Last Saturday morning, I went to get a haircut and my friend Jamie had sent me a very, very, very long Substack article about manhood, using a comparison between Andrew Tate and Jason Aldean to make various points. I read it before the haircut started — it was a long read — and while it made good points and was generally worth the read, it was also confusing and pivoted in 160 different places. I am sure half the articles I write are similar, so I became frustrated with myself, then got a nice beard trim.
I saved it in my “Writing Inspiration” folder.
This morning, I got to it and re-read it. As noted, a big chunk of it is this Tucker Carlson-Andrew Tate interview from his new Twitter platform, which has garnered about 95 million views, thus boosting the egos of both men to new heights.
That’s a 2-hour, 30-minute interview and by no means would I say watch even a part of it. It is hyper-masculinity to the max. It is a more brash form of the stuff Josh Hawley is pushing: men are being made weak, we are feminized, they want us to be women, and society cannot survive without strong men. Some of those things are true, in very small pockets — society does generally “need” men to play a certain role, although that role has evolved over the last 100 years — but the narrative right now has been hijacked by two extremes, like everything else.
There’s a brash form of masculinity based on cashing checks, snapping necks, and getting laid. There’s an opposite extreme of some vulnerable house husband who plays video games while the kids are at school. I guess trans rights somehow falls in here somewhere, but I haven’t figured that out yet. I’ve opined on this stuff before too.
What became more interesting to me was how much of modern society is rooted in hypocrisy.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to What Is Even Happening? to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.