October 24, 2024 • 49 mins
Robert and Miles talk about the mid-century crisis in American masculinity and then catch up to the modern era, and Gamergate.
https://www.sandboxx.us/news/alpha-male-boot-camps-are-a-joke/
https://www.vice.com/en/article/what-are-man-warrior-camps/
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/01/fashion/01Fitness.html?pagewanted=2&_r=0
https://nypost.com/2018/11/15/masculinity-guru-wants-guys-to-stop-being-so-nice-to-women/
https://www.vox.com/first-person/2017/1/23/14238530/self-help-advice-bogus
https://www.newstatesman.com/comment/2023/09/manosphere-poisoning-conservatism
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media, welcome back to Behind the Bastards. I'm doing
my Halloween boys because this will probably come out pretty
close to Halloween. Miles. And if you be poisoned, if
you have.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
The poisoned candy, Have ever poisoned candy?
Speaker 1 (00:18):
Yeah, anyone's candy. If you ever poisoned a child's candy, Miles.
Speaker 3 (00:21):
No, I used to poison mine to get out of school.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
There.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
Well, we'll leave that and maybe Miles. Are you ready
to get back into part two here? Miles Gray Host,
I'm so ready.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
I'm so ready because, like I said, I feel like
I feel like man's are going to turn it around.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
Yes, some men are going to fluence themselves into a
healthier place.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
I feel like I hated that we've got Look, we've
got man fluenza over here.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
I hated that also concerned about men, including both of you.
So I'm going to start this episode by returning to
the distant past and the next era of man masculinity
gurus to come around after the stock market collapsed. One
(01:05):
of the first guys through that particular door was a
man that you probably heard his name, Charles Atlas. When
nineteen thirty started, Reading started running a series of ads
in Popular Mechanics, bragging, let me prove in seven days
that I can make you a new man now. Atlas
was obviously not the first guy to promise insecure men
that he could make them huge, and that in doing
(01:27):
so he would solve every problem in their lives, but
he was probably the most muscular of the first generation
of these guys. As the Depression faded and the war
years came, Atlas was also the first to realize that
magazines meant for mature adults, like Popular Mechanics, weren't the
best place to target insecure young men. To do that,
you had to reach them in comic books. Charles placed
(01:48):
ads in every comic under the sun. Because this was
a hungrier era in general, he didn't tend to focus
on like trying to get men, you know, to lose
weight or whatever. That really wasn't a thing, right, trying
to convince them that like they're fat and out of shape,
that wouldn't really work in this era because everyone's starving.
So instead he mocked them for being too skinny. This
tactic culminated in his famous ninety seven pound weekling ads.
(02:11):
Here's an early example, right, and to think they called
me skinny, give me fifteen minutes a day and I'll
give you a new body. And then we see a
very a very oily Italian man, right, I mean, just
just as shiny as the days longer paint undise painted
(02:32):
on him. There's a little box underneath him, right above
his knees that says Charles Atlas, holder of the title
the world's most perfectly developed man. But you're wondering where
does that titles? Car Internet who decided that we'll talk
about it?
Speaker 2 (02:48):
Did he did?
Speaker 1 (02:49):
Now? What really made Charles stand out in a crowded
field of fitness Gurdus was his laser focus on fucking
with the self confidence of boys and young men reading
his age. Right. He was the guy who was like,
I'm I'm just going to use body dysmorphia to make
all of my mone you know, to make And he
really did it, probably the first guy I saw doing
it in a really organized way that I've found that's
like really unhealthy, in a very modern way where he
(03:12):
just wants you to feel bad about your body.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
Right.
Speaker 1 (03:15):
His most popular ninety seven pound weekly ads were comics themselves,
so he is really targeting kids to make them hate
their bodies. And the premise of like most of these,
was that a bully at the beach mocks our protagonist
for being scrawny. In the comic I have here, he's saying, hey, skinny,
your ribs are showing. Don't let him hit you, Joe,
watch what you say full off, shut up your bag
(03:37):
of bones. And then the muscular guy hits our hero,
who takes Charles Atlas's getting jacked, course, becomes swollen, and
then goes back to the beach to beat the shit
out of this guy and presumably take back his woman.
Speaker 3 (03:51):
Right right, that's how it works.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:53):
Yeah. After he beats up the beach bully, his girlfriend says, oh, Joe,
you are a real he man after all.
Speaker 2 (04:00):
Oh Jesus, thank you for me.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
Yeah yeah. This comic does not pass the Bechdel test.
I not enjoy that. Yeah, no, horrible stuff. Now, it's
not going to surprise you to learn that Charles Atlas
was not his real names. That's that's not anyone's real name.
What is funny is that his real name also sounds fake.
He was born Angelo Siciliano, which sounds like what JK.
(04:25):
Rowling would have named an Italian wizard. It's not a
real person's name.
Speaker 2 (04:32):
Angelo Sicilians, yes.
Speaker 1 (04:36):
Italian wizard. Now, before he was a muscle salesman, he
was a poor kid in Brooklyn who couldn't afford a
YMCA membership and tried several fad workouts of the day
without results. Siciliano thus fell for the con before he
got in on it himself, treating Bernarmic Fadden's Physical Culture
(04:57):
magazine as the Bible and hassling strong in at weightlifting
competitions to learn their secrets. He would later claim that
the infamous ninety seven pound weekling story had its origins
in his real life, that that was a thing that
actually happened to him as a kid, that he had
sand kicked in his face by a bully. And then
my favorite part of this is because there were no
(05:18):
Charles Atlas classes to take when he was bullied as
a kid, he went to the zoo where he studied
found out the secrets of muscle growth by watching a
lion because his old program was like calistenics base. He's like, well,
lions have muscles and they don't lift weights, so it
must be a calisthenics problem.
Speaker 2 (05:36):
Holy shit. Also that logic, he just like ran down
like musclemen from the circus to.
Speaker 1 (05:44):
He would go to like muscle shows and then would
like annoy them afterwards, being like, hey, man, had you
get so big? Howd you get so huge? Like, I
don't know, eat nothing but beef steak and picked up
heavy things.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
Bro.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
It was like the nineteen teens just manomach, just shoveling
it in their mouths aacerous now whatever his real secret,
Sciliano did figure out how to get swollen, and he
made his living as a circus strongman until in nineteen
twenty two he met a homeopathic doctor who'd written for
(06:16):
Physical Culture and hired him to author a fitness course
he could sell in magazines. He changed his name to
Charles Atlas, and the rest was history. Now I looked
into the case of like who declared him the world's
most perfectly developed man, and Wikipedia says there's no evidence
that he ever won this. This is just a thing
he declared himself. But I found another source that I
(06:37):
trust implicitly, barbend dot com, which offers a free arm
training ebook to readers that claims with citations that he
did in fact win a most Handsome Man contest held
by Bernard McFadden and a subsequent America's Most Perfectly Developed
Man contest held also by Bernard McFadden. So you know,
maybe it's kind of legit. Although he was sort of
(06:58):
working for the guy right now. Atlas was absolutely a grifter,
but it came far enough back that he was at
least fun. Right in his day, it was enough to
be huge and make kids feel bad about their bodies. Today,
his descendants, guys like Andrew Taate have to do that.
And you know, they also have to sell like supplements
(07:18):
and shit, right, they have to get into all this
culture warshit.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
Right.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
It's not just you can't just pose naked and offer
health and dieting trips tricks anymore, right, Right, you have
to have a place in the culture wars. Right. You
have to find a way to like make people think
that by listening to your shit, they're part of like
a great and vicious struggle. Right. Otherwise there's just nothing,
like you kind of get lost by the wayside without that.
(07:43):
And I don't know why. I think some of this
has to do with the fact that in Charles Atlas's day,
they didn't really know how people got big, right, They
generally knew that you had to lift heavy things. But
there was a lot of lot less was known about,
like sports nutrition and the like. A lot less was
known about how to work out in order to maximize
muscle growth, and steroids weren't really a thing. Right now
(08:04):
we have, thank god steroids.
Speaker 3 (08:06):
Thanks right, the anabs came online.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
It's easier. People can get swollen pretty easily if they
have time and money. Now it is right, and the
acne is free, and the back acne is free, right,
as is the hgh gut. You too can look like
Joe Roby.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
I like to call it organ in large man, all right,
don't call it that's what my organs are becoming oversized.
Speaker 1 (08:29):
He has the massive guts of a healthy man. Yeah,
now I want to uh yeah. So it's like, think
about that guy who compared himself to the rock before
getting his legs butchered. Right, Just the fact that you're
shredded isn't going like. People aren't confident at all as
a result of that anymore. It doesn't bring you the
same it used to be. If you were huge, maybe
that was enough to feel like a big man. Nowadays
(08:51):
it just really makes you feel like one of the herds.
So these guys who you know, are essentially doing the
same thing Atlas was. They have to sell themselves as
like culture war icons too, right, because part of in
part because these men are struggling for something that gives
them meaning, right, and and war is a force that
gives us meaning. So they want some sort of like
(09:12):
thing to fight for and some sort of leader to like,
you know, take the raids, right, right. And a good
example of like how some guys do this is the
current panic among right wing masculinity influencer types over seed oils. Now.
One of the major sources of the seed oil panic,
and the idea is that seed oils are toxic and
they're stopping you from like being muscular. They're killing you.
(09:35):
They're basically killing you as a man. They're rendering you infertile,
you know. And it's a conspiracy, right, that's kind of
the insinuation that the spread of seed oils in cooking
is part of a conspiracy to destroy men. You know.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
Yeah, yeah, it's easier to do that than really zoom out.
Yeah it's a seed oils man.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
Yeah, man, don't like it is all the seed oils
that safflower oil is really fucking you up.
Speaker 3 (10:00):
Oh man, safflower, I'll pray for you.
Speaker 1 (10:04):
Yeah, pray for you. It's got to be olive oil, right,
where's all of oil? Is seed oil? I don't think so,
I hope not.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
I mean, I guess it comes from the olives themselves. Whatever,
you know, what I'm gonna do.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
All I know is my brother says that there's only
to eat avocado oil. And he's a doctor. He says,
to eat a cotton Oh there you go.
Speaker 2 (10:23):
I hear that too, has a high smoke point, higher
smoke point than olive oils. If you high temperature cooking.
I'm like, I can second that.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
See, I'm as as a masculinity influencer myself, Myles, I
cook only with diesel fuel, you know, yeah, right right,
if it's good for me. Yeah, oh well yeah to
W three. Well, I just put that on some bread,
you know, a little bit of salt in there. Not
too much. You don't want to that's too much sodium.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
Yeah, vegas dip my bread in ten W thirty. So.
Speaker 1 (10:53):
One of the big names in the seed oils community
is Carnivore Orrelius, a Twitter account with more than three
hundred thousand followers that it's he's done a few things.
He was all these guys my brain. Yeah, take pictures
of old like buildings from the classical era and be like,
why can't we make these anymore?
Speaker 2 (11:12):
Right?
Speaker 1 (11:12):
I mean we could, bro we just have other ways
of making houses than having men hugh granite for a
thousand years. I don't know. We have better materials if
you like, if you ever had to walk around on
a floor made out of fucking marble when it's raining, Like, yeah,
we have other ways of building things.
Speaker 2 (11:30):
Now, if you do that, now you're gonna break your
little extendo. I'm keep balancing.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
So he is one of the big guys who is
pushing this idea that seed oils are responsible for all
of the woes of modern life. And I don't think
I need to waste time breaking down why he's wrong.
But I will show you a post of his from
August of twenty twenty three, which I find interesting as
a mirror to the Charles Atlas ads that we started
this episode with. Before seed oils were invented, everybody was
hot and healthy, less than ten percent of people were
(12:00):
obedes forty percent today, and CBD was non existent. But
in the two last hundred years, seed oil consumption has
increased twenty times, and so is disease. Here a study
show him why I don't eat them. And then his
evidence is this picture of Atlantic Beach in nineteen oh eight, Like,
look at that, at all these and like, what I
find interesting here is that if you look at the
(12:21):
men in this, they're like, for one thing, a lot
shorter than men today tend to be, and also pretty
skinny as a general rule. And if this same picture
in nineteen oh eight would have been used by Charles
Atlas as like evidence of how scrawny the average min
is and why they need his workout program, they're all wets.
Look at these wins. They're going to get sand kicked
in their face. Look at these.
Speaker 3 (12:42):
Bags of bone embarrassments there.
Speaker 1 (12:45):
Like Chuck Atlas, he just sees targets there, sand kicking
targets like that boy on the left right there with
the you could see him in the left side, bottom
side of the picture, and the uh, the wife beater
black shirt. Like that guy's getting sand kicked right in
his face.
Speaker 2 (12:58):
Oh yeah, so.
Speaker 1 (12:59):
Is the guy all them wife beaters anymore? Is that
a fence in these days?
Speaker 2 (13:02):
Yeah? I think you're supposed to call them tank tops
tops weak wow tanks.
Speaker 1 (13:06):
So the military industrial complex is fine, Miles.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
Yeah, I guess I don't know, man, Like I don't
make the rules. Man, I don't make it. I'm just
here to sell seed oils. Man.
Speaker 1 (13:15):
I did. Like when I was a kid, that was
the only thing people ever called those shirts. Oh yeah,
no adult was ever able to explain to me, Like,
why are they called wife beating?
Speaker 2 (13:24):
No, the other one you heard was it was a
guinea tea?
Speaker 1 (13:27):
Are the guinea t Yeah?
Speaker 2 (13:29):
Those are like the alternatives, and like there were no
good options, like to the point now I remember needing
one and I said it off handily, and my partner,
her majesty, is like, Yo, that's that's that's not can't
call them that, And I'm like, no, that out loud.
Yeah I don't want to say that in a store.
Speaker 1 (13:45):
In the small town I grew up. But yeah, they
were definitely always called wife beaters, and it was because
it was like a shirt people in trailer parks would
often wear. And I think probably my mom didn't tell
me why it got that name because all of my
friends were kids in trailer parks. Did she want to
talk shit about their dads. But it was like I
didn't really evaluate that until just now that like, oh yes,
(14:07):
it is kind of messed up to call a T
shirt that.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
Yeah yeah, well look, these are strange times we were dealing. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:14):
Yeah, we're all growing every every minute. Anyway. It also
we don't have enough black tank tops in our society.
It's not a bad look. Not a bad look on
those kids. I'm sure they're dead now, but they look nice.
Speaker 3 (14:25):
And hey, you never know photo eight teenagers.
Speaker 1 (14:30):
They're dead as hell.
Speaker 2 (14:33):
They're making some.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
Worms happy though, Yeah, yeah, probably, or at least we're
like seventy years ago. Yeah yeah, let's they cremated, which
is a bad way, but well we'll see, we'll see.
So yeah, this is I just found it funny that
like the same the same picture that is being like
portrayed as this is like how much ah men used
to be real men back when all of those men
were alive, they were being told you're far too skinny.
Speaker 3 (14:56):
But it's the same way even with like who's raising
our kids?
Speaker 2 (15:00):
Right right? The men should be there with the kids.
And now it's like you hear people be.
Speaker 1 (15:04):
Like women they're not raising the kids.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
Yeah, I would never hire a man to babies sit.
That's just wrong. And you're like, wow, whatever, it's a
funhouse mirror. Depending on where your life's at and where yeah,
it is.
Speaker 1 (15:16):
A certain chunk of the population are just always going
to be assholes who need to find a reason why
whatever other people are fine with isn't okay and is
ruining their lives because usually they want to make money
off of it, right, you know, like that's just the
reality of human beings, and the sooner you make peace
with it, the sooner you can just daydream about those
people getting hit by buses. So yeah, So anyway, I
(15:41):
want to read a quote about the fake seed oil
crisis by Rolling Stones EJ. Dixon, just to kind of
give you some context on this fun little piece of
our culture at the present moment. Carnivora Realis is an
account dedicated to restoring our ancestral meat loving lifestyle. Its
website also sells a branded bag of beef liver crisps
for eighty nine ninety nine my Other proponents of the
(16:02):
carnivore diet, like Jordan Peterson or Andrew Tate, Carnivor Orrelius
frequently advocates for traditional family values, tweeting about how feminism
is a scam or idyllic photos of young, beautiful blonde
moms with babies with the caption Ladies, there's nothing wrong
with you if you want this over becoming a partner
at a law firm. It is also devoided much space
to pushing the evils of seed oils. My favorite thing
(16:24):
about this is so he has to claim. He's claimed
that seed oils are the most destructive force in the
world today and cutting them out of the diet will
hit your diet, will change your health. And some of
his evidence for that is canola oil is literally made
from seeds of the rape plant, named after what it
will do to your health. And Okay, I feel like
I shouldn't need to say anything here, but I will.
(16:47):
Which is that rape seed which is the unfortunate name
of the plant that canoila was misspelled whenever I had
seen No. No, it is an unfortunate name, but it
has nothing to do with rape. The thing right, It
comes from the Latin word rape them for turnip because
it's like related to the turnip planted.
Speaker 3 (17:04):
Oh, thank god, just unrelated. I thought, just some sick fuck?
Speaker 2 (17:08):
Was this like you know what we're gonna name it.
Speaker 1 (17:10):
Could we have called it rap seed probably probably would
have been a better idea. But you know, the basement
scientists never listen to what I think things should be named.
Speaker 2 (17:18):
And I keep telling, I keep telling them, and I
keep telling the you know, the local police say it's
a misunderstanding. It's a misunderstanding. He's got good ideas. Listen to.
Speaker 1 (17:29):
Speaking of calling the local police, don't do that. Listen
to these ads, and we're back. So we are again.
I'm not going to spend a lot of time fact
checking Carnivore Aurelius his Twitter count in part because his
fans won't listen to this show.
Speaker 2 (17:48):
They can read Yeah, I mean I know about it,
but like maybe maybe offline, you can just tell me
why I shouldn't be tripping about it because I threw
out all my.
Speaker 1 (17:56):
Oh no, you should be very scared of seeing absolutely,
But it's okay. I have a solution for you. You know
I have I have pure chicken liver that did not
come from KFC. It just for three hundred dollars a pound.
I will send it to you via the mail. Do
they have that kids? They used to have it at KFC,
did they not anymore? I haven't got a KFC in
(18:18):
a very long time. They had chicken liver and chicken
livers and it was pretty good.
Speaker 4 (18:22):
It was not.
Speaker 1 (18:24):
I like liver. I'm like the liver king, you know.
Speaker 2 (18:26):
Yeah, you some more chev.
Speaker 1 (18:29):
Thank you, thank you. It's because of all the steroids.
So going back to our journey through time, you might
expect the post war era, right the you know, late
forties through the fifties, to have been a time where
like the masculinity in crisis thing wouldn't have found much purchase. Right.
If any period of time men were actually confident in themselves,
(18:51):
it must have been the post war years, right. These
guys went and they kicked some Nazi ass and they
came back and they bought houses for thirteen dollars, right, Like,
there was never a better time to feel like a
man than this, as long as.
Speaker 2 (19:03):
You were white, right, Yeah, PTSD as a concept didn't
really exist.
Speaker 4 (19:07):
You're just drinking your way through that, you know. Yeah,
that guy that poor fucker's show shocked. Yeah, scared of war? Ah,
why do I scream at my kids every night? Just
go back home and hit your children like the rest
of us. Come on now.
Speaker 1 (19:25):
So this was, however, a time of crisis for masculinity
like literally every other period of modern American history has been,
and specifically, it was a time in which American intellectuals
first really started to write in a modern sense about
the crisis of American masculinity. Now, the fact that this happens,
it happen to make sense when you put a few
more things together. The nineteen fifties is the era in
(19:48):
which hyper violent men's magazines first become really popular. We've
had some episodes with Margaret Kiljoy where we read through
a few of those, but these are like you see
him made fun of on the inn today magazines where
like the cover will be a guy fighting a bunch
of crabs, right, or like wrestling affair or something, while
a half naked woman like looks on right. And if
you read interviews with like writers of that era, some
(20:08):
of them are pretty open about the fact that they
saw their audience as primarily frustrated men who'd been in
the military during the war years but never seen combat,
and so they just kind of permanently felt like they'd
missed out right this thing that would have made me
into a man and made me confident. I didn't get
it was kind of stolen from me.
Speaker 2 (20:28):
Right right, right? Yeah, isn't that how what Jarhead was about?
Speaker 1 (20:32):
Yeah? Yeah, I mean, well, yeah, I guess so, because
like you know, Desert Storm wasn't really a war. Yeah,
I'm mis remembering.
Speaker 2 (20:40):
I felt like that was like a big part of
it a long time. I needed to see the pink
misted man and it was enough. Yeah yeah, yeah, kind
of thing anyway.
Speaker 1 (20:48):
Yeah, that you only get that experience that of guys
who didn't see the pink miss But I guess that
makes sense. Yeah. So with Kowski points out that the
nineteen fifties was not so much a real crisis of
manhood because again, the average white man in America was
doing pretty well in that decade. But instead it was
a crisis, and all of these articles about crises and
(21:09):
masculinity were part of the result of a crisis and
self confidence among the kind of men who wrote about
culture for a living, right, these were guys who overwhelmingly
hadn't fought right. These are guys who felt insecure about
their position as cultural elites. And this is when you
started to also see analysis of like films and TV
(21:29):
shows and what they had to say about masculinity. Right.
One of the shows that really scared these kind of
like men writing these articles at the time was The
Adventures of Ozzy and Harriet, which poked fun at male
authority figures and had competent, witty female characters. And there
was a certain kind of public intellectual who was terrified
by this. And I'm going to read a quote again
(21:50):
from Witkowski's paper and a fascinating Look magazine article entitled
the American Male, Why do Women Dominate Him? Author J.
Robert Moskin opined with harm, it is certain that as
women grow ever more numerous and more dominant, we will
have to invent new meanings and myths for maleness in America, because,
as psychiatrist doctor Irene J. Rosalind warns, we are drifting
(22:11):
toward a social structure made up of he women and
she men. Moskin believed men coped with this situation, at
least in part through a set of gendered consumption activities.
They drank regularly and commuter Kane Barkars, watched televised baseball
at home, played golf on weekends, and went on all
male fishing trips at work. Their expense accounts paid for
meals at fancy restaurants and when traveling for spacious suites
(22:32):
and lavish entertaining. Moskin's article clearly focused on the lives
of middle class men like himself. He was senior editor
at Look magazine at the time. And that is such
a part of all of these, all of these male
panic articles. Is that, like, it's just the thing that
you the guy who was born into wealth and privilege
and is like the head editor at Esquire. It's just
(22:54):
what you are scared of, right, Yeah, yeah, because you
know that you don't have a real job, right.
Speaker 2 (23:00):
What do you do? It's like I rank bow ties
and then talked to guys who were just served in
a combat zone.
Speaker 1 (23:06):
Yeah. I tried to scare men who lived through the
SS attacking them about Ozzie and Harriet, Yeah, survivors of
Best Stone. I tried to get to freak out about
girls and movies, awesome stuff. Man.
Speaker 2 (23:21):
I know how to speak their language.
Speaker 1 (23:23):
Man, It's part of why this is so funny. Again,
my grandpa did all of this stuff, went overseas, like,
fought in wars and then came back home and would
have been the first to tell you that he took
every dime he ever made and handed it over to
his wife, who managed all of the family finances because
he had an eighth grade education and she was really
good at math, right, right. He never felt like less
(23:43):
of a man as a result of it.
Speaker 2 (23:45):
I Oh, yeah, I mean that's I mean, that's the
thing that I think, especially that generation was offered like
in that sense because so many served. Yeah, they come
back and like maybe just come back and like, you
know what, I realized, I don't know shit about math. Man.
Just to take these checks. Yeah, yeah, just keep me
fed and I'll be okay.
Speaker 1 (24:08):
So Moskin was a major advocate of the idea that
the increasing visibility of gay men, and remember this is
nineteen fifty, goddamn mate, was a signed that American men
were losing their potency now, as opposed to the crisis
of manhood around the turn of the century or the
nineteen twenties. The chief fear here wasn't that women were
ruining young boys. Instead, now it had moved on to
(24:29):
a feeling that in a world of more liberated women,
men might have to work harder to find companionship. Now.
The MA influencer who sailed into this breach was kind
of ironically the least toxic guy we're going to talk
about in these episodes, Hugh Hefner. And I'm not saying
he was a very toxic man.
Speaker 2 (24:47):
Right, yeah, yeah yeah.
Speaker 1 (24:49):
Playboy actually offered in addition to a new vision of manhood,
it offered a new vision of like womanhood that was
in some ways less poisonous than what had come before, right,
in part because women were not seen in Playboy as
a threat as opposed to women being interested in you
was shown as a sign of vigor and success.
Speaker 2 (25:08):
Right.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
There's a lot that's toxic about that. But it wasn't
telling men you should be scared of women because they're working, right.
It was more telling them that your ability to be
interesting to these new liberated women is what defines you
as a man.
Speaker 2 (25:20):
You know.
Speaker 1 (25:21):
And again there's toxic stuff there, but it's less poisonous
than some of the stuff we've talked about.
Speaker 2 (25:25):
But it's centered.
Speaker 3 (25:26):
It's like, no, man, you're less than and can do better.
Speaker 2 (25:30):
It's not them you and.
Speaker 1 (25:32):
You need to meet their new and expanded interests too
by by changing and all, you know, largely by buying
things right, by being by like having a bachelor pad,
by purchasing these kind of luxury item.
Speaker 2 (25:42):
Having having multiple rooms that were just gigantic mattresses. Ye people,
but yeah.
Speaker 1 (25:48):
Yeah yeah, like Hugh Hefner is not doing this because
it's the good thing to do, but it does. It
is like less poisonous than like women are corrupting your
children because they're they're they're raising them. Yeah right now.
Playboy helped ignite a market for a new kind of
content aimed entirely at men, as the men's adventure magazines were,
but focused on cultivating an image of class and refinement
(26:11):
by selling designer clothing and high end stereo equipment to
guys with disposable income. And I also think it's a
little less toxic to be like spend your disposable income
on like gym shit or getting taller, as opposed to like,
at least you've got a stereo. If you buy a stereo,
maybe it won't actually help you pick up a lady,
but at least you've got a stereo.
Speaker 2 (26:29):
Right, And maybe a grand kid comes across that amplify
and he's like, hey.
Speaker 1 (26:32):
Yeah, yeah, you get a fucking sweet amp.
Speaker 2 (26:34):
Yeah I can sell that for drugs, right.
Speaker 1 (26:37):
Yes, for the news sign of masculinity. Now. One of
the magazines that came from this moment was Esquire, which
in nineteen fifty eight published an article you will see
cited in every history of American masculinity. If you read
any of these modern day like published in the last
year or two articles about our current crisis of masculinity,
they will all reference an article called the Crisis of
(26:59):
American Masculinity by Arthur Slschinger Junior. Now, Arthur was kind
of the platonic ideal of an East Coast intellectual elite.
His mom's family had come over on the Mayflower. His
dad was a Prussian Jew who'd converted and sent him
to Exeter Academy and then Harvard. Over a long career
as a political writer, he laid down the definitive first
(27:21):
biography of JFK's White House. He convinced RFK to run
for president. He then wrote a definitive book about RFK
after he was assassinated. He invented the term the Imperial presidency.
So he's a guy people listened to, and also, I
wall wager, a guy who knew very little about how
the average man in the US felt about masculinity. Right,
(27:42):
he was not a guy who talked to a lot
of blue collar laborers. You know, his friends are all
wealthy and influential elites. In nineteen fifty eight, he decided
to write an article that reflected their fears about manhood.
Because this was the late fifties, it ran into Esquire
next to one of the better cigarette ads I've seen, Miles,
does this make you want a pall mall? Because I'll
(28:03):
tell you what.
Speaker 3 (28:04):
Oh damn wait, how do I how do I get
that flap?
Speaker 1 (28:08):
Like lobster and tobacco, two great tastes that go great together.
Speaker 2 (28:12):
Look, I'm always I've always said, there's nothing that goes
together like North Carolina, North Carolinian tobacco and shellfish just
mixing in my mouth.
Speaker 1 (28:22):
Look, when you're when you're eating the shellfish in Atlantic City,
it's been rancid for up to seventy two hours before
it hits your plate. You need a pall mall to
coat your throat. That's just a protective effects.
Speaker 2 (28:33):
Yeah, that's that's how you.
Speaker 3 (28:35):
Yeah, you fight off the bacterial infection.
Speaker 1 (28:37):
The way to survive eating Atlantic City shellfish?
Speaker 2 (28:40):
What the fucking lifestyles? Like? You want this, bro? We
know you want to have a fucking cigarette in one hand,
bunch of fucking shrimp sucking down seventy degrees quote unquote fresh.
Speaker 1 (28:53):
Yeah, no, man, that's not the way to advertise these things. Hey,
boys want to not eat for days?
Speaker 3 (28:59):
Yeah, yummies. Yeah, your rims are showing now.
Speaker 1 (29:05):
I do find it interesting too that ad uses the
term smoked out uh no, dry smoked out taste, but
in a very different term to how we use smoked
out today as wow. But now I'm like, hold on,
Paul Maul, what are you saying? I'm back fascinating. Slashinger's
article is still deeply influential today, in part because it
seems so modern. When he lists archetypes of masculinity, they're
(29:27):
all characters from books or movies, and a huge amount
of his conclusions on this crisis are based on media.
Hemmingway's later books, for example, he cites his evidence that
men have become men in general have become preoccupied with
proving their virility, and like, I might suggest that Hemingway's
lack of self confidence as he aged might have more
to do with why those books were the way they
(29:48):
were than how the average American was in nineteen fifty eight.
I don't know, maybe that makes a little more problem.
It's not a problem, a meat problem. Yeah, obviously the
average of Himingway was channeling Joe Schmoe in these books.
He wrote fourteen seconds before blowing his brains out, You know,
clearly just fascinating conclusions that he came to.
Speaker 2 (30:13):
Here.
Speaker 1 (30:14):
Now it becomes clear a few paragraphs in that Slushinger
is personally upset with some of the same things that
had worried men a generation earlier. Quote. While men design
dresses and brew up cosmetics, women become doctors, lawyers, bank cashiers,
and executives. Women now fill many masculine roles, writes the
psychologist doctor Brunel Bettelheim, and expect their husbands to assume
(30:35):
many of the tasks once reserved for their own sex.
They see men expanding aggressive force, seizing new domains like
a conquering army, while men, more and more on the defensive,
are hardly able to hold their own and gracefully accept
assignments from their new rulers. Yeah, they're new rulers. Women
ruling everything in nineteen fifty.
Speaker 3 (30:53):
Eighth, How did they see the future?
Speaker 2 (30:56):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (30:57):
Fascinating stuff.
Speaker 2 (30:58):
Patriarchy.
Speaker 1 (30:59):
Two men are making Now, now, as a liberal intellectual,
I will say Arthur doesn't let himself go too far
down this road. He does pivot by it. First off,
he says that like, well, we can't turn things around.
Once women have gotten a taste of freedom, They're just
going to keep being free, and we have staff to
accept that, right, And he does point out he also
makes a note that like, obviously there's a chance that
(31:20):
a man who helps out with cleaning the house might
just be super confident in his masculinity. Right, maybe maybe
a man who literally stabbed ss men to death with
frozen icicles doesn't feel emasculated by sweeping, you know. But
then we get this line. But there is more impressive
evidence than the helpful husband that this is an age
(31:41):
of sexual ambiguity. It appears no accent, for example, that
the changing of sex, the Christine Jorgensen phenomenon so fascinates
our newspaper editors and readers, or that homosexuality, that incarnation
of sexual ambiguity should be encouraged enjoying a cultural boom
new in our history. Now, we've talked about Christine Organson
on the show before. She was probably the first transgender
(32:03):
woman on American television. You know, she was kind of
the first public transgender celebrity in like American life. And
she was you know because in part because she was
seen as kind of singular as opposed to a symbol
of a community of people. I think she actually got
a lot less attacked than you know, we currently see
(32:23):
today in like the right wing anti trans culture war.
She was kind of described. She was often seen as
like this is one person who is like has this
peculiar thing about them or having on them on TV
to talk about it, as opposed to like, you know,
something broader. But it is interesting to me that, like,
in this foundational work of American male insecurity slashing her
picks on a trans woman, right, like that is kind
(32:45):
of kind of fascinating, and he's not the only guy
doing it, but he does so in a way that's
like very familiar to the modern era. It's like she's
a sign that men in general are less confident in
being men, just like colleague, homosexuality a sign of sexual ambiguity,
and like, man, there's nothing ambiguous about being clear pretty clear?
(33:06):
Yeah I want, yeah, but I do I do consider
it worthwhile to draw the connection right now if you
can tolerate the way that Slashinger writes, and that is
a big if. His article is extremely funny. At points.
There's a long segment where he frets over homosexual male
characters in fiction and how they suggest men are rejecting
normal female desire for full and reciprocal love, And then
(33:29):
he writes this incredible paragraph. One can pause and note
why the Gary Cooper's, Carry Grants, Clark Gables, and Spencer
Tracy's continue to play romantic leads opposite girls young enough
to be their daughters. It's obviously because so few of
the younger male stars can project a convincing sense of masculinity. Man,
(33:49):
that's why. Yeah, that's why, bro, It's going to keep
happening for all of the time that movies exist. Yes,
holy shit, Yes, it's just that these these young bucks
can't compete with the sex the masculinity of a carry
Gary Cooper, you know. Yeah, hell yeah.
Speaker 3 (34:08):
Wow, so funny.
Speaker 2 (34:09):
Love that.
Speaker 1 (34:10):
That's so funny.
Speaker 2 (34:12):
Bottle that up. I love that. Yeah, man, it's because
these guys can't get their dicks up.
Speaker 1 (34:17):
It's not because a lot of men like very young women.
It has to be because of this absolutely just nuts,
you know, what else is crazy, Miles, the deals that
our advertisers will guarantee you absolutely so out of their
mind that they have been fifty one to fifty and
are currently being held in a psychiatric facility against their will.
(34:40):
It's really a problem.
Speaker 2 (34:41):
Yeah, they're wearing grippy socks.
Speaker 1 (34:43):
Yeah, anyway, we're back. So Arthur does come, despite some
very very silly lines, to a decent enough conclusion. I
will say, this is not like a hateful article, it's
just deeply out of touch. And his conclusion is that
if we can't there's no like recovering the old style
(35:06):
of masculinity. Things have changed. Women now have much more
freedom than they do, and that that's not going backwards.
Speaker 2 (35:12):
Right.
Speaker 1 (35:12):
So he specifically states, I'll give him credit for this.
He's like, trying to go back to the old style
of masculinity is as foolish as trying to bring back
white supremacy. Right. He describes both as the neuroses of
an immature society, and then he goes on to suggest
that men need to remake themselves. And this is again
where you get to, well, you're just a deeply out
of touched coastal elite. Where he's like and obviously the
(35:34):
way for men to relate to make themselves is through
satire and politics. Right, men should write funny articles for
the New Yorker to recover their masculinity.
Speaker 4 (35:43):
How many smoking jackets do you get into politics? He writes,
A virile political life will be definite and hard hitting,
respecting debate and dissent, seeking clarity and decision. Basically, he's like,
to solve the crisis of vasculinity, we need to defight
to find masculinity as like writing pithy articles for a
living and political columns, you know, which is exactly what
(36:07):
he does.
Speaker 1 (36:08):
Arthur Sleshinger, a man who was not at all insecure
about his manhood does for a living. Yeah, I just
find that so funny. Now, obviously, Miles, in our modern era,
where men still control most of the wealth and power
in society, one of the best ways to profit off
the masculinity crisis is to sell guys like Arthur Slushinger,
who himself was not Again not going to make fun
(36:29):
of his appearance, but if you look at a picture
of him, not an imposing figure, right to sell guys
like that an image of masculinity they want to copy,
and as we sort of started the episode with the
model is very consistent across all of the grifters today. Right,
And it's a guy who looks like a Navy seal
in a movie from the mid odds. Right, it's like
a fat yeah. Right, And to give you an example,
(36:50):
they all look kind of like this. Right. If there's
a phenotype for manfluencers, the most common one by far,
and like Andrew Tait doesn't match this, but a lot
of them do. Right, Yeah, it's this guy. He's got
like kind of a military style haircut. He's got a
big beard. He's either wearing a tailored suit, workout gear,
or like combat gear, right, right, all of like the
(37:11):
eighty percent of the dudes in this tailored attack gear
or Taylor tack gear.
Speaker 2 (37:15):
Right.
Speaker 1 (37:16):
Too skinny of a tie, personally, too skinny of a tie.
You know, Beard clearly died, but whatever. Now, there's a
million of these guys out there. But the particular guy
whose photo I just showed you is named Jack Murphy. Now,
Jack came up in a similar social stratus to slashing
around his peers. He graduated George Mason University and then
(37:38):
went to Georgetown School of Foreign Service, where he earned
an MA in International Affairs. He has talked about his
childhood as being extremely difficult and like abusive. Maybe that's true.
I don't know, because this man's a liar. I'm really
not going to get into it much. This is not
a full bet beyond the guy. But either way, he
goes to Georgetown Town and he gets an MA in internationals. Right,
(38:00):
he gets a job consulting. This is not a poor person.
This is a guy who gets a job consulting on
two different charter schools in the DC area and eventually
winds up running two charter schools. Barbara Smith, who worked
under him and eventually wrote a book about the experience,
claims that he fired off staff in order to collect
two executive director salaries, making a cut like a million
(38:22):
dollars in change in the few years that he's there
right now. During his time in power over these schools,
they had the lowest family return rates for any charter
schools in the district. And by the way, he is
working in a majority black district. So this is a
white guy who came into a majority black district basically
took over, gutted two charter schools, fucked them up seriously.
(38:43):
And pocketed the money. Right, that's Jack.
Speaker 2 (38:45):
School choice, man. We need to see a choice though.
Speaker 1 (38:47):
Yeah, critically important, not just a way to empower these freaks. Yeah.
In twenty fifteen, the year after gamer Gate, Jack realized
that there was an even better con out there blogging
about masculinityte In one article that year, quote, it is
our duty as men to save the feminists from themselves.
Therefore I am offering rape to feminists as an olive branch.
(39:09):
Now this guy, this guy, Yeah, he may have heard
about him. He got a lot of this is he
kind of broached into the mainstream a little bit when
he wrote that, because people are very angry about it. Unfortunately,
it doesn't really hurt guys like this. We'll talk about
what hurts guys like this, because the good news is
that Jack is now no longer a major figure in
the right wing. Right Now, this guy's whole life is
(39:32):
like a conservative fantasy. Right. He cashes in on hurting
black black kids particularly, and gets rich off of like
running charter schools into the ground. That's their dream. Right.
But despite this, he pretends to have been a liberal,
and in twenty eighteen writes a book titled Democrat to deplorable,
an attempt to take advantage of the fact that right
(39:54):
after Trump's election, certain kinds of journalists, particularly at the
times we're starving to platf guys like him, and his
hope was, I write this book, They'll all do to
me what they did to Jade Vance, right, where I'll
suddenly get all this mainstream legitimacy for explaining why very
reasonable people used to be very liberal were now Donald Trump.
You know, we just got forced to write now. Unfortunately
(40:15):
for Jack, he was a little late in this. Right.
If this book could come out and like spring of
twenty seventeen, right, he might have really had something here, right,
that would have been the ideal time to launch this grift.
Twenty eighteen is a little late. For one thing, it's
after Charlottesville, right.
Speaker 3 (40:29):
Like, yeah, that's kind of the window.
Speaker 1 (40:32):
That's kind of a window. You were just a little
bit too late, man. I know publishing is a slow process, Homeinge, Like,
I get it. It's tough. It's tough to make those deadlines.
To his credit, he saw the future of monetizing being
a guy like this, though, was in selling coaching services,
and so he launched the Limital Order, where for one
hundred dollars a month, young men could learn to stop
(40:53):
being beta males. And this is almost the same grift
that Andrew Tate has set up, right, Like, it's this
this whole thing where like you pay me a monthly
salary to get exam, like, you know, access to a
chat room where I will coach you in being you know,
a better man, a stronger man.
Speaker 2 (41:09):
Right.
Speaker 1 (41:09):
And I think that's traffic out of traffic women, right.
I don't know if Jack would have gotten into that,
probably if you didn't have enough time. He also started
trying to rebrand as a gun fluencer and posing in
badly set up tactical gear. This just is not how
you do it. You don't put the gun there, man,
You don't put the gun there. You want to draw
your fucking side arm and shoot yourself in the shoulder. Homie,
is that what you're looking for? Brow? What is he?
(41:31):
What are you doing? What are you looking like? Did
you see holding a gun that way? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (41:37):
I mean it's just clearly it's like I saw a
video I saw a video game cover that looked like this,
and that's what I'm impersonating.
Speaker 1 (41:43):
We have at this point a couple of hundred years
of men wearing guns professionally, and everyone agrees somewhere around
the waist, right, we could debate the position around the waist,
but somewhere around the waist, not your sternum. You know,
what are you doing?
Speaker 2 (41:58):
Man? Oh I just clocked what do you like?
Speaker 1 (42:00):
A glock on his classical block? It is fucking classical?
Speaker 2 (42:03):
Oh sorry? Did I tend to turn up the contrast
on my screen to be.
Speaker 1 (42:07):
Like fucking hell?
Speaker 2 (42:09):
Wow?
Speaker 1 (42:09):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (42:10):
You know when you pull that thing out, you want
whoever you're aiming that at, You're like, dude, this thing
sounds like your armpit.
Speaker 1 (42:15):
Yeah, that's that's that's the right way to fucking carry
a gun, my guy, I know. So Jack launched a
podcast where he hosted guests like Mike Cernovich and Jack Bisobic,
men who had been moderately more successful than him, and
cultivating an audience and followers with variations of the same grift,
and then, near the end of twenty twenty one, disaster struck.
Some of his fans found that back in twenty fifteen,
(42:37):
he'd done something besides blog about feminism. He'd written about
his love of being cuckolded. Yeah, oh that's wrong. This
guy's a fun one. This guy's a fun while being cuckold.
It is a perfectly fine fetish in which a man
has his girlfriend or a wife or whomever pick up
other men and fuck them in front of him. As
(42:59):
far as things people do in bed go, we would
call this pretty vanilla where.
Speaker 2 (43:03):
I come from.
Speaker 1 (43:04):
But on the right, watch someone have sex, right right, Okay,
share whatever. On the right wing twenty twenty twenty one,
cuck was maybe the single most popular insult so coming
out as you're trying to brand yourself as an influence
into space that you are literally a cuck not gonna
go over well. Right after this comes out, Jack gets
(43:25):
interviewed by The Blaze and he's asked about his fetish.
In a medium post, Jonathan Pletti summarizes what happened next,
he exploded at the female host, I'm not going to
talk about this, and basically, you know, fuck you for
bringing this up right here and right now. Why are
you doing this to me? Talking to social media afterwards,
he tried to get the hosts of the interview fired.
It was perceived as so unhinged as a fuel curiosity
(43:47):
about his past, right wingers found themselves on a Russian
porn website watching amateur masturbation videos done in twenty eighteen
for a gay audience called Big Bad Bear one thousand.
Here was Jack naked on camera, calling himself hetero flexible
and talking about his history of male male sex. I
like men, I like men, and I like boys. Wow
(44:07):
the boys.
Speaker 3 (44:09):
Great stuff, bro, Yeah yeah, I know that that's that great.
Speaker 1 (44:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (44:12):
I mean again, when this poor guy, you didn't have
to almost blow your armpit off with a gun or
any of this other stuff.
Speaker 3 (44:19):
You could have just lived your truth. You could have
much of your life.
Speaker 4 (44:23):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (44:23):
Yeah, you still could have written a bad book. You know. Hey,
people can write terrible books too, everyone can. That's you're
right as an American.
Speaker 3 (44:32):
Yeah, yeah, no, don't not get that. Get that pistol
away from you.
Speaker 1 (44:36):
Still carry a gun that way, you shouldn't have a
gun at all, Jack.
Speaker 2 (44:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (44:40):
Now, there are more influential far and by the way,
this guy was a fellow at the Claremont Institute, So
great stuff. They are more influential far right masculinity grifters.
But I think Jack represents the pulsing insecurity at the
heart of every one of these dudes. He is a
human embodiment of what these crises of masculinity really are
(45:00):
at their core and always have been, boring men from
privileged backgrounds, working high paid but useless jobs that don't
make them quite enough to paper over the deep, yawning
void at the center of their soul. I've been pretty
critical of that Slashinger piece this episode, and I think
with good reason. But I will give Arthur credit. There's
a paragraph in his piece that absolutely describes Jack and
(45:20):
a lot of these guys to a t. The pre
democratic world was characteristically a world of status, in which
people were provided with ready made identities, but modern Western society, free, equalitarian,
democratic has swept away all the old niches in which people,
for so many centuries found safe refuge. Only a few
people at any time in human history have enjoyed the
challenge of making themselves. Most have fled from the unendurable
(45:43):
burden of freedom into the womblike security of the group.
The new age of social mobility may be fine for
those strong enough to discover and develop their own roles
before the timid and the frightened, who constitute the majority
in any age, The great vacant spaces of equalitarian society
can become a nightmare filled with nameless horrors.
Speaker 2 (46:03):
Yeah all right, yep, didn't miss on that one.
Speaker 1 (46:07):
Yeah, he didn't miss on that one. I think that
really gets I think that gets a lot of what's
going on with these guys is there's this they have freedom,
they could be whoever they wanted to be, right, and
they see I think it's part of it's not all of,
but it's part of like why trains people are such
a constant focus for them. They see some people take
this freedom that exists in our society and that to
(46:28):
some extent was increased by the coming of the digital age,
and they're angry and jealous because they don't have the
courage to find or make themselves in the same way,
and so they want to attack those people who are
authentically creating themselves right.
Speaker 2 (46:42):
Right, and are much less risky to be like yeah,
like I like being a cook, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (46:48):
Well whatever, yeah whatever, that's that's who you are, Jack,
You could have just been that right.
Speaker 2 (46:54):
Yeah. Wow, that that's such a great point of yea. Yeah,
to see people like where the the stakes are so
much hire in terms of society's acceptance of them, and
like you have these other guys just like I just
want to be like a nerd or something.
Speaker 1 (47:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (47:06):
Yeah, that manifesting or metastasizing it to that kind of angers.
Speaker 1 (47:10):
Yeah yeah, frightening it yeah, frightening bad, sad. But you know,
kudos to Steve Bannon for realizing this was going on
and had a fucking profit off of it.
Speaker 2 (47:19):
Yeah, man, getting that sweet Seinfeld money too.
Speaker 1 (47:22):
Yeah, you know, I was playing his cards right, Maybe
not the most toxic person involved with Seinfeld, say that's right.
Speaker 2 (47:30):
Ye.
Speaker 1 (47:34):
Anyway, Miles, that's the end of the episode. You get
anything the plug before we roll out here.
Speaker 2 (47:40):
Check me out if you want to hear me talk
every day about news politics since the like on the
Daily Zeitgeist. And look if you also want to blow
steam off and hear me talk about trash reality show
with Sophia Alexandra, who's been a past guest on here.
I'm on four to twenty fiance. Those are the spots
you can check me.
Speaker 1 (47:56):
Well, check that out. And you know, as Miles says,
every year, yeah, and you know, anyway, once we do that,
we can take back our country. That's what you're always saying, Miles.
Speaker 2 (48:09):
That's what I'm saying, and I'm backing down man.
Speaker 1 (48:13):
Hell yeah, brother, hell yea brother, yeah yeah, hell yeah.
So anyway, look up Miles's new fertilizer bomb recipe at
Miles I don't even know what to call that website. Miles,
thanks for coming on the show. Fertilizer Bombs, Yeah anyway.
Speaker 2 (48:38):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 1 (48:41):
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 2 (48:51):
Behind the Bastards is now available on.
Speaker 1 (48:53):
YouTube, new episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our
channel YouTube dot com slash at Behind the Bastards
Also media, welcome back to Behind the Bastards. I'm doing
my Halloween boys because this will probably come out pretty
close to Halloween. Miles. And if you be poisoned, if
you have.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
The poisoned candy, Have ever poisoned candy?
Speaker 1 (00:18):
Yeah, anyone's candy. If you ever poisoned a child's candy, Miles.
Speaker 3 (00:21):
No, I used to poison mine to get out of school.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
There.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
Well, we'll leave that and maybe Miles. Are you ready
to get back into part two here? Miles Gray Host,
I'm so ready.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
I'm so ready because, like I said, I feel like
I feel like man's are going to turn it around.
Speaker 1 (00:36):
Yes, some men are going to fluence themselves into a
healthier place.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
I feel like I hated that we've got Look, we've
got man fluenza over here.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
I hated that also concerned about men, including both of you.
So I'm going to start this episode by returning to
the distant past and the next era of man masculinity
gurus to come around after the stock market collapsed. One
(01:05):
of the first guys through that particular door was a
man that you probably heard his name, Charles Atlas. When
nineteen thirty started, Reading started running a series of ads
in Popular Mechanics, bragging, let me prove in seven days
that I can make you a new man now. Atlas
was obviously not the first guy to promise insecure men
that he could make them huge, and that in doing
(01:27):
so he would solve every problem in their lives, but
he was probably the most muscular of the first generation
of these guys. As the Depression faded and the war
years came, Atlas was also the first to realize that
magazines meant for mature adults, like Popular Mechanics, weren't the
best place to target insecure young men. To do that,
you had to reach them in comic books. Charles placed
(01:48):
ads in every comic under the sun. Because this was
a hungrier era in general, he didn't tend to focus
on like trying to get men, you know, to lose
weight or whatever. That really wasn't a thing, right, trying
to convince them that like they're fat and out of shape,
that wouldn't really work in this era because everyone's starving.
So instead he mocked them for being too skinny. This
tactic culminated in his famous ninety seven pound weekling ads.
(02:11):
Here's an early example, right, and to think they called
me skinny, give me fifteen minutes a day and I'll
give you a new body. And then we see a
very a very oily Italian man, right, I mean, just
just as shiny as the days longer paint undise painted
(02:32):
on him. There's a little box underneath him, right above
his knees that says Charles Atlas, holder of the title
the world's most perfectly developed man. But you're wondering where
does that titles? Car Internet who decided that we'll talk
about it?
Speaker 2 (02:48):
Did he did?
Speaker 1 (02:49):
Now? What really made Charles stand out in a crowded
field of fitness Gurdus was his laser focus on fucking
with the self confidence of boys and young men reading
his age. Right. He was the guy who was like,
I'm I'm just going to use body dysmorphia to make
all of my mone you know, to make And he
really did it, probably the first guy I saw doing
it in a really organized way that I've found that's
like really unhealthy, in a very modern way where he
(03:12):
just wants you to feel bad about your body.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
Right.
Speaker 1 (03:15):
His most popular ninety seven pound weekly ads were comics themselves,
so he is really targeting kids to make them hate
their bodies. And the premise of like most of these,
was that a bully at the beach mocks our protagonist
for being scrawny. In the comic I have here, he's saying, hey, skinny,
your ribs are showing. Don't let him hit you, Joe,
watch what you say full off, shut up your bag
(03:37):
of bones. And then the muscular guy hits our hero,
who takes Charles Atlas's getting jacked, course, becomes swollen, and
then goes back to the beach to beat the shit
out of this guy and presumably take back his woman.
Speaker 3 (03:51):
Right right, that's how it works.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:53):
Yeah. After he beats up the beach bully, his girlfriend says, oh, Joe,
you are a real he man after all.
Speaker 2 (04:00):
Oh Jesus, thank you for me.
Speaker 1 (04:03):
Yeah yeah. This comic does not pass the Bechdel test.
I not enjoy that. Yeah, no, horrible stuff. Now, it's
not going to surprise you to learn that Charles Atlas
was not his real names. That's that's not anyone's real name.
What is funny is that his real name also sounds fake.
He was born Angelo Siciliano, which sounds like what JK.
(04:25):
Rowling would have named an Italian wizard. It's not a
real person's name.
Speaker 2 (04:32):
Angelo Sicilians, yes.
Speaker 1 (04:36):
Italian wizard. Now, before he was a muscle salesman, he
was a poor kid in Brooklyn who couldn't afford a
YMCA membership and tried several fad workouts of the day
without results. Siciliano thus fell for the con before he
got in on it himself, treating Bernarmic Fadden's Physical Culture
(04:57):
magazine as the Bible and hassling strong in at weightlifting
competitions to learn their secrets. He would later claim that
the infamous ninety seven pound weekling story had its origins
in his real life, that that was a thing that
actually happened to him as a kid, that he had
sand kicked in his face by a bully. And then
my favorite part of this is because there were no
(05:18):
Charles Atlas classes to take when he was bullied as
a kid, he went to the zoo where he studied
found out the secrets of muscle growth by watching a
lion because his old program was like calistenics base. He's like, well,
lions have muscles and they don't lift weights, so it
must be a calisthenics problem.
Speaker 2 (05:36):
Holy shit. Also that logic, he just like ran down
like musclemen from the circus to.
Speaker 1 (05:44):
He would go to like muscle shows and then would
like annoy them afterwards, being like, hey, man, had you
get so big? Howd you get so huge? Like, I
don't know, eat nothing but beef steak and picked up
heavy things.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
Bro.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
It was like the nineteen teens just manomach, just shoveling
it in their mouths aacerous now whatever his real secret,
Sciliano did figure out how to get swollen, and he
made his living as a circus strongman until in nineteen
twenty two he met a homeopathic doctor who'd written for
(06:16):
Physical Culture and hired him to author a fitness course
he could sell in magazines. He changed his name to
Charles Atlas, and the rest was history. Now I looked
into the case of like who declared him the world's
most perfectly developed man, and Wikipedia says there's no evidence
that he ever won this. This is just a thing
he declared himself. But I found another source that I
(06:37):
trust implicitly, barbend dot com, which offers a free arm
training ebook to readers that claims with citations that he
did in fact win a most Handsome Man contest held
by Bernard McFadden and a subsequent America's Most Perfectly Developed
Man contest held also by Bernard McFadden. So you know,
maybe it's kind of legit. Although he was sort of
(06:58):
working for the guy right now. Atlas was absolutely a grifter,
but it came far enough back that he was at
least fun. Right in his day, it was enough to
be huge and make kids feel bad about their bodies. Today,
his descendants, guys like Andrew Taate have to do that.
And you know, they also have to sell like supplements
(07:18):
and shit, right, they have to get into all this
culture warshit.
Speaker 2 (07:21):
Right.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
It's not just you can't just pose naked and offer
health and dieting trips tricks anymore, right, Right, you have
to have a place in the culture wars. Right. You
have to find a way to like make people think
that by listening to your shit, they're part of like
a great and vicious struggle. Right. Otherwise there's just nothing,
like you kind of get lost by the wayside without that.
(07:43):
And I don't know why. I think some of this
has to do with the fact that in Charles Atlas's day,
they didn't really know how people got big, right, They
generally knew that you had to lift heavy things. But
there was a lot of lot less was known about,
like sports nutrition and the like. A lot less was
known about how to work out in order to maximize
muscle growth, and steroids weren't really a thing. Right now
(08:04):
we have, thank god steroids.
Speaker 3 (08:06):
Thanks right, the anabs came online.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
It's easier. People can get swollen pretty easily if they
have time and money. Now it is right, and the
acne is free, and the back acne is free, right,
as is the hgh gut. You too can look like
Joe Roby.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
I like to call it organ in large man, all right,
don't call it that's what my organs are becoming oversized.
Speaker 1 (08:29):
He has the massive guts of a healthy man. Yeah,
now I want to uh yeah. So it's like, think
about that guy who compared himself to the rock before
getting his legs butchered. Right, Just the fact that you're
shredded isn't going like. People aren't confident at all as
a result of that anymore. It doesn't bring you the
same it used to be. If you were huge, maybe
that was enough to feel like a big man. Nowadays
(08:51):
it just really makes you feel like one of the herds.
So these guys who you know, are essentially doing the
same thing Atlas was. They have to sell themselves as
like culture war icons too, right, because part of in
part because these men are struggling for something that gives
them meaning, right, and and war is a force that
gives us meaning. So they want some sort of like
(09:12):
thing to fight for and some sort of leader to like,
you know, take the raids, right, right. And a good
example of like how some guys do this is the
current panic among right wing masculinity influencer types over seed oils. Now.
One of the major sources of the seed oil panic,
and the idea is that seed oils are toxic and
they're stopping you from like being muscular. They're killing you.
(09:35):
They're basically killing you as a man. They're rendering you infertile,
you know. And it's a conspiracy, right, that's kind of
the insinuation that the spread of seed oils in cooking
is part of a conspiracy to destroy men. You know.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
Yeah, yeah, it's easier to do that than really zoom out.
Yeah it's a seed oils man.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
Yeah, man, don't like it is all the seed oils
that safflower oil is really fucking you up.
Speaker 3 (10:00):
Oh man, safflower, I'll pray for you.
Speaker 1 (10:04):
Yeah, pray for you. It's got to be olive oil, right,
where's all of oil? Is seed oil? I don't think so,
I hope not.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
I mean, I guess it comes from the olives themselves. Whatever,
you know, what I'm gonna do.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
All I know is my brother says that there's only
to eat avocado oil. And he's a doctor. He says,
to eat a cotton Oh there you go.
Speaker 2 (10:23):
I hear that too, has a high smoke point, higher
smoke point than olive oils. If you high temperature cooking.
I'm like, I can second that.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
See, I'm as as a masculinity influencer myself, Myles, I
cook only with diesel fuel, you know, yeah, right right,
if it's good for me. Yeah, oh well yeah to
W three. Well, I just put that on some bread,
you know, a little bit of salt in there. Not
too much. You don't want to that's too much sodium.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
Yeah, vegas dip my bread in ten W thirty. So.
Speaker 1 (10:53):
One of the big names in the seed oils community
is Carnivore Orrelius, a Twitter account with more than three
hundred thousand followers that it's he's done a few things.
He was all these guys my brain. Yeah, take pictures
of old like buildings from the classical era and be like,
why can't we make these anymore?
Speaker 2 (11:12):
Right?
Speaker 1 (11:12):
I mean we could, bro we just have other ways
of making houses than having men hugh granite for a
thousand years. I don't know. We have better materials if
you like, if you ever had to walk around on
a floor made out of fucking marble when it's raining, Like, yeah,
we have other ways of building things.
Speaker 2 (11:30):
Now, if you do that, now you're gonna break your
little extendo. I'm keep balancing.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
So he is one of the big guys who is
pushing this idea that seed oils are responsible for all
of the woes of modern life. And I don't think
I need to waste time breaking down why he's wrong.
But I will show you a post of his from
August of twenty twenty three, which I find interesting as
a mirror to the Charles Atlas ads that we started
this episode with. Before seed oils were invented, everybody was
hot and healthy, less than ten percent of people were
(12:00):
obedes forty percent today, and CBD was non existent. But
in the two last hundred years, seed oil consumption has
increased twenty times, and so is disease. Here a study
show him why I don't eat them. And then his
evidence is this picture of Atlantic Beach in nineteen oh eight, Like,
look at that, at all these and like, what I
find interesting here is that if you look at the
(12:21):
men in this, they're like, for one thing, a lot
shorter than men today tend to be, and also pretty
skinny as a general rule. And if this same picture
in nineteen oh eight would have been used by Charles
Atlas as like evidence of how scrawny the average min
is and why they need his workout program, they're all wets.
Look at these wins. They're going to get sand kicked
in their face. Look at these.
Speaker 3 (12:42):
Bags of bone embarrassments there.
Speaker 1 (12:45):
Like Chuck Atlas, he just sees targets there, sand kicking
targets like that boy on the left right there with
the you could see him in the left side, bottom
side of the picture, and the uh, the wife beater
black shirt. Like that guy's getting sand kicked right in
his face.
Speaker 2 (12:58):
Oh yeah, so.
Speaker 1 (12:59):
Is the guy all them wife beaters anymore? Is that
a fence in these days?
Speaker 2 (13:02):
Yeah? I think you're supposed to call them tank tops
tops weak wow tanks.
Speaker 1 (13:06):
So the military industrial complex is fine, Miles.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
Yeah, I guess I don't know, man, Like I don't
make the rules. Man, I don't make it. I'm just
here to sell seed oils. Man.
Speaker 1 (13:15):
I did. Like when I was a kid, that was
the only thing people ever called those shirts. Oh yeah,
no adult was ever able to explain to me, Like,
why are they called wife beating?
Speaker 2 (13:24):
No, the other one you heard was it was a
guinea tea?
Speaker 1 (13:27):
Are the guinea t Yeah?
Speaker 2 (13:29):
Those are like the alternatives, and like there were no
good options, like to the point now I remember needing
one and I said it off handily, and my partner,
her majesty, is like, Yo, that's that's that's not can't
call them that, And I'm like, no, that out loud.
Yeah I don't want to say that in a store.
Speaker 1 (13:45):
In the small town I grew up. But yeah, they
were definitely always called wife beaters, and it was because
it was like a shirt people in trailer parks would
often wear. And I think probably my mom didn't tell
me why it got that name because all of my
friends were kids in trailer parks. Did she want to
talk shit about their dads. But it was like I
didn't really evaluate that until just now that like, oh yes,
(14:07):
it is kind of messed up to call a T
shirt that.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
Yeah yeah, well look, these are strange times we were dealing. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:14):
Yeah, we're all growing every every minute. Anyway. It also
we don't have enough black tank tops in our society.
It's not a bad look. Not a bad look on
those kids. I'm sure they're dead now, but they look nice.
Speaker 3 (14:25):
And hey, you never know photo eight teenagers.
Speaker 1 (14:30):
They're dead as hell.
Speaker 2 (14:33):
They're making some.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
Worms happy though, Yeah, yeah, probably, or at least we're
like seventy years ago. Yeah yeah, let's they cremated, which
is a bad way, but well we'll see, we'll see.
So yeah, this is I just found it funny that
like the same the same picture that is being like
portrayed as this is like how much ah men used
to be real men back when all of those men
were alive, they were being told you're far too skinny.
Speaker 3 (14:56):
But it's the same way even with like who's raising
our kids?
Speaker 2 (15:00):
Right right? The men should be there with the kids.
And now it's like you hear people be.
Speaker 1 (15:04):
Like women they're not raising the kids.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
Yeah, I would never hire a man to babies sit.
That's just wrong. And you're like, wow, whatever, it's a
funhouse mirror. Depending on where your life's at and where yeah,
it is.
Speaker 1 (15:16):
A certain chunk of the population are just always going
to be assholes who need to find a reason why
whatever other people are fine with isn't okay and is
ruining their lives because usually they want to make money
off of it, right, you know, like that's just the
reality of human beings, and the sooner you make peace
with it, the sooner you can just daydream about those
people getting hit by buses. So yeah, So anyway, I
(15:41):
want to read a quote about the fake seed oil
crisis by Rolling Stones EJ. Dixon, just to kind of
give you some context on this fun little piece of
our culture at the present moment. Carnivora Realis is an
account dedicated to restoring our ancestral meat loving lifestyle. Its
website also sells a branded bag of beef liver crisps
for eighty nine ninety nine my Other proponents of the
(16:02):
carnivore diet, like Jordan Peterson or Andrew Tate, Carnivor Orrelius
frequently advocates for traditional family values, tweeting about how feminism
is a scam or idyllic photos of young, beautiful blonde
moms with babies with the caption Ladies, there's nothing wrong
with you if you want this over becoming a partner
at a law firm. It is also devoided much space
to pushing the evils of seed oils. My favorite thing
(16:24):
about this is so he has to claim. He's claimed
that seed oils are the most destructive force in the
world today and cutting them out of the diet will
hit your diet, will change your health. And some of
his evidence for that is canola oil is literally made
from seeds of the rape plant, named after what it
will do to your health. And Okay, I feel like
I shouldn't need to say anything here, but I will.
(16:47):
Which is that rape seed which is the unfortunate name
of the plant that canoila was misspelled whenever I had
seen No. No, it is an unfortunate name, but it
has nothing to do with rape. The thing right, It
comes from the Latin word rape them for turnip because
it's like related to the turnip planted.
Speaker 3 (17:04):
Oh, thank god, just unrelated. I thought, just some sick fuck?
Speaker 2 (17:08):
Was this like you know what we're gonna name it.
Speaker 1 (17:10):
Could we have called it rap seed probably probably would
have been a better idea. But you know, the basement
scientists never listen to what I think things should be named.
Speaker 2 (17:18):
And I keep telling, I keep telling them, and I
keep telling the you know, the local police say it's
a misunderstanding. It's a misunderstanding. He's got good ideas. Listen to.
Speaker 1 (17:29):
Speaking of calling the local police, don't do that. Listen
to these ads, and we're back. So we are again.
I'm not going to spend a lot of time fact
checking Carnivore Aurelius his Twitter count in part because his
fans won't listen to this show.
Speaker 2 (17:48):
They can read Yeah, I mean I know about it,
but like maybe maybe offline, you can just tell me
why I shouldn't be tripping about it because I threw
out all my.
Speaker 1 (17:56):
Oh no, you should be very scared of seeing absolutely,
But it's okay. I have a solution for you. You know
I have I have pure chicken liver that did not
come from KFC. It just for three hundred dollars a pound.
I will send it to you via the mail. Do
they have that kids? They used to have it at KFC,
did they not anymore? I haven't got a KFC in
(18:18):
a very long time. They had chicken liver and chicken
livers and it was pretty good.
Speaker 4 (18:22):
It was not.
Speaker 1 (18:24):
I like liver. I'm like the liver king, you know.
Speaker 2 (18:26):
Yeah, you some more chev.
Speaker 1 (18:29):
Thank you, thank you. It's because of all the steroids.
So going back to our journey through time, you might
expect the post war era, right the you know, late
forties through the fifties, to have been a time where
like the masculinity in crisis thing wouldn't have found much purchase. Right.
If any period of time men were actually confident in themselves,
(18:51):
it must have been the post war years, right. These
guys went and they kicked some Nazi ass and they
came back and they bought houses for thirteen dollars, right, Like,
there was never a better time to feel like a
man than this, as long as.
Speaker 2 (19:03):
You were white, right, Yeah, PTSD as a concept didn't
really exist.
Speaker 4 (19:07):
You're just drinking your way through that, you know. Yeah,
that guy that poor fucker's show shocked. Yeah, scared of war? Ah,
why do I scream at my kids every night? Just
go back home and hit your children like the rest
of us. Come on now.
Speaker 1 (19:25):
So this was, however, a time of crisis for masculinity
like literally every other period of modern American history has been,
and specifically, it was a time in which American intellectuals
first really started to write in a modern sense about
the crisis of American masculinity. Now, the fact that this happens,
it happen to make sense when you put a few
more things together. The nineteen fifties is the era in
(19:48):
which hyper violent men's magazines first become really popular. We've
had some episodes with Margaret Kiljoy where we read through
a few of those, but these are like you see
him made fun of on the inn today magazines where
like the cover will be a guy fighting a bunch
of crabs, right, or like wrestling affair or something, while
a half naked woman like looks on right. And if
you read interviews with like writers of that era, some
(20:08):
of them are pretty open about the fact that they
saw their audience as primarily frustrated men who'd been in
the military during the war years but never seen combat,
and so they just kind of permanently felt like they'd
missed out right this thing that would have made me
into a man and made me confident. I didn't get
it was kind of stolen from me.
Speaker 2 (20:28):
Right right, right? Yeah, isn't that how what Jarhead was about?
Speaker 1 (20:32):
Yeah? Yeah, I mean, well, yeah, I guess so, because
like you know, Desert Storm wasn't really a war. Yeah,
I'm mis remembering.
Speaker 2 (20:40):
I felt like that was like a big part of
it a long time. I needed to see the pink
misted man and it was enough. Yeah yeah, yeah, kind
of thing anyway.
Speaker 1 (20:48):
Yeah, that you only get that experience that of guys
who didn't see the pink miss But I guess that
makes sense. Yeah. So with Kowski points out that the
nineteen fifties was not so much a real crisis of
manhood because again, the average white man in America was
doing pretty well in that decade. But instead it was
a crisis, and all of these articles about crises and
(21:09):
masculinity were part of the result of a crisis and
self confidence among the kind of men who wrote about
culture for a living, right, these were guys who overwhelmingly
hadn't fought right. These are guys who felt insecure about
their position as cultural elites. And this is when you
started to also see analysis of like films and TV
(21:29):
shows and what they had to say about masculinity. Right.
One of the shows that really scared these kind of
like men writing these articles at the time was The
Adventures of Ozzy and Harriet, which poked fun at male
authority figures and had competent, witty female characters. And there
was a certain kind of public intellectual who was terrified
by this. And I'm going to read a quote again
(21:50):
from Witkowski's paper and a fascinating Look magazine article entitled
the American Male, Why do Women Dominate Him? Author J.
Robert Moskin opined with harm, it is certain that as
women grow ever more numerous and more dominant, we will
have to invent new meanings and myths for maleness in America, because,
as psychiatrist doctor Irene J. Rosalind warns, we are drifting
(22:11):
toward a social structure made up of he women and
she men. Moskin believed men coped with this situation, at
least in part through a set of gendered consumption activities.
They drank regularly and commuter Kane Barkars, watched televised baseball
at home, played golf on weekends, and went on all
male fishing trips at work. Their expense accounts paid for
meals at fancy restaurants and when traveling for spacious suites
(22:32):
and lavish entertaining. Moskin's article clearly focused on the lives
of middle class men like himself. He was senior editor
at Look magazine at the time. And that is such
a part of all of these, all of these male
panic articles. Is that, like, it's just the thing that
you the guy who was born into wealth and privilege
and is like the head editor at Esquire. It's just
(22:54):
what you are scared of, right, Yeah, yeah, because you
know that you don't have a real job, right.
Speaker 2 (23:00):
What do you do? It's like I rank bow ties
and then talked to guys who were just served in
a combat zone.
Speaker 1 (23:06):
Yeah. I tried to scare men who lived through the
SS attacking them about Ozzie and Harriet, Yeah, survivors of
Best Stone. I tried to get to freak out about
girls and movies, awesome stuff. Man.
Speaker 2 (23:21):
I know how to speak their language.
Speaker 1 (23:23):
Man, It's part of why this is so funny. Again,
my grandpa did all of this stuff, went overseas, like,
fought in wars and then came back home and would
have been the first to tell you that he took
every dime he ever made and handed it over to
his wife, who managed all of the family finances because
he had an eighth grade education and she was really
good at math, right, right. He never felt like less
(23:43):
of a man as a result of it.
Speaker 2 (23:45):
I Oh, yeah, I mean that's I mean, that's the
thing that I think, especially that generation was offered like
in that sense because so many served. Yeah, they come
back and like maybe just come back and like, you
know what, I realized, I don't know shit about math. Man.
Just to take these checks. Yeah, yeah, just keep me
fed and I'll be okay.
Speaker 1 (24:08):
So Moskin was a major advocate of the idea that
the increasing visibility of gay men, and remember this is
nineteen fifty, goddamn mate, was a signed that American men
were losing their potency now, as opposed to the crisis
of manhood around the turn of the century or the
nineteen twenties. The chief fear here wasn't that women were
ruining young boys. Instead, now it had moved on to
(24:29):
a feeling that in a world of more liberated women,
men might have to work harder to find companionship. Now.
The MA influencer who sailed into this breach was kind
of ironically the least toxic guy we're going to talk
about in these episodes, Hugh Hefner. And I'm not saying
he was a very toxic man.
Speaker 2 (24:47):
Right, yeah, yeah yeah.
Speaker 1 (24:49):
Playboy actually offered in addition to a new vision of manhood,
it offered a new vision of like womanhood that was
in some ways less poisonous than what had come before, right,
in part because women were not seen in Playboy as
a threat as opposed to women being interested in you
was shown as a sign of vigor and success.
Speaker 2 (25:08):
Right.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
There's a lot that's toxic about that. But it wasn't
telling men you should be scared of women because they're working, right.
It was more telling them that your ability to be
interesting to these new liberated women is what defines you
as a man.
Speaker 2 (25:20):
You know.
Speaker 1 (25:21):
And again there's toxic stuff there, but it's less poisonous
than some of the stuff we've talked about.
Speaker 2 (25:25):
But it's centered.
Speaker 3 (25:26):
It's like, no, man, you're less than and can do better.
Speaker 2 (25:30):
It's not them you and.
Speaker 1 (25:32):
You need to meet their new and expanded interests too
by by changing and all, you know, largely by buying
things right, by being by like having a bachelor pad,
by purchasing these kind of luxury item.
Speaker 2 (25:42):
Having having multiple rooms that were just gigantic mattresses. Ye people,
but yeah.
Speaker 1 (25:48):
Yeah yeah, like Hugh Hefner is not doing this because
it's the good thing to do, but it does. It
is like less poisonous than like women are corrupting your
children because they're they're they're raising them. Yeah right now.
Playboy helped ignite a market for a new kind of
content aimed entirely at men, as the men's adventure magazines were,
but focused on cultivating an image of class and refinement
(26:11):
by selling designer clothing and high end stereo equipment to
guys with disposable income. And I also think it's a
little less toxic to be like spend your disposable income
on like gym shit or getting taller, as opposed to like,
at least you've got a stereo. If you buy a stereo,
maybe it won't actually help you pick up a lady,
but at least you've got a stereo.
Speaker 2 (26:29):
Right, And maybe a grand kid comes across that amplify
and he's like, hey.
Speaker 1 (26:32):
Yeah, yeah, you get a fucking sweet amp.
Speaker 2 (26:34):
Yeah I can sell that for drugs, right.
Speaker 1 (26:37):
Yes, for the news sign of masculinity. Now. One of
the magazines that came from this moment was Esquire, which
in nineteen fifty eight published an article you will see
cited in every history of American masculinity. If you read
any of these modern day like published in the last
year or two articles about our current crisis of masculinity,
they will all reference an article called the Crisis of
(26:59):
American Masculinity by Arthur Slschinger Junior. Now, Arthur was kind
of the platonic ideal of an East Coast intellectual elite.
His mom's family had come over on the Mayflower. His
dad was a Prussian Jew who'd converted and sent him
to Exeter Academy and then Harvard. Over a long career
as a political writer, he laid down the definitive first
(27:21):
biography of JFK's White House. He convinced RFK to run
for president. He then wrote a definitive book about RFK
after he was assassinated. He invented the term the Imperial presidency.
So he's a guy people listened to, and also, I
wall wager, a guy who knew very little about how
the average man in the US felt about masculinity. Right,
(27:42):
he was not a guy who talked to a lot
of blue collar laborers. You know, his friends are all
wealthy and influential elites. In nineteen fifty eight, he decided
to write an article that reflected their fears about manhood.
Because this was the late fifties, it ran into Esquire
next to one of the better cigarette ads I've seen, Miles,
does this make you want a pall mall? Because I'll
(28:03):
tell you what.
Speaker 3 (28:04):
Oh damn wait, how do I how do I get
that flap?
Speaker 1 (28:08):
Like lobster and tobacco, two great tastes that go great together.
Speaker 2 (28:12):
Look, I'm always I've always said, there's nothing that goes
together like North Carolina, North Carolinian tobacco and shellfish just
mixing in my mouth.
Speaker 1 (28:22):
Look, when you're when you're eating the shellfish in Atlantic City,
it's been rancid for up to seventy two hours before
it hits your plate. You need a pall mall to
coat your throat. That's just a protective effects.
Speaker 2 (28:33):
Yeah, that's that's how you.
Speaker 3 (28:35):
Yeah, you fight off the bacterial infection.
Speaker 1 (28:37):
The way to survive eating Atlantic City shellfish?
Speaker 2 (28:40):
What the fucking lifestyles? Like? You want this, bro? We
know you want to have a fucking cigarette in one hand,
bunch of fucking shrimp sucking down seventy degrees quote unquote fresh.
Speaker 1 (28:53):
Yeah, no, man, that's not the way to advertise these things. Hey,
boys want to not eat for days?
Speaker 3 (28:59):
Yeah, yummies. Yeah, your rims are showing now.
Speaker 1 (29:05):
I do find it interesting too that ad uses the
term smoked out uh no, dry smoked out taste, but
in a very different term to how we use smoked
out today as wow. But now I'm like, hold on,
Paul Maul, what are you saying? I'm back fascinating. Slashinger's
article is still deeply influential today, in part because it
seems so modern. When he lists archetypes of masculinity, they're
(29:27):
all characters from books or movies, and a huge amount
of his conclusions on this crisis are based on media.
Hemmingway's later books, for example, he cites his evidence that
men have become men in general have become preoccupied with
proving their virility, and like, I might suggest that Hemingway's
lack of self confidence as he aged might have more
to do with why those books were the way they
(29:48):
were than how the average American was in nineteen fifty eight.
I don't know, maybe that makes a little more problem.
It's not a problem, a meat problem. Yeah, obviously the
average of Himingway was channeling Joe Schmoe in these books.
He wrote fourteen seconds before blowing his brains out, You know,
clearly just fascinating conclusions that he came to.
Speaker 2 (30:13):
Here.
Speaker 1 (30:14):
Now it becomes clear a few paragraphs in that Slushinger
is personally upset with some of the same things that
had worried men a generation earlier. Quote. While men design
dresses and brew up cosmetics, women become doctors, lawyers, bank cashiers,
and executives. Women now fill many masculine roles, writes the
psychologist doctor Brunel Bettelheim, and expect their husbands to assume
(30:35):
many of the tasks once reserved for their own sex.
They see men expanding aggressive force, seizing new domains like
a conquering army, while men, more and more on the defensive,
are hardly able to hold their own and gracefully accept
assignments from their new rulers. Yeah, they're new rulers. Women
ruling everything in nineteen fifty.
Speaker 3 (30:53):
Eighth, How did they see the future?
Speaker 2 (30:56):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (30:57):
Fascinating stuff.
Speaker 2 (30:58):
Patriarchy.
Speaker 1 (30:59):
Two men are making Now, now, as a liberal intellectual,
I will say Arthur doesn't let himself go too far
down this road. He does pivot by it. First off,
he says that like, well, we can't turn things around.
Once women have gotten a taste of freedom, They're just
going to keep being free, and we have staff to
accept that, right, And he does point out he also
makes a note that like, obviously there's a chance that
(31:20):
a man who helps out with cleaning the house might
just be super confident in his masculinity. Right, maybe maybe
a man who literally stabbed ss men to death with
frozen icicles doesn't feel emasculated by sweeping, you know. But
then we get this line. But there is more impressive
evidence than the helpful husband that this is an age
(31:41):
of sexual ambiguity. It appears no accent, for example, that
the changing of sex, the Christine Jorgensen phenomenon so fascinates
our newspaper editors and readers, or that homosexuality, that incarnation
of sexual ambiguity should be encouraged enjoying a cultural boom
new in our history. Now, we've talked about Christine Organson
on the show before. She was probably the first transgender
(32:03):
woman on American television. You know, she was kind of
the first public transgender celebrity in like American life. And
she was you know because in part because she was
seen as kind of singular as opposed to a symbol
of a community of people. I think she actually got
a lot less attacked than you know, we currently see
(32:23):
today in like the right wing anti trans culture war.
She was kind of described. She was often seen as
like this is one person who is like has this
peculiar thing about them or having on them on TV
to talk about it, as opposed to like, you know,
something broader. But it is interesting to me that, like,
in this foundational work of American male insecurity slashing her
picks on a trans woman, right, like that is kind
(32:45):
of kind of fascinating, and he's not the only guy
doing it, but he does so in a way that's
like very familiar to the modern era. It's like she's
a sign that men in general are less confident in
being men, just like colleague, homosexuality a sign of sexual ambiguity,
and like, man, there's nothing ambiguous about being clear pretty clear?
(33:06):
Yeah I want, yeah, but I do I do consider
it worthwhile to draw the connection right now if you
can tolerate the way that Slashinger writes, and that is
a big if. His article is extremely funny. At points.
There's a long segment where he frets over homosexual male
characters in fiction and how they suggest men are rejecting
normal female desire for full and reciprocal love, And then
(33:29):
he writes this incredible paragraph. One can pause and note
why the Gary Cooper's, Carry Grants, Clark Gables, and Spencer
Tracy's continue to play romantic leads opposite girls young enough
to be their daughters. It's obviously because so few of
the younger male stars can project a convincing sense of masculinity. Man,
(33:49):
that's why. Yeah, that's why, bro, It's going to keep
happening for all of the time that movies exist. Yes,
holy shit, Yes, it's just that these these young bucks
can't compete with the sex the masculinity of a carry
Gary Cooper, you know. Yeah, hell yeah.
Speaker 3 (34:08):
Wow, so funny.
Speaker 2 (34:09):
Love that.
Speaker 1 (34:10):
That's so funny.
Speaker 2 (34:12):
Bottle that up. I love that. Yeah, man, it's because
these guys can't get their dicks up.
Speaker 1 (34:17):
It's not because a lot of men like very young women.
It has to be because of this absolutely just nuts,
you know, what else is crazy, Miles, the deals that
our advertisers will guarantee you absolutely so out of their
mind that they have been fifty one to fifty and
are currently being held in a psychiatric facility against their will.
(34:40):
It's really a problem.
Speaker 2 (34:41):
Yeah, they're wearing grippy socks.
Speaker 1 (34:43):
Yeah, anyway, we're back. So Arthur does come, despite some
very very silly lines, to a decent enough conclusion. I
will say, this is not like a hateful article, it's
just deeply out of touch. And his conclusion is that
if we can't there's no like recovering the old style
(35:06):
of masculinity. Things have changed. Women now have much more
freedom than they do, and that that's not going backwards.
Speaker 2 (35:12):
Right.
Speaker 1 (35:12):
So he specifically states, I'll give him credit for this.
He's like, trying to go back to the old style
of masculinity is as foolish as trying to bring back
white supremacy. Right. He describes both as the neuroses of
an immature society, and then he goes on to suggest
that men need to remake themselves. And this is again
where you get to, well, you're just a deeply out
of touched coastal elite. Where he's like and obviously the
(35:34):
way for men to relate to make themselves is through
satire and politics. Right, men should write funny articles for
the New Yorker to recover their masculinity.
Speaker 4 (35:43):
How many smoking jackets do you get into politics? He writes,
A virile political life will be definite and hard hitting,
respecting debate and dissent, seeking clarity and decision. Basically, he's like,
to solve the crisis of vasculinity, we need to defight
to find masculinity as like writing pithy articles for a
living and political columns, you know, which is exactly what
(36:07):
he does.
Speaker 1 (36:08):
Arthur Sleshinger, a man who was not at all insecure
about his manhood does for a living. Yeah, I just
find that so funny. Now, obviously, Miles, in our modern era,
where men still control most of the wealth and power
in society, one of the best ways to profit off
the masculinity crisis is to sell guys like Arthur Slushinger,
who himself was not Again not going to make fun
(36:29):
of his appearance, but if you look at a picture
of him, not an imposing figure, right to sell guys
like that an image of masculinity they want to copy,
and as we sort of started the episode with the
model is very consistent across all of the grifters today. Right,
And it's a guy who looks like a Navy seal
in a movie from the mid odds. Right, it's like
a fat yeah. Right, And to give you an example,
(36:50):
they all look kind of like this. Right. If there's
a phenotype for manfluencers, the most common one by far,
and like Andrew Tait doesn't match this, but a lot
of them do. Right, Yeah, it's this guy. He's got
like kind of a military style haircut. He's got a
big beard. He's either wearing a tailored suit, workout gear,
or like combat gear, right, right, all of like the
(37:11):
eighty percent of the dudes in this tailored attack gear
or Taylor tack gear.
Speaker 2 (37:15):
Right.
Speaker 1 (37:16):
Too skinny of a tie, personally, too skinny of a tie.
You know, Beard clearly died, but whatever. Now, there's a
million of these guys out there. But the particular guy
whose photo I just showed you is named Jack Murphy. Now,
Jack came up in a similar social stratus to slashing
around his peers. He graduated George Mason University and then
(37:38):
went to Georgetown School of Foreign Service, where he earned
an MA in International Affairs. He has talked about his
childhood as being extremely difficult and like abusive. Maybe that's true.
I don't know, because this man's a liar. I'm really
not going to get into it much. This is not
a full bet beyond the guy. But either way, he
goes to Georgetown Town and he gets an MA in internationals. Right,
(38:00):
he gets a job consulting. This is not a poor person.
This is a guy who gets a job consulting on
two different charter schools in the DC area and eventually
winds up running two charter schools. Barbara Smith, who worked
under him and eventually wrote a book about the experience,
claims that he fired off staff in order to collect
two executive director salaries, making a cut like a million
(38:22):
dollars in change in the few years that he's there
right now. During his time in power over these schools,
they had the lowest family return rates for any charter
schools in the district. And by the way, he is
working in a majority black district. So this is a
white guy who came into a majority black district basically
took over, gutted two charter schools, fucked them up seriously.
(38:43):
And pocketed the money. Right, that's Jack.
Speaker 2 (38:45):
School choice, man. We need to see a choice though.
Speaker 1 (38:47):
Yeah, critically important, not just a way to empower these freaks. Yeah.
In twenty fifteen, the year after gamer Gate, Jack realized
that there was an even better con out there blogging
about masculinityte In one article that year, quote, it is
our duty as men to save the feminists from themselves.
Therefore I am offering rape to feminists as an olive branch.
(39:09):
Now this guy, this guy, Yeah, he may have heard
about him. He got a lot of this is he
kind of broached into the mainstream a little bit when
he wrote that, because people are very angry about it. Unfortunately,
it doesn't really hurt guys like this. We'll talk about
what hurts guys like this, because the good news is
that Jack is now no longer a major figure in
the right wing. Right Now, this guy's whole life is
(39:32):
like a conservative fantasy. Right. He cashes in on hurting
black black kids particularly, and gets rich off of like
running charter schools into the ground. That's their dream. Right.
But despite this, he pretends to have been a liberal,
and in twenty eighteen writes a book titled Democrat to deplorable,
an attempt to take advantage of the fact that right
(39:54):
after Trump's election, certain kinds of journalists, particularly at the
times we're starving to platf guys like him, and his
hope was, I write this book, They'll all do to
me what they did to Jade Vance, right, where I'll
suddenly get all this mainstream legitimacy for explaining why very
reasonable people used to be very liberal were now Donald Trump.
You know, we just got forced to write now. Unfortunately
(40:15):
for Jack, he was a little late in this. Right.
If this book could come out and like spring of
twenty seventeen, right, he might have really had something here, right,
that would have been the ideal time to launch this grift.
Twenty eighteen is a little late. For one thing, it's
after Charlottesville, right.
Speaker 3 (40:29):
Like, yeah, that's kind of the window.
Speaker 1 (40:32):
That's kind of a window. You were just a little
bit too late, man. I know publishing is a slow process, Homeinge, Like,
I get it. It's tough. It's tough to make those deadlines.
To his credit, he saw the future of monetizing being
a guy like this, though, was in selling coaching services,
and so he launched the Limital Order, where for one
hundred dollars a month, young men could learn to stop
(40:53):
being beta males. And this is almost the same grift
that Andrew Tate has set up, right, Like, it's this
this whole thing where like you pay me a monthly
salary to get exam, like, you know, access to a
chat room where I will coach you in being you know,
a better man, a stronger man.
Speaker 2 (41:09):
Right.
Speaker 1 (41:09):
And I think that's traffic out of traffic women, right.
I don't know if Jack would have gotten into that,
probably if you didn't have enough time. He also started
trying to rebrand as a gun fluencer and posing in
badly set up tactical gear. This just is not how
you do it. You don't put the gun there, man,
You don't put the gun there. You want to draw
your fucking side arm and shoot yourself in the shoulder. Homie,
is that what you're looking for? Brow? What is he?
(41:31):
What are you doing? What are you looking like? Did
you see holding a gun that way? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (41:37):
I mean it's just clearly it's like I saw a
video I saw a video game cover that looked like this,
and that's what I'm impersonating.
Speaker 1 (41:43):
We have at this point a couple of hundred years
of men wearing guns professionally, and everyone agrees somewhere around
the waist, right, we could debate the position around the waist,
but somewhere around the waist, not your sternum. You know,
what are you doing?
Speaker 2 (41:58):
Man? Oh I just clocked what do you like?
Speaker 1 (42:00):
A glock on his classical block? It is fucking classical?
Speaker 2 (42:03):
Oh sorry? Did I tend to turn up the contrast
on my screen to be.
Speaker 1 (42:07):
Like fucking hell?
Speaker 2 (42:09):
Wow?
Speaker 1 (42:09):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (42:10):
You know when you pull that thing out, you want
whoever you're aiming that at, You're like, dude, this thing
sounds like your armpit.
Speaker 1 (42:15):
Yeah, that's that's that's the right way to fucking carry
a gun, my guy, I know. So Jack launched a
podcast where he hosted guests like Mike Cernovich and Jack Bisobic,
men who had been moderately more successful than him, and
cultivating an audience and followers with variations of the same grift,
and then, near the end of twenty twenty one, disaster struck.
Some of his fans found that back in twenty fifteen,
(42:37):
he'd done something besides blog about feminism. He'd written about
his love of being cuckolded. Yeah, oh that's wrong. This
guy's a fun one. This guy's a fun while being cuckold.
It is a perfectly fine fetish in which a man
has his girlfriend or a wife or whomever pick up
other men and fuck them in front of him. As
(42:59):
far as things people do in bed go, we would
call this pretty vanilla where.
Speaker 2 (43:03):
I come from.
Speaker 1 (43:04):
But on the right, watch someone have sex, right right, Okay,
share whatever. On the right wing twenty twenty twenty one,
cuck was maybe the single most popular insult so coming
out as you're trying to brand yourself as an influence
into space that you are literally a cuck not gonna
go over well. Right after this comes out, Jack gets
(43:25):
interviewed by The Blaze and he's asked about his fetish.
In a medium post, Jonathan Pletti summarizes what happened next,
he exploded at the female host, I'm not going to
talk about this, and basically, you know, fuck you for
bringing this up right here and right now. Why are
you doing this to me? Talking to social media afterwards,
he tried to get the hosts of the interview fired.
It was perceived as so unhinged as a fuel curiosity
(43:47):
about his past, right wingers found themselves on a Russian
porn website watching amateur masturbation videos done in twenty eighteen
for a gay audience called Big Bad Bear one thousand.
Here was Jack naked on camera, calling himself hetero flexible
and talking about his history of male male sex. I
like men, I like men, and I like boys. Wow
(44:07):
the boys.
Speaker 3 (44:09):
Great stuff, bro, Yeah yeah, I know that that's that great.
Speaker 1 (44:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (44:12):
I mean again, when this poor guy, you didn't have
to almost blow your armpit off with a gun or
any of this other stuff.
Speaker 3 (44:19):
You could have just lived your truth. You could have
much of your life.
Speaker 4 (44:23):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (44:23):
Yeah, you still could have written a bad book. You know. Hey,
people can write terrible books too, everyone can. That's you're
right as an American.
Speaker 3 (44:32):
Yeah, yeah, no, don't not get that. Get that pistol
away from you.
Speaker 1 (44:36):
Still carry a gun that way, you shouldn't have a
gun at all, Jack.
Speaker 2 (44:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (44:40):
Now, there are more influential far and by the way,
this guy was a fellow at the Claremont Institute, So
great stuff. They are more influential far right masculinity grifters.
But I think Jack represents the pulsing insecurity at the
heart of every one of these dudes. He is a
human embodiment of what these crises of masculinity really are
(45:00):
at their core and always have been, boring men from
privileged backgrounds, working high paid but useless jobs that don't
make them quite enough to paper over the deep, yawning
void at the center of their soul. I've been pretty
critical of that Slashinger piece this episode, and I think
with good reason. But I will give Arthur credit. There's
a paragraph in his piece that absolutely describes Jack and
(45:20):
a lot of these guys to a t. The pre
democratic world was characteristically a world of status, in which
people were provided with ready made identities, but modern Western society, free, equalitarian,
democratic has swept away all the old niches in which people,
for so many centuries found safe refuge. Only a few
people at any time in human history have enjoyed the
challenge of making themselves. Most have fled from the unendurable
(45:43):
burden of freedom into the womblike security of the group.
The new age of social mobility may be fine for
those strong enough to discover and develop their own roles
before the timid and the frightened, who constitute the majority
in any age, The great vacant spaces of equalitarian society
can become a nightmare filled with nameless horrors.
Speaker 2 (46:03):
Yeah all right, yep, didn't miss on that one.
Speaker 1 (46:07):
Yeah, he didn't miss on that one. I think that
really gets I think that gets a lot of what's
going on with these guys is there's this they have freedom,
they could be whoever they wanted to be, right, and
they see I think it's part of it's not all of,
but it's part of like why trains people are such
a constant focus for them. They see some people take
this freedom that exists in our society and that to
(46:28):
some extent was increased by the coming of the digital age,
and they're angry and jealous because they don't have the
courage to find or make themselves in the same way,
and so they want to attack those people who are
authentically creating themselves right.
Speaker 2 (46:42):
Right, and are much less risky to be like yeah,
like I like being a cook, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (46:48):
Well whatever, yeah whatever, that's that's who you are, Jack,
You could have just been that right.
Speaker 2 (46:54):
Yeah. Wow, that that's such a great point of yea. Yeah,
to see people like where the the stakes are so
much hire in terms of society's acceptance of them, and
like you have these other guys just like I just
want to be like a nerd or something.
Speaker 1 (47:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (47:06):
Yeah, that manifesting or metastasizing it to that kind of angers.
Speaker 1 (47:10):
Yeah yeah, frightening it yeah, frightening bad, sad. But you know,
kudos to Steve Bannon for realizing this was going on
and had a fucking profit off of it.
Speaker 2 (47:19):
Yeah, man, getting that sweet Seinfeld money too.
Speaker 1 (47:22):
Yeah, you know, I was playing his cards right, Maybe
not the most toxic person involved with Seinfeld, say that's right.
Speaker 2 (47:30):
Ye.
Speaker 1 (47:34):
Anyway, Miles, that's the end of the episode. You get
anything the plug before we roll out here.
Speaker 2 (47:40):
Check me out if you want to hear me talk
every day about news politics since the like on the
Daily Zeitgeist. And look if you also want to blow
steam off and hear me talk about trash reality show
with Sophia Alexandra, who's been a past guest on here.
I'm on four to twenty fiance. Those are the spots
you can check me.
Speaker 1 (47:56):
Well, check that out. And you know, as Miles says,
every year, yeah, and you know, anyway, once we do that,
we can take back our country. That's what you're always saying, Miles.
Speaker 2 (48:09):
That's what I'm saying, and I'm backing down man.
Speaker 1 (48:13):
Hell yeah, brother, hell yea brother, yeah yeah, hell yeah.
So anyway, look up Miles's new fertilizer bomb recipe at
Miles I don't even know what to call that website. Miles,
thanks for coming on the show. Fertilizer Bombs, Yeah anyway.
Speaker 2 (48:38):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 1 (48:41):
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 2 (48:51):
Behind the Bastards is now available on.
Speaker 1 (48:53):
YouTube, new episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our
channel YouTube dot com slash at Behind the Bastards
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