This is such sharp analysis. The detail about Victorian domesticity being considered a masculine virtue completely flipped my understanding. I had no idea that "home as man's place" was the actual ideal before imperial expansion demanded a different kind of man. What particularly strikes me is how today's algorithmic amplification seems to accelerate this cycle. Instead of taking decades to manufacture and spread new gender scripts through institutions, we can now see these "traditional" identities being A/B tested and optimized in real-time through engagement metrics. The Liver King types aren't just selling nostalgia, they're iterating on what version of fake masculinity gets the most clicks. It makes me wonder if understanding this historical pattern of manufactured gender norms gives us better tools for recognizing and disrupting it as it happens. Thank you for sharing!!
Thank you! I’m so glad it resonated. I do think that once you see how gender roles have been shaped and reshaped by larger forces throughout history, it becomes impossible not to notice the same thing happening again today.
I like your observation about iterations of masculinity. I think it’s particularly salient give. The demographic (bored teenage boys and young men) most likely to watch that type of content. I think we’re seeing an element of classes of masculinity develop right in our media streams.
More and more I think nothing is going to get better - which means it's going to keep getting worse - until we do something serious about the rich, because everything else seems to end up being the distraction of shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic. As you demonstrate here, gender norms nostalgia is one of those ploys.
Great article! One little quibble (which I feel entitled to make as I wrote my PhD thesis on it!): while Stevenson's Treasure Island is often seen as the archetype of the "Boy's Adventure Novel", it is actually a scorching critique of the well-established genre. Very much unlike the "Boy's Books" of Ballantine or Kingsley, or the imperialist propaganda of the "Boy's Own" adventures, Treasure Island presents a troubling and strange version, in which the battle for Jim Hawkins's loyalty, between the "Gentlemen in Earnest" (the Squire, the Lawyer, the Doctor: all models of conventional masculinity) and the "Gentlemen of Fortune" (Long John Silver and the pirates) is NOT decisively won by the virtuous side, and the pirates get off mostly scot free ... Stevenson, like Conrad after him (who I also worked on), shows the flaws of believing in the myth of imperialist masculinity, and the dangers of being seduced by a simplistic literature of jolly adventure. The reality, as they both underline, is much more strange and awful, and belief in the myths we are fed an obstacle to flourishing as a man, and as a human being. Stevenson himself was a very queer and odd example of a man, and constantly in dialogue in his life and work with the conventions and the codes of virtue and masculinity, as can be clearly seen in, for example, his other great classic text, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde....
I think The Strange Case is eerily apt for today’s men. I see men who crave acceptance and meaning and try to assuage those cravings with a forced social order.
"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." - so true, and so apt in many contexts.
synchronicity: reading White Noise today et voila/wallahi
“Murray said, 'I don't trust anybody's nostalgia but my own. Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It´s a settling of grievances between the present and the past. The more powerful the nostalgia, the closer you come to violence. War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country.”
I'm pleased you continue to write about this issue and present well researched historical facts. Social media today is a monster influencer - speed, 'wackadoodle' posts, out-there comments etc. It really is about attention because attention is monetized & $$ is power. Likewise, the AI techno-world is unfolding in warp-time so many are taking comfort in some past nostalgia for something that never was or is significantly distorted into fantasy because it's somehow less threatening than evil AI. We're experiencing a binary headspace ignoring the multiplicity of variety - which is truly what this universe is - complex systems. Thanks for writing on this topic.
True, to some it probably feels comforting to cling to a simplified, idealised past than to face the uncertainty and complexity of the present. Only if everyone did that, I'm not sure we'd have a future at all...
Excellent, as always. I’ll have to see if I can find the anthropology book I once read that said that fewer than 10% of hunts in prehistoric societies were likely successful. That means what much of society thinks of as this “provider man hunting for his family” was really someone who subsisted on collectively-gathered nuts and vegetables.
Sure, I once wrote a piece on the subject and still have a lot of notes. The book is called The !Kung San: Men, Women, and Work in a Foraging Society by Richard Lee:
This was a classic from the 1970s, but, I've got another gem for you if you're interested. It's a dense and long academic paper, but totally worth it.
It shows that even this 10% number is optimistic. The paper analyzed the different types of hunting strategies across many hunter-gatherer tribes. They don't explicitly give a "percent of successful hunts" figure because we've since updated how we measure hunting success to hunter-days: how much a single hunter catches per day; a group of 10 hunters on one hunt = 10 hunter-days.
Success rates ranged from 0.034 per hunter-day, which amounts to one carcass every 29 days (not enough to feed a tribe!) to the least effective hunters, who had a rate of 0.022 carcasses per hunt-day, which is basically one carcass every 45 days (DEFINITELY not enough to feed a tribe).
While the idea that "men hunted and women gathered" has been basically debunked, as women too hunted in some tribes, men are still more likely to be the hunters in various tribes (different tribes do things differently), but with an absolutely massive caveat: they weren't really contributing to the nourishment.
The paper authors discuss the "Showoff Hypothesis" which is that men don't hunt for food/nourishment, but for reputation. Many tribes valorize hunters, even if they're unproductive and have to grovel for nuts and berries after their hunts inevitably fail.
This reminds me of how our culture valorizes CEOs and bosses, even if they're unproductive and don't actually work.
In some tribes, both men and women hunted (debunking the idea that only men hunted) while in others, it's mostly or entirely male, but, one thing is abundantly clear: male hunters aren't "providers" like the modern Western myth tells us.
Western men have this fantasy that men hunted and gathered the bulk of the nourishment, while women gathered the nuts and berries that complimented the meal. The reverse is true, but the fantasy of the strong, provider man is so engrained in our culture that those who believe it refuse to analyze the facts.
I've got a third bit of juicy research lying around here somewhere *if* I can find it.
Furthermore, I *highly* recommend the book The Sexual Politics of Meat if you haven't read it before. From the 1990s, but an incredible dive into the maleness of meat, particularly how much of a male fantasy the concept of meat-eating is.
I can’t help but think this isn’t nearly as socially widespread as “3 million instagram followers” makes it out to be.
On a broader, more important note, nostalgia for traditional gender roles is, mostly, nostalgia for being able to provide for a mate/family, which, even if those roles are “social constructs”, they’re almost irredeemably ingrained in us.
If the wealth of the world, but especially in the Anglosphere was better spread, I think we’d see less of the more “vulgar” expressions of what is, at its heart, material insecurity
This is such sharp analysis. The detail about Victorian domesticity being considered a masculine virtue completely flipped my understanding. I had no idea that "home as man's place" was the actual ideal before imperial expansion demanded a different kind of man. What particularly strikes me is how today's algorithmic amplification seems to accelerate this cycle. Instead of taking decades to manufacture and spread new gender scripts through institutions, we can now see these "traditional" identities being A/B tested and optimized in real-time through engagement metrics. The Liver King types aren't just selling nostalgia, they're iterating on what version of fake masculinity gets the most clicks. It makes me wonder if understanding this historical pattern of manufactured gender norms gives us better tools for recognizing and disrupting it as it happens. Thank you for sharing!!
Thank you! I’m so glad it resonated. I do think that once you see how gender roles have been shaped and reshaped by larger forces throughout history, it becomes impossible not to notice the same thing happening again today.
I like your observation about iterations of masculinity. I think it’s particularly salient give. The demographic (bored teenage boys and young men) most likely to watch that type of content. I think we’re seeing an element of classes of masculinity develop right in our media streams.
More and more I think nothing is going to get better - which means it's going to keep getting worse - until we do something serious about the rich, because everything else seems to end up being the distraction of shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic. As you demonstrate here, gender norms nostalgia is one of those ploys.
Divide and conquer works.
The most radical thing we can do is make common cause. If women and men band together we will reshape the world and we need not do it violently.
Great article! One little quibble (which I feel entitled to make as I wrote my PhD thesis on it!): while Stevenson's Treasure Island is often seen as the archetype of the "Boy's Adventure Novel", it is actually a scorching critique of the well-established genre. Very much unlike the "Boy's Books" of Ballantine or Kingsley, or the imperialist propaganda of the "Boy's Own" adventures, Treasure Island presents a troubling and strange version, in which the battle for Jim Hawkins's loyalty, between the "Gentlemen in Earnest" (the Squire, the Lawyer, the Doctor: all models of conventional masculinity) and the "Gentlemen of Fortune" (Long John Silver and the pirates) is NOT decisively won by the virtuous side, and the pirates get off mostly scot free ... Stevenson, like Conrad after him (who I also worked on), shows the flaws of believing in the myth of imperialist masculinity, and the dangers of being seduced by a simplistic literature of jolly adventure. The reality, as they both underline, is much more strange and awful, and belief in the myths we are fed an obstacle to flourishing as a man, and as a human being. Stevenson himself was a very queer and odd example of a man, and constantly in dialogue in his life and work with the conventions and the codes of virtue and masculinity, as can be clearly seen in, for example, his other great classic text, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde....
Thank you! That’s a valid insight—and definitely not a quibble!
I think The Strange Case is eerily apt for today’s men. I see men who crave acceptance and meaning and try to assuage those cravings with a forced social order.
Who is nostalgic - white men who gained from have a domestic servant. I am not one bit nostalgic. Let them serve themselves.
This is all very true and so eloquently stated. It's very unfortunate that the people who most need to read it are, literally, the least able to. https://cathyreisenwitz.substack.com/p/the-manosphere-vs-the-illiterati
"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." - so true, and so apt in many contexts.
In too many contexts, unfortunately.
synchronicity: reading White Noise today et voila/wallahi
“Murray said, 'I don't trust anybody's nostalgia but my own. Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It´s a settling of grievances between the present and the past. The more powerful the nostalgia, the closer you come to violence. War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country.”
I'm pleased you continue to write about this issue and present well researched historical facts. Social media today is a monster influencer - speed, 'wackadoodle' posts, out-there comments etc. It really is about attention because attention is monetized & $$ is power. Likewise, the AI techno-world is unfolding in warp-time so many are taking comfort in some past nostalgia for something that never was or is significantly distorted into fantasy because it's somehow less threatening than evil AI. We're experiencing a binary headspace ignoring the multiplicity of variety - which is truly what this universe is - complex systems. Thanks for writing on this topic.
True, to some it probably feels comforting to cling to a simplified, idealised past than to face the uncertainty and complexity of the present. Only if everyone did that, I'm not sure we'd have a future at all...
Excellent, as always. I’ll have to see if I can find the anthropology book I once read that said that fewer than 10% of hunts in prehistoric societies were likely successful. That means what much of society thinks of as this “provider man hunting for his family” was really someone who subsisted on collectively-gathered nuts and vegetables.
Thank you so much Joe! Would love to know the title of the book if you ever track it down.
Sure, I once wrote a piece on the subject and still have a lot of notes. The book is called The !Kung San: Men, Women, and Work in a Foraging Society by Richard Lee:
https://www.cambridge.org/us/universitypress/subjects/anthropology/social-and-cultural-anthropology/kung-san-men-women-and-work-foraging-society?format=PB&isbn=9780521295611
This was a classic from the 1970s, but, I've got another gem for you if you're interested. It's a dense and long academic paper, but totally worth it.
It shows that even this 10% number is optimistic. The paper analyzed the different types of hunting strategies across many hunter-gatherer tribes. They don't explicitly give a "percent of successful hunts" figure because we've since updated how we measure hunting success to hunter-days: how much a single hunter catches per day; a group of 10 hunters on one hunt = 10 hunter-days.
Success rates ranged from 0.034 per hunter-day, which amounts to one carcass every 29 days (not enough to feed a tribe!) to the least effective hunters, who had a rate of 0.022 carcasses per hunt-day, which is basically one carcass every 45 days (DEFINITELY not enough to feed a tribe).
This, on average, is a 2-3% success rate.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5875731/
While the idea that "men hunted and women gathered" has been basically debunked, as women too hunted in some tribes, men are still more likely to be the hunters in various tribes (different tribes do things differently), but with an absolutely massive caveat: they weren't really contributing to the nourishment.
The paper authors discuss the "Showoff Hypothesis" which is that men don't hunt for food/nourishment, but for reputation. Many tribes valorize hunters, even if they're unproductive and have to grovel for nuts and berries after their hunts inevitably fail.
This reminds me of how our culture valorizes CEOs and bosses, even if they're unproductive and don't actually work.
In some tribes, both men and women hunted (debunking the idea that only men hunted) while in others, it's mostly or entirely male, but, one thing is abundantly clear: male hunters aren't "providers" like the modern Western myth tells us.
Western men have this fantasy that men hunted and gathered the bulk of the nourishment, while women gathered the nuts and berries that complimented the meal. The reverse is true, but the fantasy of the strong, provider man is so engrained in our culture that those who believe it refuse to analyze the facts.
I've got a third bit of juicy research lying around here somewhere *if* I can find it.
Furthermore, I *highly* recommend the book The Sexual Politics of Meat if you haven't read it before. From the 1990s, but an incredible dive into the maleness of meat, particularly how much of a male fantasy the concept of meat-eating is.
Cheers.
I think I'm going to cover this again as that was a couple years back and my article was more about what people were like in pre-history.
Incisive analysis and muscular explanation, as always.
Thank you, that means a lot!
Well said!
Goodness, if only men didn’t feel so disempowered…🤨
I can’t help but think this isn’t nearly as socially widespread as “3 million instagram followers” makes it out to be.
On a broader, more important note, nostalgia for traditional gender roles is, mostly, nostalgia for being able to provide for a mate/family, which, even if those roles are “social constructs”, they’re almost irredeemably ingrained in us.
If the wealth of the world, but especially in the Anglosphere was better spread, I think we’d see less of the more “vulgar” expressions of what is, at its heart, material insecurity
I don’t agree that the express stated desire to dominate women, physically and legally, is a manifestation of material insecurity.
You'd be surprised, male insecurity gets expressed in all sorts of ways
Oh I certainly see the insecurity, I disagree that it is materially based. I think it’s metaphysically derived.
“Semantics like a noose, take out your dictionaries”
Willfully obtuse?