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