Andrew Tates of the world and the claviculars of the world. As we mentioned, we've been talking about this kind of two roads thing. I'm wondering if we see the other side of it in. But I'm not sure if we see another road in real life.
Alex Schwartz
My God, it's like Pedro Pascal and that's it. It's like Pedro, carry us on your shoulders.
Vincent Cunningham
Pedro Pascal Colman Domingo. These are real guys who say, okay, we can kind of queer our notions of clothes and how we present ourselves and not be like super macho, but are there. And this is the other thing on Instagram, they're always telling me how to be jacked. There's a guy named Body by Mark who goes up to people. I don't know if you've seen this Instagram.
Nomi Frye
I haven't.
Alex Schwartz
He goes Body by Mark.
Vincent Cunningham
He goes up to people and all he says is all he says is, you look jacked. Tell me how you work out, people who are really fit, what they do for their workouts. And you were jacked. Eight calisthenics, seven days.
Nomi Frye
No, I touch weight.
Vincent Cunningham
You do lightweight.
Alex Schwartz
So how many days a week are you doing that?
Vincent Cunningham
Three days. One meal a day.
Alex Schwartz
What are your strongest lifts? Well, overhead press is a strong lift. Divide how much normally it can go.
Nomi Frye
I didn't want to be, like, a skinny, fat person. I want to have a superhero body. I've been training for, like, 20 plus years.
Vincent Cunningham
We're back in this moment of, like, you got to be a he man or you got to be like a wayfish. Something has happened where, like, the comic book almost. Yes is back.
Alex Schwartz
Vincent, I think you're totally right. I read a really fascinating article this week in the New York Times called why so Many Men are Obsessed with Testosterone. And I really recommend that people read this. It is totally fascinating. It makes the point, which is very interesting, that the Trump administration is super pro testosterone pro making testosterone supplements very widely accessible after a long period of time in which you had to be prescribed these supplements by doctors because you had a low testosterone count. Now it's gonna be easier than ever for people to access extra testosterone. It's really fascinating because it gets to the heart of this contemporary idea of what it is to be a man that you've gotta be jacked. You've gotta be ripped. Look at heated rivalry. We love these soft men. They're hot as hell. Like, they're hot as hell. They're peptided up. I can't say that for sure, but they might as well be. So I don't think we have a ton of viable alternatives. I watched that documentary that you guys might have heard about Louis Theroux's Inside the Manosphere on Netflix. This has not gotten a ton of praise, this documentary. I think the general consensus is too little, too late. Louis Theroux goes around with a bunch of these guys who have made fame and fortune by selling these same ideas to young men. The main point I got from it was that these guys are salesmen, and they talk about themselves that way, and they very much identify that way. And you're selling the idea to men that if they want to be viable in the sexual marketplace, but also very much the economic marketplace, they need to do these things. They need to become a certain type of person. And there's a scene where one influencer, he runs into two young guys who say, you have shown me the way. You. Because we are born without Value?
Vincent Cunningham
How do you. What do you mean? Life as a man, you're born without value. It's nothing. You have to have your single penny.
Alex Schwartz
Do you think women have.
Vincent Cunningham
I. I think they're born with their value through beauty.
Alex Schwartz
Exactly.
Vincent Cunningham
Because a woman can be stunningly beautiful at 20 years old and get invited to ride in that car or onto a boat or be flying to Miami or whatever, because it's pure beauty. Nobody's going to invite him on a trip to Miami. They're not going to fly him out. He has to create value in the world. He has to be valuable to other men.
Alex Schwartz
Exactly.
Vincent Cunningham
Otherwise nobody cares.
Alex Schwartz
Exactly, you say.
Vincent Cunningham
And that's a fact. Say to your face.
Alex Schwartz
Of course. My heart breaks when I see this, because every person has value. So everyone has value. Let's start with that. You know, what a brilliant idea I just had.
Nomi Frye
No, I mean, I think a return to the values of humanism is.
Alex Schwartz
We love those.
Vincent Cunningham
But really, what is to be done in the political, cultural, or even just the personal realm? Are there any solutions that you see sort of shooting up green shoots of promise in this area?
Alex Schwartz
Yeah, I think, Vincent, to your point of. Are we seeing solutions in culture? I don't think culture is really there to provide solutions. I know you don't necessarily think that either. I do think we're getting very interested. Damaged men being shown to us and not damaged in the stereotypical toxic masculinity way. I have mixed feelings about half man. And one of those mixed feelings is that I think the show's somewhat didactic point is like a strong he man is hurting, too. And I get it. Something that I think a lot of people love is the pit. We've talked about the pit on this show before, and you have Dr. Robbie right there aching and hurting a man who's absolutely falling apart. Not a he man at all. A very competent carer who has a really broken life. And we're seeing a portrait of male trauma, of someone who has taken and taken and taken more than he can hold and has no outlet for and is breaking. It's a very sad portrait of a person. And it's. I think it's also helpful in this discourse.
Nomi Frye
I think, really, you know, in my younger years, I feel like I was much more combative. And I see it in my teen daughter as well. And I think it's important. I totally appreciate it. For instance, like, going nuts about manspreading. You know what I mean? Like, stuff like that, which is small, obviously. It's not. We're not talking like Anything. But I. This is obviously just a small example, but I'm trying, and I know this is a funny thing to say as, like, the chief hater of this podcast. I'm trying to, like, advance with love. Like, I don't know if, like, just saying I don't want to have anything to do with these assholes is gonna totally help. And I think, you know, there has been discussion about, like, is the term toxic masculinity, like, doing more harm than good at this point? Right. You know, giving these young men who feel like they have no alternatives but to be, you know, hateful and dominating and et cetera, et cetera, because they feel they have no value otherwise expressing our, you know, our own anger and frustration as women, which is completely earned. I mean, it's certainly in a lot of ways justified and more satisfying, certainly, and does much, maybe in the way of kind of consciousness raising, I guess, oppositionally, but in terms of kind of moving forward, I wonder if there's another alternative.
Alex Schwartz
I want Vincent to tell us how to be a man.
Nomi Frye
I know. Oh, yeah, let's ask Vincent. Vincent, Vincent, can you, as the man in our midst, a wonderful man in
Vincent Cunningham
our midst, thank you very much, I appreciate it.
Nomi Frye
Could you tell us what the secret is? How does one be a man?
Vincent Cunningham
You know, much like Dante, I'm halfway down life's journey, still trying to figure it out. Don't know. But I will say this. If I'm ever asking, what would a man do in this situation, I'm usually thinking the wrong thoughts. Usually if I'm thinking about being a man, it is in a self reproving or self indicting way that is not helpful to the situation. I can still remember every time a teacher when I was a kid put their face in my face and told me to be a man. It happened a lot. I think most men that I, my acquaintance and my generation, maybe I should say, have a voice like that in their head. And it has to do with messages that have been directed at us for a long time. And so when you're asking how to be a man, often the real answer is just how to be a person. This has been critics at large. Alex Barish is our consulting editor and Rhiannon Corby is our senior producer. Our executive producer is Steven Valentino. Alexis Quadrato composed our theme music and we had engineering help today from Pran Bandy with mixing by Mike Kutschman. Remember, we're working on a new edition of our advice series, I Need a Critic. If you need some cultural advice. Just record a voicemail on your phone and send it to us@themailewyorker.com that's the mail at new yorker.com subject line critics and as always, you can find each and every one of our episodes@New Yorker.com Critics.
Alex Schwartz
Hi, I'm Nicole Phelps, the global fashion news and features Director and co host of Vogue's podcast the Run Through. Each week on the show, our listeners get an all access pass to the world of Vogue with the latest fashion news and the most exciting voices in the industry. On Tuesdays, join me to hear interviews with influential leaders in the industry like Calvin Klein, Daniel Roseberry and Jonathan Anderson. On Thursdays, join Head of Editorial Content at Vogue Chloe Mao and Head of Editorial Content at British Vogue Cho Manati as they explore style and culture and through the lens of fashion with guests like Martha Stewart, Kamala Harris and Tracee Ellis Ross. The Run through with Vogue New episodes every Tuesday and Thursday. Wherever you get your podcasts.
Nomi Frye
From prx.
Release Date: May 21, 2026
Panelists: Alex Schwartz, Nomi Frye, Vincent Cunningham
This episode tackles the perennial question: What’s going on with men? The Critics at Large team—Alex Schwartz, Nomi Frye, and Vincent Cunningham—explore whether men are in crisis, tracing cultural, political, and media portrayals of masculinity. Focusing on recent TV and film, social trends, and the 'manosphere,' they analyze the evolving (and sometimes cyclical) discourse about what it means to be a man today.
The conversation is wry, thoughtful, and rigorous—typical of The New Yorker. Humor and skepticism balance empathy and concern, with references to pop culture, history, and current affairs. The critics frequently challenge dominant cultural narratives and poke fun at themselves, especially about generational divides and the limits of criticism.
For listeners:
This episode offers a sweeping, nuanced exploration of the crises, history, and possibilities of masculinity—melding pop culture, social critique, and personal stories with the incisiveness and wit that marks the Critics at Large podcast.