Why Gender Norms Nostalgia Is So Dangerous — and So Insanely Potent

It’s more than just longing for a past that barely even existed

‘American Gothic’ by Grant Wood, 1930, image via Wikimedia Commons.

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Netflix’s new documentary, Untold: The Liver King, is exactly what you’d expect: lots of raw organ (and genital) eating, laced with pseudoscientific ramblings and a heavy dose of performative, ‘caveman-style’ masculinity.

Brian Johnson, better known as the titular Liver King, is a supplement salesman turned hypermasculine lifestyle guru who insists that ‘the modern man is weak’ and must reject modern inventions — such as medicine or… vegetables — in favour of the ‘ancestral’ way of living, all while secretly pumping himself full of decidedly modern steroids.

It’s tempting to write him off as just a cartoonish caricature, the ‘muscle Andrew Tate,’ as some have dubbed him. I certainly can’t think of anyone in my own life who would take him, or his ideas, seriously. And yet. Despite being publicly exposed for his deception, Johnson continues to command a massive online following: nearly 3 million Instagram followers and over a million YouTube subscribers at the time of writing. And he’s hardly alone in this grift. Dozens of other self-proclaimed ‘alpha males’ and wannabe cavemen profit off selling rigid notions of masculinity, centred on dominance, aggression, and emotional suppression, disguised as empowerment. On the flip side, there’s also the wave of women romanticising the ‘tradwife’ ideal, curated around the supposedly feminine urge to wear vintage-inspired dresses and obediently serve your husband.

And beneath all this absurdity lies a shared and deepening nostalgia for an imagined past, a time when ‘men were men’ and ‘women were women,’ a sentiment frequently echoed not just by influencers but also by conservative pundits and politicians alike.

But were our ancestors ever truly so enamoured with rigid gender norms? And if they were, when — and more importantly, why?

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Let’s start with the obvious: no, our Palaeolithic ancestors did not subsist solely on raw organs. In fact, the proportion of calories they derived from fruits, vegetables, nuts, grains, etc., was sometimes much greater than from meat, especially in regions with rich flora.

A wealth of anthropological, archaeological, and ethnographic research also suggests that early humans weren’t especially hierarchical or violent. Instead, they lived in cooperative, relatively egalitarian societies with a flexible division of labour. Both women and men hunted — one study of Early Americas burial sites found that 30–50% of hunters were female — gathered, made tools, cared for children, and fought, although actual warfare likely occurred far less often than we once imagined. Recent studies also show that gender had little influence on the kinds of physical activities people engaged in, including at the dawn of the Agricultural Revolution.

More defined gender roles and clear signs of male-dominated kinship systems — such as patrilocality (where couples live with the husband’s family) and patrilineality (where inheritance is traced through the male line) — only began to emerge around 5,000 years ago. But even then, these structures were far from universal. Many early societies remained egalitarian or followed matrilineal or matrilocal systems, such as the proto-city of Çatalhöyük in present-day Turkey or various Celtic groups in Britain.

Even in ancient patriarchal societies, like Rome or some Greek city-states, class often played a far greater role than gender in shaping labour roles and social expectations, with lower-class women working alongside men in agriculture and elsewhere. The same holds true for the Middle Ages and the early modern era, when men and women typically laboured side by side in fields and family businesses. And while gender norms did gradually become more defined, usually due to religious influences, they were neither universally imposed nor unquestioningly obeyed.

The reality is that for a big chunk of ancient, medieval, and early modern history, the average person was likely far more concerned with their crops failing or surviving the next winter or plague than with whether they were performing their gender correctly.

Even if you were transported to, say, merry old England in the early to mid-1800s — the Early Victorian era — gender roles didn’t look quite the way we often imagine them. Domesticity, for instance, was actually considered a masculine virtue. As social historian John Tosh notes in A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England:

Never before or since has domesticity been held to be so central to masculinity. For most of the nineteenth century home was widely held to be a man’s place, not only in the sense of being his possession or fiefdom, but also as the place where his deepest needs were met.

To be a man during this period meant to serve as paterfamilias (the male head of the family), yes, but also to be virtuous, deeply religious, self-restrained, gentlemanly, and involved in family life and child-rearing, especially of sons. But as the British Empire entered a new phase of intensified imperialism in the 1880s — known as ‘high imperialism’ — this ideal of ‘domesticated’ masculinity began to disappear. As Tosh explains:

With the rapid expansion of the empire after 1880 — not to mention the growing fears for its security — this [domestic masculinity] was no longer an adequate answer to imperial manpower requirements. If the colonial frontiers were to be populated and the new colonial subjects administered, the appeal of home comforts and feminine civilisation must be actively countered among those who might otherwise be drawn to them.

The new, martial model of masculinity that emerged in response was defined by discipline, courage, aggression, and loyalty, unencumbered by any domestic ties or feminine associations. And it was found everywhere: from adventure novels like Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1883 Treasure Island to advice literature, sermons, and, perhaps most crucially, boys’ formal education, where stoic endurance, group loyalty, and readiness for military or civil service were all increasingly emphasised. ‘Strive to be ready when the call shall come…’ declared an imperial propagandist at Eton College in 1890, ‘for you shall leave father and mother and wife and children for your Queen, your country or your faith.’

This marked, arguably for the first time in modern history, a deliberate and large-scale effort to manufacture and institutionalise a rigid ideal of masculinity — one that was then exported across the vast territories of the British Empire, many of which had their own, often far more fluid and less patriarchal and heteronormative, traditions of gender and sexuality. And as men came to be seen less as caretakers, partners, or community members and more as soldiers, conquerors, adventurers, and labourers, domesticity and caregiving were framed as an exclusively female sphere and duty. But this shift wasn’t organic or inevitable; it was engineered to serve the needs of an expanding empire.

And it wouldn’t be the last time we’d see such a campaign unfold either.

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In a speech delivered in the late 1930s, Italian Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini declared that only war and a militaristic education could purge the flaws of the ‘old’ man — and old Italy — and usher in a new, glorious era. Unsurprisingly, the ideal of the New Man (or New Italian) that emerged during this time bore striking similarities to the model of masculinity promoted during the British Empire’s high imperialism.

As fascism scholar Jorge Dagnino notes:

The New Italian, during this phase of national history, should above all be distinguished for his frankness, courage, discipline, obedience, sacrifice and readiness to resort to violence. Life itself was a permanent war and had to be combated with the disciplined spirit of a soldier, removing any trace of compassion that could weaken the nation’s might.

(…) It was frequently commented that his ‘beauty lays in his roughness and his elegance in the perfect dominion of his muscles.’

And much like in the British Empire, this new Italian masculinity was then actively enforced through institutional measures, including mandatory military service, regimented schooling, physical education programs, and symbolic projects, such as the sixty towering marble statues of muscular male bodies commissioned by Mussolini for Rome’s Stadio dei Marmi.

Under Nazi Germany, the cult of martial masculinity grew more pronounced, too. However, it had already begun to take root before 1933, mainly as a reaction to the alleged ‘feminisation of men’ and ‘the masculinisation of women’ during the Great Depression, when, according to some, women were ‘stealing men’s jobs’ (Sounds awfully familiar, doesn’t it?) But we also see similar sentiments and increasingly rigid gender ideals pop up in other countries around the world, exacerbated by rising economic inequality and social discontent. And although the Second World War temporarily loosened these norms — out of necessity, as women’s labour on the home front became essential to the war effort — the post-war period saw them tighten once again.

Still, even the much-romanticised 1950s, often seen as a golden age of domestic bliss, especially in advertising and women’s magazines, were far from idyllic. Besides, many women, whether married or not, did work outside the home. Meanwhile, masculinity underwent yet another reinvention. The emphasis shifted from man as the ruthless soldier-conqueror to man as the breadwinner — and, especially in the US, where the American Dream was increasingly tied not to civic virtue or patriotic sacrifice but to material accumulation, to man as the happy consumer.

The truth is, there’s no universal definition of what ‘masculinity’ or ‘femininity’ entails, and even the idea that men belong in the public sphere (work, politics) and women in the private one (home, family) is a recent invention. Gender norms have always evolved in response to the needs and goals of the societies that shaped them — and, more specifically, to the goals of those in power, whether imperialists, clergy, fascists, or capitalists. And then, in moments demanding greater control or cohesion — be it empire-building, authoritarian rule, or economic recovery — they became more rigid and more aggressively enforced.

However, the gender norms nostalgia we see today isn’t just historically flimsy at best and willfully misleading at worst — it’s also quite dangerous.

The most immediate and obvious harm falls on women. After all, the message pushed by many conservative pundits, politicians, and influencers is frequently this: for ‘masculine virtues’ to return, usually invoking a martial, imperial-era ideal of manhood, women must be pushed out of public life and back into a subordinate role. In short, they must disappear.

As writer Anna Funder points out in a recent Time article:

(…) why is it so important in our culture to disappear women from the story? Turns out, it’s how patriarchy creates itself. Erasing women makes men into the main characters in life and in history, and women into supporting cast, or caste.

Of course, modern nostalgia for feminine gender norms doesn’t frame this erasure, sometimes self-imposed — which writer Anne Helen Petersen aptly calls ‘self-annihilation’ — as oppressive or limiting, but rather as something natural, noble, even aspirational.

But women who refuse to self-annihilate are punished, too. One recent series of four studies published in Psychology of Men & Masculinities found that men who express strong nostalgia for ‘traditional’ gender roles were significantly more likely to hold biases against ‘nontraditional’ women — such as working or childfree women. More troublingly, this nostalgia was also strongly linked to misogyny and an acceptance of violence against women and trans people.

Still, rigid gender scripts harm men as well. The pressure to conform to narrow ideals of masculinity can take a serious toll on men’s mental and physical health, contributing to higher rates of cardiovascular disease, mental health issues, and even early mortality. These norms also work against men’s ability to form close, emotionally rich relationships.

When society needed men to adapt to cutthroat, hierarchical, and often dehumanising environments, it packaged the traits required to survive them — ruthlessness, aggression, and emotional suppression — as markers of masculinity. But just because something was branded as ‘manly’ doesn’t mean it was ever healthy or good for men.

They were simply led to believe it was.

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The most effective propaganda relies on three key elements: the distortion of the past, the exaggeration of the present, and the promise of a brighter future. Repeat these messages often enough while suppressing or discrediting anything that contradicts them, and you create a powerful illusion that feels like truth.

Modern narratives surrounding gender roles follow this formula almost perfectly. First, the past is romanticised: for thousands of years, men were the providers, women were kept at home, and society thrived. Then, the present is exaggerated as a chaotic fallout from abandoning these supposedly natural, divinely ordained roles: men are falling behind, and women, no longer confined to their rightful place near the kitchen stove or laundry machine, are angry, unfulfilled, and hellbent on destroying the world as we know it. Finally, a seductive promise is made: if we just return to the good old ways, everything will fall back into place, and we’ll all live happily ever after.

That promise does seem particularly potent for men, though. After all, when you’re told that at least one class of people can be positioned beneath you — whether it’s women or any other marginalised group — it creates the illusion of power, even when you’re otherwise powerless. And it matters less if you can’t find stable work, can’t afford basic needs, or have to trade autonomy for loyalty to a few powerful men.

It’s really not surprising that some men — and some women — turn to these ‘traditional’ gender scripts, even as they’re weaponised to trap men in emotionally starved, violent ideals and to limit women’s freedom. They feel attractive, just like all effective propaganda does. And like all effective propaganda, they become useful political tools, serving as means of both repression and distraction from real structural crises.

The problem today is that this narrative is no longer just imposed from above. Our media ecosystem, especially social media, is quite literally engineered to reward shock-value content, including the kind pushed by opportunists who’ve found a goldmine in patriarchal nostalgia. It’s likely never been easier to instil these rigid gender norms, to repackage them as solutions to uncertainty, loneliness, or social change, which is precisely why it’s never been more urgent to have honest conversations about them — about how masculinity and femininity are constructed, enforced, and internalised. About the many times and places where they looked nothing like what we now take for granted. About what we lose when we buy into their historical inevitability and universality. But also about what we gain when we realise how malleable human nature actually is.

The fact that the only times some men ‘were men’ and some women ‘were women’ required deliberate social engineering — via laws, cultural pressures, or outright force — proves that these roles aren’t carved in biological stone. Instead, they can be bent, questioned, reimagined, and replaced with something better.

And this time, ideally, by design that liberates rather than confines.

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The next time you see someone talking about ‘real men’ or ‘real women,’ about ‘ancestral living’ or ‘traditional values,’ it’s worth asking: what exactly are they selling? And who stands to profit from nostalgia for rigid and largely historically inaccurate gender norms?

Because it’s rarely the people being told to shrink and contort themselves to fit into these painfully narrow roles who do.

Ultimately, distorting the past limits the possibilities for all of our futures.

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