How Can We Avoid Marketing Toxic Masculinity?
Commentary by Ernesto Tinajero | FāVS News
Recently, two men down on their luck sat six feet apart in a Romanian mansion and shared a stagnant pond of a conversation about manhood. During the conversation, Andrew Tate shared with Tucker Carlson about how a man who hits a woman is a weak man.
A true statement to be sure, but one that reeked of spoiled egg irony. Was Tate, who has been documented as hitting women multiple times, admitting to being a weak man? No. Such a reading would require a belief that either man is capable of self-reflection and facing the truth. If they were, Carlson would have a follow-up question about the hitting of women.
Instead, he watch on as Tate leveled all his venom at those that oppose him. In his telling, he was being persecuted by “the Matrix” for calling on men to be men, strong and courageous. The “Matrix” similar to the “Deep State” is his conspiratorial belief that any attempt to hold him accountable for his crimes is fear of him by the elites.
Through it all was Carlson nodding along. He had long played similar themes of manhood and its virtues being under attack by the culture at large. His “End of Men” series on his former employer Fox News asked where have all the real men gone and stated today’s men are to girly. While it became a punchline with it is advocacy of testicle tanning, it used tools from the marketing world to create a grievance about how men are treated today.
Marketing Toxic Masculinity
For both men, marketing masculinity in their narrow view trumps truth and reality.
Why did Carlson travel all from his Maine home to interview Tate? Carlson, after his firing from Fox News, started his own show on Twitter. His opening big numbers of views from his first show had deflated and shrunk so low, he was desperate for views. He must know about those Fox News personalities previously fired fade into irrelevance.
Tate also had seen his luck turn with his recent arrest and release-to-house arrest. Both men needed each other. Both needed a hit off the attention bong. So it made sense to exchange their ideas about what a real man is to aid their dark careers. He engaged Tate for the “market,” truth be damned.
Manhood, what it should be, and the trouble with men today, has been a hot topic.
Books on a Similar Topic
Senator Josh Hawley’s “Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs” and Richard Reeves’ “Of Boys and Men” have both identified similar problems men face today, but with different prescriptions as to the causes and solutions.
For Hawley, it is the American Left that has made manly virtues of strength, courage and aggressiveness toxic. Putting aside the questionable idea that aggressiveness is a virtue, Hawley sees young men as unengaged, dependent and still living at home and addicted to screens of various types. He offers advice to men to embrace their roles as husbands, fathers, warriors and kings.
Hawley didn’t bother with boring details of how to become husbands, fathers, warriors and kings. Rather, he cherry picked through the stories of the Bible to prove his point.
For example, he encouraged looking to King David as an example of a king and warrior. David the poet? Not so much. And please ignore David in his adultery, his committing murder and his role as a failed father. After all, the Bible, for Hawley and many of his type, is a tool to use for their own purpose.
It is telling he seldom mentions Jesus in his prescription for manhood. Love your enemies is for suckers.
Loneliness the Cause of Diminishing Manhood
Reeves also see the desperate life young men lead with high rates of suicide, relatively lower wages and lower participation in the economy at large. Yet, in all this musing about the trouble with men, manhood and what makes a good man, a larger social context of where we are today has been ignored.
To understand this we have to look at another current hot topic, the epidemic of loneliness. Recently, there have been multiple articles about how the COVID lockdowns exasperated the problem of loneliness. Since the publication in 2000 of Robert Putnam’s “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community,” the growing disconnection from friends, family and community has been known and studied.
Yet no one has bothered to connect the loneliness epidemic with the sense of loss many men have. Because of this, many intellectual hustlers like Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan and, of course, Tate have filled the void with their warped view of masculinity.
In this next series, I want to explore how the loneliness epidemic affects conversations about manhood and what virtues we can look toward to lead out the quicksand of the various views of manhood.
The next one will about the biblical wisdom about how it is not good for a human to be alone. Stay tuned.
This is part one in Ernesto Tinajero’s “Manhood Series: The Courage to Be.“
