The media’s obsession with ‘toxic masculinity’ shows no sign of letting up. This week, RTÉ aired a primetime special on ‘The Manosphere’ which asked whether things are “getting worse” for women in Ireland.
“Social media algorithms are bombarding boys with bile, misogyny, and distorted forms of masculinity. Tonight we ask: What needs to be done to help them navigate away from negative influencers?” Prime Time said.
In truth, however, I felt the programme didn’t really provide any answers. Influencer Charleen Murphy said during a segment: “I don’t know what the root cause of it is. I just think it’s happening much younger than it was before.”
Education Minister, Helen McEntee, was live from the studio, and we heard the usual bland talk of policies and safeguarding measures for schools, the implication being that teachers are afraid of male pupils who watch certain Instagram reels.
“I think it’s really positive that we’re having this discussion – that the entire programme is focused on this,” said McEntee, as she talked about going back to basics and changing attitudes.
One of the things most noticeable was that the way these issues are covered, and the solutions proposed, are just so flimsy. The conversation is always so painstakingly cautious and politically correct, so surface-level. It’s not insignificant that pornography got just one tiny mention during the 40-minute programme (but no discussion) while Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan were highlighted as a problem by a man who said that he had fallen down an rabbit-hole by first watching Peterson.
The interviewee, according to RTÉ, had quickly “been pulled into something much darker.”
“Jordan Peterson appeared on my feed, giving some seemingly clean advice and so on. After that, I got served many other videos from some of the most lunatic accounts. A lot of Joe Rogan videos, a lot of those phoney scientists that Joe Rogan has on talking about gender and how trans people don’t really exist. A lot of memes on Facebook which, a lot of them did actually seem innocuous, but they actually weren’t. There were sub-texts of racism that I didn’t really understand,” said the man, a musician named Rob from Donegal.
There are a few things to point out there — the pop psychologist Peterson has been credited with helping the lives of millions of people. His infamous 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos published in 2018, was enjoyed for being no-nonsense in tone. ‘Stand up straight with your shoulders back’ was the first rule. Others included ‘Tell the truth’ and ‘Set your house in perfect order before you criticise the world.’ I don’t know if that sounds so sinister.
The book topped bestseller lists in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom, selling over ten million copies worldwide in the five years after its release. This is the problem with RTÉ – it can’t discuss anything without having a go at those it seems to want to sneer at and knock down. Because Peterson is a Conservative, a figure on the right, who talks about things including ethical principles and religion, he must be included in wide-sweeping criticism. You may not like Peterson, but to link him through association to misogyny, is nonsense in my opinion.
As for Joe Rogan, he tops podcast lists everywhere. He’s the most popular podcaster in the world. And yet we’re supposed to believe that he, too, is some kind of dangerous extremist because he explores issues that the establishment media don’t want to touch? I don’t need to agree with everyone who’s appeared on Rogan to recognise this is a ridiculous narrative, spun once again by our national broadcaster on a primetime slot, that alienates so many people, particularly the perfectly decent men who listen to Rogan or Peterson while they’re at the gym.
RTÉ, billing itself as the impartial outlet trying to solve a problem, may only be alienating the ordinary man, insisting he can only be acceptable if he becomes a feminist ally, a soy latte-drinking man who has turned his back on traditional masculinity. Of course it’s true that there are dark and horrible men who seek to influence the culture, but this endless conflation of Peterson and Rogan with such people is absurd.
Further, the conversation is also almost always off-balance. How can you claim you’re trying to improve relations between the sexes if you make men feel like they are always on the backfoot? Men have to take all the blame, for everything. If equality exists between the sexes, and there’s a manosphere, then surely there must be a femosphere, too? What about the ‘femcel’ influencers who use their platforms to urge followers to use men for financial gain? I’ve seen it on my feed, oftentimes portrayed in a good-humoured way, but it really is serious – and done in the name of feminism. Could I go on and talk about how I’ve been victimised by that algorithm?
To add in a bit of balance, RTÉ could talk about toxic femininity, a parallel internet world populated by Bonnie Blue, Lilly Phillips, and other Only Fans ‘creators.’ The latest sad case being that of Annie Knight from Australia, who said this week she was hospitalised for having sex with 583 men in six hours.
The general response to these women, from other females, is to kind of shrug and laugh off this behaviour. There’s no national media reckoning.
Sex has become a spectator sport with the help of Only Fans, but I heard no mention of that last night. If Peterson or Rogan are representative of a slippery slope into misogyny, what about Only Fans as a slippery slope into pornography?
When it comes to porn, it’s a shame that warnings about its use are often treated with apathetic shoulder-shrugging. If you look into some of the most depraved, real life misogynists, you’ll often find that they had pornography addictions.
The thousands upon thousands of female Only Fans creators, in Ireland alone, selling intimate photos and videos of themselves to men on the internet are equally responsible for this mess. But we aren’t allowed to talk about that. The most annoying thing of all is that, aside from papering over the hard questions, RTÉ implies that there is only one way to be a man. God forbid you are politically or socially Conservative, or enjoy listening to Joe Rogan’s podcast, because if that’s you – then you’ve been duped by the evil manosphere. What nonsense.