Behind the Bastards dissects Charles Atlas, a 1930s con artist who exploited body dysmorphia via "97-pound weakling" ads, and contrasts him with modern grifters like Jack Murphy, who embezzled funds before pivoting to toxic masculinity blogging. The hosts analyze Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s 1958 warning that regressing to old-style manhood is as foolish as reviving white supremacy, critiquing figures like Andrew Tate and Steve Bannon for profiting from this crisis by framing transgender rights as threats to male identity. Ultimately, the episode reveals how these "masculinity grifters" mask deep insecurity with conspiracy theories, linking historical anxieties to current culture wars. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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The Era of Man Masculinity Gurus00:03:26
Cool zone media.
Welcome back to Behind the Bastards.
I'm doing my Halloween voice because this will probably come out pretty close to Halloween.
Yeah.
Miles?
And it's scary.
Have you ever poisoned candy?
Have I ever poisoned candy?
Yeah, anyone's candy.
Have you ever poisoned a child's candy, Miles?
No, I used to poison mine to get out of school, though.
Well, we'll leave that at maybe.
Miles, are you ready to get back into part two here, Miles Gray?
Host of the Daily Side guys.
I'm so ready.
I'm so ready.
Because like I said, I feel like mans are going to turn it around.
Yes, some men are going to fluince themselves into a healthier place.
I feel like it's going to happen.
I hated that.
Look, we've got manfluenza over here.
Oh, I hated that also.
Manfluenza.
Concerned about concerned about men, including both of you.
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that.
Trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Lori Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
An in-depth conversation with a man who's shaping our future.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
Check out my newest episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Shari, stay with me each night, each morning.
Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Mode of my next guest.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hanging in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
Charles Atlas and Seed Oils00:15:17
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Ranchini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trapped.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Listen to Love Trapped Podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
So I'm going to start this episode by returning to the distant past and the next era of man masculinity gurus to come around after the stock market collapsed.
One of the first guys through that particular door was a man that you probably heard his name, Charles Atlas, who in 1930 started reading, started running a series of ads in popular mechanics bragging, let me prove in seven days that I can make you a new man.
Now, Atlas was obviously not the first guy to promise insecure men that he could make them huge and that in doing so, he would solve every problem in their lives.
But he was probably the most muscular of the first generation of these guys.
As the depression faded and the war years came, Atlas was also the first to realize that magazines meant for mature adults like popular mechanics weren't the best place to target insecure young men.
To do that, you had to reach them in comic books.
Charles placed ads in every comic under the sun.
Because this was a hungrier era in general, he didn't tend to focus on like trying to get men, you know, to lose weight or whatever.
That really wasn't a thing, right?
Trying to convince them that like they're fat and out of shape.
That wouldn't really work in this era because everyone's starving.
So instead, he mocked them for being too skinny.
This tactic culminated in his famous 97-pound weakling ads.
Here's an early example, right?
And to think, they called me skinny.
Give me 15 minutes a day and I'll give you a new body.
And then we see a very, a very oily Italian man, right?
I mean, just, just as shiny as the day as long as painted on him.
There's a little box underneath him, right above his knees that says, Charles Atlas, holder of the title, the world's most perfectly developed man.
I bet you're wondering, where does that title come from?
Free internet.
Who made up that?
Who decided that?
We'll talk about that.
He did.
He did.
Now, what really made Charles stand out in a crowded field of fitness gurus was his laser focus on fucking with the self-confidence of boys and young men reading his adjust.
He was the guy who was like, I'm just going to use body dysmorphia to make all of my money.
And he really did it.
Probably the first guy I saw doing it in a really organized way that I've found that's like really unhealthy in a very modern way, where he just wants you to feel bad about your body.
His most popular 97-pound weakling ads were comics themselves.
So he is really targeting kids to make them hate their bodies.
And the premise of like most of these was that a bully at the beach mocks our protagonist for being scrawny.
And in the comic I have here, he's saying, hey, skinny, your ribs are showing.
Don't let him hit you, Joe.
Watch what you say, fell off.
Shut up, you bag of bones.
And then the muscular guy hits our hero who takes Charles Atlas's getting jacked course, becomes swole, and then goes back to the beach to beat the shit out of this guy and presumably take back his woman, right?
That's how it works.
Yeah, yeah.
After he beats up the beach bully, his girlfriend says, oh, Joe, you are a real he-man after all.
Oh, Jesus.
Thank you for winning me back.
Yeah.
Yeah.
This comic does not pass the Bechdel test.
I did not enjoy that.
Yeah.
Thank you.
No, horrible stuff.
Now, it's not going to surprise you to learn that Charles Atlas was not his real name.
That's not anyone's real name.
What is funny is that his real name also sounds fake.
He was born Angelo Ceciliano, which sounds like what J.K. Rowling would have named an Italian wizard.
Just not a real person's name.
Angelo Ciciliamus.
Yes, Ciciliamus.
Italian wizard.
Now, before he was a muscle salesman, he was a poor kid in Brooklyn who couldn't afford a YMCA membership and tried several fad workouts of the day without results.
Ceciliano thus fell for the con before he got in on it himself, treating Bernard McFadden's physical culture magazine as the Bible and hassling strongmen at weightlifting competitions to learn their secrets.
He would later claim that the infamous 97-pound weakling story had its origins in his real life, that that was a thing that actually happened to him as a kid, that he had sand kicked in his face by a bully.
And then my favorite part of this is because there weren't no Charles Atlas classes to take when he was bullied as a kid.
He went to the zoo where he studied, found out the secrets of muscle growth by watching a lion.
Because his whole program was like calisthenics-based.
He was like, well, lions have muscles and they don't lift weights.
So it must be a calisthenics problem.
Holy shit.
Also, I do love that.
He just like ran down like muscle men from the circus to be like, hey, what'd you see?
What'd you see?
He would go to like muscle shows and then would like annoy them afterwards being like, hey, man, how'd you get so big?
How'd you get so huge?
I don't know.
Lifted a ton of weight.
He ate nothing but beefsteak and picked up heavy things, bro.
It was like the 19 teens.
Just raw ground beef, man.
Room temperature, raw ground beef.
Just shoveling it in their mouths.
Icarus.
Now, whatever his real secret, Ceciliano did figure out how to get swole and he made his living as a circus strongman until in 1922, he met a homeopathic doctor who'd written for physical culture and hired him to author a fitness course he could sell in magazines.
He changed his name to Charles Atlas and the rest was history.
Now, I looked into the case of like, who declared him the world's most perfectly developed man?
And Wikipedia says there's no evidence that he ever won this.
This is just a thing he declared himself.
But I found another source that I trust implicitly, barbend.com, which offers a free arm training e-book to readers that claims, with citations, that he did in fact win a Most Handsome Man contest held by Bernard McFadden and a subsequent America's Most Perfectly Developed Man contest held also by Bernard McFadden.
So, you know, maybe it's kind of legit, although he was sort of working for the guy.
So now, Atlas was absolutely a grifter, but he came far enough back that he was at least fun, right?
In his day, it was enough to be huge and make kids feel bad about their bodies.
Today, his descendants, guys like Andrew Tate, have to do that.
And, you know, they also have to sell like supplements and shit, right?
They have to, they have to get into all this culture war shit, right?
It's not just, you can't just pose naked and offer health and dieting trips, tricks anymore, right?
Right.
You have to have a place in the culture wars, right?
You have to find a way to like make people think that by listening to your shit, they're part of like a great vicious struggle, right?
Otherwise, there's just nothing like you kind of get lost by the wayside without that.
And I don't know why.
I think some of this has to do with the fact that in Charles Atlas's day, they didn't really know how people got big, right?
They generally knew that you had to lift heavy things, but there was a lot of, a lot less was known about like sports nutrition and the like.
A lot less was known about how to work out in order to maximize muscle growth.
And steroids weren't really a thing, right?
Now we have, thank God, steroids.
Thank God the anabolics came online, baby.
It's easier.
People can get swole pretty easily if they have time and money nowadays, right?
And the back acne is free.
And the back acne's free, right?
As is the HGH gut.
And you too can look like Joe Rose.
Hey, I like to call it organ enlargement.
All right.
Don't call it an atheist.
That's what's happening.
My organs are becoming oversized in my body.
He has the massive guts of a healthy man.
Yeah.
Now, I want to, yeah, it's like, think about that guy who compared himself to the rock before getting his legs butchered, right?
Just the fact that you're shredded isn't going like people aren't confident at all as a result of that anymore.
Doesn't bring you the same it used to be.
If you were huge, maybe that was enough to feel like a big man.
Nowadays, it just really makes you feel like one of the herd.
So these guys, who you know, are essentially doing the same thing.
Atlas, was they have to sell themselves as, like culture war icons too?
Right, because part of, in part, because these men are struggling for something that gives them meaning right and, and war is a force that gives us meaning.
So they, they want some sort of like thing to fight for and some sort of leader to like.
Right, you know, take the raids right.
Right, and a good example of like how some guys do this is the current panic among right-wing masculinity influencer types over seed oils.
Now, one of the major sources of the seed oil panic, and the idea is that seed oils are toxic and they're stopping you from like being muscular.
They're they're killing you.
They're basically killing you as a man.
They're rendering you infertile, you know, and it's a conspiracy right, that's kind of the insinuation that the spread of seed oils in cooking is part of a conspiracy to destroy men.
You know yeah yeah yeah, it's easy, it's easier to do that than really zoom out.
Yeah, it's a seed oils man.
Yeah man, that's it girls don't like, because all the seed oils, that safflower oil is really you up.
Oh man safflower.
Oh, i'll pray for you, i'll pray for you, i'll pray for you.
It's got to be olive oil, right?
Where's olive oil is seed oil?
I don't think so.
I hope not.
I mean, I guess it comes from the olives themselves.
Whatever you know, what do you mean to do?
All I know is my brother says that there's only to eat avocado oil, and he's a doctor.
He says to eat avocado.
Oh, there you go, I hear that too.
It also has a high smoke point, higher smoke point than olive oil.
So if you're doing high temperature cooking, i'm like I can second that.
See, i'm as a, as a masculinity influencer myself miles, I cook only with diesel fuel.
You know yeah right right, if it's good enough for my truck, it's good enough for me.
Yeah yeah, oh well yeah, 10w30.
Well, i'll just put that on some bread.
You know, a little bit of salt in there, not too much, you don't want to.
You don't ask too much sodium.
Yeah oh Vegamike gross, dip my bread in 10w3.
So one of the big names in the seed oils community is Carnivore Aurelius, a twitter account with more than 300 000 followers.
That it's.
He's done a few things.
He was one of these guys.
Yeah, take pictures of old, like buildings from the classical era and be like, why can't we make these anymore?
Right, I mean, we could, bro.
We just have other ways of making houses than having men hew granite for a thousand years.
I don't know, we have better materials, if you like.
Have you ever had to walk around on a floor made out of marble when it's raining?
Like yeah, we have other ways of building things.
Yeah, if you do that now, you're gonna break your little extendo femur bone that you pay 75.
You're not gonna be able to keep balance on that.
So he is one of the big guys who is pushing this idea that seed oils are responsible for all of the woes of modern life, and I don't think I need to waste time breaking down why he's wrong, but I will show you a post of his from august of 2023, which I find interesting as a mirror to the Charles Atlas ads that we started this episode with.
Before seed oils were invented, Everybody was hot and healthy.
Less than 10% of people were obese.
We got 40% today.
And CBD was non-existent.
But in the last hundred years, seed oil consumption has increased 20 times and so is disease.
Here are studies showing why I don't eat them.
And then his evidence is this picture of Atlantic Beach in 1908.
Like, look at that.
Look at all these.
And like, what I find interesting here is that if you look at the men in this, they're like, for one thing, a lot shorter than men today tend to be.
And also. pretty skinny as a general rule.
And if this same picture in 1908 would have been used by Charles Atlas as like evidence of how scrawny the average men is and why they need his workout program, they're all wimps.
Look at these wimps.
They're all going to get sand kicked in their face.
Look at these bags of bone.
Absolute embarrassments.
They like Chuck Atlas.
He just sees targets there, sand kicking targets.
Like that boy on the left right there with the, you could see him in the left side, bottom side of the picture in the wife beater black shirt.
Like that guy's getting sandkicked right in his face.
Oh, yeah.
So is the guy.
Do we call him wife beaters anymore?
Is that offensive these days?
Yeah, I think you're supposed to call them tank tops.
Tank tops.
Wow, tanks.
So the military industrial complex is fine, Miles.
Yeah, I guess.
I don't know, man.
Look, I don't make the rules, man.
I don't make the rules.
I'm just here to sell seed oils, man.
I did.
Like, when I was a kid, that was the only thing people ever called those shirts.
Oh, yeah.
No adult was ever able to explain to me like why are they called wife beaters?
No.
The other one you heard was it was a guinea tea.
Are the other ones in it?
Guinea tea.
Yeah, those are like the alternatives.
And like, there were no good options.
Yeah.
Like to the point now, I remember needing one and I said it offhandedly and my partner, Her Majesty, is like, yo, that's that, that's not that.
And I'm like, no, that out loud.
Yeah, I don't want to say that in a store.
See, in the small town I grew up in, yeah, they were definitely always called wife beaters.
And it was because it was like a shirt people in trailer parks would often wear.
And I think probably my mom didn't tell me why it got that name because all of my friends were kids in trailer parks.
She didn't want to talk shit about their dads.
But it was like, I didn't really evaluate that until just now that like, oh, I guess it is kind of messed up to call a t-shirt that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, look, these are strange times we were dealing with.
Yeah.
We're all growing every minute.
Anyway, also, we don't have enough black tank tops in our society.
It's not a bad look.
Not a bad look on those kids.
I'm sure they're dead now, but they look nice and hey, you never know.
A photo is taking 1908 and 1908.
Teenagers now.
Yeah, they're dead as hell.
Hey, they're making some worms happy, though.
Yeah, yeah, probably, or at least were like 70 years ago.
Yeah.
Unless they cremated, which is a better way, but hey, well, we'll see.
We'll see.
So, yeah, this is, I just found it funny that like the same, the same picture that is being like portrayed as this is like how much, oh, men used to be real men.
Back when all of those men were alive, they were being told you're far too skinny.
But it's the same way, even with like, who's raising our kids, right?
It's like the men should be there with the kids.
And now it's like you hear people be like, women are dead.
They're not raising the kids.
Yeah.
I would never hire a man to babysit.
That's just wrong.
And you're like, wow, whatever.
It's a funhouse mirror, depending on where your life's at and where society is.
A certain chunk of the population are just always going to be assholes who need to find a reason why whatever other people are fine with isn't okay and is ruining their lives because usually they want to make money off of it.
Right.
You know, like that's just, that's just the reality of human beings.
And the sooner you make peace with it, the sooner you can just daydream about those people getting hit by buses.
So yeah.
So anyway, I want to read a quote about the fake seed oil crisis by Rolling Stones E.J. Dixon, just to kind of give you some context on this fun little piece of our culture at the present moment.
Uncovering a Disturbing Pattern00:04:06
Carnivore Aurelius is an account dedicated to restoring our ancestral meat-loving lifestyle.
Its website also sells a branded bag of beef liver crisps for $89.99.
Like other proponents of the carnivore diet, like Jordan Peterson or Andrew Tate, Carnivore Aurelius frequently advocates for traditional family values, tweeting about how feminism is a scam or idyllic photos of young, beautiful blonde moms with babies with the caption, ladies, there's nothing wrong with you if you want this over becoming a partner at a law firm.
It has also devoted much space to pushing the evils of seed oils.
My favorite thing about this is, so he's claimed that seed oils are the most destructive force in the world today, and cutting them out of the diet will chit your diet, will change your health.
And some of his evidence for that is canola oil is literally made from seeds of the rape plant, named after what it will do to your health.
Oh, okay.
I feel like I shouldn't need to say anything here, but I will, which is that rape seed, which is the unfortunate name of the plant that canola.
I always thought it was misspelled whenever I had seen it.
I was like, no, it is an unfortunate name.
Yeah.
But it has nothing to do with rape, the thing, right?
It comes from the Latin word rapum for turnip because it's like related to the turnip plant.
Oh, thank God.
Just unrelated.
I thought just some sick fuck was this like, you know what we're going to name this one.
Could we have called it rap seed?
Probably.
Yeah.
Probably would have been a better idea.
But you know, scientists never listen to what I think things should be named.
And I keep telling, I keep telling them and I keep telling the, you know, the local police.
I'd say it's a misunderstanding.
It's a misunderstanding.
He's got good ideas.
Listen to it.
Speaking of calling the local police, don't do that.
Listen to these ads.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
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What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Monument.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
Clayton Eckard's Paternity Scandal00:03:24
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Olespi and Michael Marancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Amaricopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired, City Hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
Jeffrey Hood did.
July 2003.
Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged you a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
He related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Sherry, stay with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
And we're back.
So again, I'm not going to spend a lot of time fact-checking Carnivore Aurelius' Twitter account, in part because his fans won't listen to this show.
They can read.
The New Sign of Masculinity00:15:50
Yeah.
I mean, I know about it, but like maybe offline, you can just tell me why I shouldn't be tripping about it because I threw out all my.
Oh, no, you should be very scared of seeing it.
Absolutely, but it's okay.
I have a solution for you, you know?
I have pure chicken liver that did not come from KFC.
Just for $300 a pound, I will send it to you via the mail.
Do they have that again?
They used to have it at KFC.
Do they not anymore?
I haven't gotten a KFC in a very long time.
Had chicken liver, chicken livers, and it was pretty good.
It was not.
Wow, I have no idea.
I like liver, i'm like the liver king, you know.
Yeah yeah, you fried up some more jacket, thank you, thank you.
Uh, it's because of all the steroids.
Oh, going back to our journey through time, you might expect the post-war era right, the you know, late 40s through the 50s to have been a time where like, the masculinity and crisis thing wouldn't have found much purchase.
Right, if any period of time men were actually confident in themselves, it must have been the post-war years.
Right, these guys went and they kicked some Nazi ass and they came back and they bought houses for 13.
Right, like what?
There was never a better time to feel like a man than this.
As long as you were white right yeah, ttsd as a concept didn't really exist there's.
No, you're just drinking your way through that, you know?
Yeah, that poor fucker's shell.
Shocked yeah, scared, of war.
Why do I scream at my kids every night?
Just go back home and hit your children like the rest of us.
Come on now uh, so this was however, a time of crisis for masculinity, like literally every other period of modern American history has been.
Um, and specifically, it was a time in which American intellectuals first really started to write in a modern sense about the crisis of American masculinity.
Now, the fact that this happens makes happened to make sense when you put a few more things together.
The 1950s is the era in which hyperviolent men's magazines first become really popular.
We've done some episodes with Margaret Killjoy where we read through a few of those.
But these are, like you see them made fun of on the internet today magazines where like, the cover will be a guy fighting a bunch of crabs right or like rustling a bear or something, while a half-naked woman like looks on right.
And if you read interviews with like, writers of that era, some of them are pretty open about the fact that they saw their audience as primarily frustrated men who'd been in the military during the war years but never seen combat, and so they just kind of permanently felt like they'd missed out right, this thing that would have made me into a man and made me confident I didn't get.
It was kind of stolen from me.
Right right right right yeah, isn't that kind of what Jarhead was about?
Yeah yeah, I mean well, what's?
Yeah, I guess so because, like you know, Desert storm wasn't really a war.
Um yeah uh, am I misremembering?
I felt like that was like a big part of a long time.
Oh, I needed to see the pink mist man, and I wasn't enough.
Yeah yeah yeah, kind of thing anyway.
Yeah, that you only, you only get that experience, that a guy's who didn't see the pink mist, but I guess that makes sense, yeah.
So Witkowski points out that the 1950s was not so much a real crisis of manhood because again, the average white man in America was doing pretty well in that decade but instead it was.
It was a crisis, and all of these articles about crises and masculinity were part the result of a crisis and self-confidence among the kind of men who wrote about culture for a living.
Right, these were guys who overwhelmingly hadn't fought right.
Right, these are guys who, you know, felt insecure about their position as cultural elites, and this is when you started to also see analysis of like films and tv shows and what, What they had to say about masculinity, right?
One of the shows that really scared these kind of like men writing these articles at the time was The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, which poked fun at male authority figures and had competent, witty female characters.
And there was a certain kind of public intellectual who was terrified by this.
And I'm going to read a quote again from Witkowski's paper.
In a fascinating Look magazine article entitled The American Male, Why Do Women Dominate Him, author J. Robert Moskin opined with harm, it is certain that as women grow ever more numerous and more dominant, we will have to invent new meanings and myths for maleness in America.
Because as psychiatrist Dr. Iron J. Roseland warns, we are drifting toward a social structure made up of he women and she men.
Moskin believed men coped with this situation, at least in part, through a set of gendered consumption activities.
They drank regularly in commuter cane bar cars, watched televised baseball at home, played golf on weekends, and went on all-male fishing trips.
At work, their expense accounts paid for meals at fancy restaurants and when traveling for spacious suites and lavish entertaining.
Moskin's article clearly focused on the lives of middle-class men like himself.
He was senior editor at Look magazine at the time.
And that is such a part of like all of these, all of these male panic articles is that like, it's just the thing that you, the guy who was like born into wealth and privilege and is like the head editor at Esquire, it's just what you are scared of, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Because you know that you don't have a real job.
Right.
Yeah.
What do you do?
It's like, I rank bow ties and then talk to guys who just served in a combat zone.
Yeah, I tried to scare men who lived through the SS attacking them about Ozzie and Harriet.
Yeah.
Right, right, right.
Survivors of Bastone.
I try to get to freak out about girls in movies.
Awesome stuff, man.
I know how to speak their language, man.
It's part of why this is so funny.
Again, my grandpa did all of this stuff, went overseas, like fought in wars, and then came back home and would have been the first to tell you that he took every dime he ever made and handed it over to his wife who managed all of the family finances because he had an eighth grade education and she was really good at math, right?
He never felt like less of a man as a result of it.
I know.
Yeah, I mean, I mean, that's the thing that I think, especially that generation was offered, like in that sense, because so many served.
Yeah, they come back and like, maybe you just come back and be like, you know what?
I realized I don't know shit about math.
Here, man, just take these checks.
Just keep me fed and I'll be okay.
So Moskin was a major advocate of the idea that the increasing visibility of gay men, and remember, this is 1950 goddamn eight, was a sign that American men were losing their potency.
Now, as opposed to the crisis of manhood around the turn of the century or the 1920s, the chief fear here wasn't that women were ruining young boys.
Instead, now it had moved on to a feeling that in a world of more liberated women, men might have to work harder to find companionship.
Now, the manfluencer who sailed into this breach was kind of ironically the least toxic guy we're going to talk about in these episodes, Hugh Hefner.
And I'm not saying he was a very toxic man, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Playboy actually offered, in addition to a new vision of manhood, it offered a new vision of like womanhood that was in some ways less poisonous than what had come before, right?
In part because women were not seen in Playboy as a threat, as opposed to women being interested in you was shown as a sign of vigor and success, right?
And there's a lot that's toxic about that, but it wasn't telling men you should be scared of women because they're working, right?
It was more telling them that your ability to be interesting to these new liberated women is what defines you as a man, you know?
And again, there's toxic stuff there, but it's less poisonous than some of the stuff we've talked about out there.
But at least it's centered.
Like, no, man, you're less than and can be better.
It's not them.
You need to improve.
And you need to meet their new and expanded interests too by changing and largely by buying things, right?
By being by having a bachelor's pad, by purchasing these kind of luxury items, having multiple rooms that were just gigantic mattresses where untold horrors befell people.
But yeah, yeah, yeah.
Hugh, like Hugh Hefner is not doing this because it's the good thing to do, but it does.
It is like less poisonous than like women are corrupting your children because they're raising them.
Yeah.
Right.
Now, Playboy helped ignite a market for a new kind of content aimed entirely at men, as the men's adventure magazines were, but focused on cultivating an image of class and refinement by selling designer clothing and high-end stereo equipment to guys with disposable income.
And I also think it's a little less toxic to be like, spend your disposable income on like gym shit or getting taller, as opposed to like, at least you got a stereo if you buy out of a stereo.
Maybe it won't actually help you, you know, pick up a lady, but at least you've got a stereo.
Right.
And maybe a grandkid comes across that amplifier and is like, hey, this is a fucking sweet amp.
Yeah.
I can sell that for drugs.
Right.
Yes.
For the new sign of masculinity.
Now, one of the magazines that came from this moment was Esquire, which in 1958 published an article you will see cited in every history of American masculinity.
If you read any of these modern day, like published in the last year or two, articles about our current crisis of masculinity, they will all reference an article called The Crisis of American Masculinity by Arthur Schleshinger Jr.
Now, Arthur was kind of the platonic ideal of an East Coast intellectual elite.
His mom's family had come over on the Mayflower.
His dad was a Prussian Jew who'd converted and sent him to Exeter Academy and then Harvard.
Over a long career as a political writer, he laid down the definitive first biography of JFK's White House.
He convinced RFK to run for president.
He then wrote a definitive book about RFK after he was assassinated.
He invented the term the imperial presidency.
So he's a guy people listened to.
And also, I will wager, a guy who knew very little about how the average man in the U.S. felt about masculinity, right?
He was not a guy who talked to a lot of blue-collar laborers.
You know, his friends are all wealthy and influential elites.
In 1958, he decided to write an article that reflected their fears about manhood because this was the late 50s.
It ran into Esquire next to one of the better cigarette ads I've seen.
Miles, does this make you want a Paul Maul?
Because I'll tell you what.
Oh, man.
Wait, how do I get that flipped?
Nothing like lobster and tobacco, two great tastes that go great together.
Look, I'm always, I've always said there's nothing that goes together, like North Carolina, North Carolinian tobacco and shellfish just mixing in my mouth.
Look, look, when you're eating the shellfish in Atlantic City, it's been rancid for up to 72 hours before it hits your plate.
You need a Paul Maul to coat your throat.
That's just a protective effect.
Exactly.
Yeah, that's how you, yeah, you fight off the bacterial infection.
That's the only way to survive eating Atlantic City shellfish.
What a fucking lifestyle.
It's like you want this, bro.
We know you want to have a fucking cigarette in one hand.
Bunch of fucking shrimp sucking down 70-degree quote-unquote fresh shrimp.
Yeah.
No, man, that's not the way to advertise these things.
Hey, boys, want to not eat for days?
Yeah.
Cigarette.
Yummies.
Yeah.
Your ribs are showing now, fella.
I do find it interesting, too, that Ad uses the term smoked out, no dry smoked-out taste, but in a very different term to how we use smoked-out today, Miles.
Wow, but now I'm like, hold on, Paul Maul.
What are you saying?
I'm back.
Fascinating.
Yeah.
Schleshinger's article is still deeply influential today in part because it seems so modern.
When he lists archetypes of masculinity, they're all characters from books or movies.
And a huge amount of his conclusions on this crisis are based on media.
Hemingway's later books, for example, he cites as evidence that men in general have become preoccupied with proving their virility.
And like, I might suggest that Hemingway's lack of self-confidence as he aged might have more to do with why those books were the way they were than how the average American was in 1958.
I don't know.
Maybe that makes a little more sense to me.
It's not a me problem.
It's not a me problem.
Yeah.
Obviously, the average American, like Hemingway was channeling Joe Schmo in these books he wrote 14 seconds before blowing his brains out, you know?
Clearly.
Just fascinating conclusions that he came to here.
Now, it becomes clear a few paragraphs in that Schlesinger is personally upset with some of the same things that had worried men a generation earlier.
Quote, while men design dresses and brew up cosmetics, women become doctors, lawyers, bank cashiers, and executives.
Women now fill many masculine roles, writes the psychologist, Dr. Brunel Bettelheim, and expect their husbands to assume many of the tasks once reserved for their own sex.
They see men expanding, aggressive force, seizing new domains like a conquering army, while men, more and more on the defensive, are hardly able to hold their own and gracefully accept assignments from their new rulers.
Yeah, their new rulers, women ruling everything in 1958.
Oh, how do they see the future?
Yeah.
Fascinating stuff.
Downwent patriarchy.
Men are making perfume now.
Now, as a liberal intellectual, I will say Arthur doesn't let himself go too far down this road.
He does pivot by it.
First off, he says that, like, well, we can't turn things around.
Once women have gotten a taste of freedom, they're just going to keep being free.
And we just have to accept that.
Right.
And he does point out, he also makes a note that, like, obviously there's a chance that a man who helps out with cleaning the house might just be super confident in his masculinity, right?
Maybe, maybe a man who literally stabbed SS men to death with frozen icicles doesn't feel emasculated by sweeping, you know?
But then we get this line.
But there is more impressive evidence than the helpful husband that this is an age of sexual ambiguity.
It appears no accident, for example, that the changing of sex, the Christine Jorgensen phenomenon, so fascinates our newspaper editors and readers, or that homosexuality, that incarnation of sexual ambiguity, should be encouraged, enjoying a cultural boom new in our history.
Now, we've talked about Christine Jorgensen on the show before.
She was probably the first transgender woman on American television.
You know, she was kind of the first public transgender celebrity in like American life.
And she was, you know, because in part because she was seen as kind of singular, as opposed to a symbol of a community of people, I think she actually got a lot less attacked than we currently see today in like the right-wing anti-trans culture war.
She was kind of described, she was often seen as like, this is one person who is like, has this peculiar thing about them or having on them on TV to talk about it as opposed to like, you know, something broader.
But it is interesting to me that like in this foundational work of American male insecurity, Schlesinger picks on a trans woman, right?
Like that is kind of, kind of fascinating.
And he's not the only guy doing it, but he does so in a way that's like very familiar to the modern era.
It's like, she's a sign that men in general are less confident in being men.
Just like calling homosexuality a sign of sexual ambiguity.
I'm like, man, there's nothing ambiguous about being clear.
Pretty clear.
Yeah.
I know what I want.
Yeah.
But I do consider it worthwhile to draw the connection.
Right.
Now, if you can tolerate the way that Schleshinger writes, and that is a big if, his article is extremely funny at points.
There's a long segment where he frets over homosexual male characters in fiction and how they suggest men are rejecting normal female desire for full and reciprocal love.
And then he writes this incredible paragraph.
One can pause and note why the Gary Coopers, Carrie Grants, Clark Gables, and Spencer Tracy's continue to play romantic leads opposite girls young enough to be their daughters.
Redefining Masculinity Through Writing00:05:06
It's obviously because so few of the younger male stars can project a convincing sense of masculinity.
Yeah, man, that's why.
Yeah, that's why, bro.
That is going to keep happening for all of the time that movies exist.
Yes.
Holy shit.
Yes.
It's just that these young bucks can't compete with the sex, the masculinity of a Carrie, Gary Cooper, you know?
Yeah.
Oh my god.
Yeah.
Wow.
So funny.
I love that.
That's so funny.
Bottle that up.
I love that.
Yeah, man.
It's because these guys can't get their dicks up.
It's not because a lot of men like very young women.
It has to be because of this.
Absolutely.
Just nuts.
You know what else is crazy, Miles?
The deals that our advertisers will guarantee you.
Absolutely so out of their mind that they have been 5150 and are currently being held in a psychiatric facility against their will.
It's really a problem.
Yeah, they're wearing grippy socks.
Yeah.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one: never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two: never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends, oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modern.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through it.
I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Yeah.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news out of Maricopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired, City Hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that, Jeffrey, what did it?
July 2003, Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
A Charismatic Politician's Secret00:14:19
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listening to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Anyway, we're back.
So Arthur does come, despite some very, very silly lines, to a decent enough conclusion.
I will say this is not like a hateful article.
It's just deeply out of touch.
And his conclusion is that if you, we can't, there's no like recovering the old style of masculinity.
Things have changed.
Women now have much more freedom than they do, and that that's not going backwards, right?
So he specifically states, I'll give him credit for this, he's like, trying to go back to the old style of masculinity is as foolish as trying to bring back white supremacy, right?
He describes both as the neuroses of an immature society.
And then he goes on to suggest that men need to remake themselves.
And this is again where you get to, well, you're just a deeply out of touch coastal elite where he's like, and obviously the way for men to relate, remake themselves is through satire and politics, right?
Men should write funny articles for the New Yorker to recover their masculinity.
How many smoking jackets do you own?
Get into politics.
He writes, a virile political life will be definite and hard-hitting, respecting debate and dissent, seeking clarity and decision.
Basically, he's like, to solve the crisis of masculinity, we need to redefine masculinity as like writing pithy articles for a living and political columns, you know?
Right, right.
Which is exactly what he does.
Arthur Schleshinger, a man who is not at all insecure about his manhood, does for a living.
No.
Can I comment on it?
Yeah, I just find that so funny.
Now, obviously, Miles, in our modern era, where men still control most of the wealth and power in society, one of the best ways to profit off the masculinity crisis is to sell guys like Arthur Schlesinger, who himself was not, again, not going to make fun of his appearance, but if you look at a picture of him, not an imposing figure, right?
No.
To sell guys like that an image of masculinity they want to copy.
And as we sort of started the episode with, the model is very consistent across all of the grifters today, right?
And it's a guy who looks like a Navy SEAL in a movie from the mid-aughts, right?
It's like, yeah, right.
And to give you an example, they all look kind of like this, right?
If there's a phenotype for manfluencers, the most common one by far, and like Andrew Tate doesn't match this, but a lot of them do, right?
Yeah.
It's this guy.
He's got like kind of a military style haircut.
He's got a big beard.
He's either wearing a tailored suit, workout gear, or like combat gear, right?
Right.
Yeah.
All of like 80% of the dudes in this area.
Tailored or tailored tack gear, right?
Too skinny of a tie, personally.
Too skinny of a tie, you know, beard clearly died, but whatever.
Now, there's a million of these guys out there, but the particular guy whose photo I just showed you is named Jack Murphy.
Now, Jack came up in a similar social stratus to Schlesinger and his pierce.
He graduated George Mason University and then went to Georgetown School of Foreign Service, where he earned an MA in international affairs.
He has talked about his childhood as being extremely difficult and like abusive.
Maybe that's true.
I don't know because this man's a liar.
I'm really not going to get into it much.
This is not a full BTB on the guy.
But either way, he goes to Georgetown, a town, and he gets an MA in international affairs, right?
He gets a job consulting.
This is not a poor person.
This is a guy who gets a job consulting on two different charter schools in the DC area and eventually winds up running two charter schools.
Barbara Smith, who worked under him and eventually wrote a book about the experience, claims that he fired off staff in order to collect two executive director salaries, making a cut like a million dollars in change in the few years that he's there, right?
Now, during his time in power over these schools, they had the lowest family return rates for any charter schools in the district.
And by the way, he is working in a majority black district.
So this is a white guy who came into a majority black district, basically took over, gutted two charter schools, fucked them up seriously, and pocketed the money, right?
That's Jack.
Hey, school choice, man.
We need school choice, though.
Yeah.
Critically important, not just a way to empower these freaks.
Yeah, yeah.
In 2015, the year after Gamergate, Jack realized that there was an even better con out there, blogging about masculinity.
He wrote in one article that year, quote, it is our duty as men to save the feminists from themselves.
Therefore, I am offering rape to feminists as an olive branch.
Now, this guy.
This guy.
Yeah, you may have heard about him.
He got a lot of, this is, he kind of broached into the mainstream a little bit when he wrote that because people were very angry about it.
Unfortunately, it doesn't really hurt guys like this.
We'll talk about what hurts guys like this because the good news is that Jack is no longer a major figure in the right wing, right?
Now, this guy's whole life is like a conservative fantasy, right?
He like cashes in on hurting black people, black kids particularly, and gets rich off of like running charter schools into the ground.
That's their dream, right?
But despite this, he pretends to have been a liberal.
And in 2018, he writes a book titled Democrat to Deplorable: an attempt to take advantage of the fact that right after Trump's election, certain kinds of journalists, particularly at the Times, were starving to platform guys like him.
And his hope was: I write this book, they'll all do to me what they did to JD Vance, right?
Where I'll suddenly get all this mainstream legitimacy for explaining why very reasonable people used to be very liberal who are now voting for Donald Trump.
You know, we just got forced to, right?
Um, now, unfortunately for Jack, he was a little late in this, right?
If this book had come out in like spring of 2017, right, he might have really had something here, right?
That would have been the ideal time to launch this grift.
2018 is a little late.
For one thing, it's after Charlottesville, right?
Like, yeah, that's kind of the window.
That's kind of the window.
You were just a little bit too late, man.
I know publishing is a slow process, homie.
Like, I get it.
It's tough.
It's tough to make those deadlines.
To his credit, he saw the future of monetizing being a guy like this, though, was in selling coaching services.
And so he launched the liminal order, where for $100 a month, young men could learn to stop being beta males.
And this is almost the same grift that Andrew Tate has set up, right?
Like, it's this whole thing where, like, you pay me a monthly salary to get exam, like, you know, access to a chat room where I will coach you in being, you know, a better man, a stronger man, right?
And I think how to traffic women, right?
I don't know if Jack would have gotten into that, probably if you'd given him enough time.
He also started trying to rebrand as a gunfluencer and posing in badly set up tactical gear.
This just is not how you do it.
You don't put the gun there, man.
You don't put the gun there.
You want to draw your fucking sidearm and shoot yourself in the shoulder, homie?
Is that what you're looking for, bro?
What?
What are you doing?
What are you doing?
He looks like who did you see holding a gun that way?
Yeah.
I mean, it's just clearly, it's like, I saw a video, I saw a video game cover that looked like this, and that's what I'm impersonating.
We have at this point a couple of hundred years of men wearing guns professionally, and everyone agrees somewhere around the waist, right?
We could debate the position around the waist, but somewhere around the waist, not your sternum, you know?
Yeah.
What are you doing, dude?
I just clocked that.
What do you have like a Glock on his face?
Yeah, he's got like a Glock in his fucking clavicle.
Oh, sorry, Mike.
I didn't, I tend to turn up the contrast on my screen to be like, fucking hell.
Wow.
You know, when you pull that thing out, you want whoever you're aiming that at.
They're like, dude, this thing smells like your armpit.
Yes, that's that's that's the right way to carry a gun.
My God, I know.
So Jack launched a podcast where he hosted guests like Mike Cernovich and Jack Bisovic, men who had been moderately more successful than him in cultivating an audience and followers with variations of the same grift.
And then near the end of 2021, disaster struck.
Some of his fans found that back in 2015, he'd done something besides blog about feminism.
He'd written about his love of being cuck-olded.
Oh, that's wrong.
This guy's a fun one.
This guy's a fun one.
Well, being cuck-olded is a perfectly fine fetish in which a man has his girlfriend or wife or whomever pick up other men and fuck them in front of him.
As far as things people do in bed go, we would call this pretty vanilla where I come from.
But on the right.
Right, watch someone have sex.
Right, right.
Okay, sure, whatever.
On the right wing, 2021, in 2021, cuck was maybe the single most popular insult.
So it coming out as you're trying to brand yourself as an influence in this space, that you are literally a cuck, not going to go over well.
Right after this comes out, Jack gets interviewed by the Blaze and he's asked about his fetish.
In a Medium post, Jonathan Paletti summarizes what happened next.
He exploded at the female host.
I'm not going to talk about this.
And basically, you know, fuck you for bringing this up right here and right now.
Why are you doing this to me?
Talking to social media afterwards, he tried to get the hosts of the interview fired.
It was perceived as so unhinged as to fuel curiosity about his past.
Right-wingers found themselves on a Russian porn website watching amateur masturbation videos done in 2018 for a gay audience called Big Bad Bear 1000.
Here was Jack naked on camera calling himself hetero flexible and talking about his history of male-male sex.
I like men.
I like men and I like boys.
Wow.
The boys part.
Great stuff, bro.
Yeah, yeah, no, that's not great.
Yeah.
I mean, again, when this poor guy, you didn't have to almost blow your armpit off with a gun or any of this other stuff.
You could have just lived your truth.
You could have probably lived a much happier life.
Yeah.
And you still could have written a bad book.
You know, gay people can write terrible books too.
Everyone.
Everyone can.
That's your right as an American.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Now, don't get that.
Now get that pistol away from you.
You still carry a gun that way.
You shouldn't have a gun at all, Jack.
Yeah.
Now, there are more influential far-right.
And by the way, this guy was a fellow at the Claremont Institute.
So great stuff.
There are more influential far-right masculinity grifters.
But I think Jack represents the pulsing insecurity at the heart of every one of these dudes.
He is a human embodiment of what these crises of masculinity really are at their core and always have been.
Boring men from privileged backgrounds working high-paid but useless jobs that don't make them quite enough to paper over the deep yawning void at the center of their soul.
I've been pretty critical of that Sleshinger piece this episode, and I think with good reason, but I will give Arthur credit.
There's a paragraph in his piece that absolutely describes Jack and a lot of these guys to a T.
The pre-democratic world was characteristically a world of status in which people were provided with ready-made identities.
But modern Western society, free, equalitarian, democratic, has swept away all the old niches in which people for so many centuries found safe refuge.
Only a few people at any time in human history have enjoyed the challenge of making themselves.
Most have fled from the unendurable burden of freedom into the womb-like security of the group.
The new age of social mobility may be fine for those strong enough to discover and develop their own roles, but for the timid and the frightened who constitute the majority in any age, the great vacant spaces of equalitarian society can become a nightmare filled with nameless horrors.
Yeah.
All right.
Yep.
Didn't miss on that one.
Yeah, he didn't miss on that one.
I think that really gets, I think that gets a lot of what's going on with these guys is there's this, they have freedom.
They could be whoever they wanted to be.
Right.
And they see, I think this is part of, it's not all of, but it's part of like why trans people are such a constant focus for them.
They see some people take this freedom that exists in our society and that to some extent was increased by the coming of the digital age.
And they're angry and jealous because they don't have the courage to find or make themselves in the same way.
And so they want to attack those people who are authentically creating themselves, right?
Right.
And it would be much less risky to be like, yeah, like, I like being a cuck.
Yeah.
Well, whatever.
Yeah.
Whatever.
That's, that's who you are, Jack.
You could have just been that.
Right.
Right.
Yeah.
And wow, that's such a great point.
Yeah.
Yeah.
To see people like where the stakes are so much higher in terms of society's acceptance of them.
And like you have these other guys who's like, I just want to be like a nerd or something.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That manifesting or metastasizing into that kind of anger is frightening.
Yeah.
Frightening, bad, sad, but you know, kudos to Steve Bannon for realizing this was going on and how to fucking profit off of it.
Yeah, man.
Kudos to you were doing that sweet Seinfeld money too, man.
You know, my guy was playing his cards right, baby.
Not the most toxic person involved with Seinfeld.
We'll say that.
I know, right?
The Frightening Rise of Anger00:04:22
Anyway, Miles, that's the end of the episode.
You got anything to plug before we roll out here?
Check me out if you want to hear me talk every day about news, politics, and the like on the daily zeitgeist.
And look, if you also want to blow steam off and hear me talk about Trash Reality Show with Sophia Alexandra, who's been a past guest on here, I'm on 420 Day Fiancé.
Those are the spots you can check me.
Well, check that out.
And, you know, as Miles says every year.
Yeah.
And, you know, anyway, once we do that, we can take back our country.
That's what you always say, Miles.
That's what I'm saying.
And I ain't backing down, man.
No, I ain't backing down.
Hell yeah, brother.
Hell yeah, brother.
Yeah.
Hell yeah, bro.
That's the most frightening shit ever.
So anyway, look up Miles' new fertilizer bomb recipe at Miles.
I don't even know what to call that website.
Miles, thanks for coming on the show.
You don't sell fertilizer bombs.
Yeah, yeah.
Anyway, we're done.
Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
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Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com/slash at behind the bastards.
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