Last month, Mark Zuckerberg sat down with Joe Rogan, the king of the podcasters, and delivered a bold message: American business culture needed to regrow its manhood. “The corporate world is pretty culturally neutered,” said Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta. “A culture that celebrates the aggression a bit more has its own merits . Masculine energy, I think, is good.”
In one sense, this was an astonishing statement.Zuckerberg – who empowered Sheryl Sandberg, the country’s foremost advocate of corporate feminism, to run the day-to-day operations of his company for more than a decade – was proclaiming that his world had overcorrected toward the female. But it was also a long time coming. For years, a masculinist current in American culture and politics has been rising, largely in digital spaces outside traditional media and entertainment. Now, it has flooded the banks of the mainstream.
Zuckerberg offered his paean to the male virtues just days before Donald Trump returned to the White House. Since the election, many political observers have been grasping for language to talk about the resurgent masculine formation. “Manosphere” has become the most common shorthand. A term with hazy origins, it has come to refer to a wide range of media content aimed at men. At one end, it incorporates explicitly misogynistic influencers like Andrew Tate, who has said that women shouldn’t vote and that they bear responsibility for their own sexual assault. At the other, there is the YouTube channel of the self-improvement influencer and neuroscientist Andrew Huberman, who doles out advice on sleep hygiene.
And it is more than just an array of websites, podcasts, social networks, message boards, group chats. The brash, boys-will-be-boys sensibility can now be felt in the halls of power too. Pete Hegseth, the newly sworn-in defence secretary, was asked how many push-ups he can do during his confirmation hearing . Not long ago, the term “manosphere” referred only to the most extreme fringe of online communities. Clearly, no longer. At Trump’s inauguration, guests included the mixed martial arts fighter Conor McGregor; the UFC chief executive Dana White; the boxer and influencer Jake Paul and his brother Logan, a wrestler and influencer. A group of macho men gathered to witness the ascent of their leader: This is a scene that has been repeated endlessly in the span of recorded human history, sung in songs, celebrated in paintings and recorded in books. One might say, just a bit facetiously, that the real “manosphere,” strictly speaking, is Planet Earth.
