Where Do Men Go from Here?

Hi, it's David Remdick and I've got some news for you. We're headed to the Tribeca Festival for a special live taping of the New Yorker radio hour. We'll be doing a one night only show at the festival's 25th anniversary. So come out and join us on Wednesday, June 10th at 8.15. Tickets are available now at Tribecafilm.com/audio. That's Tribecafilm.com/audio. This is Critics at Large, a podcast from the New Yorker. I'm Alex Schwartz. I'm Naomi 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 one. Perennial even. What's going on with men? Are they okay? Men? What do you guys think? I don't think anyone is okay. Yeah, yeah. It's not just men, Vincent. 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. There are many statistics that show that men are falling behind women in grade school that they enroll in college and lower numbers that their career prospects are dwindling that their life spans are shorter than women's life spans. 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 men, they're not doing great. And as we said, this is a concern that's ongoing. We even touched on it on more than one 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 do we see in? In terms of culture right now, I think what we are seeing is two roads diverge in a wood in five situation. On the one hand, we have cultural texts. For instance, the new HBO show Half-Man created by Richard Gad. I couldn't get out my mind. Your words, your violence. Don't talk like your band and me. Not after what you did. We leaning into a violent aggression of the kind of alpha male 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 your work. 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 emotionally, you know, do boys cry, etc, etc. 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 one 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. I'm critics of 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 70s. 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 gender responsibilities and gender identities, really. Then out of this grows men's rights, men's pride agenda. When I think about that, I think about a fictional character from the late 90s. I think about Frank T.J. Mackie from Magnolia. Respect the clock. Paul Thomas Anderson's 1999 movie. Frank T.J. Mackie is a men's rights advocate who gives seminar performances at which he rises up before a group of frankly lame dudes. And enjoyants them too, as Nomi said, respect the clock. I have a whole clip I can play if we want to pause for this. But we can also click on the event. Do you guys want to see the beginning of Frank T.J.? It's so good. So this is just Tom Cruise pumping his arms in a kind of gladiatorial slash Christlike gesture. It seems to me. And behind him, unfurls a banner that says to do some destroyed. Respect the clock. And tame the cunt. Tame it. Take it on head first with the skills that I will teach you at work and say no. You will not control me. No. You will not take my soul. No. You will not win this game. Because it is a game, guys. It's such a good idea. It's amazing. I'm thinking about another movie from the same year, in fact, Fight Club, David Fincher's Fight Club, which treats the crisis and masculinity less from the positioning of being cucked by women and more in the sense of the softness that capitalism has begat. Not a damnant and tired generation pumping gaps, waiting tables, slaves with white collars. Havitizing has his chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate, so we can buy shit we don't need. And has made men kind of like softened cucks. And the way to confront that is, of course, by going to the underground Fight Club, where you're like, you know, a fist hits the flesh and the blood spurt and the man feels alive and regains his lost powers that, you know, the kind of late 20th 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 Columbine shooting. And it's funny because the discourse in my lifetime over mass shootings has now become almost holy about guns and gun control, gun violence, et cetera, rightly so. But at that initial moment, it was a lot about young boys and bullying the sort of cruelty of young boys on one hand on the vulnerability of them on another. I was part of this group in my high school. I got all of my community service hours by being a part of this group that was called N Teen Cruelty. And it was, it was started by this woman who was a psychologist and wanted to like train kids to sort of diffuse bullying. And it was like almost explicitly about like sort of how to combat like intramasculine violence. It was really, it was a big discourse in my childhood. And you mentioned this thing that you set up earlier, you know, me like this kind of two sides thing. You can see it even in media, they're popped up instead of the sort of relatively sophisticated presentation of men's magazines like Esquire and GQ. All of a sudden there was maximum. And all of a sudden there were these wild mags. Yes. The Lad mags of the odds, you know, girls, Joe Francis and girls gone wild. I think the second wave feminism of the 70s 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 one 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 two huge things happen. One is the internet and one is MAGA. You get all this stuff migrating online, you get people posting message boards, people spreading 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 men. Now, this show isn't a lot of ways the occasion for this episode. It's another Florida exercise in violence and tortured sexual neurosis by Richard Gat. It was made for the BBC and HBO. Gat, as many listeners will know, is the creator of another polarizing show, Baby Rain Deer. 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 group of course line dreamers. No, I'm kidding. So, okay, here we are. It's the '80s. We are in Scotland. We are in the working class. Okay? We have two boys, two teenage boys. We have Nile, a kind of twitchy, fidgety, probably closeted gay boy of about 16. His rough and tumble mother is Alazbian, who has a girlfriend, and along with a girlfriend, comes the girlfriend's son, Ruben. A hunky, hunk of beef, but also a violent criminal type. - Look, I'm sorry. Okay, I should've told you. I'm keeping 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? - She has a guest. - No, he's not. He's a psycho. He's but someone's no-so. I've seen the guy too. It's horrible. It's wife left him and everything. - This is the setup. - Remember me, Bambi? Last time I saw you, you were about, "Yea, hi." - We have these two boys. - You've got the exact same size head, though. Creepin me out with that. - As they grow up, Ruben becomes both a tormentor of Nile and a protector of Nile. You know that the hateful, but yearning erotic tension, at least from Nile towards Ruben cannot be denied. They are brothers. They are blood brothers and yet he is a violent monster. The first traumatic event that we are privy to is Nile is on the verge and uni, on the verge of exploring his homosexuality with his flatmate, Albi, and Ruben loses it and humbles Albi into the ground, almost kills him, goes to jail. There's a lot of that happening over the course of the show. Basically, it's about Nile's. - She's gone it. She's gone it. I love it. Tell us what it's about. I'm like, "What is the show about?" - So this show. - It's so hard to say. I know I always say this, but every episode is 9,000 hours long. Okay, I mean, they are technically speaking, slightly over an hour long each and it's six episodes, but it's glacial. Vincent, you said "florid", I could not agree more. This is some fringe festival shit, like long, long, long scenes overwrought, just like the trauma, the pain, the completely inexplicable connection between these characters, who in fact are incredibly thinly drawn. - Sounds like he loved it. - Once again, you guys, I'm a hater. I'm a hater. I'm sorry, I wish I could give a better. It's hard to synopsis. - No, I wasn't laughing at you. I was laughing at the fact that the show repeats itself so many times that once you start engaging with it and it's plot terms, you were just going to find yourself in a loop that you keep going up and around and up and around 'cause that's the point of the show. The point of the show is about cycles that can't be broken. And the cycle that can't be broken is the mutually intensely destructive relationship between these two 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 one to show the mean ones some feelings and they want the mean one to kind of out the tender one, stand up for himself and walk through life a little bit taller, you know, "Well, like a man, like a man." That's 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 probably-- What did you make of this? I don't think of myself as a Nile or a Rubin. 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 Gattiverse of-- it's like a-- it's high polish menace. 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 and it's eye toward the viewer. It's very self-conscious of the way it's being watched. It's the theatrical. I would say. It has a maybe the theatricality as a way to talk about that. But I did like the extent to which these characters become in some way-- to your point, the moms want them to help each other. They do become in some way codependent or in maybe even parasitic on one another. If we talk about this idea of two roads, as we mentioned, are you going to toughen up and be the right wing psycho? Are you going to be whatever pathetic nice guy or something like that? I don't know. Here it says, what if you actually-- two roads diverged in the yellowwood? And sorry, I could not travel both and be one traveler. This show is like, I am going to be one 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 a fight club, right? That's-- this is why it's very fight club. At some point, kind of, again, unsuttely a character that says, what do you mean you're like him to Nile? He says, you guys are about as much alike as Jackal and Hyde. And that's kind of the thesis statement of the show. It's somebody trying two people on some level trying to have it both ways. And so 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. Nile has sort of escaped the home situation. And he, at a moment of panic, when he's worried about the developing relationship with this albi, 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 one that made the decision because of his uncertainty about masculinity. So he's sort of deploying this dark corner of his own psyche in the person of his brother from another lover, as I always say. Yes. That aspect of the show I did really kind of think of psychologically acute and interesting as a paradigm, of how these two ideas about masculinity or choose one can actually be a kind of end run around, a total loop. [MUSIC PLAYING] Critics at large, from the New Yorker, will be right back. [MUSIC PLAYING] On Big Lives, we take a single cultural icon-- People like Jane Fonda, George Michael, Little Richard. And we pull apart the story behind the image. And we do this by digging through the BBC's vast archives, discovering forgotten interviews that changed exactly how we see these giants of our culture. We're here for the messy, the brilliant, the human version of our heroes. I'm Emmanuel Jocci. I'm Kai Wright. And this is Big Lives. Listen to Big Lives wherever you get your podcasts. [MUSIC PLAYING] Before we get back to the conversation listeners, it's that time again. We're working on another I Need a Critic episode. We've come to really love this series because it gives us a chance to hear from you. Oh, yeah. You all know the drill at this point. But for anyone who doesn't, don't fear. All you have to do is record a voice memo on your phone with a specific cultural question that we can help you with. Maybe your looking for the perfect book to read after you just had a baby and you have no attention span or time. Maybe you want to know whether book clubs are actually helpful. Maybe you want an example in media, the movies, what have you of an actually happy relationship. I mean, who can tell really what you come up with and we can't wait to find out you've got questions. We've got answers. Hit us up. Send your voice memos as always to the [email protected] with the subject line critics and now back to the episode. So Half-Man is this very dark portrait of masculinity. But like we said, these depictions are kind of going everywhere and maybe pointing out two different lands. So what's the other side? If Half-Man is the dark side of this Ian and Yang, what can we point to as the polar opposite? I mean, okay, well we've talked about our beloved heated rivalry which also takes place in a highly masculineist world of professional sports and the sports professional sports fear in which it takes place allows for a kind of like old school closetedness that creates kind of plot possibilities and tonal possibilities. And these two characters, Elian Shane, should by all rights be expected to be Rubin, right? To be these killers who cannot kind of accept any sign of kind of like softness 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 of what? The questions. You have too many of them. I'm sorry. It's okay. I wasn't clear. I'm sorry in advance for tonight's game. We're gonna destroy you guys. Oh. So you're the asshole. No, it's still you. No, 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 Rubin Nesk. Yeah. Or more to the point, not Nile-esque, I think, though the the the thesis of heated rivalry is that you need to let this on China. There that you need to expose things 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. Yeah. Yeah. And then also we had Adolescence a couple of years ago. 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 classmates as a little girl. What is she used that then? Why would you ask her? Hmm? 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 one 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 kind of 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 half-man. There was actually a calmness, a female calmness in England who said she thought this should be shown anywhere men are gathered, strong disagree, like what's that going to do here? This doesn't make any sense to me. You're going to see the results of your actions and feel so horrified that you change your ways and who are you even? I find this to be such an irritating approach both to men and to art, like both deserve better than that. In terms of the other ways to be a man that we're being shown right now, another show we've talked about is DTF St. Louis. We didn't talk about this aspect of DTF St. 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. Wonderful piece. Yeah. Because check it out, listeners. I've just never seen a relationship between men quite like the one depicted on DTF St. Louis, which to me is almost science fictional and 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 and something like half-man, DTF St. Louis posits a world where there kind of is no shame around things that traditionally men would find shame in the like homosexuality. This is a show in which two straight middle-aged men who are both are in a total rut in their lives and in their marriages form an intense bond with one 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. Like like this sun one year cold. Like water. When you really need water. I don't understand. Like sex. No. Or I love Floyd. I found it totally fascinating and beautiful and also totally tragic because the show of course does not. None of this works at well for the men in any of these shows. Right. So, right. I want to ask you Alex, but these men, they're also kind of presented as losers. Are they not? Right. But no one is presented as the cool alternative. Are they losers? They're kind of average. I think it's the idea. The whole thing about the show is there isn't such thing as a loser. Like the kind of the phrase that keeps getting tossed around from the show is no one is normal just looks that way from across the street. And again, the problem for these guys is that particularly for the Floyd Smurnich character, the one played by David Harper 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. And he just thinks those things. He can't surmount those things. And 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 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, that's right. And there 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'm still thinking about it. I thought it was really well done. And maybe the maybe the issue with the heart of that, which is kind of at the heart of all of these things we're talking about with that are about these texts, these TV shows, whatever that are about men and boys, is there sense there's a sense of being profoundly misunderstood by the wider world 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 one of those archetypes, you're not going to be seen anyway because your individuality is going to be completely scrubbed. 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 us, 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. But Vincent, you watch another show, right? And the recent show and new adaptation of Lord of the Flies on Netflix. Yeah. Yeah. And so it's, it is a mini series based on the 1954 novel by William Golding. Lord of the Flies also, but 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. You know, the story is a bunch of school boys have survived, survived a plane crash. and our lost in Ireland, 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. It's to find out exactly where we are. - A chief will decide that. (cars honking) - I can be chief. From chapter chorus to a head boy. I can see high sea shock. - Oh, it's in favor of me. - I think we should have more than one in consideration if a chief is to be decided. - And it goes from there all the skirmishes that are sort of maybe proto-political 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 pre-lapse area in 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 one of the boys. And it's made by Jack Thornt, who is also the creator, director, visionary behind Adolescence. Did he either go watching it? - I didn't, but 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 by word for a Hobbesian environment in which boys probably each other to the death. The demise of Piggy. I can't even tell you when I read it 30 years ago. - Traumatic, absolutely traumatic, little Piggy. They smash his glasses, 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, right now for Lord of the Flies? Do you think that there is using from my memory, which is 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 one 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. He is leadership rival who is the head of the, he's come with his school choir and becomes the head of the hunter to become this sort of role 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 did think, okay, this is about how human society develops without the sort of civilizing hand of the law government institutions. But today, though, this time around, 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 we're traveling in that plan, 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 go to a different genre altogether about another example of kind of like, the roads diverging from men and how the pendulum moves from one side to another. I recently wrote about the newest season of Vanderpump rules, the Bravo. What are those kids getting into? Reality shows. So, okay, so here's what happened. The show ran for 11 seasons. It got tired. There was nowhere else to go. The storylines weren't storing anymore, et cetera, et cetera, especially after Scandival, which, if you know, you know. Oh, yeah. 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, bar tenders and waitresses at the sexy unique restaurant, Lisa Vanderpump's Well-Sahleywood establishment. And so we have a new group of kind of 20-somethings, right? And I was struck by how much more, at least on the surface of it, that's how they present themselves on the show, in touch with their feelings. The men are. There's still assholes, there's still drama, there's probably going to be cheating and. How else do you have a TV show? Exactly. And yet the way they speak about things and their relative openness about their own possible failings, maybe their sexual shortcomings, one of them needs to use Viagra because he has like. And he talks about this openly. And I was thinking about how the show, the first iteration that started in 2013, I don't think that would have been possible with the guys who grew up in the 2000s, 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 the Rhodes diverging and going in that direction, not the manosphere direction, at least not in this group of people. Not yet. The long season. You know what? It's a long season. You're right. You're right. So we've talked about these two 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. [music] Comprehensive. Whitty. Speculative. Critical. Insightful. Profound. Wide-ranging. Hopefully it doesn't take itself too too seriously. I'm David Remnick and each week on the New Yorker Radio Hour. My colleagues and I try to make sense of what's happening in this chaotic world. I hope you'll join us for the New Yorker Radio Hour, wherever you listen to podcasts. The thoughtful, exquisite, just, you know, real. [music] 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 and 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 "Clevicular." And I would love to hear your analysis of "Clevicular" and his fellow travelers in the minds of "Looks Maxing." So "Clevicular" is a name that I would say I had never heard before. I would say like March 20th, 20th, 20th, 26. And since roughly that date, I've heard it between 3 and 400 times. "Clevicular"'s real name is Braden Peters. He's 20 years old, he's from Hoboken, New Jersey. These are some facts about Clivic. Just 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. There we go. Hoboken, indeed, 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. So he has come to prominence through TikTok and kick a platform again that I was not aware of before "Clevicular" brought it to my attention for "Looks Maxing." And for some people who listen to the show will know exactly what that is. 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. (laughter) We're in a turn you gray of a gray you. It's not like getting bricks of heroin from Silk Road, but nor is it ordering Tylenol from Amazon. It's somewhere in between the peptide business. Clivic. Clivic. 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 going to 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. Wrong collarbone. I mean, he's a nice clavicle, I guess. So "Clavicular" was doing this interview with Logan Paul and his co-host of his show. They asked to be rated by him on his personal scale of sexual attractiveness. One of them is rated a 3.75, a devastating sexual attractiveness rating. Yeah, you can tell his why. So, yeah, mostly because his interpupillary distance, so like how close that his eyes are, and also the longer midface would be the main-- The seriousness with which "Clavicular" approaches this task, it is as if he's, you know, juler 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. One is that I do think in like traditional ideas of masculinity, that stuff was not supposed to matter. That was girly stuff. Like, oh, you're going to spend all this time. Like, I just rub some, I just spring on my face and I'm out the door being a lumberjack. That was a version 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 Helen 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, goes with that saying. Well, I think it's interesting. The thing about the violence that is being turned inward, we can't also forget the violence turned outward in this kind of manosphere environment. Someone like Andrew Tay, who 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 satirical over-the-top depiction in Peter Anderson's magnolia. This is like the tip of the iceberg of what we're hearing right now. But it does seem-- yeah, it does seem that there is this resurgent reactionary notions just of what gender is. I mean, you see it. There's always these two sides of the coin where this focus on the male body, eye at least, and it's probably because of 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 hymns, which already is talking about these things in the construct of gender, his and the avaers. 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. I mean, we can talk about all the reasons for it. Ozempic might be one, but it's not just that. These aesthetics of extreme skininess are back. And so the body starts to write these scripts that we've seen again. But I'm wondering-- it's interesting because, yeah, there are the endutates of the world and the claviculars of the world. As we mentioned, we've been talking about this kind of two roads thing. I'm wondering if we see the other side of it in culture. But I'm not sure if we see another road in real life. Oh my god. It's like Pedro Pascal, and that's it. It's like Pedro Carrias and your shoulders. Pedro Pascal, a Coleman Domingo. These are real guys who say, OK, we can kind of queer our notions of clothes and how we present ourselves and not be like super macho. But this is the other thing on Instagram. They're always telling me how to be jacked. There's a guy named Body by Mark who goes up to people. I don't know if you've seen this Instagram account. I haven't. Who is Body by Mark? He goes up to people and he always says, is always says, is you look jacked. Tell me how you work out. Who are really fit what they do for their workouts? And you were jacked. Eight. Calistetics. Seven days. Not a twist away. You do. Light weight. So how many days a week are you doing that? Three days. One really day. What are your strongest lifts? Oh, overhead breasts is a strong lift, divide. How much? Normally, it can go up to 100. I didn't want to be like a skinny fat person. I want to have a super hero body. I've been training for like 20 plus years. You're back in this moment of like, you've got to be a human or you've got to be like a waif. Something has happened where like the comic book almost 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? 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-testosterum. So 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 going to 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 got to be jacked. You got to be ripped. Look at heated rivalry. We love these soft men. They're hot as hell. Like, they're hot as hell. Pepp tied it up. 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 Thoreaus inside the manosphere on Netflix. This has not gotten a ton of praise. This documentary, I think the general consensus is too little too late. Louis Thoreau goes around with a bunch of these guys who have made fame and fortune by selling the same ideas to young men. The main point I got from it was that these guys are salesmen. They talk about themselves that way and they very much identify that way. You're selling the idea to men that if they want to 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. There's a scene where one influencer, he runs into two young guys who say, "You have shown me the way. Because we are born without value." What do you mean, life is a man you're born without value? Nothing. You have to have every single payment. Do you think women have it hard? I think they're born with their value for 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 a fly to Miami or whatever because it's pure beauty. Nobody's going to invite him on a trip to Miami. They're not going to fly him out. He has to create value in the world. He has to be valuable to other men. Otherwise, nobody cares. That's a fact. I want to see. Of course, my heart breaks when I see this because every person has value. Everyone has value. Let's start with that. What a brilliant idea I just had. I think 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 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 either. I do think we're getting very interested damaged men being shown to us and not damaged in the stereotypical toxic masculinity way. I have mixed feelings about half-man and one of those mixed feelings is that I think the show's somewhat didactyl point is like a strong human is hurting too. I get it. Something that I think a lot of people love is the pit. We've talked about the pit on the show before and you have Dr. Robbie right there, aching and hurting, a man who's absolutely falling apart, not a human at all, a very competent terror 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, going nuts about man spreading. You know what I mean? 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 trying and I know this is a funny thing to say as the chief hater of this podcast. I'm trying to advance with love. I don't know if, just saying I don't want to have anything to do with these assholes is going to totally help. And I think, you know, they're 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 et cetera, et cetera, because they feel they have no value otherwise expressing our, you know, our own anger and frustration as women, which is completely earned. I mean, it's certainly in a lot of ways justified and more satisfying certainly and does much maybe in the way of kind of consciousness raising, I guess, oppositionally, but in terms of kind of moving forward, 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, 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 one be a man? You know, I'm much like Dante. I'm halfway down life's journey. It's 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 isn't a self-reproving or self-indighting 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 a lot. I think most men that I, my acquaintance and my generation, maybe I should say, have a voice like that in their head. And it has to do with messages that have been directed at us 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 Rianan Corby is our senior producer. Our executive producer is Steven Valentino. Alexis Quadrado composed our theme music and we had engineering help today from Grand Bandit with mixing by my catchment. 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 voice mail on your phone and send it to us at [email protected]. That's [email protected] subject line critics. And as always, you can find each and every one of our episodes at NewYorker.com/critics. This is Tanya Mosley-Cost of Fresh Air. You'll see your favorite actors, directors and comedians on late night TV shows or YouTube. But what you get with Fresh Air is a deep dive. Spend some quality time with people like Billy Eilish, Questlove, Ariana Grande, Stephen Cobair, and so many more. We ask questions you won't hear asked anywhere else. Listen to the Fresh Air podcast from NPR and WHWiWi.