The Manosphere and Me

This is a web exclusive from our upcoming issue Why Be Healthy? In an age of health care and wellness industries and near-religious pursuit of fitness and self-optimization, this issue asks what it means to live well despite the limitations and frailties of our bodies, and what, beyond the scope of medicine, is needed for our flourishing.

Among the thousand famous indignities of middle age, this is not the least: at forty-seven you finally have the self-discipline and/or executive function to do 5–10 percent of the things you intended to do at twenty. You can anticipate most of your pet stalling mechanisms and answer many of your impeccably reasonable excuses. Along with this, perhaps more important than this, you also have begun to distinguish the sorts of projects that are – attack them with whatever enthusiasm – simply unsustainable from those that you might actually be able to do. You have begun the long acceptance of the truth outlined in Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash, that every young man believes that, if he really willed it, he could be the “baddest” in the world:

If I moved to a martial arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad.

At forty-seven you may not yet have fully accepted that this was never true. But you at least know it isn’t true anymore.

With this modicum of self-knowledge in hand, what stands between you and your proper work – the things that, with a little application, you could actually accomplish? Only your whole body and your whole life. Your mounting exhaustion, your multiplying responsibilities, your decreasing resilience, your slowing metabolism. Only entropy.

About a year ago, on a cold Sunday morning before church, while Annie Lennox’s cover of the 1985 synthpop classic “No More ‘I Love Yous’” played through my earbuds, I deadlifted an amount of weight that impressed and worried my wife. I then immediately got Covid and lost ten percent of my strength. The number I achieved that day, modest enough that I have no interest in publishing it, nevertheless haunted me for months afterward – I worried that I would not exceed it in this life. In the hope of doing so, I spent an unusual amount of time watching and reading a lot of internet “fitness content” (dreadful phrase) aimed at men, especially at lifters. In “consuming” (as the equally awful but fitting verb has it) this “content,” I have arrived at a unified theory of the so-called “masculinity crisis.” Thank me later.

For a long time, one has heard and read of such a masculinity crisis. Fathers haven’t done their jobs, the theory goes – whether they disappeared or, leaching their toxins, stayed. A kergyma has gone uncommunicated. The gospel of Man Stuff was, by some all-important generation – there is some controversy about which – denied to a group of boys. What was the gospel of Man Stuff? A lot of practical things, like how to properly wield a drill or throw a spiral. But also some metaphysics – God put you here to kill things – and some popular psychology – your brain is hard-wired to kill things. At its most benign, the gospel of Man Stuff is a large number of specific tasks and techniques and savoirs-faire that stand, in the aggregate, for a kind of Odyssean adequacy to any given task, along with a quiet reliability that I’m not sure any of the Greek gods or heroes exemplify. This combination, of course, is universally appealing. We could always use more competent and reliable people, whatever their gender; we could always be more competent and more reliable. And so a perfectly healthy longing is grafted to various highly tendentious theories of gender, and everyone suffers, except content creators.

Photograph by Dollar Gill / Unsplash.

But a crisis can be generated in part simply by thinking you’re in one, and America’s men and boys do seem to think that crisis is where they live. They think they need a reason to live beyond “Because God wills it,” a special function in social life beyond “Whatever God has made you, personally, good at doing, and whatever the people around you need.” Thus, some of them have turned to the so-called “manosphere”. They have apprenticed themselves to various famous ne’er-do-wells to find the fathers they need, and escape the oppressive condescension of a liberal media that hates them simply for being men. So the story runs.

I’ll tell you, as a man, the part of this story that I find the most confusing: It isn’t the notion of a kergyma of Man Stuff, which I think is basically nonsense, but nonsense of a familiar sort. I feel an ongoing disgust and wonderment at the idea that there is any form of excellence that any adult human is let off from trying to emulate – that women should leave physical courage to men or that men should leave thoughtfulness and care to women. I simply am too covetous of every kind of excellence, too impressed by the range of Types of Guys of all genders out there, not to chafe at the restrictiveness of automated gender roles. But if I find this sort of thinking silly, it’s a form of silliness I’m used to.

As for the conspiracy-minded, those who never met a quack therapy they didn’t like, don’t they on some level appeal to the Gnostic in all of us? The feeling that something fundamental and unnameable is off in modern life.

Nor am I confused, exactly, by the popularity of entertainers who tell hormone-addled boys that you can, with enough cruelty to yourself and others, forgo the risk of ever being naked with a woman whose subjectivity is real to you. That’s a lousy, life-denying message, but we aren’t surprised when some people find cocaine addiction more appealing than real life, and the promise of that kind of safety is cocaine for scared boys. The solution is the universal stigmatization, among parents all over the world, of giving children under sixteen internet-equipped screen devices. Your children’s machines should be as dumb as the people who seek your children’s clicks and likes.

I am, however, very confused by the idea that the manosphere offers some remedy on the one hand for fatherlessness or on the other for liberal condescension. If only we lacked for fathers like these – for fathers who bark at everyone else for failings they themselves display tenfold; for fathers who are eager marks; for fathers who can’t be trusted around teenage girls. As for the notion that our computer dads are offering us a relief from liberal condescension – I suppose they do, but they replace liberal condescension with reactionary condescension, which is worse. Whether he speaks on behalf of a “true America” that the majority of Americans aren’t included in, or an Ayn Randian minority of “doers,” or some other invisible empire, the reactionary always talks down to you from a height that is infinitely harder to scale than any liberal meritocracy, real or imaginary.

And, as it turns out, it’s this style – this exact tone and rhetorical strategy – that an experienced watcher of YouTube men’s fitness content comes to use, almost instinctively, to separate the good stuff from the nonsense. The hallmark of Reactionary Condescension in its milder forms is a certain tone: the scolding, cajoling, superior tone of an always already irritated older brother or dad or coach or youth pastor. And this tone is all over men’s fitness YouTube, though it’s far from universal. For a particularly vivid and entertaining example, consider the advertisements of the ubiquitous “V-Shred” Guy, an admittedly well-muscled gentleman who simply cannot believe that you are still doing steady-state cardiovascular exercise. He is so upset that you are trying to get buff in this manner that he has gone and hired one of the “LoveLines” guys to hector you about it. Detailed and forensic analyses of all the ways that this guy’s whole thing is fake are almost as rife on the internet as his commercials are. But the reason his example is useful is that he clarifies what Reactionary Condescension is really for: It’s how you sell stuff to scared men.

It wouldn’t be true to say that I have learned nothing from lifters who use this style. For an example of Reactionary Condescension as wielded by someone who actually has useful things to say, we need look no further than Mark Rippetoe, who is one of the world’s leading authorities on getting strong. In the opening sentence of his classic 2005 manual, Starting Strength, he says that physical strength is the most important thing in the world. There’s a philosophy implied there, and it’s the opposite of Christianity. And in his various books, videos, posts, and podcasts, he lets the implications of that philosophy show through often enough. But in a Rippetoe video, you can often actually see the moment when he gets too absorbed in lifting as an activity to maintain the contemptuous Mark Rippetoe persona any longer – and that’s always the moment when you need to start paying attention. You can pretty much skip the rest.

Luckily, there are many lifters who don’t bother with this style at all. If you want “positive masculinity,” some of these guys are already offering it, whether they are teaching you how to fight – the realest ones are not afraid to show themselves fighting alongside women, or even (gasp!) losing to them – or to lift. One of my favorites at the moment is Dan John, a well-muscled Midwestern Catholic who believes in kettlebell workouts and also in “the absolute dignity of every human person” I do not share his enthusiasm for the kettlebell, but two or three serious injuries or one lengthy training plateau from now, I may. John speaks frequently on the particular needs of older lifters, and in his refreshingly sane, realistic advice, he models one form of human excellence that the reactionary sort of masculinity can’t even see as a form of excellence: the acceptance of mortality, of limits.

Or there are the Buff Dudes, a pair of siblings whose channel is named, appropriately, Buff Dudes. A lot of the advice on their channel falls under the category of “basic but useful” – for super-detailed explanations of squat form, you may want to look elsewhere. What they provide, beyond basic instruction, is inspiration, and they’re great at that. Part of the reason they’re good at it is that they do not try to sell an image of themselves as all-powerful warriors. They laugh at themselves frequently, and in one recent video, the younger of the two siblings offers a frank account of his recent battle with lowered testosterone levels. In another, he spends several months training his wife as a lifter, partly in an effort to quell the unnecessary fear among many women lifters that, if they get too serious, they’ll attain an “un-feminine” level of muscle development. (You pretty much have to take steroids to get the look these women are worried about – and that’s true whether or not you’re a woman.) Whatever you think of the premise of the video, the guy spends most of it talking about how impressed he is with his wife for training so hard, praising her to her face in a way that you can’t imagine the Reactionary Condescension types praising anyone, especially not a woman.

Other YouTube lifters I have found useful include Barbell Medicine, Renaissance Periodization, and Alan Thrall. (The potential beginner is also hereby ordered to read Casey Johnston, about whom I have written elsewhere – but she lies somewhat outside the conceit of this article.) I don’t want to claim any particular philosophical or political views on behalf of these folks – the Renaissance Periodization guy, Mike “Dr. Mike” Israetel, is a libertarian, so he and I disagree on at least that much. Some of these folks have things to sell and some of them don’t. But all of them love lifting, and all of them seem to want to say something useful.

What does this tell us about the “masculinity crisis”? It tells us that the solution is all around us. Nobody can teach you how to “be a man,” because that is the wrong level of abstraction for solving your personal sense of uselessness or indefiniteness. You have to pick something you want to be good at, and then look at the people who want to help you be better at that, and who don’t try to neg you into buying something before they’re willing to help you. And then work. Masculinity is like the self in general, like identity in general – the project of figuring it out will take up as much space as you give it. But you’re most interesting, and most useful, and most fulfilled, and (to people for whom this is important) most a man, when you look outside yourself, even if all you’re looking at, in this moment, is forty-five-pound metal plates.