Part One: The History of American Masculinity Grifters

Robert sits down with Miles Gray to give a history of American Masculinity Grifters, and the media-created fears of a 'crisis' in masculinity.

(2 Part Series)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media What Mendez My Brothers. I'm Robert Evans, the
host of Behind the Bastards, a podcast where every week
I sit down with Miles Gray and go sitting Mendez
brother show.

Speaker 2 (00:15):
How are we feeling?

Speaker 1 (00:16):
A one? That one all hot for each other one,
the one where Javier Bardem is their dad.

Speaker 2 (00:21):
Yeah, I love that.

Speaker 1 (00:22):
I know there's a lot of reasons to have issue
with that. I know the brothers have have taken issue
with that show's depiction. I will say I think it
fundamentally shows the killing as justified. Because if I walked
into a house, any house I just rewatched No Country
for Old Men and saw Javier Bardem there, I'm opening fire,

(00:43):
you know. Yeah, Like it's not even about the other stuff.
It's just about like that, Like he's terrifying.

Speaker 2 (00:51):
Exactly if I would, I could go to a fucking
like fundraise charity fundraiser for orphaned children, and if he
was hosting, I'd be like, dude, lighting him up. I'm sorry,
I cannot sheathe my blade until it has spilled.

Speaker 1 (01:05):
He could have a cattle boat gun anywhere anywhere, and
even if you handcuffed that son of a bit, he
could get you.

Speaker 2 (01:12):
No he's freaky. He's freaky, he's terrifying. He's a terrifying man.

Speaker 3 (01:17):
He was in that movie Vicky Christina Barcelona, and he's supposed.

Speaker 1 (01:20):
To say he that he was. He was charming in
that movie by a pedophile.

Speaker 2 (01:23):
Supposed to be.

Speaker 3 (01:24):
But I was like, no.

Speaker 2 (01:27):
No, no, no, it's a deticted by Woody Allen. Yeah, yeah, no,
stumbling blocks detected.

Speaker 1 (01:38):
No.

Speaker 3 (01:40):
Uh.

Speaker 4 (01:41):
You know.

Speaker 1 (01:41):
You know who's not terrifying or who is terrifying but
terrifyingly talented is Miles Gray, who already introduced I don't
know why I'm doing. How are you doing today, Miles?

Speaker 2 (01:51):
I'm great, Robert, how are you doing?

Speaker 1 (01:52):
I'm doing good? Miles, you're a maafy.

Speaker 2 (01:55):
I got to ask you the Lakers, are you feeling good?
Based on what JJ Reddick the same?

Speaker 3 (02:01):
I mean, I really appreciate that he's feeling so confident,
but I'm not. I'm not I'm not feeling I'm not
feeling discouraged.

Speaker 2 (02:10):
That's what we do. That's what we do is like
your fans. Okay, sorry I had to just interject that famously.
All men.

Speaker 1 (02:16):
You know, Miles, you're a man, a man, manly a man.

Speaker 2 (02:21):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:21):
So there. A lot of us are men, and I
think if you're a man whose brain is not putting,
you've probably had the feeling often in the last like
five or six years where you'll like see something about
young people and like what influencers your popular today, like
Andrew Tate, and go like.

Speaker 2 (02:36):
What the fuck's happening with dudes? Right? What's going on?
Something awry?

Speaker 1 (02:41):
And this this feeling is kind of uh exacerbated by
the fact that I feel like every year or so,
each of the big publications The Atlantic, the Washington Post,
you know, the New York Times and New York Times
magazine will do like a masculinity and crisis article right
where they're they're trying to talk about, like why are
men getting more conservative?

Speaker 2 (03:00):
What's wrong with young men?

Speaker 4 (03:02):
You know.

Speaker 1 (03:03):
I wanted to look into that, and specifically I wanted
to look into like the history of moral panics over
masculinity in the United States, because this is a spoiler,
about every thirty years, all of the columnists in the
country get convinced that masculinity is in crisis. And this
has been happening for roughly one hundred and twenty years.

Speaker 2 (03:21):
Oh so it's the same as like nobody wants to
work these Yes, yes.

Speaker 1 (03:25):
This is exactly that kind of thing. There's some slight
changes in how it gets expressed based on the time,
but what hasn't changed is that every time there's a
crisis of masculinity, a crop of grifters rises up to
make a bunch of money off of the fact that
men don't feel good about being men anymore. So we're
going to talk about that this week. This is a

(03:46):
week where we talk about the man fluencers, a word
I'm going to use a lot, even though no one
likes it. Nobody feels good about the term manfluencer. We
all kind of yeah, how do you feel about manfluencers?
I don't care the episode started.

Speaker 2 (04:01):
Yeah, I mean fine. I look, I don't know what
we're going to talk about every time I agree to
be on the show. So I'm just glad it's something
that I've personally invested a lot of my own money,
and so I feel like maybe I can bring a
little bit of balance to this conversation, just like you, Robert,
just tear down the whole fucking movement. Bro.

Speaker 1 (04:17):
Now that you've admitted you never read our emails about
the subject, I'm excited to have you on For our
new episode, Miles reads a series of actionable threats that
elected officials.

Speaker 2 (04:29):
Dear Senator Schumer, whoa, what's this one about?

Speaker 1 (04:34):
Wow, Miles, you came with his address. I didn't even
have that in a script.

Speaker 2 (04:39):
I don't know that. Somebody's just asked me to look
up a name.

Speaker 1 (04:42):
We all love Chuck Schumer. I assume or love you anyway. Cold, open, done,
We're back, We're hot now open has begun.

Speaker 3 (04:57):
Oh yeah, I say top, I'm concerned about men, like.

Speaker 1 (05:03):
Concerned about men. We're all concerned about men.

Speaker 3 (05:05):
Just to say, because men are concerning.

Speaker 2 (05:08):
We are. Yeah, they are my sister. Yeah, I do.

Speaker 1 (05:12):
Feel Miles, you and I are you?

Speaker 2 (05:14):
When were you born? Oh? Wow? You never ask You
never ask a bro his age, dude, first rule of
man food.

Speaker 1 (05:21):
Well, Miles, your face doesn't show it, you know.

Speaker 2 (05:23):
Yeah, the day, the exact same birthday. It's Harry. Okay,
I just turned forty years old. Oh really, I wouldn't guess.

Speaker 3 (05:33):
I literally remember that you are his birthday twin every time,
every time.

Speaker 1 (05:38):
Everything.

Speaker 2 (05:39):
That's because a lot. I really think.

Speaker 1 (05:42):
I because I graduated in two thousand and six from
high school, and I think I was in a sweet
spot that like only lasted for a couple of years
where we I think very briefly really just for the
last two years of high school, things kind of were
very healthy with young men compare compared to how they
were before and after. There was a switchover that happened

(06:04):
between junior high and senior high for me, where when
I was in middle school. In junior high, like I
would get bullied a bunch for being the kid who
had like D and D books or whatever, or you know,
I played Warhammer and shit, like I got.

Speaker 2 (06:15):
Hating Warhamer Warhammer figure fifteen fifteen.

Speaker 1 (06:19):
But yeah, like that didn't go well for me. And
then when I was in my junior year, World of
Warcraft came out and suddenly all of that stopped. And
it was right at the same time that like people
started getting a little less shitty and then suddenly a
lot less shitty towards like queer kids in school. There
was this like brief period where all of the trends
for and I think I was I was kind of

(06:40):
right on the cusp of it because I just noticed
that all of the weird kids stopped getting as much shit.
When I was about sixteen years old. It doesn't seem
like that lasted very long.

Speaker 2 (06:50):
But yeah, I don't know. Yeah, I mean, I remember
in high school we used to we used to give
swirlies to the D and D kids.

Speaker 1 (06:56):
I got, I've got some swirlies until I until I
had a growth spur at around age fourteen, and then
suddenly like I was too big for swearing.

Speaker 2 (07:04):
But yeah, I got a lot of terrible eye infections
as a result of those rough days day in my
early years. But I think I know you mean because too,
like there was also like for my age, it was
like Eminem was also like the guy who was rapping
and you were just hurling the f for it around
like with abandoned.

Speaker 1 (07:22):
We let him and m get away with a lot
a lot folks. I threw me a couple of his
songs the other day and I was.

Speaker 2 (07:28):
Like, Jesus Christy, what wow, this man was out of pocket.
Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, but that was the thing you
get like, you know, but if you're like a black
guy doing that, then they'll be like, we need to
talk about censoring music. But then you're not liked. Eminem, Mom,
lovem mom, Eminem Yo. My mom didn't But my mom

(07:49):
also didn't. I don't. I don't think my mom knew
who Eminem was probably until eight mile and she's like
the white guy from the rapping movie. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (07:56):
Anyway, so Miles, a few days before I sat down
to write these episodes of videos sarted going viral. And
this is not the first time I've seen this video
go viral. It's happened at least once more like a
year or so earlier. But it shows a you may
have seen it. It shows a group of soggy men
in their late twenties to early thirties standing by the
ocean holding sledgehammers awkwardly like, while a dude who appears

(08:17):
to be about twenty percent trendblone acetate and creatine by
body weight curls abuse at them, And I'm gonna I'm
going to show you a segment of that clip, and
before I do, you should know that each of the
wet dudes getting yelled at paid twelve thousand dollars for
a three day course. So everyone's standing there getting screamed
at has settled out twelve grand for the experience.

Speaker 4 (08:39):
You don't fucking deserve to be here, fucking quick, you
piece of shit. I want to be a better man.
I want to be a better husband, I want to
be a better father. I want to be a better
You fucking whiney piece of shit. None of you deserve
to be here by move with a purpose belly.

Speaker 2 (09:04):
Ah.

Speaker 3 (09:08):
But that's embarrassing.

Speaker 2 (09:11):
That's that's just embarrassing. That's just embarrassing. These guys can't
even like lift the sledgehammers and they're just no, please
abuse me.

Speaker 1 (09:20):
No, Sophie, I do think you should click the first
link that I gave you and show that video too,
now that now that we've seen the first one, because
these are all fun.

Speaker 3 (09:28):
So for the first one that I had kep the
first time, Yeah.

Speaker 1 (09:30):
Yeah, yeah, I just I just love watching then pay
money to get screamed at and know that like every
dom that I know would charge a lot less and
then you'd be with the pretty lady exactly. It's just
a much better deal.

Speaker 2 (09:42):
And someone who smells good and takes seriously right.

Speaker 3 (09:46):
Enjoy this, and like, if you know, if you know
any of these guys, please tell them to see their dermatologists,
because I see a lot of.

Speaker 2 (10:00):
One man.

Speaker 1 (10:09):
Not incredible way to spend twelve thousand dollars the way that.

Speaker 3 (10:13):
They understood when he was like, belly, Yeah.

Speaker 1 (10:17):
Yeah, you can buy if you're this kind of guy.
For one thing, the very nicest firearms that exist in
the country, you can all buy for less than twelve
thousand dollars. Truly, you can buy a pretty good Toyota
Prius for twelve thousand dollars. You can just have twelve
thousand dollars and not get screamed at for twelve thousand dollars.
There's so much you can do with twelve thousand dollars.

Speaker 2 (10:37):
Put that in a high yield savings account, right, exactly.

Speaker 1 (10:41):
Put it under your bed, any anything, but spend it
to get screamed at.

Speaker 2 (10:45):
Yeah, by some guy who's fucking dad failed him. So yeah,
let's just repeat the cycle together, guys. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (10:54):
Now, this is a video from the Modern Day Night Project,
which exists take upper middle classmen who have money but
no sense of self worth and put them through an intense, unpleasant,
but also short and manageable experience so they feel like
real men. Their website even includes a very depressing banner
ad right at the top that says attention, The Modern

(11:15):
Day Night Project is only for entrepreneurs, executives, and leaders. Wow,
your family deserves the best version of you as a leader,
husband and father. Your family also deserves twelve thousand dollars.

Speaker 2 (11:29):
Yeah, right, exactly.

Speaker 1 (11:31):
Now, this is all This whole course is based on
a kind of the public understanding of something called Hell
Week that the Navy Seals do, which basically, if you're
going to become a Navy Seal, there's a part of
the training that's a week where you spend all of
your time doing very miserable, tortuous exercises generally in and
around the ocean and like not really sleeping, and it sucks.

(11:54):
But it's also part of like job training, right, Like
you are training to do a job that you will
be paid four as opposed to paying twelve thousand dollars.
And it's also I think there's a lot you could
one can debate is Hell Week really necessary for training
Navy Seals. What you can't debate is that, like Navy
Seals go on to do a thing as a result
of this experience, as opposed to nothing at all.

Speaker 2 (12:17):
Right, Yeah, you get to fight in America's imperial fighting forces.
This one you just go and just fucking scream at
your partner.

Speaker 1 (12:27):
Yeah, and there's this there's this misunderstanding too, and it's
this is we get the same thing with like boot camp,
right where people focus on like shit they saw in
Full Metal Jacket, you know, the drill sergeant screaming these
creative insults at you, all the like mental and physical abuse,
and they're like, wow, that's what makes soldiers and ignore
the fact that, like both for Navy Seals and for
regular soldiers, the getting yelled at is a small part

(12:50):
of like months and admit, in the case of the
Navy Seals, like literally years of like learning technical stuff
like how to use explosives, how to use firearms in
different ways, how to do all of the weird boat
shit that you have to do as.

Speaker 2 (13:01):
A name you me, and the like.

Speaker 1 (13:04):
There's a bunch of actual technical training that is a
much bigger part of the whole experience than getting screened at.
And then when you finish getting trained, you get to
go do that job instead of going back to selling
used cars and encino. Now, I don't think there's a
big point in me critiquing these places on like merit though,

(13:24):
because the Modern Day Night Project and so many other
boot camp style programs for adult men are part of
a network of what you can call manfluencer programs, all
of which capitalize on the feelings of inadequacy and weakness,
but seem to be endemic among mostly white dudes who
have more money than self confidence. When you look at
the marketing materials around all of the products in this category,

(13:45):
you see a couple of things over and over again.
Modern society has made it nearly impossible to be masculine,
and this is literally killing men. That's how this is
all framed. And here's a clip from their big advertisement
video on their website that honestly looks like it was
coded in two thousand and eight. It looks like the
Dredge Report.

Speaker 5 (14:03):
It's like administering chemotherapy to a cancerous area of the body,
and it's going to unearth and expose who you are.
The physical challenging that you go through is purpose driven.
Every single evolution is purpose driven. Every single evolution creates
opportunity for four things to lead, to show emotional discipline,

(14:23):
to communicate, and.

Speaker 2 (14:25):
To problem solve.

Speaker 5 (14:26):
So the project is here for a purpose to help
you become the man you know in your deepest heart
that you're meant to be. And all we're going to do,
is instructors over the next seventy five hours, is administer
the project no different than a doctor would administer chemotherapy
to a cancerous body part.

Speaker 2 (14:42):
This is so fucking stupid, dude.

Speaker 3 (14:44):
Yeah the music though.

Speaker 2 (14:46):
I casu.

Speaker 1 (14:48):
Yeah, my parents both died due to complications from chemo.
So for one thing, Like, I don't know, bro, Chemo's
not really like, are these guys in such a Are
these guys admitting that by doing this, they're in such
a desperate strait that they will literally die if a
man doesn't scream at them on a beach. Because I
don't think that's their issue. I think their issue is
they didn't do a job that led to them shooting people.

(15:11):
And because our media entirely almost because like a lot
of media, particularly the media guys like this consume, entirely
focuses on violets as like a way to prove your masculinity,
they have no way to feel like they're men.

Speaker 2 (15:22):
Right. Violence is a love language. Actually is what we
want to give the men who are in dire need
of chemo?

Speaker 1 (15:29):
Yeah, or as I say, fo, yeah, amazing stuff. You
could you would do a much better job by just
giving them chemo. Right, that's a real near death experience.

Speaker 2 (15:39):
Seriously, and even like the irony too of like chemo
like decades ago, where they're like, this might this radiation
might come boomerang back around in a few decades and
cause like serious illness again, other ganzer, this could be Also, yeah,
it's like, yeah, it might help now, or maybe you're
going to raise somebody who's going to turn to a
mass murder. I don't know what.

Speaker 1 (15:59):
Yeah, non zero number of these guys took their sons
out to the beach the next week and made them
hold a sledgehammer while they screamed down right right, here's
another segment from that video.

Speaker 5 (16:10):
The blood, so people spilled together who go through adversity together,
is thicker, creates a bigger bond, a deeper bond than
the water of the womb, meaning people who have shared
the same womb. The blood of the covenant is thicker
than the water of the womb.

Speaker 2 (16:28):
Cool. Now, what what the fuck?

Speaker 3 (16:31):
Man? What a cool?

Speaker 4 (16:32):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (16:34):
This is a covenant? Right? Do any of these men
even understand the gestational process either? They're like, there's it's
water womb? Was that? What was that part? Again?

Speaker 1 (16:44):
This is we're calling this a covenant because everyone paid
twelve grand to get yelled at on the beach together.
That's a fucking covenant.

Speaker 2 (16:51):
Honestly, you better god for twelve grand. They better be
calling it a fucking covenant. Yeah, if it's just like
a bunch of cool guys and hanging out getting pissed
on and then and then it ain't. It doesn't sound
as good. It's funny.

Speaker 1 (17:03):
I mean, obviously what they're playing with here is something
very real, which is that, like, when you experience actual
trauma and adversity with a group of people, it can
in fact bond you to them, right, the idea of
having and there's it's very attractive to a lot of
them in this idea that like I can go through
this very manageable version of the experience. That it is
not so like actually joining the military and fighting is

(17:26):
not a manageable experience, which is why so many people
who do it wind up killing themselves later, right.

Speaker 2 (17:32):
Sure, or coming back and being like, do not do that.
Don't do that?

Speaker 1 (17:36):
Yeah, don't not man it, Like whatever you want to
call it, it's not.

Speaker 2 (17:41):
War, and it's not fucking worth it.

Speaker 1 (17:43):
It is a chaotic and dangerous thing to do, right,
as opposed to this, which is not really all that dangerous.
And then the danger of a guy who is taking
like black market fucking gear having his heart explode as
he does fucking sledgehammer push.

Speaker 2 (17:55):
Ups or whatever.

Speaker 1 (17:56):
Right, but this idea that like, you can do this
very manageable thing that really just costs money and takes
three days. And then there's this large, you hope, influential
group of men that you share an intense bond with, right,
that is attractive to a kind of guy, a fairly
normal kind of guy today, because it's very normal for
men today to be overwhelmingly lonely. A study by the

(18:17):
Survey Center on American Life in twenty twenty one found
that one in five single American men report having no
close friends. And that's a catastrophe that really is like
an existential threat because when you have young men who
are miserable, it's very easy to convince those young men
to do terrible things. This has been a problem for
all of human history.

Speaker 2 (18:36):
See the cycle happen a lot of time. Yeah, like
you got bored young men or people who have taken
up arms previously and have nothing to do, and like Hey,
what do you guys, What are you guys up to? Yeah?

Speaker 1 (18:46):
Nothing, miserable and alone paying twelve grand to get screamed
at on the beach?

Speaker 2 (18:49):
A yeah, twelve four So what my math? Three four
grand a day four granted to day something like yell
dad on the beach and you I think you're entering
some fucking covenant, yeah, with other people who have the
same terrible problem solving skills you do, or you thought
this was the way out of whatever your problems were,

(19:10):
and then you think you're gonna be able to open
up to the guy who said you're a piece of
shit over and over when you have any kind of
problem that might need any kind of nuanced advice. Yes, yes, yes,
sign me up. Yeah, someone lend me twelve grand. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (19:24):
Now, there's a very good vice article on these camps
and on the Modern Day Night Project in particular by
Brendan Burrs. It does pretty good job of describing some
of the sorts of guys who find programs like this
appealing and why I'm going to quote from that now.
The first time that victrm Diel, a thirty nine year
old real estate agent in recent divorce, met bedros Kluian
he was at a three day business workshop hosted by Coluian.

(19:47):
Seeing Kluean's tattooed sleeve, his square set jaw, listening to
his gruff, gravelly voice, dial thought, this is a man
I want to be like. His thoughts kept tumbling. Am
my man, crushing crushing this dude? Holy shit. This is
a good example of what you call the shallow appeal
of this program and the men who run it. Right,
these guys all look like the Special Forces dudes I
watch in movies. I wish I was that kind of guy,

(20:09):
because I've kind of been taught that that's the only
way to be that has any value now. Feeling that way,
it's not something to be proud of, but I wouldn't
say it's shameful. It's extremely common. Most men go through
a period of time where they're like, I either should
try to find a way to go fight or I
wish I had right. That's not an uncommon experience for men,

(20:29):
And there's a lot to be said about the idea
that like it's probably healthy. As a society, you have
various rituals that are widely recognized that like signify the
passage into adulthood, that like societies that build something like
that in avoid some problems that we have in our society.
I'm not against that idea. I just think you probably

(20:49):
shouldn't have to pay twelve grand for the privilege ye know.

Speaker 2 (20:52):
Yes, barrier to entry.

Speaker 1 (20:54):
Yeah yeah, now. Brindan writes about another attendee, Keith Schmidt,
a forty nine year old veteran and firefighter who was
struggling with.

Speaker 2 (21:03):
Mental health issues. Quote.

Speaker 1 (21:04):
He had his demons childhood trauma full of sexual, physical
and mental abuse, plus PTSD from serving in the military.
But he'd shoved that crap down somewhere deep, shut off
from the rest of him, because, as he'd always been taught,
that's what a man does. A man doesn't cry, a
man compartmentalizes. If a man accessed any emotion, it was anger,
a fuel Schmidt knew too well. He first described its

(21:25):
power when his grade school teacher, Miss McGrath, told him
one day that he wouldn't amount to anything more than
a garbage man. Fuck you, he responded, He'd get back
at Miss mcgraf, his mother who belittled and hit him,
the mentor who molested him. He'd get back at all
them with the sweet revenge of success, and like that
is so sad, because that is a man in desperate
need of like mental health care that twelve grand could

(21:47):
provide a lot of them.

Speaker 2 (21:48):
Oh by a lot of good therapy for twelve thousand
gree for four grand one day, one day's cost of
that scream ode camp. Did you put that into therapy? Yeah?

Speaker 1 (21:58):
Shit, he might make progress, right, and Schmid is one
of the guys who will claim repeatedly that this program
improved his life, maybe even saved it. And who am
I to argue with him here?

Speaker 2 (22:09):
Right?

Speaker 1 (22:10):
There isn't much point anyway, because as silly as these
programs and the ones like them are, they're not the
most poisonous outgrowth of what is an industry devoted entirely
to the crisis of American masculinity. Right, Unlike the most
influential voices in this industry, guys like Andrew Taate Kluean
isn't tricking guys into an MLM or so far as
I can tell, ranting about race science and the evils

(22:32):
of the Nineteenth Amendment. He's just selling them the fantasy
that the problems are rooted in the fact that their
lives don't share enough of the aesthetics of an action
movie from twenty eleven, right.

Speaker 2 (22:41):
Yeah, which is funny because you know, the irony to
me is that this whole obsession with seal boot camp
that's from g I Jane, It sure is. That's a
lot of a fucking movie where a woman of God
through that, like Buds training for seals, and that was
I think one of the very first mainstream depictions we

(23:03):
got of what Bud's training looked like for a Navy seals.
So it's interesting too that we're also referencing a movie
to define masculinity that was about this woman who went
through it and became a Navy seal. And it's like, yeah, dude,
like that man, But.

Speaker 1 (23:15):
For us it's so and it's such a Again, I
have a lot of friends who served, particularly in like
the Marine Corps. Probably the closest friend I have who
did and who then went on to fight like described
it to me because I asked him about boot camp
and he like, his description was so very different this
kind of shit. He was like, Oh, it's a game.
It's like a very silly game, and you realize the

(23:36):
rules of the game early on, and you realize that
like most of the instructors. The ones who aren't out
of their mind are playing a game too, and if
you play along, then like you can get the thing
that you want out of it, which is being done
with it, right, That was his attitude. I also have
a friend who shot himself in boot camp, So, like
boot camp contains, people have wide varieties of reactions to it,
But just the idea that you would voluntarily pay money

(23:58):
to have this experience is fucking nuts to me.

Speaker 2 (24:00):
Yeah right, I mean it's convenient too to think that,
Rather than interrogate your own beliefs or trauma that might
be informing like where you're at in life, it's just
easy to be like, yeah, dude, I think I just
give this maniac twelve grand and twelve thousand dollars and
I don't even get to fire a fucking machine gun. No, no,
but I can hold a sledgehammer for five minutes above

(24:20):
my head. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (24:21):
A lot of my friends who went through boot camp
got to fire an automatic grenade launcher, which is worth
twelve Now that's that's approaching a twelve thousand dollars experience.

Speaker 2 (24:29):
Right, Yeah, we got to use a China Lake mar nineteen. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (24:35):
Now, a writer who isn't me, but whose name I
have long since forgotten. MUD's described kind of what we're
seeing with these camps as cargo cult masculinity. Now, if
you haven't heard the term cargo cult, there's a couple
of things that can mean. It's actually a much more
complicated term than it usually gets boiled down to generally
when people reference it. They're talking about a specific cult
called the John Froome Colt, which was found, like spotted

(24:58):
in a bunch of Melanesian islanders after World War Two.
And the gist of what had happened is for years
during the war they'd been gotten air drops of supplies
as like soldiers had billeted on the island, and a
bunch of the shit that was sent to those soldiers,
including Western food and technology they hadn't seen before, like
wound up getting you know, being accessible to the locals

(25:18):
as well. Right when the US pulled out, some locals
engaged in this kind of cultic behavior, trying to emulate
some of the practices they'd seen soldiers engage in. They'd
done like parade ground marches with like faked rifles carved
out of wood. They've ritually used these kind of like
handwave landing signals and fake control towers and stuff. They'd
like carved headphones from wood to try to reenact what

(25:39):
they'd seen the soldiers doing that had brought the planes,
right because they didn't really understand fully what was happening.
Because these are people that just had not been a
part of the technological world prior to World War Two. Right, So,
cargo cult masculinity is people applying that same kind of
logic to the idea of being a man. Right, You're
carving the headphones out of wood to try to pretend
like you're in a man tower because you don't understand

(26:01):
what it actually is that's going. Like you want the
sleeve tattoos and the beard, and you want to like
own the gun that you saw in the movie because
you don't actually understand what it means to be a man.
There's nothing to it to you, but like these kind
of signifiers, right. Right, So this week we're going to
be talking about the men who have made servicing this
cargo cult into an industry, and to talk about where
that industry started, we're going to have to go back

(26:23):
a century or so to a time when modern masculinity
gurus assure us men were real men who worked hard,
didn't complain, avoided seed oils, and went over to Europe
to fight in World wars every couple of years. Yeah,
fuck it, we'll be talking about the seed oils guys later. So,
speaking of seed oils, you know you won't make you

(26:43):
take a seed oil because seed oils kill your penis.

Speaker 3 (26:48):
Uh me.

Speaker 1 (26:51):
Oh, and our advertisers, we're back, We're back. And hey,
if you want to kill your penis, you know, because
fucking vast deference getting those clipped is expensive, just eat
some seed oils. I guarantee you can't get someone pregnant
if you eat seed oils. You can show you the

(27:12):
iHeart Radio Corporation if you get pregnant after eating seed oils.

Speaker 2 (27:16):
That's a promise. You know, that's a ton of rubber
bands too. You'd probably do it that too.

Speaker 1 (27:20):
You can, in fact do that lot. So the early
nineteen hundreds is like in man Fluencer lingo, like this,
this is the ideal time to be a man, right,
this is when everything was better today. If you like,
listen to these guys talk about what went wrong with men.
They'll talk about like the first half of the twentieth

(27:41):
century is like almost this perfect time, right, men were men,
everything was better, And this is largely because their attitudes
of what it was like for men in this period
of time came entirely through the lens of film and television.
So it might surprise people to learn that the nineteen twenties,
you know, the turn of the century to the nineteen twenties,
was the site of our first real crisis of masculinity

(28:02):
in the United States. Now my main source here is
an excellent article on what's called male compensatory consumption by
Terrence Witkowski for the Journeral of Macro Marketing. It starts
by making the case that back during the colonial period,
popular notions of masculinity tended to focus on either the wealthy,
slaveholding heads of planter dynasties or men's like Jefferson's mythic

(28:23):
yaloeman farmer right heroic artisans, which is the term what
Kowski uses, who lacked wealth but were skilled, physically strong,
and wealth and self reliant. By the early eighteen hundreds,
this had started to morph into a recognizable phenomenon, the
cult of the self made man. By the end of
the century, the American ideal had solidified into something still
very recognizable to us, the independent homesteader or small business owner,

(28:46):
carving a place for himself out of the wild frontier
or the chaos of the city. Nearly all man influencers
today model themselves on one of these two archetypes. In fact,
these attitudes have been so consistent that back in the
nineteen seventies, psychologist named Robert Brandon summarized the four themes
of masculinity in American society. Number one, no sissy stuff.

(29:07):
Number two Wait, actually, yes, yes, it's basically he's like
it's scared of being scared of being gay.

Speaker 2 (29:14):
Right.

Speaker 1 (29:14):
Like that's a I mean, I think he's got it
on the money. Right, fear of like being seen as
gay is a big attitude of like masculinity.

Speaker 2 (29:21):
Yes, love it. Number one, no sissy stuff.

Speaker 1 (29:25):
Number two the big wheel right, that's a reference to
the need to be the provider, right, this the source
of wealth and financial success that like, the people in
your life are reliant on. Number three the sturdy oak. Right,
that's like the protector defender of your family. And number
four give him hell right, this need to be seen
as like a fighter. You know, to some extent at

(29:46):
least capable of fighting for for yourself and your family
and whatnot. Now, this understanding of the American man was
the product of generations. It was a thing that was
like formed over time, a great deal of time and
a great deal of like media.

Speaker 2 (30:00):
Right.

Speaker 1 (30:00):
But it met its first existential conflict during the tail
end of the Victorian era, ironically as a result of
the strict separation of women and men's spheres of existence
during that period. Terrence Witkowski writes the late Victorian era
doctrine of separate spheres, where husbands left for work in
factories and offices while they're somewhat sequestered wives managed household consumption,

(30:21):
meant that mothers monopolized the better part of child rearing,
and boys lacked the benefit of close male supervision they
once had when most fathers worked closer to home. Moreover,
women were taking charge of public education, at least in
the lower grades, and thus further socializing boys in non
manly ways. According to gender alarmists, So this first panic
about gender in the US comes about at the end

(30:42):
of the eighteen hundreds early nineteen hundreds, as suddenly people
are like, wait a second, women are raising all of
the kids and they're teaching them too, They're going to
teach them how to be women.

Speaker 2 (30:51):
Yeah, like you know how that works? Women no women
things nol today?

Speaker 1 (30:57):
Boy ah, why did we send all of harmn off
to die in coal factories? It is interesting that also, like,
and this is up to the present day, all of
these crises and masculinity start with as a result of
like danger bad things capitalism does. Because right, it is
bad for like children to never see their dads because
they're working in the poison factory.

Speaker 2 (31:18):
You know, Like that's terrible, yeah, right, and why is that? Well,
you know, they have to exploit his labor.

Speaker 1 (31:26):
Since a day standing in a pile of cyanide up
to my nipples.

Speaker 2 (31:31):
Couldn't raise we discovered apples for lunch.

Speaker 1 (31:36):
Yeah, And this brings me to the most influential right
wing moral panic of the modern era, because I think
it relates exactly to the kind of panic you saw
at the turn of the nineteenth century. And I'm talking
about gamer Gate. Now, if you happen to be under
a rock or too old or too young to spend
time in places like four chan during gamer Gate, I'm
gonna summarize what happened.

Speaker 2 (31:57):
I missed out. Yeah, terrible. You guys lost it. You
were just talking about that sweet spot and six we
had about eight years. So a young man got angry
at his ex girlfriend, who was a female games developer
who had made a video game about depression. I'm not
using their names. You can find them easily.

Speaker 1 (32:16):
I just think these people have had their names stuck
out there often enough. He alleged that she had slept
with a gaming journalist and she had dated a guy
at a website called Kotaku. Now that guy had not
written about her game. He had like quoted her once
in an article before they started dating, but he had
not actually reviewed her game, which is what they claimed
the whole problem was, right that this was proof of

(32:37):
this insidious women are sleeping with men and it's polluting
the hobby right like, it's causing all of these games
to get unfair reviews.

Speaker 2 (32:44):
Right now.

Speaker 1 (32:45):
What it actually happened is that gaming had become the
most popular form of recreation in the country, and that
also made it popular among women and men who weren't assholes,
and this led to a broadening of what games could be.
You really saw in this period of the early offs,
this like explosion and all these independent games that had
very different ideas on like what gaming ought or like

(33:09):
what a game could be that did not comport with
the big Triple A games and stuff that had been
huge in the past, and like these games didn't stop
there from being Triple A games where you murder people.
That's still the most common kind of video game. In fact,
I just finished replaying Cyberpunk twenty seventy seven. Games where
you murder people are better than ever. We've gotten so

(33:29):
good at games where you murder P've perfected it.

Speaker 2 (33:31):
Yeah, now you can be pretty much any three letter
agency you want to be too, Like, there's probably a
game four that too.

Speaker 1 (33:36):
Yeah, there's a game for whatever kind of murder you
want to commit. Guys, you're fine. Yeah, but yeah, there
was this attitude that like women were ruining games, and
it's really it is the same fears, like, well, because
men need to make money, and they need specifically to
make money by laboring in factories and offices. Because we
have changed the economics of the country in a way
that's more efficient and profitable for a very small small

(33:59):
number of people. Right only the people taking care of
kids are women, And now we're going to have express
this panic towards the idea that like, that's going to
make men womanly? Right, Well, what happens at gamer Gate,
and it's it's a much more kind of autocathonic, you know,
raised from within the community sort of experience rather than
something imposed outside by these kind of moral busy bodies.

(34:21):
But you do have a lot of people who are
scared that like, oh, if women are involved in gaming,
it's going to change gaming, right, and that's going to
destroy the only place that men have to really be
men anymore.

Speaker 2 (34:32):
The only place. It's one of the things you.

Speaker 1 (34:34):
See if you read, like if you go back to
a lot of those original posts on four Channet, the
start a gamer Gate is this attitude that like, the
only place I socialize and like meet friends is in
like the lobbies of different games, and if there are
women there, if I don't feel free to use slurs
or make the kind of jokes I used to, then
there's like, no, this is a harm to me. I
am who am right?

Speaker 2 (34:54):
Yeah? If I'm a white teenager who likes to use
the hard r N word while proban call of do,
then I have no I have no soul anymore.

Speaker 1 (35:03):
Yeah, yeah, and obviously the claims that they made that
like this was about ethics and video game journalism, this
was about like, you know, corruption in these companies. That
was all bullshit, but they very successfully use that as
a screen right. And so when when it became clear
to the media that they needed to report on gamer Gate,
an awful lot of journalists did fall for well, let's
talk about how valid the allegations are as opposed to

(35:25):
let's look at the harassment campaign that's being executed. And
as a result, no one did anything about the harassment campaign,
and that harassment campaign has gone on to become the
standard right wing playbook for how to do everything. This
is the only way conservatism really works in the United
States anymore. I found a succinct explanation for how these
these efforts are carried out in a courts article by

(35:47):
Rve Waldman. Quote. The gamer Gate playbook is simple and direct. First,
identify a vulnerable target, usually a woman, person of color,
a member of the LGBTQ community. Then highlight their vulnerabilities
that disaffected, mostly white young men can attack them. Continue
the attacks until someone pushes back or the platform of
choice shuts it down. Now, if you've spent any time
online today. You've just watched the right wing panic over

(36:10):
DEI as it's led to teachers being harassed out of
jobs and schools closed by bomb threats. This is all
the Gamergate playbook, right, which is again entirely how the
right wing culture war machine works these days. Now, we're
going to talk about how that happened later, because this
was very much an intentional process, right. There were people
from the beginning who saw the potential in utilizing this

(36:31):
community of angry young men this way. He's in jail
right now, I think, Yeah, he is in jail still currently,
mister Bannon. Yeah, we'll be chatting about him a while.
And it's one of these things I've been reporting about
stuff downstream of Gamergate for years. I brought it up
on the show a lot. I didn't realize until recently
that back in the early nineteen hundreds there was this
fear over female teachers and like moms raising their sons,

(36:56):
that really is.

Speaker 2 (36:56):
It's the same.

Speaker 1 (36:57):
There's girls in this space that should just be and
it's going to ruin boys, you know, we have to do.
And it's the fault of the women right who have
forced themselves into these areas right in both cases. It's
just like capitalism saw that a lot of women are
buying video games. You know, capitalism put men in factories.

Speaker 2 (37:17):
Right, where's the market, where's the labor? There we go off,
you go.

Speaker 1 (37:20):
We're going to be kind of flitting back and forth
from the past to the future here. You know, I
just felt like that was the best way to do it.
Hopefully people will be relatively fine with this. But to
return to the nineteen hundreds, right, once the suffragette movement
started picking up steam, the kind of men who didn't
trust the concept of a female teacher got even weirder.
And I'm going to continue with a quote from Witkowski here.

(37:42):
Their presence challenged those men who felt deserving of political entitlement.
During the bicycling craze of the eighteen nineties, women constituted
about a third of the market and thus became a
visible kinetic reminder of changing gender norms. And this gets
us miles to one of my favorite moral panics in
American history, the panic over girls and bicycles. Now, the

(38:03):
gist of the issue is that with bicycles, single women
were for the first time able to travel large, long
distances on their own right, like and without needing to
have a lot of money. Right, if you have a bike,
you could travel on your own and you could travel
quite far. You need to have horse money. You need
to have a guy who will let you use a horse.
You don't need need carb money, right, you just need carbohydrates, right, yeah,

(38:24):
you just need calories.

Speaker 2 (38:25):
Now.

Speaker 1 (38:26):
This change happened during a general boom and employment for women.
So suddenly women are working and they are taking themselves places.
And also the necessities, you know, just the physical realities
of how bicycles work led to changes in women's clothing.
This is part of why the layered and complex women's
wear the Victorian era went away, right, because it's just
not as convenient when you're cycling, right, And this is

(38:49):
bicycle is one of the things that led to women
wearing pants. It's not the only, like that's a more
complicated story than that, but bicycles are a significant part
of that.

Speaker 2 (38:57):
Right. Do you think there are like some terrible accidents
where they're like, look, honey, if you're going to ride
a bike, you wear your gigantic skirt with underskirt stuff,
and that's not gonna get stuck caught in the chain
or anything. Don't worry about it. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (39:11):
Yeah, if you've got you can't get out go out
the door with less than thirty pounds of whalebone on
your body.

Speaker 2 (39:15):
No, no, no, before you get on that two wheeled abomination. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (39:19):
And obviously, like it gets the degree to which Victorian
clothing was like, where's like these insanely complicated. That gets
exaggerated some, but it's generally agreeable that like the fact
that cycles are in the mix now is part of
why it becomes more common for women to wear stuff
like pants. Right now, this all of this freaks out
a lot of people, and this generation of medical grifters

(39:40):
of like doctors who see that men are really not
happy with women bicycling, rise up to kind of profit
off of that right. And these are guys who are like,
I can explain you're not happy with this because you
just don't like women doing things, but I'm going to
come up with a medical justification for why you're really
in the right for not wanting women to wear but bicycles.

(40:01):
They started arguing, there's like papers on this that bicycles
literally change women's skeletons, cursing them with bicycle hand or bicycle.

Speaker 2 (40:09):
Foot, bicycle, hand bicycle hand? Where was the grifter who's like, oh,
I hate I mean, I know you think I'm lying.
Come over here, check this out. Our bicycles on your hand?
A fuck? Wait what am I looking at? It's a hand,
it's a hand bicycle.

Speaker 1 (40:25):
It's a hand with some muscles on it. You know,
she's not just she's not just sitting in a room
with yellow wallpapers waiting to die.

Speaker 2 (40:32):
Those are some thick thumbs. Yeah, grip that shit. Oh no.

Speaker 1 (40:40):
In an article for McGill University's Office for Science and Society,
Jonathan Jerry Wrights, it was thought that women were mentally
and physically impaired by the demands of their reproductive apparatus
and menstruation cycles. Riding around on a tricycle was considered fine,
but on a strenuous bicycle why it might cause a
woman's finite physical energy to be extinguished. Medical journal at
the time would seek out anomalies linked to bicycle writing

(41:02):
and confuse an association with a cause and effect relationship,
although perhaps the confusion was a little bit voluntary. Writing
a bicycle could cause appendicitis. They reported internal inflammation and
swelling off the throat from all the excitement, and teenage
girls whose reproductive system was still developing were thought to
be at risk of displacement of the uterus, physical shocks,
and all sorts of bodily transformations brought about by the

(41:23):
bicycle that would render them unable to bear children. Now today, Miles,
if you're an awful crank with a terrible opinion, you
can probably get the New York Times to write a
very sympathetic profile of you, if you went to a
good school with the New York Times reporter. Back in
eighteen ninety four, the Times was still at the cutting
age of endorsing nonsense. That year, they published an article

(41:44):
titled Lunacy in England. It argued, quote, there is not
the slightest doubt that bicycle riding, if persisted in, leads
to weakness of mind, general lunacy and homicidal mania.

Speaker 2 (41:55):
General lunacy, general lunacy, just general lunacies.

Speaker 1 (41:59):
Kind of catch up, Yeah, it did. I mean, it
is true that when you add cars to the mixed
bicycles do cause some people to become a homicidal but
it's not the cyclists in general.

Speaker 2 (42:08):
Oh yeah, no, no, no, not at all. No, she's
general lunis I love that. Yeah, those are my favorite
terms when like you could just grift off of just
sort of like a I'm going to combine some words.
I mean, obviously you understand what I'm saying, lunacy, but general.
So if I ever see something like, well, that woman,
she's stronger than me, it's like, well, general lunacy has
obviously taken over from the confidence you got on a bicycle.

(42:29):
I mean, this is the problem.

Speaker 1 (42:30):
Though, now, Michael Miles, in nineteen twenty, women had come
to make about twenty percent of the workforce. We know
women had always been a massive part of the economy,
that now they held formal jobs in a world of
offices and factories that had been nearly all male since
their inception. This caused another panic, one that resembles modern
panics over migrant workers, as employers realized women could handle

(42:51):
a lot of the same jobs that men could, and
they could pay women half as much for their labor.

Speaker 2 (42:56):
Right.

Speaker 1 (42:56):
It is weirdly, like very similar to the panic you
get over migrants, and it's all focused on the fact
that capitalists again are seeing like, well, we can just
have women do the same things and pay them half
as much like, there's no no one's going to get
angry at us fucking over these ladies and men start
getting pissed that, like, women are taking these jobs that
used to be held by specifically, this is not factory work.

(43:18):
Women aren't replacing men in coal mines. This is jobs
that had been held by educated men, right, like bookkeepers
in stores. Right, these guys are a lot of these
men are replaced by women and cash registers in the
eighteen eighties. The actual impact in the daily lives of
male workers would have been small, because only about a
third of employed men in nineteen ten worked for companies
with a workforce that was more than five percent female.

(43:39):
But because of the kind of men whose jobs were
disrupted and the kind of men who feared they'd be next,
were white collar types. The cultural response to this disruption
was an obsession with manliness, right, and it came about
in a large part as a result of like guys
who worked for newspapers expressing the anxieties of their class,
of like educated men who didn't get their hands sturdy

(44:01):
right Witkowski rights. Social historians have contended that many American
men engaged in myriad forms of gendered consumption behavior to
compensate for threats to their masculinity by an increasingly administrative
and allegedly feminized culture. As Rotundo put it, when changes
in the workplace caused men to feel uncertain of their manhood,
their primary response was to seek new forms of reassurance

(44:23):
about it. Strenuous recreation, spectator sports, adventure novels, and a
growing cult of the wilderness all served this need, right,
And this is a period of time we've talked about
Bernard McFadden, right, the manliness guru who came out with
Physical Culture magazine, which is kind of the first like
muscle magazine. You know, he comes out in the early
nineteen hundreds. He's very much writing this wave Teddy Roosevelt,

(44:46):
you know, to an extent, a lot of his popularity
comes out of this, right, because he's this stereotypically manly
men who is in a lot of ways not just
like a presidential candidate, but an ideal of masculinity for
a lot of men. You know, in this you read
of anxiety a lot. Yeah, I'm hunting big game in Africa.

Speaker 2 (45:04):
You're like, whoa a man.

Speaker 1 (45:06):
I'm a fucking I'm a fucking Like basically a guy
whose job used to beat a count shit at a
general store, and now I don't have a job. You know,
I'm going to fucking fantasize about being like Teddy Roosevelt,
and I'm going to get into weightlifting, you.

Speaker 2 (45:19):
Know, exactly, throw a handlebar mustache. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (45:22):
Now, these guys are followed very quickly by a swarm
of grifters selling products guaranteed to make insecure men feel
more like Bernar or Teddy. This included a variety of
quack products that feel extremely modern in the present day.
Here's what Kowski again. K Leo Minges of Rochester, New
York founded the Cartilage Company to peddle up a dubious

(45:43):
stretching program using arcane machinery that promised to increase men's
stature up to several inches. His company advertised heavily in
national publications such as Munzies magazines and Popular Mechanics, and
in many other print vehicles featuring headlines such as how
I Grew Tall, How to grow tall and broaden your shoulders,
and from nineteen oh four, every Woman Admires a Tall Man.

(46:03):
The illustrations often showed women towering over short men, and again,
you see like what the what's really happening here? This
is not a widespread anxiety. Guys who are coal miners
are not insecure about their masculinity. It's like short dudes
who work in the city and feel like, Ah, women
are taking the jobs that I thought would be safe
for me. And also I feel scared around them because

(46:26):
my mom never let me talk to women until she
died when I was twenty eight. And I just don't
understand how to deal with the world right.

Speaker 2 (46:33):
And I'm so frightened now, And I think all these
other men I'm around, they're using these machines to lengthen
their corporal right side.

Speaker 1 (46:40):
I could get taller too by buying this machine from
the fucking from a magazine up.

Speaker 2 (46:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (46:47):
Now, none of this machinery worked right, But in the
twenty first century, Miles, we've come around to actually having
a way. You can do this right. Making yourself taller
is with it. As long as you've got money you
can in fact pay to get taller, and an unthinkable
tolerance for pain.

Speaker 2 (47:05):
Yeah, and a massive yeah.

Speaker 1 (47:07):
If you are willing to permanently injure yourself and forever
be less physically capable in every way that matters.

Speaker 2 (47:13):
Hey, man Tallery, you want to be taller? You down?
Just one question? Man, you down with bone extensions?

Speaker 1 (47:20):
What? Yes, Miles, that's where we're going here. I want
to introduce you to one of my favorite TikTok accounts,
height Like Though, with one hundred and twenty three thousand
followers and almost six million likes. This is the account
for doctor Shahab Mabubian, probably the top name and funniest
name in surgical height enhancement. Today, let's take a look

(47:41):
at one of his most popular videos with seven point
three million views and like half a million likes. I
want to warn you now that watching and hearing this
video made me want to die.

Speaker 6 (47:51):
He underwent the height lengthening procedure on his famous last
week to permanently get three inches taller.

Speaker 1 (47:58):
Oh, great content, incredible stuff.

Speaker 2 (48:01):
Thank you TikTok.

Speaker 1 (48:04):
Now in that TikTok, my favorite like response to the
video itself was one guy just saying, one guy Captain B.
Maxwell saying that sounds painful honestly and bad for the bones.
And yeah, good news, captain. You are correct. This is
bad for the bones.

Speaker 2 (48:22):
What was.

Speaker 1 (48:24):
I don't know, I don't know why that decision was made.
But doctor Mabubian seems to be making enough money that
I yeah, yeah, he knows his business. Dancing ironically a
thing you won't be doing once you get leg extensions.

Speaker 2 (48:38):
They tell you you'll you'll absolutely void the warranty on
you if you deign to dance like.

Speaker 1 (48:44):
As now speaking of Cissy's no, sorry, here's ads. We're
back miles. So obviously, leg lengthening I didn't start out
as a grift for insecure men. Like the surgery itself
comes from a good place, which is there are men

(49:06):
who are born with one leg like longer than the
sure other, right, and that right, I mean I have
a cousin who's got this and like, yeah, it messes
up like the way that you walk, right, and having
a surgery that can deal with that. The trade offs
can be worth it, right, or if you've been injured seriously,
you know, as the result of like a lot of
guys get injured in war, right, and they wind up
after they get rebuilt with one leg shorter than the other,

(49:27):
and maybe they'd want to do this right in that case,
the trade offs are, at least for some people worth it, right,
And that's what the surgery was used for for decades,
but within the last fifteen to twenty years, enterprising doctors
like Mabubian have realized how much money there is and
taking advantage of insecure men.

Speaker 2 (49:44):
He told BuzzFeed.

Speaker 1 (49:45):
It's become a big part of my practice. It's the
thing most people are the most people are interested in.
That's where I get most of my consultations. Now, if
you're wondering how this surgery works, don't worry. I have
another upsetting TikTok video that explains it all.

Speaker 6 (50:00):
This nail will be implanted and the patient's steamers to
perminently make him three inches tallercise nail.

Speaker 1 (50:08):
I always check it and make sure it's nice and
tight as not lose where we.

Speaker 2 (50:12):
Put it in. Great?

Speaker 1 (50:15):
Does that seem like a reputable medical professional that you Miles?

Speaker 2 (50:19):
No, Also, like what what it looked like one of
those shitty like closet coat.

Speaker 1 (50:24):
Rat doesn't look as strong as my current bones's kind of.

Speaker 2 (50:27):
Telescoping, a kind of swimsy.

Speaker 3 (50:28):
Bony like it looks like a drain snake.

Speaker 2 (50:32):
Yeah, yeah, it looks like a fucking drained snake. That's
actually your new femur, which is a consequence like the Consequently,
it's supposed to be the strongest fucking bone in your body.

Speaker 1 (50:43):
It'll be fine, probably, Yeah, yeah, you're good.

Speaker 6 (50:45):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (50:45):
Well, look, dude, you want to be a fucking short
camp or you want to your whole life?

Speaker 1 (50:49):
Absolutely not?

Speaker 2 (50:50):
Or do you want to finally be there five? Or
do you finally want to be five to six?

Speaker 5 (50:56):
Now?

Speaker 1 (50:57):
When you read profiles of the guys who get these surgeries,
they focus heavily on how they are perceived at work
and by women as shorter men. From an article in
the New Zealand Herald about one of Mobubian's patients before
Scott's surgery in January, he was five foot seven and
said he was constantly ridiculed because.

Speaker 2 (51:13):
Of his stature.

Speaker 1 (51:14):
I was not treated with respect every single workplace I've
been in. There have been several situations where people commented
on my height to discredit me entirely as a person.
The twenty five year old recalled that, coupled with demeaning
social media and pop culture discourse about men of the
lesser stature being garden nomes, drove him to seek out
the seventy five thousand dollars perceives garden. I've never heard

(51:34):
that in my life.

Speaker 2 (51:35):
I've never heard that.

Speaker 1 (51:36):
I'm not saying guys who are short don't get shit right,
especially in school. We all get shipped for something though. Brother,
there's not a person I know people who are like
professional models that have horrible insecurities about aspects of your body.
You would never guess because some dude made fun of
that part of their body when they were like fifteen. Right,
that's just life, that's just being a person. You just

(51:56):
got to deal with it, man, Right, you don't have to.

Speaker 2 (52:00):
Yeah, hope you hope you have some kind of support
system around the ability to sort of like take these
things on without it turning into you know, this ship.
That's why it's like the kind of sad part about
all this shit too, is like you don't get there
because you're just like a dude. Like it's it's multiple
levels of failure. Then then you sort of add in
this really fragile mind state.

Speaker 1 (52:20):
Yeah, you probably don't have a lot of like people
that are just that you care about and there's nothing
transactional about that relationship in your life who you know,
maybe you could add because like that's part of how
you get over insecurities, is like having people who care
about you and you love that allow you to have
a sense of that help you build up a sense
of self worth, that let you realize how irrational the

(52:41):
things you were obsessed with work exactly. That's like just
part of becoming a person, you know, is getting that.
And when people are denied that and the loneliness epidemic
I think is a part of that, then they do
shit like pay doctor Maboobi and seventy five thousand dollars
to get their legs through it.

Speaker 4 (52:56):
Five.

Speaker 2 (52:57):
It's wild.

Speaker 1 (52:58):
That's a nice car. That's like a fully kitted out
real land Rover from a nice year right, Like, yeah,
it's like one of like in almost any car worth
having you can get for seventy five grand.

Speaker 2 (53:09):
I feel like, but nowadays, like seventy five thousands, I
get like base model Silverado truck.

Speaker 1 (53:14):
Oh yeah, but that's not really worth having, No, I know,
but I'm just saying, like it's weird.

Speaker 2 (53:18):
How like seventy five thousand.

Speaker 1 (53:22):
Trailer dot com you can get a fucking left hand
drive land Cruise and a jay engine from less than that. Yeah, right,
that'll actually turn heads. Nobody's gonna look at another Silverado.
Get you one of them Japanese fire trucks. People look
at those.

Speaker 2 (53:36):
Yeah, what's that? It's like, Oh, this it's actually uh
it's a Honda Acte. Ever heard of it? No, it's
a five speed four by four. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (53:44):
Anyway, you can get some of the cheaper unimogus for
seventy five grand. Those are cool.

Speaker 2 (53:50):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (53:51):
So my favorite of these articles was an ABC News
piece that interviewed a guy and introduced him as someone
who quote, at first glance, says he could be mistaken
for Dwayne the Rock Johnson. And I'm not I'm not
gonna pull up this guy's picture. I'm not going to
make fun of his looks. But he doesn't. What he
means by this is that he's super jacked and he
wears designer clothing. Now, I'm not going to put up
a picture of the guy, because again, I don't want

(54:13):
to edge on mocking someone's appearance. But I will laugh
a little at his explanation for why he felt that
his natural height five foot nine perfectly average.

Speaker 2 (54:20):
That is not a short man, that is a man
of normal heights. Okay, right, this.

Speaker 1 (54:26):
Is why he felt his height was insufficient. Quote, I'm
not average. I don't like to be average. So yeah, man.

Speaker 2 (54:36):
Sorry, dude, Like, and I bet guess what, I don't
even think your little femur extendo that you're about to
throw on there it might do the I don't know
if that's going to do the trick either.

Speaker 1 (54:45):
No, man, that's just going to make you a guy
who's been seventy five grand to ruin his legs. Now
you can't do squats anymore homemade, And.

Speaker 2 (54:51):
Then what do you do? Like and would a guy
like that openly tell you know a woman, because again
it's all about being.

Speaker 1 (54:57):
Like, this guy's got rid of matter, I guess. And
there's like this thing in the article he's like, well,
now I can have a kid now that I'm not
like dealing with the shame of being five foot nine?

Speaker 2 (55:06):
How much how much.

Speaker 3 (55:07):
Does this bonzergery costs on a rege? Seventy five thousand, seventy.

Speaker 2 (55:13):
Five fucking thousand. Honestly, let's do it.

Speaker 3 (55:16):
Just like get there, be in lie on your dating profile,
add to and we.

Speaker 1 (55:20):
Know you know what, you know what, I'm not going
to say, there's no women who would prefer to be
with a guy who's three inches taller than a guy
who has seventy five grand and a high heeled like
mutual funder something. But I'm gonna guess the vast majority
of men and women prefer the person with a degree
of financial stability to the permanently ruin their legs.

Speaker 2 (55:40):
Right. They're like, hey, you can be with this guy
who walks like Edgar from.

Speaker 1 (55:44):
Men in Black who's going to have murder arthritis by
age forty four.

Speaker 2 (55:49):
Or this guy who's five to eight and has seventy
five thousand dollars in.

Speaker 1 (55:53):
The Some of this comes from the shit you get,
like with the insults, where they're like, there are these
locked in stone physical features. If you don't have the
perfect version of all of them, you will never know love.
And like again, maybe this is just me coming out
of like non monogamy communities, but I know so many
short guys who get laid to a degree that would
make these people's fucking head oh yeah, right fry and

(56:14):
like that it's because they know how to do shit
like drive forklifts, and like they wound up doing like
ex showing in a public situation that they had some
sort of cool knowledge and that someone interested in them,
which is the way most people get.

Speaker 2 (56:26):
Just walking around walking around with the air of self acceptance. Yes, yes,
that's not even like you didn't have to demonstrate, like hey,
I can parallel park a big rig like no, no,
just if you walk in people notice someone is just
that not on some.

Speaker 1 (56:40):
Like superficial, super fragile ego shit people. People are generally
attracted to folks who go out, and this is men
and women attracted to folks who like do cool things
in the world. And you can you have with seventy
five grand you can pay for training to do any
number of cool things that you don't currently know how
to do.

Speaker 2 (56:57):
It's even cheaper to be able to laugh at yourself too. Yeah,
that's another underrated quality that.

Speaker 1 (57:02):
People being this kind of guy who is like so
angry at his being five foot nine that he destroys
his physical health for life. Like yeah, anyway, So grifters
like the Cartilage Company and doctor Maboubian are products of
a society with a lot of access to easy money
and deep, widespread and security on behalf of the people

(57:22):
with the most of it. When the Great Depression hit,
a lot of these vanity products and magazine shilling them
collapsed because no one had the money to pay for
this kind of bullshit. Widespread unemployment also had a negative
impact on the self and image of many men. And
this was like a period where you actually saw this
kind of crisis and masculinity spread away from the kind
of moneyed educated class to like working classmen, right, And

(57:44):
for a reason that is much more sympathetic, you know,
than a guy feeling like he's not tall enough. It's because, like,
suddenly I can't support my family, right, And the only
thing that's ever given me a sense of worth in
the society is that I can support my family, right,
and that I have a lot of sims for right,
like that you're not a that's not evidence of like
a personal weakness, that's the society itself being sick.

Speaker 3 (58:06):
You know.

Speaker 1 (58:08):
There's documentation of this. Sociologist Mira Komarovsky interviewed families of
fifty nine unemployed men from the winter of nineteen thirty
five to thirty six, and she described that men who
had lost their role as provider and their self confidence
with it tended to isolate themselves. They pulled out of
men's lodges in unions and stopped socializing even with family.

(58:28):
Sexual activity also plummeted although this may have just been
a way of saving money because condoms weren't really that
much of a thing, you know.

Speaker 2 (58:35):
At the time. Ooh rich, yeah, god, yeah.

Speaker 1 (58:39):
Yeah, you can afford to have sex and not make
more kids that you can't pay for.

Speaker 2 (58:42):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (58:44):
Now, what I found really interesting about this this study
is something that with Kowski summarizes here, men out of
work were underemployed had additional time on their hands. A
wide selection of inexpensive home leisure activities, from playing solitariy
to assembling jigsaw puzzles to building model kits became quite popular.
Considering the meaning of hobby consumption, young and young observed

(59:04):
their most important contribution during the depression years was a
capacity to impart a sense of self worth to the hobbyist.
Jobs might be scarce, but working hard at a hobby
fulfilled the need for self esteem. That's what a person
that what a person was doing had value, and that
the hobby itself took attention away from the economic difficulties
of the day. I kind of I find this interesting
because it's like, this seems to be sort of hinting

(59:25):
at the role that gaming, which is today the most
popular hobby for young men in our culture was going
to play in radicalization, right, because when you lose, when
you feel like you don't have you can't do any
of the things that make you amend. You're not making
enough money to take care of anyone. In a lot
of cases, you don't have a family to take care of.

Speaker 2 (59:43):
You.

Speaker 1 (59:43):
Saw back in the Great Depression, a lot of the
men experiencing this turn towards like hobbies and games. And
I don't think that's unrelated to what's happening now to
shit like Gameragate, right, I think there is a line there, right.

Speaker 2 (59:55):
Yeah, for sure, if you aren't able to demonstrate some
ability of being potent and with whatever financial options you
are you have, then yeah, fuck it, dude, Like I'm
going to prestige a bunch of characters and call of duty,
or I'll build a ship in a bottle.

Speaker 1 (01:00:11):
It's this also the sense of like, you know, these
guys in the Depression had had the again, their whole world,
their job cut out from under them, and a lot
of young men in our society their good jobs just
haven't ever existed, right, There's never been the hope of
being able to like get a house for yourself, of
being able to like raise kids. That's just not a
practical thing. And then you pair that with a lot

(01:00:32):
of the isolation you know that the Internet image has
brought on upon young men. And yeah, I'm not surprised.
I'm not surprised that the first big explosion of like
organized angry young men as a political force in our
culture came out of gaming right. It's not weird.

Speaker 2 (01:00:49):
Yeah, no, not at all.

Speaker 1 (01:00:50):
No, And Steve Bannon was one of the first guys
to realize that this was on the offing. In twenty fifteen,
in the immediate wake of gamer Gate, he saw the
angry young men who'd been so easy to rile up, harass,
and threaten young female developers as a ready base of
support for Trump's nascent campaign. He bankrolled and supported the
career of early influencers like Milo Eanopolis, who had gotten

(01:01:11):
their start making mediat a service the community of enraged
video game nerds Gamergate had started to organize. Now Eanopolis
is still unfortunately kind of with us. He pivoted successfully
to the alt right, which as a cultural product, was
a direct descendant and refinement of the basic elements present
in Gamergate. This cultural product was wildly successful at thrusting

(01:01:32):
a lot of these tactics for manipulating mass media and
harassing opponents into silence into mainstream Republican politics. And that's
a dark thing on its own. But there was a
darker side to Gamergate because the communities the alt right
came out of had only been momentarily useful to guys
like Bannon. He wanted power, and Milo and other influencers
who kind of came up as a result of his money,

(01:01:53):
wanted an audience of people who weren't just freaks mailing
dead animals to girls they hated. They left those guys
behind as they started courting senators and governors, but the
fever swamps remained, and the people inside them did not
handle abandonment and the passing of their cultural moment well. Now,
one of the websites that came out of Gamergate was
eight chan. Right, Gamergate really gets kind of started being

(01:02:15):
organized in four chan. Four Chan eventually kicks these guys
off for all of the harassment and law breaking, and
so eight chan gets created in like twenty fourteen as
a place for these people as refugees to go, and
eight chan very quickly becomes a place dedicated to harassment right,
particularly to harassment of women, and one of the board's
poll gets more extreme than that. It becomes just a

(01:02:37):
straight up place for Nazis to organize on the internet.
And I was the journalist following this, right, I was
the guy who was really reporting on a lot of
this stuff before most other people got around to it.
So I watched from twenty fourteen or so to twenty
nineteen as these people went from like guys who were
really angry about women in their online spaces and games,

(01:02:58):
to guys who were talking about wanting to mass murder migrants,
you know, who are like non white and creating genocide,
right or doing a white genocide by moving to other countries.
This kind of culminated, I'm sure a lot of people
are aware in the christ Church mass shootings and several
mass shootings that followed in twenty nineteen in Pawe and
Alpaso in the United States. The Buffalo shooting was related

(01:03:21):
to all of this, you know. There have been a
couple others, one in Norway that got stopped. And when
I was writing about this at the time, I used
a term called the gamification of terror to describe the
process by which young men socialized largely online in games,
used things like Twitch in first person cameras to stream
their massacres.

Speaker 3 (01:03:38):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:03:38):
It was taking now all of these elements that had
been present in the gaming that had kind of brought
them together and putting it into these real world massacres,
right because it made them in part, it made them
more familiar. It made it feel like something that was
more a natural outgrowth of what they were already doing,
and it was just something they understood. It was the
way that they communicated, and it, you know, all of

(01:04:02):
this was very surprising to people at the time, the
idea that like someone would stream in first person video
of them shooting women and children in a mosque. But
if you followed these people, it really wasn't strange at all.
You know, it was the only way things were ever
going to go. And that's kind of what's scariest to
me about it, is like there's a lot more that's
like that of like, well, we can all tell anyone

(01:04:23):
who's following knows where this shit's going next, right, and
there's just nothing to do. It feels like, but like
watch the ship's head towards the rocks anyway, Miles, that's
the episode that's part one.

Speaker 2 (01:04:35):
How are you doing U as usual? When we end
part one of a two part I feel optimistic. I
think we're going to turn around. In part two, all
the guys therapy and maybe and.

Speaker 1 (01:04:49):
All the girls get to be not near any of
those guys.

Speaker 3 (01:04:51):
Yeah, and maybe in part two Robert will pronounce the
guy's name Milo. We don't know.

Speaker 1 (01:04:57):
It doesn't matter. Fuck that guy, Yeah, fuck that guy.
I'm sorry, I don't care. Doesn't matter, It doesn't matter.
I almost talked about Davis Areni today, but I decided
not to. Maybe next time, friends, Maybe next time.

Speaker 3 (01:05:11):
How's you have anything you want to plug?

Speaker 1 (01:05:13):
Uh?

Speaker 2 (01:05:14):
Check me out every day just lamenting about uh not lament.
That's celebrating are the downfall of our society. And also
funny stuff too on the daily Zeitgeist, which is fun
with Jack O'Brien. Check that out.

Speaker 1 (01:05:26):
Yeah, hell yeah, Well, anyway, we're done, go to help.

Speaker 3 (01:05:35):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
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Bastards is now available on YouTube, new episodes every Wednesday
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(01:05:56):
At Behind the Bastards