Part One: Andrew Tate, and the Mythopoetic Men's Movement

of the Girl God podcast. Uh they have in anyway. We recorded a little bit with them, and then I had a minor emergency which has taken me out of the house for a while. Things are okay, you don't need to flip out on Reddit or whatever, but it was it was a problem, um, and we were not able to record with them. To finish recording with them, and because of the holiday, we have no backlog. So in order to get this episode done and ready for our editor asap, Sophie is going to be my guest

today along with Ian our editor. UM and we will get this out as soon as possible, because otherwise we will not have a show and we are contractually obligated to provide you with entertainment every single week until the heat death of the universe. Um, but I do want to shout out April and Grace, who are wonderful who came on and booked time for us, and I'm sorry

that things got messed up. We will have them back on the pod um at some point in the near future, and I wanted to let people know that there is They have an upcoming show at JFO Vancouver on February and people can get tickets for that show at Girl God Show dot com. You can also check out their podcast just type girl God and any of the things that have podcasts, and you can listen to their awesome show. Thank you so much again, April and Grace. I'm sorry

that there was a minor calamity. UM. Now welcome to the pod. Uh, Sophie and Ian, How are y'all doing so well? So on I night. Ian is Ian Johnson, by the way, he edits a lot of our shows, and it's also uh one half of Gladiator with fellow fellow editor DJ Daniel. All Right, and um, we do have the full Gladiator on staff, which I like to bring up as much as possible. M. I appreciate the love. And yeah, you know it's Friday. Uh, ready for the weekend.

Let's talk some tape, you know, Let's let's do it Friday, get into Friday, but also almost Saturday. Uh. And Ian is currently in his closet. We may start drinking in the in the near future. Might need to happen. Yeah, let's do it, all right, Robert? Yeah, Ian, I actually have you been on just as one of our podcasts before you you have known this my first Well, you know, Ian, people should know about you again. You're you're one half of Gladiator. You're a longtime friend of our other editor

DJ Daniel. Um, you are a legendary podcast editor. And you had absolutely no involvement in the July six plane crash that cost John F. Kennedy Jr. His life off the Massachusetts coast. No involvement at all. I don't know why people, Yeah, don't bring it up. We had nothing to do with it. Why are you talking about that? I just to let people know Ian had nothing to do with it. Ian Sophie, what do y'all know about

Andrew Tate. Um. So my limited knowledge of him is he's I believe a former m M A fighter who I don't know how he made a lot of money, but it seems like he has a lot of money from what he's seen on the internet. Will be talking about how and he's into a lot of misogynistic men rights kind of stuff. And uh, he got thoroughly destroyed online by um Grenna, So I do remember that, um. And I think he's in jail now. He is in

jail now, um. Unrelated to the Greta stuff. Um, there was a little bit of a confusion about that, but yes, he is in jail for sex trafficking in Romania. Um, Sophie, is that more or less your understanding of the guy? Yeah, he fucking sucks, Yeah he does. Indeed he does, indeed fucking suck. Um. Unfortunately, he's also kind of worth studying in detail because he's managed to do something with social media that I don't think anyone else has ever managed

to the same degree of success. Um. He's he's he's smart in one very specific way, even though he also did a bunch of dumb things and some really dumb crimes that hopefully have ruined his life. Um, he was he was smart in one in a way that has allowed him to become dangerously influential to an entire generation of teenage boys. UM, in a way that like no

one on earth has managed quite yet. Donald Trump is really the only other guy that I might put next to Tate in that kind, And I think Tate has a wider appeal among jin z teens and tweens than certainly Trump. It's interesting to see the spaces where Tate's content. Yeah, we're gonna be talking about all that. I am one of the things when I started looking into this guy, there's a ton of articles about because he blew up kind of mid one up until you know the arrest

a couple of weeks ago. There's not profile articles on him that like go into detail about his background and his past and his entire rise to power. You'll generally the best articles you'll find in places like BuzzFeed or or UM. I think we have a couple from like The Guardian, but like summarize his backstory and two or three paragraphs. I wanted to get into who this guy is and where he came from because he kind of pops out of nowhere if you if you don't follow that.

I think this is the first time anyone's really done that, So I think this will be valuable for for that. But I want to start by laying out why we have to take Tate seriously and kind of explain the scale of of sort of his influence. UM. I am not exaggerating when I say that he is maybe the most influential single person on teen and preteen males in the US and the UK and some other parts of

the West than anyone else on planet Earth. UM. In fall of two, financial services company Piper Sandler released a survey of fourteen thousand, five hundred US teens taken between August and September of that year. Tait was the number one influencer on the list in terms of popularity. He beat Kanye West, he beat Mr Beast, he beat Dwyane the Rock Johnson, all of them. Mrs. I, Yeah, I don't know who Mr Beast is, but he's somebotuber. Yeah, yeah,

he's a YouTuber. I know. Elon Musk joked about giving him control of Twitter or he asked whatever, I don't know anything about him. I'm sure you're fine, Mr Beast or he's horrible. Anybody used that famous on YouTube? I'm a little bit like, yeah, no, good people get famous on YouTube, which is what I text our friend Cody

Johnston every single day when he releases a new YouTube video. Um. Anyway, Andrew Tate hashtag on TikTok has received more than ten billion views over the course of twenty two alone, which is fucking nuts. That is that is insane. Um. That is like incomprehensibly viral. Um. He was Also he will always claim that he's like the most Googled person on Earth. I looked into what he actually is. That's not quite it. He is the He is the number one when you

type in who is into Google? Who is Andrew Tate is the number one who is question asked to Google? In two which is not the same as being the most google person on Earth. Um, although he is one of the most google people on Earth. I found a couple of lists of that, and he's often at like number eight, someplace closer to like ten. But like he's

incredibly famous. I just tested that, and um it is factor. Yes, most Google person on the planet is that's your That's that's a lot of people that that is a funload of people and and in some counts he's like beating Donald Trump WI again drump the literal president um. And it's interesting because his career you can compare him to a guy like Joe Rogan, right Joe his career, there's nothing that people like. Wonder why he's popular, but there's

no mystery as to how he became popular. He's got a very he's been consistently trajector is very very consistent guy, constantly in in in the limelight, constantly doing stuff. Not hard to see where he came from. Tate is a kickboxer for a while and then kind of drops off. Is just sort of a guy on Instagram, and then it's suddenly the most famous influencer on the planet, seemingly overnight.

And this is not an accident. This isn't also something he didn't just get surprised because something of has happened

to go viral. This was the result of a tactic I haven't seen anyone else used, or certainly not to the degree of success um that Tate used, and and the tactic that he unleashed not only made him as popular, but it made him popular enough that you can find articles about schools in the U S and the UK holding seminars for young male students and for teachers to try to talk about de radicalizing kids who have got

who have fallen undertake spell. Um when I posted a comment about him during his bat with Tunberg, just because I was frustrated at the degree I had not with Greta's response to him, which I thought was totally fair, but with like people kind of cheering it on as if he'd been beaten by it, where my concern was like, well, the attention historically has just kind of made him more popular.

And there were a bunch of comments in that post I made by teachers who were like, I don't think people understand how popular he is with like thirteen, fourteen, fifteen year old boys. Um, I talked to kids every day who worshiped the guy, and I've never seen anything like it. One of my really good friends Jack, this is actually a few weeks ago. We were hanging out and he was like, kind of joking but also serious.

He was like, Yo, I'm like, it would be scary to be a thirteen year old boy right now because of the inundation of this kind of stuff that you're seeing all day, every day, and he was like, I'm not gonna lie. If I was thirteen or fourteen and didn't know better, I could probably fall for a lot of this stuff. It's like, I couldn't imagine being that

age right now and just being flooded with that. Yeah, I think about that sort of thing, and a lot of I'll talk about kind of there's elements of Tate's pitch that I think might have worked on me when I was seventeen eighteen years old. Um. Particularly, A big part of it is like working a ship job that you hate for the entirety of your youth is bullshit, which it is, like it's a terrible way to spend

a life doing the thing you hate forever. Um. And if you kind of if that's the hook you're leading with, rather than what a lot of male influencers lead in with, which is like here's how to pick up chicks. Um. You know, that's an interesting spin that he's put up. But well, we'll we'll get it. We'll get more into his pitch and like, what about it is not new? And what about it is new? But I wanted to I want to start by kind of explaining who tilled

the soil that Tate grew up in. And to do that we have to travel back and time to the nineteen nineties and the work of the the first real modern masculinity guru. And now we've talked about guys like Bernard McFadden in the past who had elements of that where he's big into physical culture and getting buff and he talks about like, you know, how how modernity is making men weak. But the Robert Bligh is the guy who Jordan Peterson is cutting his image, and so do

degree is a guy like Andrew Tate. He is the first guy to kind of bring both academic rigor and also this kind of focus on the damage capitalism has done to masculinity into this kind of it's become the men's rights movements. It's become the pickup artist community. That's not what it was called at the time. Um, but yeah, Robert L. Wood Bli is the name of the guy who kind of kicked all of this off. And he's not the dude you'd think he was. He's an American poet.

By some accounts, he's one of the most influential poets in American history. And he was born on December twenty third nine in Minnesota. Um Initially Bligh seemed to be on certainly not the path that he wound up on. He goes to Harvard University, he studies at the Iowa Writer's Workshop. He receives a full Fulbright scholarship to go

to Norway and translate Norwegian poetry into English. And during this time he also gets connected to these great poets who are not Westerners, like Pablo Neruda and Roumi, and they influence his understanding of art and the myths that

underlie it. And it also leads him to feel that like modern contemporary American poetry is kind of hollow and lacks a connection to this kind of deeper mythology that he sees in some of these Eastern poets and some of these, you know, poets from other parts of the world that aren't the United States that he feels are making a deeper connection to things for just a personal preference. But I find the Iowa's Writer's Workshop to be a red flag. Oh yeah, wait, wait what I don't know

much about it? Tell me, tell me why is this? No, it's just it's just one of those things that gets uh were used in TV as like oh, I need to go to this thing. It's like it has like a a weird weird to leadism to it that Uh yeah, I mean that. I feel that way about Harvard too. Yeah, there's a lot of weird to lead the elitism red flags where I'm like, uh, but hearing hearing Harvard University followed by Iowa Writer's Workshop is usually not the best. Oh and then and and then there's the full yeah,

full bright grant. So it's you know, yeah, i Iowa Writer's Workshop. Sophie says, go to hell. Apparently it's right, motherfucker's. I don't know much about the Iowa Writer's Workshop. Um, but that's his background. And again this is also he's coming. He's doing this at an earlier time. I mean, Harvard was very very much that kind of thing. But I don't know, maybe the Iowa Writer's Workshop was was not.

I don't know. Um. His first poem of collection of poems, which was called Silence in the Snowy Fields, was published in nineteens sixty two, and it focused on moments of solitude and beauty. As we see in this piece driving to town late to mail a letter. It is a cold and snowy night. The main street is deserted. The only things moving are swirls of snow. As I lift the mailbox store, I feel it's cold iron. There is

a privacy I love in this snowy night. Driving around, I will waste more time, which is just like this nice, quiet little Certainly you don't see any red flags. There's just kind of a poem about one of those quiet moments that you have in your life. You know. Um, it's I don't know, I don't find it deeply affecting, but there's certainly like it's not like he's writing anything

you would see a problem with, Yeah, for sure. The next year he published an influential essay and which he attacked mainstream American poetry as impersonal, lacking in soul, and a willingness to look inward. His criticism of American society expanded after that. In the nineteen sixty six he co founded the American Writers Against the Vietnam War. UM. He is one of the very first prominent amer Rican artists to like try and organize artists against the war. Which

is I mean good because it was a bad war. UM. In nineteen sixty eight, he made a public promise to refuse to pay taxes until the end of the war, and he also made he made some very trenchent critiques of of US imperialism. In nineteen sixty seven, he wrote an article for the New York Review of Books in which he noted the fact that so few Americans have resigned from the government or from responsible posts to protest

the Vietnam War is remarkable to me. And he's bringing up also cases of like the Russian Revolution and stuff, where you would have these horrible wars being prosecuted by regimes that are on paper a lot less free than the United States, but also would have a lot more defections or people just like refusing to do their jobs because they believed that of course that the sovereign had set was unethical. And he's like, why isn't this happening in American government? Why is no one refusing to be

a part of the Vietnam War? And he went on to ask, can we imagine General Westmoreland resigning and refusing to prosecute a brutal war? Never pilots drop anti personnel bombs on small North Vietnamese villages and many of them hate it, but they don't resign with a public statement of protest. They quietly retire when their tour is over. Bligh wondered what this showed about Americans. Are we timid? Are we greedy? He thought not, And this is what

he wrote. What it shows is a disastrous split between the Americans inner and outer worlds. He does not aim to use his life to make himself whole, to join the two worlds in himself. On the contrary, he is prepared to give up one of the two worlds. The businessman gives up the inner world and clings to the outer as his way. A large body of literature denounces the business man for taking the one world without the other.

But when a writer is opposed to the Vietnam War and still accepts a grant from the government prosecuting of the war, he is doing something similar. He is letting the world split. He lets the outer world go by him with just a wave of his hand, and then he reaches out and pulls the inner world to him. He accepts the money for the sake of my work. It will enable him to live his inner live in

his inner world. But the disastrous split has already taken place before he begins to use the money for his work instead of trying to apply what he has learned in the actions of his inner life to the actions of the world. He pulls back inside the house, closes the door, and declares he doesn't know what is going on out there, or knows, but has rejected at all as outside his sphere of influence or his interest. He is not political, but what could be more within the

sphere of interest of a writer than the world. And I actually find that a really affecting critique. Um, I think about that a lot, just in terms of, like number one, this desire, I have a lot where I'll just be kind of like churning through the muck of a bunch of horrible stories about bullshit going on in Congress, or like see some horrible Twitter thing culture warship roll up and one to um feel this urge to like, well, fuck this. I don't want to pay attention to this anymore.

I just want to discard this from my life and focus on this like piece of art or creativity that I think most people feel that most reasonably will feel that way a lot. And what he's saying is like,

how can you call yourself a writer? How can you call yourself an artist an attempt to discard the outer world in favor of the one that you focus on for your creativity, Like, how can you actually be connected to your inner world in any way and and feel as if you can pretend the outer world does not exist. You're doing the same thing as a businessman who focuses entirely on his his desire to make money and ignores

his spiritual development. Like there's not a fundamental moral difference between what the two of you are doing, because you're both, Uh, you're both rejecting half of of of you're being in order to stick with the one that's more comfortable because of whatever you've you've chosen as your profession. And in the case of yeah, I don't know, I found an Attrention critique that makes me think a lot about myself. Um, maybe maybe check out what Bligh has to say about

the Vietnam War. And he put his money where his mouth was. He used that article to republish a letter he'd sent to the chairman of the National Foundation of the on the Arts and Humanities, UM, because they had offered him a five thousand dollar grant. And he turns it down because he's like, look, this is uh, this is an instrument of the United States government, and I

am opposed to a war they are waging. And even though I could argue that, like, well, if I take this money and won't get spent on bombs, what I'm really doing is providing legitimacy to the state that is carrying out this terrible war. And I'm simply not going to do that. I'm going to choose to refuse to support it in any way, even by letting it support me. Um, which, whether or not you agree with it, is a deeply principled stance that requires sacrificing something. Yeah, so when when

does he right he's not a bad guy so far? Yeah, I'm waiting. Yeah, this is not this is not cool people who did cool stuff. No, no, no, So spoiler alert, the Vietnam War ends. Um, we don't do great um goes goes okay for Vietnam though, well, I mean, millions of people die, but they do win. Um Bli remains an influential poet and thinker. In the nineteen seventies, he organizes the first Great Mother Conference, which is still going

on today. It's a nine day festival that explores human consciousness, and it celebrates this kind of archetypal idea of the Great Mother as this kind of like feminine creative force that that you know, underlies everything in society. Um and BLI the reason why he felt it was important to kind of bring consciousness and get people focused on this idea and on this celebration of femininity is that he saw the Vietnam War as kind of the expression of masculinity,

like running wild and leading to terrible death. And he believed that Americans needed to reconnect with femininity in the wake of the Vietnam War, which is again not an unreasonable stance. Um. You know, you can argue with it, but you and see where he's coming from. And they're like both waiting for it. I'm just waiting for job is coming. Motherfucker is coming. So as the aftershocks of Vietnam faded, America enters the swinging eighties, Blind becomes concerned

with something else. Entirely. He sees in the Reagan years this vapid consumer culture, you know, malls and ship the the increasing spread of popular music is like a concept in a way that it really happened. I mean again, TV there's a lot of transgressive shit on TV today. TV in the nineteen eighties was not what it is now. Um. So he sees all this happening, and he he also just sees, like, again, what kind of Reaganism and unrestrained

capitalism is doing to people? Um And he begins to believe that the kind of soullessness and and uh brokenness at the the core of the American experiment is the result now of a crisis and masculinity. Right, So previously he had Yeah, there's an extent to which he thinks, like, I don't know. Well, we'll get into what he thinks. So in nineteen ninety he writes a book that is kind of illustrating the things that he's he started to feel here, and he calls it Iron John, a book

about men. Now, do you have you heard of the fairy Tale of Iron John? Ian so familiar? No, No, you're not Big Grimm's fairy Tales people. That's fine, neither am I I had not heard about this either. I think maybe it's bigger in Germany. Umms. Fairy tales continue. Yeah, wow, wow, that's a red flat one of the greatest works of art and I'm gonna guess German history. Um, Sophie, I feel like you just hate German history reflectively for reasons that have nothing to do with anything that has ever

happened in history. Mm hmmm. I have no comment on that. Wow, Wow, well Red Flag. I think Iron John again, it's a fairy tale, and I think I'll give a brief summary of how that fairy tale goes. It's because it's again none of us. I mean, he brought it up. You should tell us what I'll tell you. I'm gonna do it so God damn. I'm gonna quote from a rite up in the New York magazine here. That story goes like this. Something in the forest is killing a kingdom's hunters.

A stranger arrives, goes into the forest with his dog, and returns with a large, hairy man he's extracted from a pond. This is the wild man whom the king locks in a cage. The king's son, playing with his ball, lets it slip into the cage, and the wild man tells him he'll give it back if the boy steals the key to the cage from under his mother's pillow and sets him free. The boy unlocks the cage, but fearful that he'll be in trouble with his par flees

on the wild Man's back to the forest. After the boy fails a series of trials and acquires a head of golden hair, the wild Man kicks him out of the forest, but after he sinks to the low status of a kitchen worker in a foreign kingdom, the wild Man helps him become a mighty warrior, and he wins the hand of the Princess, is reunited with his parents, and becomes the rich, heroic king in his own right. So, you know, I think we're probably missing some context. They're

just from culture. But it's like, I get why that's not in like the tight five of Grimm's fairy Tales, Like that's that's maybe the one you leave on the cutting room floor. That's like the B sides. Yeah, that's like a B side. Yeah, that's like, um, that's like I don't know, the one of the one of the Beatles songs that people don't talk about that much anymore. Um. Well, to be to be fair, like it's up against like

Snow White Great fairy Tale. It would be funny to see like modern Disney try to do this I mean, the actual fairy tales are pretty horrific, to be honest. Yeah, this one I also might be one of the tamer ones. I don't know. I'm not an expert on fairy tales. That's why Disney was like to tame, not into it. And again, I feel like I feel like this is

an example. I think sometimes we look at these stories that have been around a long time and are like, wow, you know, there's some deep wisdom in there, which is why we should keep telling them. But I'm looking at this, which is it's it's a parable about manhood, right and about becoming an adult. And I'm like, you know, it's a better parable about manhood and becoming an adult. First Star Wars movie. That's a good point. Much better one, much better one. Look, George Lucas knocked it out of

the park. Fuck you Grim. You know who else is George Lucas? No, Robert, who else is George Lucas? The sponsor of this podcast? I mean would be actually George, you have the cash sponsor this podcast. Uh, and we'll we'll we'll make it work, buddy, We we got you. Um anyway, Uh we are back and no, but maybe so here we are, Um, we're talking. We were having

a good time. Um So, Bligh's book looks at this myth of iron John and he re examines the myth using Young in psychology, which is again another red flag. There's perfectly valid reasons to study young, but whenever you have somebody who is reevaluating myths using Young in psychology, they always turned into Jordan B. Peterson. I'm sorry, that's

just the way that it works. Um So, he's trying to find lessons that are going to be meaningful for men struggling with modernity, and his basic conclusion, as far as I can tell, is that men need rewilding in order to fix the things that are driving them crazy. Right, they need to reconnect with the wild man inside them. Now, this is going to be this is the root of a million kinds of man influencer garbage, right, everything in

that funk. Like you guys know the liver King, that guy who was telling people that he got super jacked by eating nothing but raw animal livers that he hunted. Um, he's spending twelve tho dollars a month on steroids, which he lied about. Now he's getting sued for a hundred billion dollars because he defrauded people by convincing them to

take his liver enzyme pills. So funny. But what the livered King is doing is this is he's basically setting it, pretending to be the wild man that Blag talks about and being like, this is what you have to do in order to, you know, be healthy and deal with all of these toxic things about our modern lives is go out and throw spears at bores and then eat

their raw, uncooked organs. Um, which I would actually say is a lot less masculine than doing the thing that our actual cave man ancestors did, which was learned how to cook meat. Um. But you make a really good point. Um, it's also the root of we had. We just started this year with a couple of more episodes of Jordan B. Peterson Show. He talks a lot about the need for men to be controllable beasts and also references another Grimm's

fairy tale. The one that he chooses is, um, well, I think it's a Grimm's fairy tale, fucking Beauty and the Beast. I don't know, maybe not, maybe that started as a Disney thing. I don't know where it started, but he talks a lot about like this. Again, there the all of these guys today who were talking about you have to be primal, you have to reconnect with your cave man roots. You have to like the thing

I saw. I think I saw Jordan B. Peterson like video on Instagram the other day and I didn't know it was him. I was just scrolling and he was. But now that you say that, I'm pre sure it was him, because he was talking about how men should be dangerous, Like you should be dangerous when it's like knowing when to use the threat of violence or not. It's like, just because you're dangerous doesn't mean you're like a violent person, but you should have that capacity or

some ship. That's what makes you a true man. It's like, what, yeah, crazy, it's um that I mean. And that's you can see like Peterson is not in and he never has been an original thinker. He's cribbing from Bligh, right, they all are. Bligh is the origin of this. And it's also worth noting that while Bligh's book has been hit, the descendants Suppli's book are pure reactionary gibberish. Bligh himself was not. Again,

we went through this guy's background. He's he's a deeper thinker than that, And there's passages in his book that are kind of worth connecting with. Um. So I'm going to read a quote from that now to judge by men's lives in New Guinea, Kenya, North Africa, Zulu Lands, and in the Arab and Persian culture favored flavored by Sufi communities, men have lived together in heart union and

soul connections for hundreds of thousands of years. Contemporary business life allows competitive relationships only in which the major emotions are anxiety, tension, loneliness, rivalry, and fear after work. What do men do collect in a bar to hold light conversations over light beer? Unities that are broken off whenever a young woman comes by or touches the brim of someone's cowboy hat. Having no soul union with other men

can be the most damaged and wound of all. And Cowboy had things kind of weird, But that's a totally valid point. The lack of intimate male to male friendship is a deep problem in our light beer I had, I mean because I think he's just sort of I mean, okay, whatever he's getting into a little bit of masculinely the point making like, yeah, sorry, Sophie, famous lover of light beer. Um, it's okay, I love I love my champagne beer too. I just I had some lovely Actually, wish I had

some Peroni right now. Peroni is a lovely ice, wonderful, especially on a hot day. Yeah, I've I've done. I've gone on long runs with nothing but a backpack full of Pironi to keep me going. Um, that sounds very believable. Lot Peroni. It is essentially water. I can smell the ad dollars coming in. Yeah, p sponsor us, you coward.

But you see like what he's making there, And this is not a point that like, this is not a point Andrew Tate would make, right, because these guys are all hyper competitive, and that's a huge part of like what they're talking about. Whereas one of the like BLI is at his core a large part of what he's complaining about is totally rational, which is like, again, aren't allowed to where is it? Where is this thing? Well, that's not the only thing in the book. Um. He's

also talking a lot of yeah for it. Yeah, we're we're getting to it. Ironed John spends sixty two weeks on the New York seller list. Yeah. I don't think anything gets spends that long in the best seller listing. Yes, that is UM. Yeah, this is n UM because it's on there for more than a year. UM. And it turned Bly from a respected poet and activist into the

first masculinity guru in modern US history. Now again, we had guys like Bernar McFadden before UM, who had talked about aspects of this, but Bly is wrapping his arguments in respected academia, and the way he's connecting with his people is exactly the same as the kind of ship that Jordan Peterson and and other folks do today, guys like Ivan Throne and whatnot who were in the masculinity

influencer thing. He's doing conferences, he's having rooms full of people, men gather and he's speaking to them and he's like running them through. He's basically bringing them to these moments of emotional height. And you can see some there's a little bit of Werner Erhard in this. You know, there's a reason this is all coming out at the same time as we start to get the self help craze hit UM. But he's basically holding these big pep rallies

for adult men. In nineteen nine one more than a thousand men went to see him at the East Bold Auditorium in Parkland, Washington, paying seventy five nineteen dollars for the privilege. Yeah. A contemporary article in Entertainment Weekly describes the scene thus, lee as the customers file in, a dozen white guys flail away incompetently on African drums. When the crowd has seated, the drummers quit the stage, and Bly and Michael Mead, a storyteller who helps run the workshops,

begin to recite, rambling myths and bits of verse. Meat occasionally bangs a bongo bli, plinks a bazooki, the Greek version of the mandolin, seening, sending mournful notes wafting out over the audience. So that that sounds good, right, It sounds like a fun time. Yeah, it sounds like a great way to spend seventy ft. Yeah. I always love

white guys playing African drums. Uh in in my in my gigantic stadium uh speech series by a fucking poet anyway, Bly, who in or had been called the most influential living American poet by current biography, became a kind of celebrity that hadn't previously existed. So he's filling stadiums with people who want to hear him talk, But he's also he's engaging them in a way that's going to spawn the

modern men's self help industry. Quote, Bly are just men to rediscover their manhood by getting back to their wild nature. Some feminists, he says, in a justified fear of brutality, have labored to breed fierceness out of men, creating the sort of soft male of whom Teddy Roosevelt might have said, I could carve a better man out of a banana.

BLYI believes that inside of every such male, there's a wild man yearning to get out, a radiant inner king, just waiting to confirm masculine pride and shareness of purpose. Bli insists he doesn't blame women for men's sorry state. He blames older men who have failed to provide young ones with the role models they crave. In traditional societies, boys worked alongside men, plowing fields and fashioning arrowheads, but the industrial Revolution severed that connection. The title character and

his bestseller is a wild hairy Fellow. Who in the in a grim fairy tale is fished up from a pond and becomes a boy's mentor. That image is also the inspiration for his most extravagant exercise and manly self discovery, five day wild Man Excursions, in which groups of a hundred men take to the woods under the tutelage of Bly and others to dance around fires, banging on drums. I mean, honey, just say you have daddy issues and

move the funk on. Yeah, yeah, I mean again, this is there's this there's this element where he's like, society is fucked because feminists have tried to breed the violence out of her. Yeah, okay, so you know you have It's like like astonishing to me that people are picking seventy five dollars and like selling out, because I mean that's more like that's more than the people were paying

for for Coachella in the early early two thousand's. The crazy thing is like at the core of what he's saying, it's like most of that sounds that he's making some good points points about, you know, how men have evolved in our So I'm just saying, where where's the twist, because yeah, there's the there's you've seen it start to

happen here. So it's because like the valid thing in that past is just he's like, hey, look, young boys used to grow up learning alongside both their father and the other men, you know, in whatever community they were in, and that taught them what it meant to be a man.

And now because capitalism has kind of taken the man out of the house, you're supposed to be working forty six eight hours a week, right, they're not there to right, it's just the usually in like the way our our society where it's just the woman who's raising the kid. That's what he's saying then, that we've cut men off from this process of learning how to be adult men and and like that is actually a pretty valid critique.

And the problem is that not that he's saying. The problem is that feminists have bred fierceness out of men instead of being like, capitalism separates parents from children for huge amounts of time, and that's bad for kids. And actually, if you look at it, like you can see in the in that very scenario of like men are out of the house working, so they're kids are raised largely by their mothers, well, that also means an unfair burdens

being placed on the mother. You could see this, there's a way to have solidarity between the genders here and be like, oh, yeah, this is all of a problem of this system we've built that like separates families in ways that are really fucked up. Like I identify with that when I was a kid um because we didn't have much money at all. The only job my dad could get was in New York City, and there was a period of more than a year where he was gone.

He was living on a friend's couch working. They're sending money back to us, and it was it was it's not just him that made a sacrifice. I made a sacrifice as his son, and my mom made a sacrifice dealing with the entire job of like raising me. Like, there's a thing to identify with their But you can see the start of the toxicity where he's like, well, what's the problem is that feminists have tried to make

men less fierce? That's not really the problem. Robert Bligh Like, Um, one interesting thing just before you keep going, is I think in that quote, did he say that justifiably they tried to breathe Yeah, brutality out of men or whatever, even they're like on some level, you know, you can kind of like okay, like I kind of see what the point he's making. You know, men do p pretruate a lot of the bullshit that happens to women in

our society. So like, he's nearly he's not anywhere. He's not on the same planet of toxicity as a lot of as as guys like you know, Andrew Tate who are about to talk about, or even like Jan Peterson. But you can see the root of it right where he is. Yeah, yeah, he's he's still saying fundamentally, part of the problem is famous want men to be less aggressive, and like, no, that's not really part of the problem that you have adequately identified. Um, yeah, he wants his listeners.

The young boys are drowning in female energy in the schools. Every young man has a fantastic need for initiation. That's why we all became so crazy about our football coach. Such initiations, he says, channel wildness and the socially approved acts. And again you see kind of this, like, well, why is the problem? Isn't female energy? Like it's not that, Like it's that young men it's that families are being split up by this like need to compete and work

in ways that are really unhealthy for kids. But anyway, you can look at the sea of other self help grifters at the time we're in her air hard around Hubbard who would come around at this point, and you could say that BLI is just kind of another dude, and that he's doing a lot of the same things a lot of these other self help grifters are doing.

But one of the things that differs him is those guys are mostly pile like plying nonsense based on bad interpretations of Eastern religion and psychological abuse, and BLI is kind of he's not insulting or attacking people. He's not calling them them weak. Um he's he's making some reasonable

points about stuff that's toxic about our society. And then he's trying to create like mutual cathartic experiences with the men in his audience who are being an vited to kind of see the men around them as brothers in a way that's more intimate than maybe they had been trained to do previously. Um. So again he's there's there's something interesting going on here that isn't even holy toxic that I think is kind of worth acknowledging as we lead to the parts of it that are a lot

more toxic. Um. And it's one of those things where, like I've spent a lot of time on in cell message boards and they do talk a lot about this feeling of disconnection with society. So when he says that, like young men are not connected to their communities, he's

he's making a decent point. Um. He Also one of the points he makes that I thought was interesting is he talks about the differences between female sex that and male sex, and he points out that because of like just basic biological realities of how periods happen, young girls are instructed about their bodies in ways that young boys are not, and it leads to lifelong discomfort talking about

their bodies, talking about health problems. Um. And that's probably be a valid thing to point out, um, but definitely goes both ways. Sure, and again he's very he's completely ignorant too. Well. I'm sure there's a lot of things actually, especially today, that women are not taught about their bodies because of anyway, Again, these are a lot of two way problems, and he's focusing just on the male aspect of them. But he's not inherently wrong about the male

aspect of them. He's just leaving a large part of the equation out um, and that's where the toxicity comes in here. Yeah, I'm I'm I'm ready, I'm ready. BLI has reached his fundamental message. Men and women are essentially alien, and neither should apologize they're different tribes. He is saying, my father was an alcoholic, and yet if you look underneath his weakness, there was something there that my mother didn't have. She was fine, but she didn't have it.

Three million sperms start out and they find themselves immediately in a hostile environment facing an egg approximately forty times bigger, where the product of the one survivor that didn't give up, which is it's really weird to be like setting up the gender struggle as like sperm versus egg, where it's like, well, actually all of us are the product of sperm. That's the only way people happen. That's what I emphasize on the last part of that quote there, you said, we're

in the product of the one survivor that didn't give up. Yeah, what's the other half of that equation. Is it just is it just one little bit of a bit of cum that makes a baby? Why is there another part to the baby equation? Yeah, I just want to be like, honey, did you not show up for sex said class that day? Did you miss that lesson? He's framing it like the sperm have to murder the eggs so that one can survive.

That is not the way it works. Um. Bli actually insists that he is not preaching old style machismo, and he takes pains to tell his audience that, in fact, male rage is weakness. We're not talking about aggression. He calls out a few of his listeners seemed confused. At the height of an hour long discussion of the Gulf War, one audience member announces that he's succeeded from society. I'm

not paying my taxes. I bought an a K forty seven, and I'm farting around with ammunition just in case I have to back up my decision, he says, softly but firmly. Bli and many others have spoken out against the Gulf War, yet nobody criticizes the a K forty seven fellow, and when Bli asks the Vietnam bets to stand to be honored.

The room erupts with the applause for about three minutes, and you can see there too, the seeds of a lot that's going on right now, right where Yeah, he's like, we're not talking about many to more be more aggressive. And then the guy's like, I have dropped out of society and started buying guns. And everyone's like that's great. Um, look we're not anyway whatever the BLI died last year. Um he lived a long time, yeah, I would say, And you can find people, you know, reappraising his work

and stuff. There's some folks who will say that, like, his greater talent was for self promotion rather than poetry, and he wasn't as good a poet as people had said. I don't know. I'm not a not a poetry guy. I'm not gonna analyze his poetry in in that way. I do think sometimes because somebody turns out to age into a problematic person, people are like, well, I guess their work that everybody loved in the past sucked, And

I think that's kind of cowardly. Like, no people liked his poems, they were influential, and then he turned into a crank. That's fine, that happens, like yeah, um, anyway, you know who isn't a crank and who will never do anything problematic My favorite filmmaker Roman Oh. Oh you know what. I googled his name as I was saying, oh boy, oh dear, um, Well, I'm gonna go burn all my DVDs of Rosemary's Baby, and y'all check out

these ads. Ah, we're bad, really glad if a little while I thought it was good, with like the talk about reabrasing artists works and the thank you, thank you, I thrive on praisey. Yeah, that was something different, good for you. So um Blin died, but his work launched what scholars have called the mytho poetic men's movement, and it's it's, oh my god, that's amazing. It is. It is a somewhat uh fucking prickish name to call it,

I guess, but it's what they mean by mythopoetic. I should explain, Like, what they're saying is like the argument Bli and the other because there's a bunch of other

authors in this. The argument they're making is that our society has stripped mythology out and has become this like kind of coldly competitive engine for creating cash value, and that we need in order to make men healthier, we need to reintroduce like this kind of mythic under standing of of masculinity and of the world that like, that's kind and a lot of it is they're like looking at like Native American cultures and some of the different

rituals around masculinity they had and being like, well, maybe well, and there's actually again, there's a scientific basis to a lot of this is cultural appropriation. But like, one of the things that's happening this period is you've got a lot of Vietnam veterans dealing with PTSD in an era

before they understand it. And a thing that occurs during this period is that some of them have buddies who are also struggling with PTSD and our Indigenous Americans and who invite their their white and black and Hispanic battle buddies back to do stuff like sweat lodges um in order to like cope and other kind of different rituals that have existed in some of these indigenous societies to deal with what happens to men when they go to war and they invite their friends back, and that stuff

works better than just getting a job working for an accounting firm immediately after leaving Vietnam. Um. And so people are starting to study this and write about it. And one of the things that the mythopoetic guys take is this belief that you should basically just kind of like steel wholesale from these cultures and and dress white people up in head dresses and give them drums and stuff, as opposed to being like, oh, well, maybe you know, there's a way that isn't that to look at the

value that some of these rituals have in healing people. Um. You know, I'm not the person to to analyze that completely, but that's part of what what they're saying here is that, like they're they're kind of recognizing there's something hollow at the center of American culture that is not hollow in some of these other cultures. And instead of being like, maybe there's things that we should fundamentally change about American culture, they're they're saying, what if we dress up like these

other people? Right? That's essentially what's going on with a lot of the mytho poetic movement. So a big chunk of this and these are some of this is blig. Some of these guys outside of Bligh is there. They're making their like putting a bunch of like white accountants and sweat lodges that they make the wrong way and lecturing them about you know, young and Joseph Campbell, or they're like making them dress like Caveman while playing you know,

African drums. There's a lot of like weird and comfortable racism in the mythopoetic men's movement. UM. That said, it is less toxic than the men's rights movement that would follow it. Um. Things kind of get increasingly aggressive and toxic from this point out. UM. But Bly and the initial mytho poetic influencers were not They saw themselves as therapists, and again I don't think they were good at this. But they were not political. So they were not This

was not a conservative movement. They were not billing themselves as right wing. They were not really like weighing in on culture war issues, in part because the culture war didn't exist in the same way then that it does now. UM. And it's interesting because Bli expressly says this is an a political movement. You might criticize him because he had just written a really kind of beautiful essay during the Vietnam War about the cowardness of being a political but whatever, um.

I found an article from the Washington Post in nine that talked to a number of men who had been most active in the movement, and there's some interesting pieces in there. Quote an affirmation and strength comes from a bonding between men that's impossible to put into words, says ed Hanold, the mild mannered federal lawyer and founder of the Men's Council of Creator Washington, one of six such local groups salving men's deep inner pain through communal rituals

of dancing, roaring, hugging, and weeping. The experience was known to men in the past, but has been forgotten. American men face a desperate situation and don't even know it. There are large numbers of men wandering lost and some personal waste, land of jobs with little meaning, personal lives with little passion, and massive confusion about the reasons why. He pauses thoughtfully and adds, there's a lot of hurting

cowboys out there. Now, these guys are not cowboys. These guys were like middle managers at auto parts stores and ship like, they're absolutely not hurting cowboys. Um, and also actual cowboys aren't what this guy thought they were. But he's not wrong again and saying that, Like, the situation of American men was pretty unpleasant in the early nineteen nineties. They were struggling against a capitalist culture that thrived on

the obliteration of meaning. However, men, of course they are not the only ones suffering from this, nor are they suffering worse than any other group of Americans. Right, this is just alienation under capitalism. Part of what he's doing here that is noteworthy and becomes a huge problem later on, is he is identifying real problems with the society we live in and then cutting men off from the rest of that society and thus cutting off the pacity of

possibility of solidarity. So you can't look at this kind of alienation and loss of meaning and be like, wow, men and women and everybody is being harmed by the meaninglessness this whole, at this or of our culture. You have to say men are being harmed, and then that invites like, well, there must be women that are doing it, and it must be we should be looking at how feminine flow right in It's interesting to see like just how far John Wayne's like reach impacts the way men think. Yeah,

there's a lot of hurting cowboys. Motherfucker, you are not a cowboy. And by the way, cowboys were mostly like poor black and Hispanic and Indigenous men who were being exploited for their labor. Like, this is not none of what you're saying means anything. You are entirely You're you're talking about the emptiness of culture and your understanding of history has been entirely formed by the movies you watched. Like anyway, do better, well, some of them will eventually

in the future. I think it would be interesting to try and find out look into all these men's groups in the Washington in the state of Washington in this period of time and see how many of those guys wound up being elders and the proud boys thirty years later. But that's that's that's a more in depth work for for someone in the future if they want to do it. Um So, one of the most dangerous aspects of the mytho poetic men's movement is that it was not as

toxic as its descendants. Again, it identifies real problems, but then it recasts them as things that just men, mostly white men, are suffering from. And the answer is like, KEECHI kind of racist LARPing as member like that. That's basically what they're doing, right, and this, yeah, it's it's, it's it causes problems. Later on, one of the most ridiculous aspects of the mytho poetic men's movement was the creation of wing Span, the Journal of the Male Spirit.

Uh don't you just want to sit down in with a copy of Wingspan read out quotes to your buds. I start every morning with it, with it. Yeah, just spread spreading your wings. So in the in the pre internet era, this acted as a clearing house for the movement and a introl place where influencers could advertise their events.

Quote the last issue of Wingspan list dozens of publications and events for men around the country, including a New Warrior Training Adventure weekend in Wisconsin, Drumming and Dancing for men in Massachusetts, Brother to Brother in New York, Healing the Father Wound in California, and Afro American Mails at Risk in New Jersey. A recent grandfather ceremony at the Fairfax Unitarian Men's Council featured drumming on a five and

a half foot thunder heart drum. In this area. There are three large councils in Virginia, one in Gaithersburg and another in Baltimore. The Men's Council of Greater Washington, which Hanld started in June of nine with fifty men, is the largest, with two thousand members and fifty newcomers arriving

for each monthly meeting. Late one night in January, at the Council's meeting in the Washington Ethical Society Auditorium on Upper sixteenth Street, Hanald shed his Clark Kent image as he leads five hundred men who are pounding drums and chanting. The sweating windows shape with rhythmic thunder that reverberates up and down the street as they raise Honald, gyrating and clapping high overhead and parade him about the room. Then group leaders circulate with large feathers and clay pots, wafting

the smoke of burning sage into the waiting faces. And what is termed a Native American ritual designed to put you in touch with generations of male ancestors. So that's a little problematic, just to scoch um a number of other masculinity grifters, followed by Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette wrote the bestseller King, Warrior, Magician, Magician, Lover, which reported to that's a that's a title right there. I want to be a cane, warrior, magician, lover. And these are

these are like the archetypes of male masculinity. Um I don't think they're in order, because you probably don't start as a king and end up as a lover, although maybe you do. That would be progressive actually saying that you need to you need to shed your your mastery and your sense of ownership in order to become a lover. But I don't think that's the point they're making. Um More is a young an analyst and a professor of psychology. Jillette,

like Dr Jordan balt Is Peterson, was a mythologist. I found a good write up that described the main arguments in their book by Aaron Innes. The book's second shared premise is that there are universal male archetypes inherent to every male bodied person that are represented in myth and story around the world, but are suppressed in the dominant culture. The Developmental History of every Man says more, Gilette is in large part the story of his failure or success

at discovering within himself the archetypes of mature masculinity. Following young and psychological theory. They claim that if men are not given room to express these archetypes in a healthy manner, they will act them out unconsciously in ways that are damaging and violent, either directed outward at other people as overtly hostile male behavior, or directed inward which SAPs the

fatality of the men involved. It's worth noting that the authors of both books, as well as their contemporary followers, seem a hell of a lot more concerned about remedying male acting out that's turned inward and creating male malaise

than they are about male violence directed towards others. Take the essay why Men Find It So Hard to Feel by Mythopoetic Workshop leader Darren Austin Hall, who says that women are at an advantage to men spiritually and at minstrel cycles made women are energetically connected to cycles of the moon, which in turn is energetically linked to our unconscious This leads him to the conclusion that the solution to warmongering tyrants in the world is for women to

use touch and the beautiful arts of seductive love to disarm men, and that this will solve male violence. There is the girl's just gotta touch us, Ryan, We'll stop doing genocides. That's incredible. Hitler wouldn't have done all that bad stuff, if I get what I mean. He was dating his cousin, So I don't really want to continue this joke. But dating dating is the wrong word. Um. You know that story, Sophie. We've talked about Hitler and his cousin. Yeah, I killed herself. Yeah, it's bad. It's

a really bad story. Again, bringing up Hitler and the cousin that he may be murdered, um, is definitely perhaps a good way of pointing out how fucked up it is to say the problem of men's violence is that women don't touch them the right way. Um, it's pretty bad. It also brings to mind I'm thinking about our Liberia episodes and the that sex strike that a bunch of women went on to get the warlords to come to the table to negotiate, and how it's like literally the opposite.

It's it's number one one of the most amazing stories of activism I've ever heard of, and it's literally the opposite of what these guys are saying. Um. But I don't know, I don't know. This is also gross. Um yeah ikey. So most regular listeners of the show are broadly familiar with the way men's empowerment gurus and men's rights influencers evolved over the last twenty years or so, a mix of right wing culture war politics intersecting with

very divorced men. And I think we haven't talked about this yet, but these guys are all extremely divorced, right, There's a there's a lot of weekend Dad energy in these sense. Yeah, okay, that's why they're also better Okay, yea that there's just no way anything else is going on here. Um. Elon Musk would have been really really would have fit in at these Maybe it would have kept him from buying Twitter. You know, I don't want to say it was all toxic. Um. So yeah, again,

you have UM. Most people listening are kind of familiar with where things descend after the mytho poetic men's movement, which still kind of is around, but more or less peters out over the course of the nineties, and after that point, you've got a mix of right wing culture war politics that intersects with these very divorce dudes angry over custody, you know, yelling about how men are discriminated against.

And then we have pick of course, starting in the early two thousands, these pickup artists selling the secret to fucking chicks at bars, and this all gets brewed up into this slurry, and you know, you've got to pick up artists intersecting with the men's rights activists, intersecting with the right wing culture war politicians, intersecting with these literal Nazis. And from that slurry we get gamer Gate and the alt right and at least a portion of Donald Trump's

political success. Right, Um, so that is that is the story? Well, I mean this is I I we haven't gone into this on the show, and it was something I was broadly aware of it, didn't know much about. But I think this is especially leading into a story about a guy like Andrew Tate, who was the most toxic, arguably calls himself the most like toxic man on the Internet, and is certainly an articon of of male toxicity. I think it kind of behooves us to talk about what

led to him because it's interesting. Um. Anyway, this is the end of episode one. Anybody anybody got some thoughts here at the end of things? Um, I mean, I think that was a really great explainer on kind of laying the groundwork for where the ideas that eventually became Andrew Tap you know, started and took a foothold, and uh, yeah, after you broke it down, it makes sense and I

can see how we got there, you know. But it is interesting that, you know, some of the initial original points, like you said, we're valid and do kind of highlight some issues in our society that maybe we should be focusing more on or addressing. But also, as you said, it's not just a men's problem. It's a problem for everyone, and everyone's being affected by it, and we should be finding solidarity in that, and how can we help everybody improve our lives, not just oh it's a problem that's

only affecting men, so women problem. It's so interesting to me how many people see, oh, men are being made to like spend their entire young and mature adult lives like laboring for somebody else's profit in a factory whatever, and as a result, their kids barely know them, which

is a real problem. A lot of kids raised and like the fifties, sixties, seventies have and translating that as and like seeing you know, their moms struggling to like keep the house going and raise the kids through all that and and and the kids suffering, and be like, well, this is clearly a men's problem. No, this is this is a cultural problem. Everybody's problem is this. Um anyway, Sophie, I'm really not looking forward to what's coming next, Sophie.

It's gonna be terrible, and you're gonna have to play a lot of clips. So I'm so sorry listeners, but I'm sorry, but it is necessary. You know what. I'm not sorry. I'll never apologize. That's what I learned from Andrew Tate. I think you wrote a really good script though.

Thank you, Sophie. Welcome Robert, I love me too. All right, everybody that's gonna do it with us for us today at at Behind the Bastards the podcast that will be recorded again immediately after this, although I will probably start drinking because it is now quite late. Um So, Huzza Huzza. Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.

For more from cool Zone, Media This at our website, cool zone media dot com, or check us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.