Obsolete Men and Vanishing Adulthood

This essay is a follow-up to Obsolete Men and the Gendered Violence Epidemic and Obsolete Men vs. Shrinking Women

Braden “Clavicular” Peters

I don’t like giving Braden “Clavicular” Peters free oxygen, largely because his philosophy is so dangerous that I fear it becoming airborne. His belief that life belongs to those who are good-looking enough is maybe not controversial, as we merely average-looking men can attest. But his desire to manipulate his physiognomy to become as absurdly handsome as possible, involves a regimen of intensive self-harm.

It was bad enough with men like Andrew Tate, whose abusive workout regimen has distorted his body as badly as his soul. Any psychologist can tell you that obsessive bodybuilding, to the point where your body becomes cartoonish, emerges from the same well of self-hatred that manifests in women as anorexia nervosa. Tate is loud and charismatic enough to make his insecurities everyone else’s problem, at great mutual cost.

Peters, though, doesn’t just distort himself. Bodybuilding is only part of a larger regimen, which includes injecting dangerous drugs, wolfing down questionable supplements, and self-flagellation. He became the public face of “looksmaxxing” in recent months as the most grotesque part of his regimen—self-administered facial beatings with a hammer—went viral. He believes that treating himself with violence will make him more conventionally handsome.

And he isn’t entirely wrong. Recent photos show Peters looking like an exaggerated form of a mid-20^th Century matinee idol, with big shoulders, great hair, and a well-defined chin. Of course, as I write, Peters has recently turned twenty, so whether his good looks represent his abusive regimen, or simply graduating from awkward adolescence, is subject to debate. What we can’t debate, though, is: this man looks thirty.

Telling a twenty-year-old woman that she looks thirty would probably get you smacked. In American culture, female physical beauty correlates with outward markers of fertility, which means youth. Women use ointments, tinctures, injections, and surgery to stave off the appearance of age, though the results are questionable. Lauren Sanchéz Bezos’ recent appearance at the Met Gala resulted in laughter at her augmented appearance and questionable wardrobe.

Lauren Sanchéz Bezos

But for men, looking older is desirable. In interviews, Peters describes injecting himself with steroids at age fourteen to achieve the shredded look that normally requires years of dedication and effort. His famous, highly defined jaw, does indeed come to most men through years of small-scale trauma, sports injuries, and dangerous work. Like millions of adolescents, Peters wants to skip the dues-paying stage and be recognized as an adult.

Who can blame him? As entry-level professional jobs dwindle, men keep jobs into their twenties and thirties that formerly belonged to teenagers. Countless adults, of both biological sexes, cannot afford to move out of their parents’ houses. Student debt, once a ten-year commitment, has become a lifelong burden. The average age of first-home purchase is now forty. In such an environment, paying one’s dues in linear time is downright foolish.

In such an environment, Peters doesn’t want to merely look good. Placed in his social context, Peters wants to speed-run adulthood, or anyway the one aspect of adulthood which he can control. Savvy media manipulators can fake the personal characteristics that make older men attractive to women, including emotional regulation and economic stability. But only those willing to treat themselves violently can look old enough to enter the market.

However, let’s continue looking at that same broader context. The ways that men used to hasten rugged good looks, like playing sports or doing difficult physical labor, are all communitarian. There’s no such thing as solitaire football, and building a house requires a team. The ways men formerly organized themselves into communities, including labor unions, religious congregations, and even bowling leagues, look increasingly quaint, if they even still exist.

Peters has to speed-run adulthood alone because, otherwise, he has nowhere to go. Modern life has become mostly solitary and, unless you’re born to money, the chance of getting ahead through hard work and ingenuity alone is virtually nil. Peters has made himself a mass-media grotesque, but in doing so, he’s captured our attention, the one meaningful resource for cash-poor boys hoping to make themselves a life in American modernity.

Our solution must involve getting outside our own homes, and outside our own heads. Easier said than done. But even as churches and unions seem irrelevant, many communities still have adult sports leagues, maker spaces, and public libraries. Individuals and small groups can organize new networks, like community choirs, improv companies, and charitable volunteer organizations.

We must seek the trappings of adulthood, once hoarded in the workplace, out in the large rcommunity.

Creating a Marketplace for Reliable Guessing

Philip E. Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?

Why are professional prognosticators so consistently bad at predicting the future? We know this phenomenon most clearly from basic cable news, where credentialed experts prognosticate about how good, bad, or volatile the near future will be, usually in ways that support their ideology. But it manifests in other environments: business professionals who fail to forecast economic trends. Legislators who let lush opportunities slip away. Inventors pushing questionable technology.

Canadian-American psychologist Philip Tetlock, currently at the University of Pennsylvania, asked himself this question immediately after Operation Iraqi Freedom. Mass-media oracles predicted either swift, easy victory, or else nigh-apocalypse. The reality reflected neither partisan extreme, but instead descended into the same quotidian brutality that has characterized American intervention since WWII. Why, Tetlock asks, were both sides so wrong, and why has nobody paid for their overconfidence?

He favors the metaphor of foxes and hedgehogs, which he pinches from Isaiah Berlin, though it’s far older. Foxes know many things, Tetlock writes; hedgehogs know one big thing. Mass-media operators love highly credentialed experts, especially on economics and world affairs. But those experts’ predictions are often only marginally better than committed dilettantes who read newspapers daily and remains informed. Further, the more advanced one’s credentials, the more marginal the gains.

So far, so good. Tetlock’s description essentially accords with our recent experiences of camera-friendly experts reliably whiffing their predictions. My problem arises when Tetlock transitions from describing to explaining. A consummate scholar, Tetlock is reluctant to say anything which he cannot support strictly from quantifiable evidence. And holy moly, does Tetlock have extensive and thoroughly documented evidence to deploy.

Let’s make something clear: despite his praise (often muted) for well-informed dilettantes, he writes for scholarly audiences motivated by deep research. He fortifies his prose with histograms, p-values, and confidence intervals. He spends several column inches breaking down the mathematical modeling which supports his conclusions, and he seldom goes beyond the evidence. He dedicates an entire chapter to anticipating and transcribing his critics’ likely counterarguments.

Philip E. Tetlock, Ph.D.

Tetlock briefly acknowledges, but doesn’t expand much upon, the reality of who receives attention. TV pundits, hero CEOs, civil rights activists, and tech bros all broadly favor certainty, volume, and swagger. Reliable predictors, working from diversified backgrounds and intellectual caution, can look timid on Sunday talk shows or corporate board meetings. Put another way, saying wrong things confidently looks more telegenic than trading in likelihoods, conditionals, and caution.

Unfortunately, Tetlock himself demonstrates this. He refuses to offer opinions without sourced evidence, and he refuses to offer evidence without lengthy discursions on mathematical variance. Because his status relies on measurable outcomes—what he terms “reputational bets”—he refuses to place everything on one spin of the roulette wheel. The product he thus creates is more likely to be accurate, but less compelling in a media-saturated “attention economy.”

He also omits something I consider vitally important. The principle of homophily means we’re more likely to spend time around people like ourselves. Scholars congregate with other scholars; journalists chill with media professionals; lawmakers drink with lawyers. We see this particularly in economics, the scholarly field least likely to cite sources from other disciplines: our environment discourages seeking differing influences, disconfirming evidence, or even a diverse friend network.

Invested dilettantes make reliable predictions, perhaps, because they see how hypothetical outcomes postulated in scholarly journals actually unfold in daily life. Unfortunately, to calculate his confidence intervals on reliable predictions, Tetlock generates a core sample of prognosticators who are, like himself, flush with academic credentials. If military historians predict one outcome for war, and generals predict another, maybe consult the enlisted men carrying weapons, not more historians and generals.

Rereading what I’ve written, I feel I’ve misrepresented Tetlock’s product. I like his thesis, that intellectual diversity trumps depth in creating reliable forecasts. Later chapters on public accountability are particularly promising, if underwritten. Especially in subsequent years (Tetlock’s first edition appeared in 2005), we’ve seen public experts become increasingly hostile to criticism or disconfirming sources. Doubt has become, not the precursor to better thinking, but a sign of disloyalty. Unsurprisingly, experts have become more likely to be wrong.

Considering my doubts, and new evidence since 2005, we could perhaps read this volume as a prolegomenon to further research. Tetlock himself co-wrote a subsequent volume, which I’ve already purposed to read. But I feel it actually serves Tetlock’s thesis to suggest that future research should come from an interdisciplinary source, perhaps a public-private partnership. The future of the forecasting business is too valuable to entrust only to other forecasters.

Obsolete Men vs. Shrinking Women

This essay is a follow-up to my previous essay Obsolete Men and the Gendered Violence Epidemic

Sabrina Carpenter

If, as I stated previously, modern masculinity means rejecting anything feminine in the self, what then is modern femininity? This matters as women’s appearances have come in for renewed criticism. Louis Theroux, in Inside the Manosphere, followed several men whose male reinforcement routines involve obsessive exercise and bodybuilding, making their bodies huge and brawny. Simultaneously, we’ve witnessed the recent rise in demand for feminine smallness.

Smarter critics than me have commented upon the rise in Ozempic bodies. Celebrity women who once tied their public personas to their larger frames, like Amy Schumer and Adele, recently lost weight so rapidly that it’s essentially impossible without synthetic pharmaceuticals. Large women gaining small bodies requires expensive drugs and full-time exercise routines, so it’s obviously impractical for most women. Yet it’s widespread enough recently to appear normative.

Some time ago, I read an essay—now lost—critiquing gender roles in “romantasy” fiction. The author noted a recurrent theme she called “size gaps,” presented as almost equally reprehensible as age gaps. Many romantasy novels feature hulking, muscular leading men, basically walking slabs of uncooked steak. Their leading women are dainty flowers, maybe skilled swordswomen, but usually small enough to ride piggyback on their lovers’ shoulders.

This underlines part of my problem: we define gender in our society oppositionally. Men are large, tall, and muscular; women are small, slight, and shouldn’t have muscles. Standards of feminine beauty have changed little since 1925, when Lewis & Young praised a woman for being “five foot two, eyes of blue.” A century later, feminine beauty icon Sabrina Carpenter (five foot zero) omitted trousers from a custom Louis Vuitton suit, specifically because of her height.

Not to criticize Carpenter personally; she had no more control over her height than I had over becoming exceptionally tall. But her social icon role, beautiful and sexy but not necessarily for men, includes her body type: short, buxom, with large facial features. We see similar behavior from other women who sway cultural standards. Lizzo, Melissa McCarthy, and Kathy Bates, all celebrated large women, recently lost weight with GLP-1 drugs.

Criticizing Hollywood bodies is nothing new. Women on camera have long been expected to maintain teenage proportions well into adulthood, a standard only possible for those who can afford personal assistants and pricy gym regimens. But the recent rise in waif-like women, coupled with the concomitant visibility of ox-like men, reflects a brutal reality: men must not look like women. And women must not look like men.

Braden Peters

Such attitudes have very real consequences. One of the best actors I ever shared the stage with, a beautiful woman with dynamic range and powerful singing chops, also stood over six feet tall. This made her too tall to gaze up soulfully into most men’s eyes, which precluded her from substantial roles. She bounced through some insulting comic relief roles that reduced her to a function of her unusual height, before leaving the industry altogether.

Switching genders, I see the culmination of this trend in the male “looksmaxxing” influencer Braden Peters, stage name Clavicular. Peters put himself through grotesque paces to achieve his appearance goals: drug injections, day-long bodybuilding runs, even beating himself with a hammer to maximize his jawline. The regimen has arguably worked, because he looks like an exaggerated caricature of a midcentury Hollywood leading man.

But he’s achieved his goals at a catastrophic price. By his own admission, Peters began injecting himself with synthetic testosterone supplements at age 14 to hasten adult characteristics. Within five years, he’d consumed so much fake testosterone that his body stopped producing the natural stuff. In essence, Clavicular chemically castrated himself. He maintains the external appearance of a sexy man, but his (ahem) primary sexual characteristic no longer works.

Sabrina Carpenter and Braden Peters are opposite sides of the same coin, and I do mean opposite. If women are shorter than men, then Carpenter’s exceptionally slight height becomes aspirational. If men are harder-featured then women, then Peters literally beating his face with a hammer to maximize his jawline becomes an acceptable price. Influencers define both binary genders by looking as little as possible like the other.

I’m using external appearance, like height and build, as metaphors here. The problem is much more pervasive. As American society generally becomes more accepting of alternate gender presentations, our cultural gatekeepers have become even more rigid and restrictive. This is still currently a fringe issue, mercifully. But then, so was the alt-right, until it conquered the government. Left untended, these positions risk becoming mainstream.

How To Build and Destroy an Empire

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 122
Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa

Belgium’s King Leopold II aspired to become one of Europe’s great powers, although Belgium, a loose regional federation, didn’t exist before 1830. Becoming a colonial empire, on par with Britain and France, allowed Leopold a quick, cost-effective way to achieve greatness. It certainly helped that he didn’t care who he hurt, and saw native peoples on colonized land as a treatable nuisance. So he set eyes on the Congo.

Journalist Adam Hochschild previously covered South Africa’s waning apartheid government, a beat that put him in contact with CIA and MI6 officials and their off-the-record stories. One such story involved the CIA’s multiple slapstick efforts to overthrow Patrice Lumumba, the only democratically elected leader of the post-colonial Congo. Further investigation led Hochschild to a colonial history that, in the 1990s, was largely forgotten in Europe and America.

Using primary source documents, including eyewitness testimony and elaborate government and business records, Hochschild reconstructs Leopold’s process. Europeans in the 19^th Century desperately wanted to see themselves as heroes. They bankrolled adventurers l ke Henry Morton Stanley, whose wanderings in Africa’s interior were polished to conceal his actual violent tendencies. Europeans also moralistically raged against Arab slave trading, despite having barely ended the Triangle Trade themselves.

Leopold managed his age’s three great influences—moralism, adventurism, and industrialism—to build support for Belgian intervention in Africa. Except not in Belgium, which cared more about building a reliable domestic state. So Leopold sold bonds overseas, got lucrative British and Prussian loans, and mortgaged royal properties to subsidize his plans. They paid off, too, as Stanley inked treaties with Congolese nations that gave Leopold massive territorial control.

Territory that, incidentally, he never visited.

But, burdened with debt obligations and international prestige, Leopold quickly needed to show profits. He hired agents who cared little for rules, armed them with newfangled carbine rifles, and set quotas. This turned out to be an excellent formula for lucrative export markets, provided nobody cared about the human cost to native peoples. Several state agents made a mint, while Leopold became fabulously rich. Natives fled the bloodshed.

Adam Hochschild

Then as now, money and property became their own justifications. Agents of the state corporation didn’t care whom they hurt, provided they got paid. Those forced to do the actual work never saw the rewards, and indeed were punished severely for even minor noncompliance; casual maiming was common, and company soldiers destroyed entire villages when quotas weren’t met. Africans lived as slaves in their ancestral homeland.

Not everything in Hochschild’s telling is bleak, though. As Leopold’s hybrid of military, government, and capitalism grew to unprecedented power and violence, others began resisting. While many state agents reveled in violence, others were sickened, and carried their stories back to Europe. One such disillusioned state agent was Joseph Conrad, whose novella Heart of Darkness continues telling the resistant story long after Leopold’s colony ended.

Two other resisters were E.D. Morel and Roger Casement. A journalist and a state bureaucrat respectively, they carried news of Leopold’s brutal government to the very countries that owned Congolese bonds and debt instruments. Leopold attempted a PR campaign in Europe and America to assure Whites everywhere of Belgium’s moral valor. But Morel and Casement shone lights on how Leopold’s administration governed, and who got rich of African labor. World sentiment finally turned.

Hochschild writes history without moral sentiment. Those who resisted Leopold’s imperial experiment often had their own racist lenses, and sometimes preserved power as much as they resisted it. While Leopold’s Congo may have been exceptionally violent, Morel and Casement overlooked British and French abuses in adjacent colonies. And Conrad, though conscious of the damage empire caused, never had courage enough to abandon his privileges.

Of all problems in writing this history, though, Hochschild acknowledges the greatest himself: Africans left few primary sources. Even oral history wasn’t coordinated until the survivors of Leopold’s terror were aged and vanishing. Congo historiography winds up being a heavily European narrative; Africans become somebody Europeans speak with, or speak for, not autonomous individuals who speak for themselves. History is as much a matter of what’s missing as what’s known.

Despite these yawning gaps, Hochschild’s history is thorough and enlightening. It’s also timely. When it appeared in 1998, it was revolutionary and even dangerous, but Hochschild’s broad themes have become intrinsic to the modern narrative of resistance. Because, although company agents aren’t massacring villages or cutting off hands, the underlying parallels are way too visible. History is never about the dead; it’s about we who live in the aftermath.

Obsolete Men and the Gendered Violence Epidemic

CONTENT WARNING: this essay contains direct discussions of sexual and gendered violence. I've tried to remain dispassionate and considerate of readers’ sensibilities, but the subject remains what it is.

Nobody asked my opinion about the “global rape academy” story that exploded on social media last week, nearly a month after CNN first reported it. As a book blogger with a negligible audience and few respondents, my interpretation doesn’t matter. Certainly nothing I say will ameliorate the repellent content and persistent harm this “academy” has perpetuated. I’ve debated whether my contribution would do more harm than good.

But in one of those flukes of synchronicity, this story overlapped with several others. The story gained traction as I finished reading Gareth Russell’s The Six Loves of James I. Russell writes that, nearing the end of his life, King James strenuously avoided entangling England and Scotland in Europe’s wars of religion. For this, British political and religious leaders disparaged James as “feminine,” and therefore unworthy of power.

Millions of viewers watched Louis Theroux’ Netflix documentary Inside the Manosphere, which dropped almost simultaneously with CNN’s report. Theroux interviews representatives of a highly public form of masculinity, which rewards displays of strength and valor, while actively disparaging women. Theroux’ interviewees call their girlfriends “the dishwasher” and discuss monogamy for thee but not me, demonstrating the inferior position they reserve for women.

Anti-estrogen pills for men have begun invading my all-night doomscrolling sessions. Minimally regulated supplements, sold by mostly anonymous vendors, promise to help aging men eliminate man-boobs and soft guts, while turning them into sexual powerhouses guaranteed to please their partners. These ads’ innate subtext includes that any implication of femininity, including softness or having boobs, undercuts one’s status as a man and a husband.

All three influences share the supposition that femininity is necessarily inferior. Any man showing feminine signs is perforce disqualified from being a king, a husband, or even a man; men must purge femininity through war, domination, or chemical self-mutilation. Men must hurt or kill anything feminine within themselves, not only internally, but in highly public displays of masculine reinforcement. Anything less diminishes a man.

Should we wonder, in such conditions, that some men—and indeed, some women—consider the feminine necessarily deficient, no matter who displays it? Womanhood becomes, not another manifestation of human potential, but an enemy to control and restrict. Men raping their wives, or men intruding themselves into women’s personal space in public to demand sexual favors, aren’t merely criminals or assholes. They’re defending their dwindling male prerogative.

This form of masculinity often, but not necessarily, correlates with political conservatism. Right wingers like Paul Joseph Watson, who popularized the epithet soyboy, and Alex Jones, whose rage at progressives often becomes so pitched that he screams wordlessly into the microphone, perform notorious displays of machismo. Jones’ shirtless horse rides, a naked mimicry of Vladimir Putin, are pointedly anti-American in nature.

Nor are these displays unique to men; because conservatives consider anger a prerequisite to seriousness, conservative women adopt public displays of macho anger. Tomi Lahren notoriously starts her broadcasts already spitting rage. Candace Owens loves getting belligerent, often cussing into the microphone to prove her legitimacy. If violence and war are necessarily masculine, and therefore strong, these women will remake themselves as masculine as possible.

Most men lack the social reach of Alex Jones, manosphere influencers, or President Taco. They can’t hurt women as a class. They’re reduced to hurting women as individuals—which means the women to whom they have the readiest access. Reducing gendered violence to a sexual fetish also allows them to commodify their violence; CNN reports that several “academy” participants sold one another unregulated sedatives online.

Woman hatred as entrepreneurship. Yuck.

These men drugging and raping their wives are functionally equal to ICE agent Jonathan Ross, who videoed himself shooting a mother in the face, then calling her a “fucking bitch.” Whether it’s murdering mommies in the street, belittling them on podcasts, or turning them into lifeless sex dolls in their own bedrooms, these men all treat women equally. Femininity deserves to be hurt, both in myself and in the world.

I take comfort that these displays are rare. As Snopes reports, the 62 million users number, popularized after CNN’s report, describes the entire hosting website, a porn outlet owned by a New York smut entrepreneur. The “academy” itself had barely a thousand active users. Even this, though, isn’t wholly comforting, as the site’s content is entirely user-generated, and therefore almost certainly contains other illegal content.

I wish I had uplifting, humanitarian solutions. Sadly, we’ve reached this position behind a raft of causes: male economic obsolescence, rapidly changing gender roles, diminishment of hierarchy and violence as mandatory social organizing tools, and more. We neglected the causes until they became a crisis. History warns that the situation is unlikely to reverse itself now, unless something brutal upsets the apple cart.

Until then, all of us, male and female, will continue paying the revolting price.