Gen X men: if you don't find the strength to inoculate boys against the manosphere, what men are left?

The Guardian

05-04-2025

'The fitness coach starts his very early morning routine by removing a piece of tape from his mouth,' CNN reports. The 'manfluencer' in question, Ashton Hall, spends the rest of his day dunking his face in ice water, rubbing banana peel on his skin and chugging down 'Saratoga Water'. This is apparently the modern western definition of hardcore masculinity.
Friends, maybe – just maybe – we should restart that conversation about western manhood because if it involves banana peel, you are not demonstrating what it means to be a human adult; you are culturally appropriating a clown.
Hall has nearly 11 million followers on Instagram. We had a good run as a species for a while, didn't we? Although it is slightly embarrassing we had less time on Earth than a bunch of giant lizards that never even invented the internet.
I'm so old that I remember when the definition of masculinity was taking responsibility for yourself and others around you. Chainsaw-wielding billionaires like Elon Musk and his president-of-somewhere sidekick, Donald, are most insistent on their role as champions of Western Civilisation™, so I wondered how they missed the instruction that one should 'not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment'. These are the words of the Apostle Paul in the Bible, so I guess the source is pretty niche.
How great that Maga identities have Project 2025 to explain to them the gender roles they're so rigorously policing. Should we be concerned that the campaign to politically erase trans people – so en vogue both in America and among America's political lemmings in the Australian right – is a symptom of their endgame of reducing 'men' and 'women' to binary 1950s stereotypes that didn't even reflect the reality of their time? Yes. Obviously, my brain works different because I was raised a girl; studies suggest I am therefore more likely to be burdened with evidence-based research and scholarship. That's how you discover that before the postwar baby boom, a consistent 20% of western women lived child free, and – even during the boom, in the 50s – 47% of married American women also held down jobs.
As a feminist, I yearn for those ancient sunny days of … 2019, when we merely worried that young men were consuming so much misogynist porn their junk had stopped working. I miss being concerned that Tucker Carlson was influencing men to shove their dicks in a toaster – three years and at least three Andrew-Tate-rape-allegations ago.
Tate is a manfluencer who once had nearly 5 million Instagram followers himself before achieving the unimaginable and actually getting kicked off the platform for hate speech. The former professional kickboxer denies all allegations of violence that have brought him legal trouble. 'All of it is a lie,' he said of an ex-girlfriend who accused him this week of choking and beating her.
He doesn't deny calling women 'a man's property', of course. Or claiming girls are out to 'steal [men's] power' – that's in his book 'The Tate Bible II: The New Testament'. Stick that up your apostle, Paul. Confronted with similar proselytised woman-hating in the classroom, Australia 'risks losing a generation of school leaders without urgent reforms', a world-leading educational psychologist said this week, in a story about primary school principals referred to as 'bitch dogs', slut-shamed and threatened with having their throats slit.
One can stay in a comforting bubble of ignorance, or instead choose to read newspapers, watch the critically acclaimed TV drama series Adolescence, or – God help you – pretend to be a feminist on Elon's bespoke propaganda channel X for five entire minutes to see the extent of the problem. To explain it, you could consider that in the monetised attention economy of the internet, extremity is incentivised, that grifters gonna grift and a lot of money from rightwing gender-binary fantasists has been funding this hot, hateful garbage for years.
You could also claim that a generation of gen-X men who are now parents have, perhaps, abrogated conversations about manhood and sexuality they might feel cringe or squeamish about having to an online cult of male toxic nutjobs more than eager to instruct their sons for them. It's extraordinary that the heterosexual western gen-X men who reaped the economic rewards of dual incomes and planned parenthoods, the pleasure of liberated sexuality and the instant social status gain of knowing how to bring a woman to orgasm – to actual orgasm, not the mimicking of poses and sounds from porn girls have been culturally coerced to watch – would not share these insights with the generations that follow them.
The popularity of Adolescence has provided an icebreaker for these conversations, but having them is not a responsibility women can shoulder towards boys who've already been convinced that we're 'bitch dogs' by the time they go to freakin' primary school.
You know the internet's a lie. You know the life offered by the manfluencers is angry, unhappy and unloving. But I say this to the men of my own generation: if you don't find the strength to inoculate the boys against it … what men are left?
Van Badham is a Guardian Australia columnist