Critics at Large | The New Yorker - Where Do Men Go from Here?

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This is Critics at Large, a podcast from The New Yorker. I'm Alex Schwartz. I'm Nomi Fry.

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 1. Perennial, even. What's going on with men?

Are they okay? Men. What do you guys think? Are they?

I don't think anyone is okay.

Yeah. Yeah. Like, it's not just men, Vincent.

Are are they okay relative to other categories of being?

No.

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?

I mean, you know, so much talk about toxic masculinity that it's almost become a cliche at this point. Yeah.

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 really 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 wrong for men right now.

Yeah. The the the men, they're they're not doing great. And as we said, this is a concern that's ongoing. We even touched on it on more than 1 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. What are we seeing?

In terms of culture right now, I think what we are seeing is 2 roads diverge in a wood Mhmm. Vibe situation.

Yes.

On the 1 hand, we have cultural texts. For instance, the new HBO show, Half Man, created by Richard Gad.

I couldn't get out of my mind to get a word. She's violent.

Don't talk like you're better than me, not after what you did.

Really leaning into violent aggression of the kind of alpha male and 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.

It's not just me. Right? Not just you. Feel it too, don't you?

Which is kind of like, can men get back in touch with their softer side? You know? Like, what might be available for them Mhmm. Emotionally? You know?

Do boys cry? Yeah. Etcetera, etcetera. I think this is kind of what we're dealing with in culture right now.

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 1 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 here? Alright. 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?

I would take it back honestly to the feminist movement. Absolutely. 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 seventies, 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, and gender responsibilities and gender identities, really. And then out of this grows a men's rights, men's pride

Mhmm.

Agenda. And when I think about that, I think about a fictional character from the late nineties. I think about Frank TJ Mackie

Of course.

From Magnolia. Respect the cock. Paul Thomas Anderson's

Mhmm.

1999 movie. And Frank TJ Mackie is a a men's rights advocate who gives seminar performances at which he, rises up before a group of frankly, like, lame dudes Mhmm. And enjoins them too. As Nomi said, respect the cock. I have a whole clip I can play if we wanna pause for this, but we can also keep on moving.

Please.

Do you guys wanna see the beginning of Frank Mackey'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.

Mhmm. 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.

No. You will not control me. No. No. You will not take my soul.

No. No. You will not win this game. Yeah. Because it is a game, guys.

You guys are fun. It's good It's ingenious.

Yeah. It's amazing. I'm thinking about another movie from the same year, in fact, Fight Club, David Fincher's Fight Club, which is 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.

Goddamn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables, slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need.

And and has has made men kind of, like, softened cucks. And the way to confront that is, of course, by going to the underground fight club

Yeah.

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 twentieth century has sucked out of him.

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 the Columbine shooting.

Absolutely.

And it's funny because the discourse in my lifetime over mass shootings has now become almost wholly about guns and Mhmm. Gun control, gun violence, etcetera, rightly so. But at that initial moment, it was a lot about young boys and

Yes.

Bullying, the sort of cruelty of young boys on 1 hand, on the vulnerability of them on another. I was part of this group, in 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 in it was started by this woman who was a psychologist and wanted to, like, train kids to sort of diffuse bullying. And and it was, like, almost explicitly about, like, sort of how to combat, like, intra masculine violence. It was really it was a big discourse in my childhood.

And you mentioned this thing that you set up earlier, Nomi, like, this kind of 2 sides thing. You could see it even in media. There 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. Mhmm.

And all of a sudden, there 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 seventies, since then, this pendulum swing, right, between what is acceptable and not acceptable in terms of, like, the way men are and specifically the way they relate to women has swung from 1 kind of side to another. And I think all of this is the prehistory to the moment we're in today.

Yeah. I would say 2 huge things happen. 1 is the Internet, and 1 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.

That's right. So with all that in mind, let's turn to Half 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?

Okay. The curtain opens

Boy, does it.

On a on a group of of Chorus Line Dreamers. No. I'm kidding. The the so okay. Here we are.

It's the eighties. We are in Scotland. We are in the working class.

Mhmm.

K? We have 2 boys, 2 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.

Look. I'm sorry. Okay? I should have told you. And keep him with the theme of surprises.

He's moved into your room. What? No way. What did you think that second bed was for? We were almost begging you to ask.

I thought it was for guests. He is a guest. No. He's not. He's a psycho.

He bit someone's nose off. I've seen the guy too. It's horrible. His wife left him and everything.

This is the setup.

Remember me, Bambi? Last time I saw you, you were about yay high.

We have these 2 boys.

You've got the exact same size head, though, 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 from Niall towards Reuben, cannot be denied. They are brothers. They are blood brothers, and yet he is a violent monster.

Mhmm.

The first kind of, like, traumatic event, I guess, that we are privy to is Nile is on the verge and Uni on the verge of exploring his homosexuality with his flatmate Mhmm. Albie. And Ruben, like, loses it and, like, pummels Albie into the ground, almost kills him, goes to jail. Mhmm. Okay?

And there's a lot of that happening over the course of of the show. Basically, it's about Niles.

She's gonna she's I love it. Tell us what it's about. I'm like, what is this show about?

So this It's show

so hard to say.

It's so hard to say. I know I always say this, but every episode is 9000 hours long. Okay? I mean, they are, like, technically speaking, slightly over an hour long each, and it's 6 episodes. But it's glacial.

Vincent, you said florid. 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.

Sounds like you loved it.

Once again, you guys, I'm a hater.

There you go.

I'm a hater. Did I I'm sorry. I wish I could give a a better it's hard to synopsize.

No. I I wasn't laughing at you. Was laughing at the the fact that the show repeats itself so many times that once you start engaging with it and its plot terms, you are just gonna find yourself in a loop Yeah.

That you

keep going up and around and up

and around

because that's the point of the show. The point of the show is about cycles that can't be broken. Right?

Yes.

And and the cycle that can't be broken is the mutually intensely destructive relationship between these 2 people. I think the show is set up with a rather simple idea that each can be the other savior to some extent. Certainly, that's what their mothers want for them. They want the tender 1 to show the the mean 1 some feelings, and they want the mean 1 to kinda help the tender 1 stand up for himself and walk through life a little bit taller, you know, walk like a man, talk like a man. That's 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.

That's

right. Vincent, you're a man.

Yeah. I am a man. I am a man. And I'm proud

make of this?

You know, I don't I don't I don't think of myself as a a as a Nile or a Reuben. I'm somewhere in between. But I liked it slightly better than you have described. I definitely there was a kind of patina to the Richard Gadaverse of It's like It's it's it's like a It's it's high polish menace.

Mhmm.

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 of the way it's being watched.

It's theatrical.

It was if it has a maybe theatricality is the way to talk about that. But I did like the extent to which these characters become on on in some way to your point, the moms want them to help each other. They do become in some way codependent Mhmm. Or and maybe even parasitic Mhmm. On 1 another.

Mhmm. If we talk about, you know, this idea of 2 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? I don't know. Here it says, what if you actually, you know, 2 roads diverged in the yellow wood, and sorry I could not travel both and be 1 traveler.

This shows like, I am gonna be 1 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.

Right? It is very that's this is why it's very Fight Club. Yeah. At some point, kind of, again, unsubtly, a character says, what do you mean you're like him? To 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. Mhmm. It's somebody trying, 2 people on some level trying to have it both ways. And so, it's not a 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 Albie, that's when he calls Ruben and says, I need you, man. And then he comes, and Nile realizes this might be irreversible, the violence that is about to be visited upon everybody that I live with. But he's the 1 that made the decision because of his uncertainty about masculinity. So he's sort of deploying this 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 kinda think was psychologically acute and interesting as a as a sort of paradigm Yeah. Of how these 2 ideas about masculinity or choose 1 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.

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So Half Man is this very dark portrait of masculinity. But like we've said, these depictions are kinda going everywhere and maybe pointing out 2 different lanes. So what's the other side? If Half Man is the dark side of this yin and yang, what can we point to as the the polar opposite?

I mean, okay. Well, we 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 it takes place allows for a kind of, like, old school closetedness that that, you know, creates kind of plot possibilities and tonal possibilities. And these 2 characters, Ilya and Shane, should by all rights be expected to be Reuben, right, to be these killers who cannot kind of accept any sign of kind of, like, softness or 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.

Enough what? Questions. You have too many of them. I'm sorry. It's okay.

I wasn't clear. I'm sure in advance for tonight's game, we're gonna destroy you guys. Oh, so you're the asshole? No. It's still you.

No. It's not me. You're the asshole. Everyone must know this. Everyone, Shane Hollander is an asshole.

And are able to create a version of masculinity that is not Rubenesque. Rubenesque. Little

angels. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

Or more to the point, not Niallesque, I think. The the the thesis of heated rivalry is that you need to let the sunshine in. The the that you need to expose things. 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. Mhmm.

Yeah. Yeah. And then also, we had adolescence Mhmm. A couple of years ago Mhmm. Also from The UK, about a young, 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 a little girl.

Why is is she your dad then?

Why would you ask her?

Is she?

Oh, yeah. She is. And we think you know that. So it's really clever of you to ask the question if that is the case. Anything?

Careful, dear Baskin. Okay then. Tell you what, describe your friendship to me.

Adolescence is another 1 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 kinda had this ray of possibility that it could be otherwise, if only we would all change or something like that.

I think that was very much the point of adolescence. Adolescence, which was created by Jack Thorne, 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 about half man. You could I there was actually a a columnist, a female columnist in in England who said she thought this should be shown anywhere men are gathered. Strong disagree. Like, that what's that gonna do here?

This this doesn't make any sense to me. No. You're you're gonna see the results of your actions and feel so horrified that you change your ways, and who are you even I I find this to be such an irritating approach both to men and to art. Like, both deserve better

Mhmm.

Than that. In terms of the, like, other ways to be a man that we're being shown right now, another show we've talked about is DTF Saint Louis. We didn't talk about this aspect of DTF Saint 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 Check it out, listeners.

I I've just never seen a relationship between men quite like the 1 depicted on DTF Saint 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 Saint Louis posits a world where there kind of is no shame around things that traditionally men would find shame in, like homosexuality. Mhmm. This is a show in which 2 straight middle aged men who are both are at in a total rut in their lives and in their marriages form an intense bond with 1 another to the point where they act like lovers and look like lovers, but aren't. You loved him?

Yes. But you loved her. Yeah. But I loved him more. I would never hurt him.

Loved him how? Like you love something, you know, like like this sun when you're cold. Like water. When you really need water? I don't understand.

Like snacks? No. Or, like, I love Floyd.

I found it totally fascinating and, beautiful and also totally tragic because the show, of course, does not It none of this works out well for the men in any of these shows.

Right. Right. So right. I wanna ask you, Alex, like but these men, they're also kind of presented as losers, are they not? Right?

But no 1 is presented as the cool alternative. There's something very are they losers? They're kind of average, I think is the idea. The show the show the whole thing about the show is there is no such thing as a loser. Like, the the kind of the phrase that keeps getting tossed around from the show is no 1 is normal just looks that way from across the street.

And, again, the problem for these guys is that, particularly for the Floyd Smurnach character, the 1 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 with feeling too fat, too old, and having a weird crooked penis.

Mhmm.

And he just thinks those things, he can't surmount those things.

And they're they're not 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 I 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.

Yes.

You know?

That's right.

And there and and I did think that DTF was if there was something very open about it, it was about an open portrayal of deep suffering. Yeah. I'd I'm I'm still thinking about it. I thought it was really well, really well done.

And maybe the 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 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

Mhmm.

Going on in all of these. And I think that 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 1 of those archetypes, you're not gonna be seen anyway because your individuality is gonna be completely scrubbed.

Right.

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 as, you know, into a superhero or into the exact opposite, but the individuality part gets lost in the wash. Nobody sees it. Nobody sees it.

Yeah. But, Vincent, you watched another show, right, in the recent show, a new adaptation of Lord of the Flies on Netflix.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so it's, 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, it you know, the story is a bunch of schoolboys have survived 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. The first almost the first thing that happens is we need a chief.

He's right, though. We do need to make some key decisions. It seems to me we ought to have a chief. More important is to find out exactly where we are. A chief will decide that.

I can be chief. I'm chapter chorister in head boy. I can sing high c sharp. Almost in favor of me is I think we should have more than 1 consideration if a chief is to be decided.

And it goes from there. All the skirmishes that are sort of maybe protopolitical 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 fish island, which I usually don't like. And each of the episodes sort of is focalized through, the point of view of of of 1 of the boys. And it's made by Jack Thorne, who is also the creator, director, visionary behind adolescence. Did either of guys watch any of these?

I didn't, but I have a 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

Sure.

The the end the demise of Piggy. Ugh. I can't even tell you when I read it 30 years ago. Traumatic. Absolutely traumatic.

Little piggy. They they smash his glasses, you know, horrifying.

Not the glasses.

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 what's going on there? Why now for Lord of the Flies?

I do think that there is using from my 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 1 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 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 I did think, okay, this is about how human society develops without the the sort of civilizing hand of the law government institutions. But today though, this time around, I I would say, in this adaptation, it's much more about what we 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.

I was thinking about another I mean, to to go to a different genre altogether, about another example of kind of, like, the the the roads diverging for men and how the pendulum moves from 1 side to another. I recently wrote about the newest season of Vanderpump Rules. Oh, man. The Bravo

What are those kids getting into?

Reality show. So okay. So here's 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, etcetera, etcetera, especially after Scandivol, which if you know, you know. Oh, yeah. Thick 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 and waitresses at the sexy, restaurant, Lisa Vanderpump's West Hollywood establishment. And so we have a new group of kinda 20. Right? And I was struck by how much more, at least on the 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 trying

to make it have a TV show.

Exactly. And yet the way they speak about things and their their relative openness about their own possible failings, you know, maybe their sexual shortcomings. 1 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 the, you know, the show, the first iteration that started in 2013, I I don't think that would have been possible with the guys, you know, who grew up in the February, 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.

Not yet.

Not yet. Season.

It's a you know what? It's a long season. You're right. You're right.

So we've talked about these 2 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.

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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 in 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.

Mhmm.

And I would love to hear your what your analysis of, Clavicular and his fellow travelers in in in the minds of Luxmaxing?

So Clavicular is a name that I would say I had never heard before, I wanna say, like, 03/20/2026. And since roughly that date, I've heard it between 3 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.

Like Frank Sinatra.

I didn't realize he was a Hoboken boy.

See, I knew I'd be dropping things that you had not yet known. 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. It's Florida to the max.

It's Florida to the max. So he has come to prominence through TikTok and Kik, a platform, again, that I was not aware of before clavicular brought it to my attention for lux maxing. And for some people who listen to the show will know exactly what that is. I 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.

It's gonna turn you gray. A gray you.

It's like it's not like 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. Yes. Yeah. Clavicular has, as I learned from listening to his interview on impulsive, Logan Paul's podcast, has been on testosterone since he was 14 in an effort to, as he says, puberty max.

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.

Longer collarbone.

That's like I mean, he is a he is a nice clavicle, I guess. So Clavicular was doing this interview with Logan Paul and his cohost of his show. They asked to be rated by him on his personal scale of sexual attractiveness. 1 of them is rated a 3.75, a devastating sexual attractiveness rating.

Yeah. Yeah. Can you tell us why? So yeah. Mostly because his interpupillary distance.

So, like, how close that his eyes are, and also the long longer mid face would be the main.

The seriousness with which clavicular approaches this task, it is as if he's, you know, jeweler examining them under a microscope 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. 1 is that I do think in, like, traditional ideas of masculinity, that stuff was not supposed to matter. That was girly stuff. Right.

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 that was a version of 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. Welcome. Welcome, boys.

Welcome. It's hell in 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. It goes without saying. Well, I

think it's interesting. The thing about, like, the violence that is being turned inward, you know, we we can't also forget the violence turned out outward in this kind of manosphere environment. You know, someone like Andrew Tate, is being investigated in The UK for rape, sexual assault, and human trafficking, and in Romania on a host of similar charges. Right. And we should say that he has denied all of these allegations.

Of course. 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 in PT Anderson's Magnolia, this is like the tip of the iceberg

Yeah.

Of what what we're hearing right now.

Well, it does seem yeah. It does seem that there is this resurgent reactionary notions just of of what gender is. I mean, you see it there's always these 2 sides of the coin where this focus on the the male body, I, at least, and that's probably because all of my apps know that I'm a man, I'm 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.

Mhmm.

There seems to be just a total, upswing in the number of these things. And of course, you know, then you look on Hollywood runways and you see that there's, it seems to me, an increasingly violent and punishing return to ideas about the female body. You know, that mean, we can talk about all the reasons for it. Ozempic might be 1, but it's not just that. These aesthetics of extreme skinniness are back.

Yep. And so the body starts to write these these scripts that we've Mhmm. We've seen again. But I'm wondering, it's interesting because, yeah, there are the androtates of the world and the claviculars of the world. As we mentioned, we've been talking about this kind of 2 roads thing.

I'm wondering if and we see the the other side of it in culture, but I'm not sure if we see another road in real life.

My god. It's like Pedro Pascal and that's it. It's like Pedro, carry us on your shoulders.

Pedro Pascal, Coleman Domingo. These are real guys who say, okay, we can kind of queer our our 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 there's a guy named Body by Mark who goes up to people. I don't know if you've seen

this Instagram I haven't.

Is Body by Mark?

He goes up to people and he always says is

Thank you.

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. 8. Calisthenics, 7 days. No. I touch weight.

You do? Lightweight. So how many days a week are you doing that? 3 days. 1 meal a day.

What are your strongest lifts? Well, overhead press is a strong lift of mine. How much? Normally, it can go up to a 100 and

I didn't wanna be like a skinny fat person. I wanna have a a superhero body. I've been training for, like, 20 plus years.

We're back in this moment of, like, you gotta be a he man or you gotta be like a way fit. It it something has happened where, like, the comic book almost Yes. Is back.

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. Mhmm. 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 gotta be ripped. Look at heated rivalry.

We love these soft men. They're hot as hell. Like, they're they're they're hot as hell. They're peptide ed up. They're 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 Yeah. 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 salesman. 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 wanna 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 1 influencer he runs into 2 young guys who say, you have shown me the way. You because we are born without value.

How do you what do you mean, life as a man, you're born without value? It's in the world is giving you. You have to you have to have your single payment. 100%. Do you think women have it hard?

I think they're born with their value through beauty. Exactly. 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 gonna invite him on a trip to Miami. They're not gonna fly him out.

He has to create value in the world. He has to be valuable to other men. Exactly. Otherwise, nobody cares. Exactly.

You say And that's a fact. Exactly. I wanna say to your

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 what a brilliant idea I just had.

No. I mean, I think a a return to the values of humanism is

We love those.

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 of promise in this area?

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 that either. I do think we're getting very interested damaged men being shown to us Mhmm.

And not damaged in the stereotypical toxic masculinity way. I have mixed feelings about half man, and and 1 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 doctor 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 it and is breaking. It's a very sad portrait of a person, and it's, I think it's also helpful in this discourse.

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, and I totally appreciate it. For instance, like, going nuts about manspreading. You know what I mean?

Like Mhmm.

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 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 wanna 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 etcetera, etcetera, because they feel they have no value otherwise expressing our, you know, our own anger and frustration as women, which is completely earned.

Mhmm.

I mean, it's certainly, in a lot of ways, justified and more satisfying, certainly, and does much maybe in the way of of kind of consciousness raising, I guess, oppositionally. But in terms of kind of moving forward, I I wonder if there's another alternative.

I want Vincent to tell us how to be a man.

I know. Oh, yeah. Let's ask Vincent. Vincent? Vincent, can you as the man in our midst, a wonderful man in our midst

Thank you very much. I appreciate it.

Could you tell us what the secret is? How does 1 be a man?

You know, I'm I'm 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.

Like, 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, like, put their face in my face and told me to be a man. It happened it happened a lot. I think most men that I my acquaintance in my generation, maybe I should say, have a voice like that in their head. And it and it has to do with messages that have been directed at us for 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 Quadrado composed our theme music and we had engineering help today from Pran Bandy with mixing by Mike Cushman.

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 at the mail@newyorker.com. That's the mail@newyorker.com. Subject line, critics. And as always, you can find each and every 1 of our episodes at newyorker.com/critics.

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People can ask me about Donald Trump for the rest of my life, and I'll tell you all the great things that I love about this guy. What I'll be happy to be out of is politics. I don't wanna talk about politics, whether they're his, Obama's, this guy, that guy, none of them.

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