How the ‘Manosphere' Became Mainstream Entertainment

New York Times

19-02-2025

Whenever Bill Belichick, the 72-year-old former head coach of the New England Patriots, goes out in public with his girlfriend, Jordon Hudson, who is exactly one-third his age, they tend to draw attention. It was no different at the 2025 N.F.L. Honors earlier this month. Everything about the red-carpet photos accentuates their Evel Knievel-size age gap: Belichick looks sedately pleased in a maroon blazer, like a car dealer at a Shriners banquet; Hudson beams in a sparkly Cirque du Soleil-style number that covers approximately 12 percent of her torso. That's what most people seemed to notice about the pictures.
But not Dave Portnoy. The founder and owner of Barstool Sports — the Utne Reader for the light-domestic-swilling, backslapping, Zyn-packing, parlay-chasing American male — Portnoy has long been treated as an avatar for everything that elite media is not. Barstool might be considered the outermost ring of the so-called manosphere, the vast realm of male-oriented alternative media that has been credited with the rightward drift of the young male vote. Portnoy — a Trump supporter with a long history of misogynistic comments and bullying, who has been accused of nonconsensually filming women during uncomfortably rough sex — doesn't exactly run away from that label. (He has denied the claims about sexual misconduct and filed a suit against the outlet that published them; it was dismissed.) And what he noticed about the photos of Belichick and Hudson was the clutch Hudson wore, which was shaped like a little football: 'Very cool purse from BB's girlfriend,' he posted on X. 'Football girlfriend purse.'
It's certainly possible that Portnoy, a die-hard Patriots fan, was being ironic, conveying something like, 'I refuse to see anything unusual here.' But I would bet that he genuinely did like the purse. I would make that bet because I have spent many hours watching Portnoy's most fascinating nonsports media product, his 'One Bite' pizza reviews, and I know about his softer side. He has been doing these reviews for 12 years, though I first encountered them during the pandemic. I was, at that point, ambiently aware of Portnoy, but only for all the stuff people hated about his website: the 'Smokeshow of the Day' photos, the army of online 'Stoolies' who mobbed his many critics. But if you watch the pizza videos, you're reminded that most of the stuff these controversial media figures do is entirely normal. A lot of the time, it's downright amusing.
Each episode of 'One Bite' begins with Portnoy's walking out the door of the business under consideration, then executing the entirety of his review right out front, sometimes practically blocking foot traffic, often with the proprietor looking on anxiously. Given all this, the concept seems almost cruel: He buys an entire pie but reviews the pizza based on one bite. 'One bite,' goes the motto. 'Everybody knows the rules.' The reason for this, Portnoy explained in an early video, is that the response has to be immediate, beneath the level of consciousness, like a 'Rotchbloch' test. But Portnoy can never limit himself to one bite, typically finishing about half a slice of molten pizza, blowing big cheekfuls of air on it the way you would for a toddler, balancing the rest of the pie in his other hand as he tries to sort out where it belongs on his 10-point scale.
Portnoy likes pizza with char on the bottom, pizza that doesn't flop when you hold it by the crust. He seems to have an almost childish distaste for strong flavors like oregano and Parmesan. Vinyl signs, old photos on the wall, wood paneling — he's a sucker for the dumpy vernacular forms of the Northeastern corner joint, and he visibly struggles when a mom-and-pop shop with a charmingly old-school interior has a mediocre product. He agonizes over his scores, always insisting on their decimal places, which give them the absurd specificity of that other famous user of the decimalized 10-point scale, Pitchfork.
This is just one of many details — his love of garish vintage clothing, his fetish for authenticity, the Yelp!-iness of this high-low foodie quest — that eventually made me realize: If Portnoy were doing this 15 years ago, you might reasonably have assumed he was some kind of hipster, not an avatar of a reactionary jock fringe. (In fact, there was something like this back then: a viral blog called Slice Harvester, by a New York punk rocker, that eventually became a memoir published by Simon & Schuster and deemed one of NPR's best books of 2015.) Once you accept this, you can see Portnoy more clearly. The Portnoy in the pizza videos often has a preening, fussy, almost effete quality that complicates his butch self-image. He frets over his weight when he has been doing too many reviews; he shows off his tan when he's in Florida. When someone walks by with a dog, he speaks to it in that baby voice people sometimes do and tries to guess its name. This can't seriously be part of the fearsome 'manosphere,' can it?
If it is — if Portnoy's website and personal conduct put anything he touches in some marginal category outside the bounds of mainstream decency — then his many, many fans have not gotten the message. In the videos, Portnoy's fame warps reality around him: People yell from passing cars, crowds form, smartphones deploy, mothers hand over babies. If the media business is about reaching people, then these people have been well and truly reached — and not by the mainstream. But also not by political propaganda or anything with any overt ideological content whatsoever. They have been reached by pizza-review videos. This is a common dynamic when the mainstream media considers the manosphere: Joe Rogan, arguably the biggest of its boogeymen, makes headlines when he transgresses some norm or another, but often he just talks about DMT, aliens and M.M.A. fighting, at excruciating length.
Over the past decade or so, the media has devoted a lot of energy to the purging of toxic elements — the presumption being that we would remain in control of what happened afterward. I suppose we imagined we were digging out someplace for all these unwanted energies to go, some cesspool far from our fort. But after some years, the cesspool got bigger, and our fort got smaller, and eventually the cesspool must have looked inviting. Because look at it now: People are swimming in it, tanning on its shores, doing doughnuts in it on their Sea-Doos, probably mystified by any claims that it's a cesspool. In fact, looking over at our sad little fort, they probably enjoy whatever scum remains.
That's the thing. It's not as if Portnoy isn't a jerk; his reputation seems well earned. But the pizza videos show that people still yearn for that trace of meanness, that disregard for niceties — that implicit demonstration of a brutal capacity for honesty.
In a video from last year, Portnoy visited a family in Troy, N.Y., whom he had come to know for tragic reasons. Their son Derek, who suffered from a form of muscular dystrophy, was a big Barstool fan; when he was in hospice care, his older brother arranged a birthday FaceTime call from Portnoy. On that call, Portnoy promised that he would review the family's homemade pizza the next time he was in the area. He made good on that some months after Derek died. In the video, the family offers him a drink and shows him around their home: the sidewalk they laid out in the backyard for Derek's wheelchair, the bench they made in his honor. Portnoy signs Derek's Barstool flag, still hanging in his room.
And Portnoy visits the family's kitchen, where Derek's father cooks pizza using a conventional oven and not the outdoor setup Portnoy imagined — a detail Portnoy fixates on, clearly troubled. 'Listen, how truthful do we want me to be here?' he asks after a bite. The family says Derek would have wanted his unvarnished opinion. Portnoy gives it a 5.8, temporarily stunning the family into silence. That is, until they start laughing.