Why are regressive expressions of masculinity now so popular?

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Hello there, it's Philippe Ali here with Scott Stevens for The Minefield. Welcome along as we try to negotiate the ethical and moral dilemmas of modern life. How are you, Scott? I'm doing well, Philippe. Thank you. Been to the gym this week? When do I not? No, actually, I cannot bear. Look, okay, here's something you may not know about me. I do exercise a lot, but there's got to be a point to it, for God's sake. It can't just be...

getting swole. I mean, I love... You've never heard me use that term. But I have three sons who are avid gym goers and who... Love it. And all sorts of things that we're going to be talking about. For me, the exercise has to have a point to it. So it's either it's going to be a run. It's going to be.

a long walk where I can either be alone with my thoughts or I can listen to something I've been wanting to listen to, or it's basketball when there's an internal telos to the activity itself. But just going to, no, I can't do gyms. This is, you're speaking like a basketball coach now.

Lads, find the internal telos. What constitutes a point? Because I heard you say going for a run, and I always found running the most horribly pointless one of the... I understand it's very popular, but I just mean I always needed a ball involved. Yeah. Do you mean like a point as in something inherent to the exercise that I enjoy? Or do you mean a point as in like a long-term goal, whether it be in life or in a team or something like that? The point of the run.

isn't the run, it's what you're able to do when your body is put on autopilot. That, for me, is what's interesting, when you're able to separate out from other things. So the body is active and the mind is able to be free. I mean, Charlotte Wood in some of her kind of wonderful... work and reflections on creativity, places really high stock on the importance of doing things where your body can be preoccupied with something. And you just allow creativity or thought.

to meander, to wander, and you simply see what happens. For me, that's the, you know, I mean, I like being as I have a fascination with birds. I have a fascination of birds that exist in pairs and couples. So, being able to do those things, the kind of natural enjoyment that goes along with it, but then being able to have...

the mind free to simply meander. That, for me, is one of the great joys, kind of the internal tell-away of the entire thing. Just sit out the front of your house with a squeezy ball looking at the trees. You'll be fine. You'll do the same thing. Yeah, possibly, but there is something about...

The body being active, I think. You know, Nietzsche had this—have I ever quoted Nietzsche on this show? Dear God. I mean, I hate just about everything. involving Nietzsche, but he did have this really fascinating concept of what he described as asephalic knowledge, the knowledge that departs from the head, the knowledge that exists.

within the body, and sometimes it's the giving over ourselves and our consciousness to the activity of the body that then lets us almost instinctively pick up things that by means of logic or deduction we wouldn't be able to pick up. Otherwise, I mean, anybody who's been involved in any form of, say, structured worship knows that that's the case. Yeah, I think that's true. It's so interesting you mention worship, actually, because...

In some ways, we're moving into a conversation here about this current obsession, particularly among men. Possibly a different thing among women, but particularly among men with physical fitness and strength. and even fighting, all these things are happening at the moment. I think I might have said this before, but in our society, because we're so pleasure-slash-fun orientated in the way that we construct our telos.

to put it in basketball terms, we seem not very good at understanding the notion of going through hardship in order to attain something, except when it comes to... aesthetics yeah physical fitness it's really interesting that that's the only one when it becomes a vanity project of some sort um and there are other things i guess attached to it but that's when we get it but the idea

which is something that does show up in worship, particularly some forms of worship, like fasting. I would argue fasting is one of the most embodied forms of worship you can do. My wife's got a theory on the pilgrimage to Mecca specifically as being so unbelievably and intensely embodied because of the struggle that's involved, the heat, the crowds, all that sort of thing.

Those sorts of things, those sort of practices are very hard to explain to anyone in a society like ours. It just seems bizarre. It's absurd. Why would you do this? Can I tell you I'm getting ripped for a photo shoot because I want to put something on Instagram.

Suddenly, even if I don't agree with you, I can understand it. Okay. There's something happening there. Oh, well, perfect. Okay, can I push you on two points? What do you mean by push? I just mean, okay, let's talk about this further. Let's go for a run with this. Because I think what's so interesting...

About the two examples that you gave, both pilgrimage and fasting. You are doing activities, physically strenuous activities. These are not discretionary activities. There are forms of obligation that attend to both of them, right? Yes. Okay. Whereas the other form of, let's call it Instagram directed. That is not activity. Bingo card. They are purely voluntary. purely discretionary, whatever.

Reason there is for this particular struggle, for getting up this early, for doing these weights, for doing this regimen, for eating these foods, for denying yourself these pleasures. Whatever it is, it's not an obligatory compulsion. It's strictly voluntary, which means you can opt into it. You can opt out of it.

Except, now here's where I think things get really interesting. You referred before to kind of, you know, let's call it the dominant sort of pleasure economy. If it feels good, what possible reason could there be for not doing it unless you're thereby harming somebody else? This was the thing that William James, the great American pragmatist philosopher back in 1910, warned against. He said that any society...

which, because of prevailing conditions of peace, no longer has the need for preparation for the conditions of war. Any peace society... runs the risk of descending into merely pleasure society. And he says what then follows from that is a loss of hardness and hardiness. A refusal to submit to external forms of authority. He referred to it as kind of obedience to command, obedience to authority.

Also call it the imminent demands of comradeship and solidarity. Okay, I'm doing this because I'm in a troop.

that requires that we all do this. So yes, it's hardship, but it's hardship together. The benefits are external to ourselves, but the constraints are inherent to the collective task itself. So William James, very... famously in this wonderful, wonderful essay called The Moral Equivalent of War, said that war should be abolished among civilized nations, but nations if they are not to simply descend into a pleasure economy.

into a pleasure society must continue to require men, and he really did hear mean men, require them to continue to train as if... for war, to develop for non-military ends the forms of hardiness, what he described as contempt for softness. He said, only if we have these moral equivalents of war that instill martial disciplines and martial virtues in the lives and the practices of young men, only thereby can a peace society no longer descend into a plan.

So this is just, it's a variant of that. Is it a Michael Hopf quote that people like quoting at the moment? What is it? Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create hard times. Something like that. That's the cycle of it, yeah. Here's the barb, though.

Unless we reinstate something like compulsory national service, or unless instead of there being, say, a discretionary gap year where, you know, someone finishes high school and they, instead of traveling the world, they embark on a year-long... you know, form of nation building or help in the regions or a placement in some kind of great task of, you know, infrastructural repair. Unless we re-engage in anything like that.

The forms, the external constraints that might yield, again, what William James, I think a little bit problematically, by the way. called contempt for softness or at least the ability to submit to authority, to find meaning in comradeship, say. What I think is interesting is the way that... preparation for and a valuing of hardness, strength, of masculinity, and not just being strong, but being seen to be strong.

Not just being capable, but being seen to be superior. There is still a kind of obligation that comes along with that. But it's an obligation that unfortunately is inseparable from a certain degree of vanity. And this is what's so interesting about, I mean, it's work that I've... quoted on this show before, it's a book that I find myself bizarrely going back to again and again.

Hervé Jouvin, this kind of weird French political philosopher, he wrote this extraordinary book in 1998 called L'événement du corps, the coming, the arrival, the emergence of the body or of bodies. And his idea. was that we are a society that no longer believes in soul. The soul doesn't have any value for us.

The notion, some kind of commitment to something beyond or above or beneath us, it no longer has any purchase on our lives. All that matters... has relocated in the visual appearance of the body itself all meaning he says is in skin and muscle, hence our desire to manufacture bodies that conform to our will, whether it be hair removal or whether it be getting ink.

Whether it be becoming incredibly lean and sinewy or bulking up and growing swole. All of those things go hand in hand with there is an obligation of my body to be. Beautiful. And if my body is not... beautiful, an expression of my will, then what that then says is it exudes weakness, it exudes inferiority, it breaks an obligation of what Hervé Jouvin calls the obligation, the requirement to...

be both available and desirable. So here, the aesthetic relocation of value to the skin, to the muscle, as the primary bearer of value, and therefore the thing that needs to be attended to above all else. This is where a form of obligation and a form of vanity, what we used to maybe think about junkies, they're completely out of control. They're in the grip of something else. We now... regard in many respects in the same way people who aren't physically fit enough.

people who are visibly not honoring the obligation to be strong, to embody that kind of contempt for softness. Yeah, and really, though, that's an extension of the fact that we have... as a species, always read values into appearance in some way. That's right. You know, now we live in an age where it is people with low socioeconomic status who are obese and people who are wealthy.

who are fit. This is also the point that Hervé Gervain makes, that there's an ontological rift that runs through the world, he said. There are those who have control of their bodies, and their teeth are perfect, and their skin is clean. And then there are those... who still belong in the state of nature and their teeth are broken and they've got out of control hair growth. Yeah, but it's not that simple, right? So what I was going to go on to say is that...

It's not very long ago that was reversed. That's right. Who were the ones who were obese? Well, they were the wealthy exhibiting their wealth through...

their obesity or whatever. This was a symbol of their status and it applied to women as well as to men. And it was the poor who were emaciated and so on. I suppose you could say that... carrying extra weight was an expression of will as well in that context it was just a differently expressed will but really it was a an expression of means an expression of capability i can do this that shows that i'm well that i i have a good paddock to be in if you like

And these things change as fashions change and as meaning attached to these things changes. So I think your characterization is great, really perceptive and really useful. The one thing I would add, and maybe this is a critique of that understanding of...

of the body and physical mastery and so on. You used the phrase briefly along the way, martial virtues. This is not a new idea. This is a very old idea in moral thinking. And it's an important one because we don't really ever talk about it as a society, I think. We think of war as something that is bad, and it is, if not occasionally necessary. But we don't tend, except maybe every now and again on Anzac Day or something,

to think about war and conduct within war as embodying a kind of virtue. And then ask the question, well, what happens when there is no war to those virtues? Now, that's kind of the basis on which you sketched out what you did. But all of those things are physical that you've identified. They're to do with hardness versus softness, for example, strength versus weakness, whatever. There are a whole lot of other martial virtues.

that go along with that, that are intangible, that remain valuable, and don't proceed or cannot be shown up in an Instagrammable way, right? So I'm thinking of things like courage, things like wisdom. Well, obedience to, yeah, to a certain extent. I mean, there is no martial virtue without obedience. Sacrifice is one of the great martial virtues. Justice, is that a martial virtue? Well, it certainly is in some...

Restraint or proportionality certainly would be. Benevolence. If we're going to talk about the martial virtues, we need to put them in their full familial context. That's right. And it seems to me that actually what we're witnessing, if we are to say this grows out of some connection to martial virtue or some kind of lost sense of the martial virtues or whatever, it seems what's happened is we have...

latched onto and stopped at those which are physically observable. Those which express some kind of desire for a sense of dominance and victory. rather than those that sit within a broader family of values that are actually fundamental to the flourishing of human life. I wonder what that's about.

I also wonder, though, whether or not there might be corners of this where this plays out in unusual ways. So we've spoken about, really we've been talking about the aesthetic side of it, you know, not necessarily even being healthy or fit, but just appearing to be so. um in a way that shows up in a photograph or a video or something like that being attractive showing that you have control over you have sovereignty over your body and the tattooing thing is i think a big part of that but

Let's take something like the growing embrace or fascination with UFC or mixed martial arts, which is not exactly the same thing we should point. My brother is at pains to tell me this. He himself is a black belt in karate. His kids are involved in martial arts and so on. He says there's mixed martial arts and there's UFC. There's a sort of business and they're different things, even if there's overlap. Okay, so I put that out there.

What is all that telling us? Is there some aspect of this that is grasping towards the virtues of courage and sacrifice and so on? Or is it all actually... the cheapening of these things and the reduction of these things to ego, money.

In other words, things that we would not necessarily regard as virtuous at all, but rather vices. Perhaps we can even speak of them as martial vices. I don't know if that language is appropriate. What's going on there? I ask this question, really, because it's not my field, and I know you pay more attention to this than I do.

But it's definitely on, and it's showing up in all sorts of ways, even outside of that. I mean, you think of the current online phenomenon of run it straight. I don't know if you've clocked to this, but this is basically... It's a head-butting contest, effectively. These people stand at each other and run straight at each other, and whoever comes off worse loses is effectively how it works. Think of it as rugby league without a ball.

And unfortunately, it seems, with a lot of participants, without the technique, which means that terrible things are bound to happen. And have happened. And have happened. You know, quadriplegia is in the air. at every instance, and that's before he gets a concussion. Interestingly, when I've seen it done, though, by people who were professional rugby league or rugby players, it looked absolutely fine because they knew what they were doing.

And the technique was fine. But leave all that aside. The phenomenon of it, the fact that there is something that means, of course, this arises. This is going to happen. That's not just about aesthetics, is it? No, it's not. Can I be a little bit associative and conjectural here? Sure. I mean there is a cultural critique I think to be brought to bear. Maybe we can look at that a little bit later. But there's also something else going on.

I think. And I think another online phenomenon would have been the slapping contest, which I just found barbaric and really, really dangerous. Maybe even not as dangerous as the run it straight. So, think back, Waleed. Think about some of the movies, the fighting-based movies that we grew up with. Think about something like Rocky or Karate Kid. There is a valorization of fighting and the ability to fight. But notice what those two films have in common. There is the underdog.

There is the underdog who has none of the access to gym or to technique or to class. Rocky boxing in the abattoir. Rocky running through the streets of Philadelphia, Daniel LaRusso waxing on, waxing off, and so on. So you've got the underdog and the joy. The thrill of the movies is the underdog overcoming the bully. So there is a kind of inherent virtue.

But it's the virtue of discipline, of humility, of hard work, being able to overcome. And, you know, then you get to sort of Rocky IV and you've got geopolitical implications, you know. Okay. Yeah, but generally speaking, it's not about dominance. It is not about dominance. And in fact, the one, the side of the equation that lusts after dominance and that acts like the bully is almost invariably the villain. What I find so interesting, I mean, I've got...

two sons who love UFC. And the thing that I cannot help but notice at almost every turn is the difference between something like UFC. And boxing, I mean, a sport that I otherwise kind of despise, but that often had kind of mythical, cultural, even in some problematic circumstances, almost civilization. implications to it. Muhammad Ali's fights weren't just fights of one person's dominance over another. There were a whole lot of mythical narratives.

that were also being brought to bear then. And then you would have the machismo, you'd have the braggadocio, you'd have the bragging and the assertions of dominance, but there was always something else that was going on and what you would conspicuously not have. are the huge gushing amounts of blood, for instance. I mean, you'd have swollen faces, but not the spurting, spouting streams of...

blood and the elbows to faces, for instance, that you regularly see in something like UFC. What I find so interesting about the cultural phenomenon of UFC is that it is the cultural celebration of absolute dominance. and absolute humiliation. That's why, I mean, one of the things then that goes along with it is a kind of ostentatiousness of living.

This also then goes to not just being strong, but appearing to be strong, creating oneself as an object of envy, something that other people look at, want to be like, want to aspire to. And this is why then the forms of aggressive conquering, self-restraint, self-discipline, but ultimately contemptuous masculinity that are paraded in things like UFC, this is why they've come to overlap.

in such clear and I think such disturbing ways with certain political expressions and things like, I mean, you know, social media platforms went from being the purview of... geeks and computer engineers to being stoics and now being essentially the purview of amateur UFC. So there's something going on here about the celebration of dominance, not just... The celebration not just of masculinity, but certain forms of hyper-domineering masculinity, of hardness.

In the interests of conquering, or if I can just put this one other way, I don't know if this is going to resonate with you or not. We are now seeing a kind of restaging of the ancient conflict between masculine Sparta and effeminate. A restaging of Stoic Rome versus philosophical Athens. And the way, for instance, that Donald Trump. has used UFC fights as campaigning opportunities.

The ways that that was then used to highlight not just the weakness and the fragility, say, of Joe Biden, but also the effeminacy of the democratic platform and of democratic culture itself. These are all the things that I think are being bound up. You mentioned before about other kind of non-visible martial virtues. And you mentioned sacrifice. One of the striking things.

about certainly the forms of martial virtue as William James imagined it, is the preparedness to sacrifice oneself for others, to engage in forms of struggle and destitution. because it was being not just demanded of oneself but of oneself for the sake of others. That, it seems to me, is the conspicuous element.

that is being airbrushed away in this celebration of hardness, of the preparedness to go into battle. Who is one fighting for? Well, we're fighting for oneself as the embodiment of one's honor. And one's honor...

as that which can only be gained, which can only be brought through the shaming, the rendering contemptuous of one's opponent. I think there is though... distinction to be drawn that i'm not very well placed to draw between the showbiz of ufc and some of its perhaps more outlandish participants you know the conor mcgregors for example and The attitudes of some of the fighters who are in it. I mean, the way I hear people talk about someone like Habib.

is quite different, actually, to the way that you described that. But perhaps this is where my brother's distinction between UFC and mixed martial arts is interesting. One of the things I found, and I say this as someone who is not an expert on any of this, and that's actually the...

That's the valuable perspective here I'm about to bring, is that whenever I've seen a mixed martial arts bout, whether it's actually in UFC or otherwise, very often they're a bit dull to me. I don't really know what I'm looking at. It lacks the spectacle to the untrained eye that perhaps boxing offers very often. Oh, he just hit him in the head and he went down. There's a bit less of that. I remember certainly early doors, I don't know if it's changed.

It was often the grappling arts that would win, right? That's right. You get them to the floor. And that still is very much the case. Yeah. You have the slow... And interestingly enough, and here's where I think a kind of mythical or even civilizational dimension does come into it, those especially trained in Eastern Europe. in the Kazakhstani, Kyrgyzstani nations, for instance, who have that painstaking...

Slow, almost constrictor-like. You bring everything down to the ground. You make everything slow. The slow, slow, slow attrition until finally you get your head around the person's neck. You're right. There is something. different that then highlights the showmanship on the part of other kind of more spectacular fighters. And also on the machine of USC, the showbiz machine of it. The point I wanted to make about that is...

It's interesting because when talking to people who do martial arts, for example, they're enthralled by this, but they're enthralled in a quite high-minded technical way. They seem to be people who carry with them more, at the very least.

This sort of notion of the noble warrior, the respect for the opponent's capacity. The mixed martial arts thing was interesting because it meant that your opponent had weapons you didn't. And so that was kind of, in a way, the fascinating element of it. At least it seemed that way to me.

There was something there that was at least grasping at, or maybe even realised, I don't know, some of the nobler aims of the martial virtues. Perhaps what we're talking about is what happens when that gets... crunched through a fairly crass money-making machine or something like that, and even then there were probably exceptions to it.

I don't know if we can say there's a continuum or there's a single phenomenon here that shouldn't be differentiated out between all that that we've been talking about on one hand, boxing on the other, particularly, you know, the old, was it Don King? Yeah. and people who are clearly taking steroids, posting photos on Instagram. I don't know if this is all the same phenomenon or they come from the same wellspring. I guess that's...

Something you can throw to our guest. Can I ask you something? Just before we bring in our guest, there has been a noticeable increase in, let's just call it taunting. in certain sports that have traditionally, okay, you have celebrations in football, but then you have taunting. The shoulder shrug. I mean, one of the things that I hate most in basketball is when someone stands over somebody else or shrugs one's shoulders after a foul that nonetheless led to a continuation basket.

And, you know, in certain sports, I think it's interesting that gridiron or American football, there are pretty firm rules against taunting of one's opponents as being so dramatically... against the rules and the spirit of the game as warranting a penalty. I mean, okay, my favorite type of athlete is the one that just goes about their business and lets their game do the communicating.

Surely the rise in kind of contemptuous taunting and highly personal taunting, that's going to be on a continuum with what we're discussing, right? It might be, but I feel that's got a much longer history, actually. You might be right. Anyone who knows the history of cricket sledging, and what a magnificent history it is, will know. Yeah, I wonder if sledging is the same. That's kind of psychological warfare. Yeah, mental disintegration.

Let's get someone who knows what they're talking about, for God's sake, Scott.

Our guest is Samuel Cornell. He's a PhD candidate in public health at the University of New South Wales. Prior to commencing his academic studies, he briefly served in the Royal Navy. He's also the author of a remarkable piece on ABC Religion and Ethics called Welcome...

Welcome to the age of fitness content where men train for battle without ever experiencing more. Samuel, welcome to the minefield. Thanks for having me. So, we've laid out a nice big bountiful table. What do you want to pick up? What do you want to do with this? So many places to start from, isn't there? I suppose one of the things you touched on, which I do think is quite essential to this phenomenon, is just this performative aspect that social media really encourages.

and the fact that performance is valued but as you've already said sacrifice it really isn't and i think that's quite a difference in the age we live in with social media in particular and that kind of content being pushed around and valued. You don't put sacrifices on social media, you know, and you also don't put your voluntary activities on social media either. It's all very volitional.

And I think that sort of coincides with this decrease we're seeing in voluntary associations, voluntary activities, which involves sacrifice. Whereas, you know, going for a 100k run at midnight, very volitional. And you can push that on social media and get a lot of likes. Yeah, and I think that's a big difference. There is one dimension here, just about this whole social media aspect, that I'll confess I don't quite...

Understand. Someone like Soren Kierkegaard had sort of famously harsh things to say about saints. The problem with saints is that they embody forms of virtue and goodness that place them so far outside of the domain of human aspiration that sometimes the very saintliness of saints can... And have the effect of diminishing or decreasing a preparedness for sort of more ordinary forms of human goodness. What I don't quite get is we're seeing these spectacular feats.

on social media that seem to be doing two things at once. One is... registering or increasing the distance between this exemplary, in some respects, person and their followers. I'm already over here. The distance is important. If anybody could do this, then it wouldn't be spectacular and it wouldn't garner the following that it does. But at the same time, it's also provoking or producing a degree of envy, right? What you have, I want also.

to have. And so it's doing that very strange, it's accentuating the difference, and there's also a kind of seduction. Maybe influencing is the thing that bridges those two. But I'll confess, I can't quite get my mind around how those two gestures are working at once. Well, I think that saintlyhood is actually seen as more accessible now.

you've got people that are able to achieve those those feats more and more people and i think social media does encourage that sort of copycat behavior and makes it seem accessible and achievable and so you can elevate yourself to that saintly level. You served in the Royal Navy. I don't know what you saw there. I don't know what you went through there. Did you encounter virtue?

I mean, there's virtue and there's virtue, right? That's a good question. Virtue. I suppose what I did encounter was... much more of an emphasis on the group rather than the individual so you know whether or not that's virtuous I mean I think it probably is because it is putting others before yourself and That's something I've just acknowledged is not prevalent on social media and certainly not in these extreme forms of display, you know, of physical endurance and feats of exercise.

which are portrayed as virtuous. But I think they're anything but because there is no sacrifice involved. It's hard to have virtue without sacrifice, I think. And do you then draw a distinction between that? performative stuff let's call it the instagrammable stuff and the ufc stuff the mixed martial arts the actual combat element of this contemporary display of masculinity no i mean i think

It's in the same ballpark for sure. And it is all very Roman and domineering. And that is Alamode right now. I do think that it's that... performative masculinity that's appealing and more and more young men are interested in copying that okay now this is where we must address something that somehow we've managed to avoid up till now yeah

And that is this notion of masculinity in this moment. The formative masculinity of this kind, it seems, is new, or at least it's taking on a new form, a new expression.

Some of that, in fact, probably most of that is just the affordances of technology and the effect that that has on our culture to court. But how much of this reflects a kind of... either crisis of masculinity or a hollowing out of the concept of masculinity in absence in a public conversation for a place for masculinity as something that can even be celebrated.

much less is. Are we witnessing some kind of reaction to an absence here? Perhaps a reaction to an alienation, which might even explain how it ends up. being politically refracted into Trump world or something like that. Is all of this just a symptom? at least to some extent, of an underlying disease of a lost sense of what masculinity is, means, or how it can even be valued.

I think partly, yeah. It's definitely a reaction to the changes that have taken place, you know, over recent decades and the changing gender roles and the role of being a man. definitely it it must be and i think that's just amplified by social media um so it's a sort of technological representation of it but i think also there is this need

in many men's lives for these rites of passage that have been lost generally in the Western world. And so I think that's being played out very publicly now, but in a very independent, volitional way online. in lieu of any form of strong community-oriented rite of passage for a man. So this is really interesting. I mean, I... It's really difficult to imagine that first Trump term without the way that it mapped almost precisely alongside that first.

wave of the Me Too movement. And one of the things that was then shocking to many people and that may well have been salutary to others was that Trump could not just evade being taken down by the Me Too movement, but could also outlast it, that he could somehow survive and even eventually thrive.

in the face of it. And there was something, there's a wonderful young philosopher who I know, Lucy Smith, who said that there was always a danger.

in using an adjective like toxic in front of a noun like masculinity. That it would be better to say, for instance, toxic machismo. In other words, a kind of accentuation of an already... accentuated or exaggerated or distorted form of masculinity, whereas placing toxic directly in front of the notion of masculinity kind of could have the effect of almost instilling or installing a degree of shamefulness into the very concept of masculinity.

I mean, I think all three of us are terrified by certain forms of hardening, of heedlessness, of entitlement that go hand in hand with certain conceptions. of masculinity, but treating masculinity from the outset as something that maybe needed to be guarded against by means of the adjective toxic. There was a kind of danger there that it made young men feel almost guilty or condemned ab initio by virtue of being men. Well, especially because...

It never had a companion in virtuous masculinity. Yeah, okay, good. That's a better one. It wasn't saying, hey, there's all these versions of masculinity, this is a toxic form. It was, this is toxic. As for the rest, we have nothing really to articulate about that. There were plenty of things that masculinity was told it could or should not be, but what there wasn't was an affirmative...

An affirmation of masculinity is something that may have an inherent worth or be inherently good, and certainly no colouring in of what that would mean. Yeah, but then Sam, your idea of rites of passage, I mean, what do rites of passage do? Rites of passage for young men, that is a way of chastening the concept of masculinity so that what one gets from the other side of that. of that rite of passage, here you are a boy, here you are a man.

is a chastened conception of not just the affordances that go along with masculinity, but also the obligations and responsibilities and restrictions that are inherent to it, not even necessarily that are simply imposed from the outside. Yeah. But I think many men aren't exactly sure what that entails or what their responsibilities are now because as we're discussing, you know, with the word masculinity in and of itself, many people are unsure what that even really means now.

Especially when you're prefixing it with other words that really change its meaning or group people into negative forms of it or positive forms of it. This is actually, there's a parallel here with a conversation we recently had about... patriotism isn't there scott yeah there is that it seems to me when when a certain form of politics gets momentum and the upper hand whose primary mode is

liberation through deconstruction. These things that once defined our landscape we regard as oppressive or somehow malformed or something like that. And so what we're going to do is critique them to the extent where there's really nothing affirmative about them. Where merely to try to affirm them is somehow to be retrograde. So masculinity I think falls in that category.

Patriotism, I think, falls into that category. There's a certain critique of that that just became withering, such that to assert any patriotism would just be to sound, I don't know, boorish or ignorant or something like that within this... kind of politics conception of the world when that happens you do vacate the field and then you leave it to be claimed by whoever cares least about the approval of

of that style of politics, or would like to set itself up into opposition to this. I've often had this thought about... you know, the Andrew Tate phenomenon, which I think is a slightly different thing. Let's call that sort of some of the more satellite reaches of what we're talking about here. But he's, I think, connected in some way. It can only come along, it seems to me, and only prevail to the extent that it has or did or whatever because of...

the vacancy, because of the breach, because of the absence of something to affirm. And so when you take that, you now have anyone who wants to assert the value of these things, masculinity, patriotism, whatever.

they have a free run in it they have no moral guardrails really to keep them in check and no incentive really to observe them they exist as oppositional forces so the more scandalous they can become in in many respects the better and they meet this technological social environment or the various social structures of our world that lionize individuals, their self-aggrandizement or, you know...

building one's brand and emphasis on the aesthetic, all of this. When you put all this together, was there any alternative but for there to be a festival of masculinity that would be a debauched expression of it, kind of shorn? Of its more self-sacrificing, more introspective, more, let's call them spiritual dimensions. I'm not sure. I mean, I don't know if it's along the same lines, but I think it's...

questioning the way that language is used and how, I mean, it can be used frivolously and it can be used seriously. I received an email in response to the article questioning whether I knew what polysemy was.

I didn't reply but I do understand that words can have multiple meanings but I think that context matters and in the article I'm critiquing rhetoric such as going to war, battle, staying hard but I think that it's not just metaphorical in the abstract i think it's being deliberately employed to evoke these emotions and imagery and actually even the moral weight of actual warfare and i think that's what's

really being pushed here by social media and that's what's being seen as masculine and seen as virtuous by many men on social media i think the framing isn't benign it's actually borrowing from real world violence and sacrifice to dramatize these sort of acts of personal fitness and self-discipline. So it's not just polysemy, it's actually appropriation in that regard.

I think that's a really fascinating point to make. And it does raise for me then, Samuel, the whole dimension of authority here. So... This might make sense. I'm probably going to fumble at it a little bit, but let me just have a crack. So, how does a rite of passage work? A rite of passage is a form of apprenticeship, isn't it? Yeah. You are being led by, for want of a better term, you are being led by a master. You are being led by someone who has achieved a certain...

competence or expertise in what it means to be a... Okay, then you can fill in the gap. In the army. When you are undergoing certain forms of training in order to reach the most proximate goal, you are being led by a certain given structure of authority. What you want to do and the extent to which your values map onto what it is you are being asked to do is pretty much irrelevant because the form of authority is extraneous to oneself. You are being led.

In many respects, the form of authority that comes to bear in a rite of passage, you have to graduate through a certain series of requirements in order to be able to assume a particular identity. You know, it all assumes that there is an ideal out there or there is a form of value out there or there is an authority that is able to command you, that is able to some extent compel or otherwise coerce you.

at the risk of, you know, of ostracisement or being discharged or whatever. But also that you cede a certain sovereignty over your own life. Yes, hence obedience. What I think is so interesting with the forms of online masculinity that you're describing is it's not that, okay, take the example of influencers. They don't have authority, do they?

I mean, surely nobody, nobody who subscribes to certain online influencers believe that these people have a certain degree of expertise or authority. What they have is a certain amount of success. They have achieved something, and my relationship to them isn't one of obedience, but rather one of envy. One of a desire to emulate and to achieve what they have achieved in order to gain the benefits that they have then accrued.

to themselves. That's a much more dangerous, it seems to me, transaction. And that's a form of masculinity or let's call it apprenticeship into manhood. that is so open to abuse and egotism and vanity and vice, that it almost makes it beyond contempt, doesn't it? There was no checks and balances on influences. authority or power. But do they have authority? I mean, what is it that draws? What's the attraction? It's very...

very aesthetically pleasing, it's very visible, it's performance, it's thick layers of performance, but they're very good at fooling people. I think even though deep down actually people... people who are following do know it's a performance but everyone is sort of playing that game it's like a circus you know everyone's got a role in that But that's actually fine because the form of masculinity that is being sought after is also a performance, right? Yeah. Yeah.

In other words, it's not the inhabiting of a role that a master or an older man who knows more about what it means to be able to lay down one's life for those he loves. It's not that one is being led. or being shown how to graduate to a particular position that's characterized by a restraint. It's instead, you've made it. I want to reach the point where I can... Where I can embody a similar performance in order to accrue the same putative benefits. That's nihilism. Yeah, I suppose it kind of is.

Or in some cases just hedonism. I think it's more that. I think it's more hedonism. Yeah. And, you know, the kinds of things that are popular in this performative masculinity, they are very. masochistic hedonistic narcissistic you know doing these for instance these challenges words run across a country or you know x number of days running they're so popular amongst

certain kinds of influences. Or in the Tate version, it's, you know, supercars and scaredly clad women and all those things as the accoutrements of embodying this ultimate... masculinity i don't want to sorry i keep going back there i shouldn't because there's a separate conversation to be had about that but i i don't know i think that's partly why i was gesturing at this idea of what happens when the field is vacated scott you can't be

brought into this or initiated into this or inculcate a higher ethic or calling as to what it is to be a man from an authority figure who's older than you in a world where that sort of thing is in itself frowned upon. Or has been to such an extent that there's a kind of distance or a scepticism from it. If those sort of structures were firmly in place in people's lives, then it's possible that this version...

of masculine performance would have no market, would have nowhere to go. I think it's very frivolous, yeah. We would see it as very self-centered. You know, frivolous and narcissistic, yeah. But for some reason it isn't seen like that by many young men in particular. It's seen as aspirational instead. Yeah. So I think this kind of leads us to a really interesting... sort of curious point.

I tend to come back to William James's idea of the need for a moral equivalent of war. Every year or so, I end up rereading that great essay. And every time, there are things about it that really trouble me. It's the phrase contempt for softness that I'll confess. It gets me every time. The importance of sacrifice, of obedience, of laying one's life down for others, of not just...

kind of seeking pleasure as an end in itself, but rather being trained into forms of life that have forms of meaning that aren't purely self-directed, but that aren't purely external either. In other words, you've really bought into something. And because you've bought into something that might be camaraderie, solidarity, patriotism, whatever.

You know, the goals are not wholly exterior, nor are they wholly interior. I think all of that is really good, is really important. I think the dangers of a... pleasure economy or a pleasure society. I think they are as true now as they were in 1910. But I think, you know, if we are being serious about the textured... the non-singular character of masculinity. Part of any training into what it means to be not just a man, but a good man.

means a kind of embrace at certain crucial points, not just of one's overall life, but of one's day, of a softness, of a tenderness, of a kindness, of a... vulnerability of a permitting of oneself to lay down certain claims to honor and supremacy in order to allow other people to gain that for themselves. That's where I think both rites of passage and genuinely morally directed apprenticeships can not only be crucial but can also bring a degree of redemption to the concept.

of masculinity that simply isn't possible in these sort of mass marketed and social media directed. Yeah, it's the equation of softness with feebleness. Yeah, or even effeminacy, which is worse. Well, yeah, although that opens up a whole different stretch of conversation. But yeah, and this is kind of why at the start of this, I was trying to broaden the concept of the martial virtues because they're not all hard. No.

Some of them are hard in their restraint. Like submission. Yeah. The hardest bits of them are actually not the ones. that are currently valorised on social media platforms. The hardest bits of them are the ones that are the intangible, self-effacing ones, but nonetheless form the code of the warrior in all kinds of long-standing traditions across the world.

We're out of time, I'm afraid. Samuel Cornell, PhD candidate in public health at the University of New South Wales, our guest for this week's edition of The Minefield, which is now at an end. We'll see you next week. You've been listening to an ABC podcast. Discover more great ABC podcasts, live radio and exclusives on the ABC Listen app.