Andrew Tate has turned bad self-esteem into a multi-billion-dollar business, and sites like Substack don’t stop him because they don’t mind sacrificing him for their own gain. Given his abusive history with women, I have no problem offering him as tribute; however, his reach is extremely harmful to teenage boys. How did we get to the point where we’ve constructed a hyper-masculinity paired with uber-bad self-esteem as the ideal man? This is the third in the series about pop culture as an expression of both patriarchy and capitalism.
One of the most frustrating things as a historian to see online is the proliferation of falsehoods about how men felt historically. We have vastly more information about men's lives than about women's. Many more writers (and other literate people) of the past were men. Despite having vast resources, including the writings of men, somehow the 21st-century belief about historic men is incredibly skewed.
Corporate profits are largely to blame. One driver of the work culture in the 21st century is in the technology industry. Many of the earliest tech entrepreneurs dropped out of college, and so didn’t have a rounded Humanities education. Their own success without a Humanities education meant they didn’t appreciate it. But they also lacked the skills to frame the factoids they learned. As they grew and needed to add an ethos to their work culture, they adopted ideas that helped them maintain truly bonkers work hours. Working longer and harder was seen as a sign of allegiance to the brand in the creation of the American Myth of the techboro. They looked to the past and pulled out exactly what they needed to support their worldview, without context. Long before MAGA was saying I do my own research, people like Zuckerberg and the PayPal Mafia were suggesting that stoicism was an emotion-free focus on getting it done by gritting it out.
Donna Zuckerberg, in Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Misogyny in the Digital Age " (2018), points out that online, many people extract and then distort classical texts to support a vision of hardened, unfeeling masculinity that helps men feel in control without having to be emotionally engaged.
Not only did tech gurus espouse men's stoicism in their ranks, but there was also a huge rise in media portraying ideal masculinity as emotion-free. Given the work-harder culture of the 21st Century, this false sense of stoicism also served employers well, creating hardworking automatons. But it was also great for the platforms these tech firms were putting out. The more content was made, the more men saw that masculinity needed to be learned online, and the more money these platforms made. Men’s bad self-esteem was good for business all around.
The podcast culture largely stems from this push. Podcasts went from a niche format in 2004 to a ~$30 billion global industry with over half a billion listeners today — roughly two decades of nearly vertical growth. Men account for about 64% of hosts on the top 100 shows and about 73% of all guests. The imbalance is most extreme in business, technology, and sports/fitness podcasts, where women hosts are under 20% — the exact categories that overlap with the optimization, self-improvement, and "masculinity" content ecosystem.
While men are learning about history and masculinity online, they’ve also become less able to assess the validity of sources and to critically engage with media. Men in the US are less educated than women. Since Title IV improved parity in educational access for women. While women started to excel in sports and graduate school. As women succeeded at higher rates, many boys fell back, partly because of unfavorable comparisons with girls. Within five years of Title IX passing, women’s completion of Associate's Degrees surpassed men’s. Within a decade, women surpassed men’s attainment of college degrees. Since the 1980s, men’s degree completion has not caught up with women's. As of 2020, women earn about 61% of master's degrees conferred in the U.S. The rhetoric around the uselessness of college, interestingly enough, has ramped up in this same period.
This disparity starts in youth. Starting as early as kindergarten, girls show higher levels of the behavioral and attentional skills that schools reward. More than biological differences, the disparity stems from how boys are aculturated differently. Boys are often taught to focus on strength and toughing it out. But even more, educators are largely women. Boys see fewer role models for how to navigate education, and emotionally struggle, as girls are doing better.
Less educated men are good for business if you need gullible customers. The men's supplement industry has grown from an effectively nonexistent segment in 1972 to roughly $27 billion in the U.S. alone today. The men's grooming and personal care industry has grown from an effectively nonexistent segment in 1972 to roughly $70–90 billion globally today. Both grew most explosively from the mid-1990s for supplements and the mid-2010s for grooming — meaning both trend lines accelerated during exactly the period that men's educational attainment and mental health indicators were eroding relative to women's.
As men have fallen behind in the domains that traditionally defined middle-class masculinity (education, stable wages, marriage), the markets selling them ways to optimize their bodies, hormones, appearance, and mindset have boomed. Men are now spending more money to be manly and less time being intellectual or prepared for fulfilling work.
Thomas Dixon, who writes about the history of emotions, points out that emotions are socially situated. As ▶Dixon brings in his short video on the subject, emotions are thoughts and, as such, need to be understood within the context of that society. You might think, but love must be the same since time immemorial?
The ancient Greeks identified eight types of love, none of which align exactly with our society today. While storge, familial love, is certainly similar, their conception of selfless love (agape) is a combination of altriuism and allegiance to community. Many of the Greek myths that involve sacrifice (and might sound tragic to us) are expressions of agape. Now, these differences aren’t just nomenclature. The way we see the world, including how we feel, is filtered through our social norms.
Angelos Chaniotis, co-curator of the exhibit “A World of Emotions: Ancient Greece, 700 B.C.–200 A.D.,” from 2017, noted that “Emotions require thinking, and thinking of a very human kind. The ancient writers understood this very well.” Rather than sublimating feelings, the Ancient Greeks sought to use thought and emotion in concert to guide action.
And this is why so much of the manosphere gets stoicism wrong. They misunderstood the context and ran with it. Philosopher Massimo Pigliucci has also suggested that pop psychology has gotten Stoicism incredibly wrong. He said in an interview: “Sometimes people say that Stoicism is more popular among men because it is about suppressing emotions, but that gets it twice wrong: first, because that’s actually a profound mischaracterization of the philosophy; second, because it uncritically accepts the stereotype that women are more ‘emotional’” He goes on to point out stoicism is not about closing yourself off from emotions but instead about learning how to navigate it.
Marcus Aurelius (the Romans took over the mantle of stoicism from the Greeks), for example, said, “The first rule is to keep an untroubled spirit. The second is to look things in the face and know them for what they are.” But he was building his ideas of stoicism from thinkers like Seneca, who said: “Tears fall, no matter how we try to check them, and by being shed they ease the soul. Let us allow them to fall, but let us not command them to do so; let us weep according as emotion floods our eyes, but not as much as mere imitation shall demand.” Don’t hold your emotions in; you’re not being your authentic self. Therefore, Marcus Aurelius can be read as saying to look things in the face, including emotions.
History, not only, doesn’t illustrate the point that in the past, manly men kept their feelings in check. It, in fact, shows plenty of men having big feelings. The Renaissance culture of troubadours was largely about love songs. Unlike the manosphere, which claims to help men find women, men’s emotional expressions about love weren’t about gaming the system to get a chick. They were about feeling moved to be united with a woman. The Renaissance culture of love wasn’t just in troubadour songs.
Henry VIII wrote scores of love letters to women (prior to having them killed, mind you.) His letters to Anne Boleyn included, “I... make it my duty to inform you of the great solitude that I find here since your departure... I ensure you, methinks the time is longer since your departure than I was used to in a whole fortnight.” His yearning for her was an expression of being a Renaissance man, where emotion was an important part of being well-rounded.
Men didn’t fight wars without feelings either. Wartime diaries, like Joseph P. Martin’s from the Revolutionary War, described the raw fear, chaos, and panic of battles. As paper and writing utensils became cheaper and more portable, more diaries and letters of soldiers’ thoughts survived. War wasn’t fought by boys who were more fighting machines than people. I wonder how much of the emotionless MAGA soldier fantasy comes from video games?
How many of our phrases for emotions come from Shakespeare? “Green-eyed monster” for jealousy and “wear my heart upon my sleeve” for being emotionally open are two from Othello that come to mind. The emotional tenor of Shakespeare’s plays is a reflection of both the nature of society and the expectations of the audience to see emotions.
Historically, men who don’t feel are a lie. Plenty of evidence shows that men felt emotions strongly and, in doing so, these men were often within their cultural norms for masculinity.
Morpheus says in the Matrix Movie, “The Matrix is everywhere. It’s all around us. Even now in this very room. You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church, when you pay your taxes.” In the 1999 film, Neo (Keanu Reeves) must choose between going down the rabbit hole of the Matrix and never learning the truth. But the Wachowski sisters, two trans women, were not creating a movement for men to deny feminism. They were creating entertainment. As with Shakespeare, they were both responding to society and reflecting society.
On the edge of Y2K, technology held promise but also fear. There was widespread fear that all of society would shut down, because computers hadn’t been programmed with the 21st century in mind. (Those days seem like a halcyon moment when technology and reality were not at odds. ) The Matrix was an expression of all that technology might be, not a crystal ball on what it would be. That it then seemed to spawn a class of men who are hampered in reality due to plummeting into the emotional hellholes much worse than any Neo experienced is heartbreaking.
There were alternatives. The humanities could have guided us. Safeguards could have been in place. But unchecked capitalism and the unrealistic belief that people would put the collective good over profit led us to this moment in society. But instead, we have platforms like Substack that’d happily take money from broken men to fill their bank accounts, because they’re broken men. They hide behind the simple reasoning that they are upholding free speech. But what they mean is I cannot take a stand because I’ve never cared about anything but myself. We’ve created a society of men who fear emotions but understand the simple rewards of money and chicks. Robot men are running things and making more robot men, but inside many of them are boys who can’t process their feelings.
To take stock of the last couple of essays, we’re in a position where women have long been objectified and their emotions manipulated for profit. In the 21st century, men have been catching up in being manipulated by the market. But unlike women, they often have less education and are less able to think critically about what they’re consuming.
The corporate masculinity of the manosphere is a lie. It’s not historical. And, it’s not healthy. But it makes people very rich. Until we change the parameters of success from profit to empathy, or from individual to collective, we’ll remain in a society where we watch college-aged students OD or engage in sexual violence for entertainment.
Feelings are part of being an animal. Emotions are how humans understand feelings within the construct of society. We cannot escape being an animal or a human. No amount of money will change our essence. Avoiding emotions or constructing a false masculinity certainly will not. Instead, what we end up with is men like video-game-like wars with the largest army the world has ever seen, and men like Andrew Tate grandstanding about his masculinity while crumbling like a baby in a boxing match.
Donna Zuckerberg sees the trajectory of masculinity as framed to validate each other. In this way, they’re channel one that is very true about history—sidelining women. By invoking ancient history, they can “position themselves as the inheritors of the classical tradition,” aligning themselves with a time when women had no power. Rather than meeting women and society as it is, they retreat to their construct of a time when women’s deceitfulness and manipulation were curtailed by society's strictures. (Never mind that women were not deceitful, nor were they uniformly curtailed). Cherrypicking from history strengthens their importance and validates their biases. (Critical thought or factual accuracy would be such a bother.) Reductive looks at history allow these men to have reductive looks at masculinity.
Zuckerberg points out that they look to history for validation for themselves to sideline women, but they claim their goal in the manosphere is to get women. Seduction, like everything else in their life, lacks authentic emotion. Instead, getting women is a game. But, not unlike video games, women in their conception are just points to rack up. Winning chicks is not a means to emotional fulfillment but instead a way to increase their bonds with other men. They’re scoring with women to get on some manosphere leaderboard.
But what’s the prize to be the leader of the emotionally stunted man-boys? There have been storied moments where men get swept up in validating each other. Famously, the tradition of men's suits originated with Beau Brummel, a bon vivant who was friends with aristocrats in early 19th-century London. His fashion trend lasted much longer than his purse or his acceptance in society. He died alone and penniless. Will the manosphere boys meet a similar end? Time will tell.
In the end, patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism, and this type of masculinity are all linked factors. These four horsemen of our cultural apocalypse are galloping through feeds day in and day out with more and more horrific news. This will not change until all of us, but most certainly men, dismantle this system.
