There is one scene in Demi Moore’s new film, The Substance, that made the actor cry, and it’s a scene about self-loathing. Getting ready for a date, her character looks in the mirror and is driven to violent despair. Nothing she tries looks right; everything about her suddenly seems wrong.
Moore, who plays a TV star driven to extreme measures after being fired for getting older, has said the film is about the shame women are conditioned to feel about their bodies and the punishment we are conned into inflicting on ourselves as a result, from expensive miracle creams we know won’t really work right up to the plastic surgeon’s knife. Swap the older woman in the film for a teenage girl, starving herself because she doesn’t meet some impossible physical ideal, and the message rings just as true. But what if you swapped her for a teenage boy?
Young men get insecure about their looks too, of course. But it’s weakness, the fear of losing face or being thought a wimp, that is their real achilles heel, and something far uglier than the beauty industry is homing in on that. In Clown World, their new book on the notorious social media influencer Andrew Tate, the journalists Jamie Tahsin and Matt Shea describe their four years investigating toxic masculinity online and its real-life impact.
With Tate currently facing charges of rape, sexual exploitation and human trafficking in Romania, much of the book is dedicated to the stories of his female accusers and to the murky underside of the webcamming industry. But they also make clear that the heart of his online operation was a lucrative commercial hustle targeting often anxious, insecure men: and that the idea of masculinity he was selling is damaging not just to women, but to the men suckered into it.
Tate’s misogynistic rants of course helped his posts, with their embedded links to the online courses from which he made his money, go viral. But he also tapped into his own followers’ deep-seated self-loathing, mocking their perceived inadequacies to soften them up for the hard sell. The choice he offered was to “keep on smoking weed and playing video games and be a loser for ever”, or pay $49.99 a month to join his Hustler’s University (basically a chatroom, with dubious get-rich-quick courses in trading cryptocurrency or copywriting bolted on).
Inside the chatroom, Shea and Tahsin found worryingly young boys beating themselves up over their perceived manly failings. In Tateworld, education was for geeks and losers, and taking antidepressants was a sign of weakness – a counsel of despair for kids who were already struggling.
Men with more money to burn, meanwhile, could join the more cult-like War Room or pay to take part in what Tate called “the test”, a mysterious kind of initiation rite that turned out to involve slugging it out violently with a professional cage fighter. Those who declined were shamed by being made to face the wall and list all the ways they had failed as men.
Almost unbelievably, the writers point out, Tate had essentially persuaded 100 men to pay him $5,000 each for a choice between being beaten to a pulp or publicly humiliated. Yet even Shea, who entered the test as part of a documentary the pair were making, writes that he found the experience of being inside Tate’s world unexpectedly destabilising; that for a while it made him question his own masculinity. Shame, it turns out, is a hell of a drug for men and women, and those who can monetise it are laughing all the way to the bank.
Teenage boys’ attention spans are short enough that for them, Tate is history now. But TikTok is still full of wannabes flexing about their Rolexes and supercars and hot model girlfriends, scornfully telling followers that “wealth is a mindset” and so if they’re broke, they’re losers. Far-right political movements have learned to use the language of the manosphere to recruit new gen Z supporters, while a darker version of the core idea that being a man is about ostentatious wealth and status – backed up by a willingness to use violence and an obsession with never losing face – has long underpinned gang culture.
Yet for young men anxious about failing to live up to the ideal they see all around them, there isn’t yet a fully fledged equivalent of the body positivity movement, which encourages women to love themselves as they are instead of obsessing over physical flaws that don’t actually exist.
Perhaps it’s not for a woman to identify what that equivalent should be, but I suspect Shea and Tahsin are right to argue that young men need healthier ways to challenge and prove themselves than they’re currently being offered by the manosphere. Crucial to many men’s sense of self, they argue, is “the longing to go through some kind of hardship” and emerge triumphant, even if these days it’s more likely to be unclogging a drain than waging war.
Parents, meanwhile, need to find ways of talking not just about how toxic masculinity hurts girls – though of course it does – but about how it hurts boys’ own life chances, too. We tell our teenage daughters not to beat themselves up for not fitting some ridiculously outdated mould. Somehow, we need to get the same message across to our sons.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
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