Where Do Men Go from Here?

12:00Naomi Fry:He's a psycho. He bites someone's nose off. I've seen the guy too. It's horrible. His wife left him and everything. This is the setup. Remember me, Bambi?

12:11Vinson Cunningham:Last time I saw you, you were about yay high.

12:14Naomi Fry:We have these two boys. You've got the exact same size head, though. Creeping me out a bit. As they grow up, Ruben becomes both a tormentor of Niall and a protector of Niall. You know that the hateful but yearning erotic tension, at least from from Nile towards Ruben, cannot be denied. They are brothers. They are blood brothers. And yet he is a violent monster. The first kind of like traumatic event, I guess, that we are privy to is Niall is on the verge and Uni on the verge of exploring his homosexuality with his flatmate, Albie. And Ruben like loses it and like pummels Albie into the ground, almost kills him, goes to jail.

13:12Naomi Fry:OK. And there's a lot of that happening over the course of the show. Basically, it's about Niles.

13:22Vinson Cunningham:She's got it. I love it. Tell us what it's about. I'm like, what is the show about? So this show hard to say. It's so hard to say.

13:31Naomi Fry:I know I always say this, but every episode is nine thousand hours long. OK. I mean, they are like technically speaking, slightly over an hour long each. and it's six episodes, but it's glacial. Vincent, you said florid. I could not agree more. This is like some like fringe festival shit, like long, long, long scenes, overwrought, just like the trauma, the pain, the completely inexplicable connection between these characters, who in fact are like incredibly thinly drawn. Sounds like you loved it. Once again, you guys, I'm a hater. I'm a hater. I'm sorry. I wish I could give a better. It's hard to synopsis.

14:25Naomi Fry:No, I wasn't laughing at you.

14:26Vinson Cunningham:I was laughing at the fact that the show repeats itself so many times that once you start engaging with it and it's plot terms, you are just going to find yourself in a loop. Yeah. That you keep going up and around and up and around because that's the point of the show. The point of the show is about cycles that can't be broken. Yes. And the cycle that can't be broken is the mutually intensely destructive relationship between these two people. I think the show is set up with a rather simple idea that each can be the other savior to some extent. Certainly that's what their mothers want for them.

14:56Vinson Cunningham:They want the tender one to show the mean one some feelings. And they want the mean one to kind of help the tender one stand up for himself and walk through life a little bit taller. You know, walk like a man, talk like a man. That's, that's, that's. And instead, they just end up in a kind of prolonged, lifelong wrestling match where they can't quit each other.

15:19Alexandra Schwartz:That's right.

15:19Vinson Cunningham:Vincent, you're a man.

15:20Alexandra Schwartz:Yeah, I am a man. I am a man. What did you make of this? You know, I don't think of myself as a Niall or a Reuben. I'm somewhere in between. But I liked it slightly better than you have described. I definitely, there is a kind of patina to the Richard Gadiverse of, it's like, it's high polish menace, you know, in a way that it doesn't, even though many of the situations are very gritty and dark, it does still have this kind of sparkle in its eye toward the viewer. It's very self-conscious of the way it's being watched.

16:02Naomi Fry:It's theatrical, I would say.

16:04Alexandra Schwartz:Maybe theatricality is the way to talk about that. But I did like the extent to which these characters become in some way, to your point, the moms want them to help each other. They do become in some way codependent and maybe even parasitic on one another. If we talk about, you know, this idea of two roads, as we mentioned, you know, are you going to toughen up and be the right wing psycho? psycho or are you going to be you know whatever pathetic nice guy or something like that i don't know um here it says what if you actually you know two roads diverged in the yellow wood and sorry i could not travel both and be one traveler this show is like i am going to be one traveler i don't have to choose what if i could be the nice guy but also have a psycho uh alter ego Well, it's very Fight Club, right?

16:58Alexandra Schwartz:This is why it's very Fight Club. At some point, kind of, again, unsubtly, a character says, what do you mean you're like him to Niall? He says, you guys are about as much alike as Jekyll and Hyde. And that's kind of the thesis statement of the show. It's somebody trying, two people on some level trying to have it both ways. And so it's not, for example, it's not a mistake that, and this is what I think is kind of interesting psychologically about the show. It's not a mistake that Ruben shows up. You know, Niall has sort of escaped the home situation, and he, at a moment of panic, when he's worried about the developing relationship with this Albie, that's when he calls Ruben and says, I need you, man.

17:38Alexandra Schwartz:And then he comes and Niall realizes this might be irreversible, the violence that is about to be visited upon everybody that I live with. But he's the one that made the decision because of his uncertainty about masculinity. So he's sort of deploying this dark corner of his own psyche in the person of his brother from another lover, as they're always saying. That aspect of the show I did really kind of think was psychologically acute and interesting as a sort of paradigm. of how these two ideas about masculinity or choose one can actually be a kind of end run around, you know, total loop.

18:14Alexandra Schwartz:Critics at Large from The New Yorker will be right back.

18:34Alexandra Schwartz:Before we get back to the conversation, listeners, it's that time again. We're working on another I Need a Critic episode. We've come to really love this series because it gives us a chance to hear from you.

18:47Vinson Cunningham:Oh, yeah, you all know the drill at this point. But for anyone who doesn't, don't fear. All you have to do is record a voice memo on your phone with a specific cultural question that we can help you with. Maybe you're looking for the perfect book to read after you just had a baby and you have no attention span or time. Maybe you want to know whether book clubs are actually helpful. Maybe you want an example in media, the movies, what have you, of an actually happy relationship.

19:12Naomi Fry:I mean, who can tell really what you come up with? And we can't wait to find out. You've got questions. We've got answers. Hit us up. Send your voice memos, as always, to themailatnewyorker.com with the subject line, Critics. And now, back to the episode.

19:34Alexandra Schwartz:So Half-Man is this very dark portrait of masculinity. But like we've said, these depictions are kind of going everywhere and maybe pointing out two different lanes. So what's the other side? If half man is the dark side of this yin and yang, what can we point to as the polar opposite?

19:55Naomi Fry:I mean, okay, well, we've talked about our beloved heated rivalry, which also takes place in a highly masculinist world of professional sports. and the professional sports sphere in which it takes place allows for a kind of like old school closetedness that creates kind of plot possibilities and tonal possibilities. And these two characters, Ilia and Shane, should by all rights be expected to be Ruben, right? To be these killers who cannot kind of accept any sign of kind of like softness or weakness or anything that diverts from kind of alpha masculinity, hyper straight, and so on. And yet, the show shows them exploring exactly that and shows the joy that they find.

20:53Naomi Fry:Enough what? Questions. You have too many of them. I'm sorry. It's okay. I wasn't clear. I'm sorry in advance for tonight's game we're going to destroy you guys oh so you are the asshole no it's still you no it's not me you are the asshole everyone must know this everyone Shane Hollander is an asshole and are able to create a version of masculinity that is not Rubenesque Rubenesque

21:31Alexandra Schwartz:Little Angels Yeah.

21:33Vinson Cunningham:Or more to the point, not Nile-esque, I think. The thesis of heated rivalry is that you need to let the sunshine in. That you need to expose things. You need to be living in the open. Let the world catch up with you. Take the risk. It's worth it not to feel the degrading shame that comes with living in the shadow, in the closet.

21:54Alexandra Schwartz:it yeah yeah and then also we had adolescence um a couple of years ago also from the uk about a young uh a young man who has spoiler alert under the sign of bullying again has committed a heinous crime of killing his female classmate as a little girl

22:37Alexandra Schwartz:Adolescence is another one of these things that it maybe isn't as it's not light It's not the opposite of half man, but it was by situating the problem among children. I felt that it kind of had this ray of possibility that it could be otherwise if only we would all change or something like that.

22:57Vinson Cunningham:I think that was very much the point of adolescence. Adolescence, which was created by Jack Thorne, has been shown in schools in France, in the Netherlands, in the UK, I believe, as a kind of educational text and as a way to make the youth aware of toxic masculinity, so to speak. I'd be very curious to know how that's worked out. I would not recommend making art in the service of educating basically anyone and certainly not the youth. I respect the youth too much for that. But it's a very, adolescence was riveting, and it also is didactic. And the same is true about Half Man. There was actually a columnist, a female columnist in England, who said she thought this should be shown anywhere men are gathered.

23:48Vinson Cunningham:Strong disagree. Like, what's that going to do here? This doesn't make any sense to me. You're going to see the results of your actions and feel so horrified that you change your ways, and who are you even? I find this to be such an irritating approach both to men and to art. Like, both deserve better than that. In terms of the, like, other ways to be a man that we're being shown right now, another show we've talked about is DTF St. Louis. We didn't talk about this aspect of DTF St. Louis when we did our episode, but I could not stop thinking about its depiction of masculinity after we wrapped to the extent that I wrote a piece about it.

24:25Vinson Cunningham:A wonderful piece. Yeah. Check it out, listeners. I've just never seen a relationship between men quite like the one depicted on DTF St. Louis, which to me is almost science fictional in how it posits a future for men. If we're talking about this kind of realism taken to a macho extreme, taken to an almost like steroidal extreme in something like Half-Man, DTF St. Louis posits a world where there kind of is no shame around things that traditionally men would find shame in, like homosexuality. This is a show in which two straight middle-aged men who are both are in a total rut in their lives and in their marriages form an intense bond with one another to the point where they act like lovers and look like lovers but aren't.

25:10Vinson Cunningham:You loved him?

25:12Naomi Fry:Yes. But you loved her. Yeah, but I loved him more. I would never hurt him. Loved him how? Like you love something, like the sun when you're cold.

25:38Like water when you really need water.

25:44Naomi Fry:I don't understand. Like snacks?

25:51No.

25:51Naomi Fry:Or, um, I... I love Floyd.

25:59Vinson Cunningham:I found it totally fascinating and beautiful and also totally tragic, because the show, of course, does not... None of this works out well for the men in any of these shows. Right.

26:08Naomi Fry:So, right. I want to ask you, Alex, like, but these men, they're also kind of presented as losers, are they not? Right? But no one is presented as the cool alternative.

26:20Vinson Cunningham:There's something very—are they losers? They're kind of average, I think, is the idea. The whole thing about the show is there is no such thing as a loser. Like, the kind of—the phrase that keeps getting tossed around from the show is, no one is normal just looks that way from across the street. And again, the problem for these guys is that particularly for the Floyd Smirnage character, the one played by David Harbour, is that he cannot find a degree of self-acceptance, which has very much to do with the body. It has to do with feeling too fat, too old, and having a weird crooked penis. And he just thinks those things.

26:51Vinson Cunningham:He can't surmount those things.

26:53Alexandra Schwartz:And they're not losers, but they are very lonely and very desperate. And so I think they are brought to the threshold of some of these questions about sexuality, about intimacy. They're brought there by their desperation. So it's not like it is, I understand what you mean, this sort of science fictional openness. But it's almost like the portal into this other world does have to be some amount of suffering.

27:17Vinson Cunningham:Yes, that's right.

27:18Alexandra Schwartz:And I did think that DTF was, if there was something very open about it, it was about an open portrayal of deep suffering. Yeah. I'm still thinking about it. I thought it was really well done.

27:30Vinson Cunningham:And maybe the issue at the heart of that, which is kind of at the heart of all of these things we're talking about that are about these texts, these TV shows, whatever, that are about men and boys, is there's a sense of being profoundly misunderstood by the wider world going on in all of these. And I think that stems from the very idea of archetypes, that if you don't subscribe to a clear archetype and make yourself very legible to the world at large, you won't actually be seen. But if you do subscribe to one of those archetypes, you're not going to be seen anyway because your individuality is going to be completely scrubbed.

28:01Vinson Cunningham:That, I think, is the kind of rub of masculinity that keeps coming back and back and back in these different things. You can turn yourself into a character and into a superhero or into the exact opposite, but the individuality part gets lost in the wash. Nobody sees it. Nobody sees it.

28:21Naomi Fry:Yeah. But Vincent, you watched another show, right? And the recent show, a new adaptation of Lord of the Flies on Netflix.

28:29Alexandra Schwartz:Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And so it is a miniseries based on the 1954 novel by William Golding. Lord of the Flies, also a BBC product, not brought to HBO this time, but to Netflix. And I really like this show. First of all, it tempts us to be, strangely, you know, the story is a bunch of schoolboys have survived a plane crash and are lost on an island. They don't know where they are. And they very quickly, speaking of archetypes, fall into roles and try to build a kind of society. Almost the first thing that happens is we need a chief.

29:18Naomi Fry:He's right, though. We do need to make some key decisions. It seems to me we ought to have a chief. More important is to find out exactly where we are. A chief will decide that.

29:31Naomi Fry:I can be chief. I'm chapter chorister in head boy. I can see high C shot. All that's in favour of me is... I think we should have more than one consideration if a chief is to be decided.

29:45Alexandra Schwartz:And it goes from there, all the skirmishes that are sort of maybe proto-political in nature is the real brain of the show. But in the meantime, though, there's a lot of quiet walking through this maybe initially prelapsarian jungle. Lots of shots of birds overhead, as if to show the kind of impassiveness of nature as all this human drama plays about. I think it's really well shot. It makes really good use of the fisheye lens, which I usually don't like. And each of the episodes sort of is focalized through the point of view of one of the boys. And it's made by Jack Thorne, who is also the creator, director, visionary behind Adolescence.

30:32Alexandra Schwartz:Did either of you guys watch any of these?

30:34Vinson Cunningham:I didn't, but I have a question about it. But the thing I'm curious to know is Lord of the Flies, of course, as you said, came out in 1954 as a novel. And it's since become just a byword for a Hobbesian environment in which boys cobble each other to the death. I mean, the end, the demise of Piggy. I can't even tell you when I read it 30 years ago. Traumatic, absolutely traumatic. Little Piggy, they smash his glasses, you know, horrifying. Not the glasses. So is this version of Lord of the Flies, do you think it's been updated in some way to speak to the issues we have today? Or is it trying to take a very classic adaptation of the text?

31:12Vinson Cunningham:Or what's going on there? Why now for Lord of the Flies?

31:16Alexandra Schwartz:I do think that there is. Using, from my memory, which is, you know, not sterling anymore, I guess. But it seemed to be very, there are lots of very close kinships with the original text. But there did seem to be an emphasis on the society from which the boys come. Ralph, who is the one who is named Chief, he's always talking about, and we get this from the beginning, my father's in the Navy. He's an admiral first class. His kind of leadership rival who is the head of the—he's come with his, like, school choir and becomes the head of the hunters who become this, like, sort of rogue fascist paramilitary.

32:00Alexandra Schwartz:He talks about, my father is a spy. And so a lot of their ideas about government—it's interesting. When I was younger, I did think, okay, this is about how human society develops without the sort of civilizing hand of the law government institutions. But today, though, this time around, I would say in this adaptation, it's much more about what we, what young people, what the young glean from the political structures in which they are raised. What is the father like? How does a man behave? What is leadership? What is toughness? These are ideas that were traveling in that plane. And although the plane crashed, the plane did not survive, but ideology did survive.

32:48Alexandra Schwartz:And so I do think that there is a dimension of received ideas and how early, perhaps, is the thesis of this adaptation. These ideas are transmitted and how fatally they are.

33:00Naomi Fry:I was thinking about another, I mean, to go to a different genre altogether, about another example of kind of like the roads diverging for men and how the pendulum moves from one side to another. I recently wrote about the newest season of Vanderpump Rules. Oh, man. The Bravo.

33:23Alexandra Schwartz:What are those kids getting into?

33:24Naomi Fry:Reality show. So, okay. So here's what happened. And the show ran for 11 seasons. It got tired. There was nowhere else to go. The storylines weren't storying anymore, et cetera, et cetera, especially after Scandival, which if you know, you know. Oh, yeah. Big stuff. And so then they went on hiatus and repopulated the show. So it's a new cast. It's the same gambit of, like, we have bar keeps, bartenders and waitresses at the sexy, unique restaurant Lisa Vanderpump's West Hollywood Establishment. And so we have a new group of kind of 20-somethings, right? And I was struck by how much more, at least on the face of it, that's how they present themselves on the show, in touch with their feelings, the men are.

34:14Naomi Fry:They're still assholes. They're still drama. There's, you know, probably going to be like cheating and kind of like that. They also do have a TV show. Exactly. And yet the way they speak about things and their relative openness about their own possible failings, you know, maybe their sexual shortcomings. One of them, like, needs to use Viagra because he has, like, and he talks about this openly, you know. And I was thinking about how, you know, the show, the first iteration that started in 2013, I don't think that would have been possible with the guys, you know, who grew up in the 2000s, you know, who reached their masculine prime in the days of Joe Francis.

34:55Naomi Fry:And yet for this new generation, I was really struck by how much that was the case. And I thought that was a really interesting example of kind of like the roads diverging and, you know, going in that direction. Not the manosphere direction, at least not in this group of people.

35:13Alexandra Schwartz:Not yet.

35:14Naomi Fry:Not yet. It's a long season. You know what? It's a long season. You're right. You're right.

35:25Alexandra Schwartz:So we've talked about these two paths for men. In a minute, we move from cultural depictions to real life. Critics at large from The New Yorker will be right back.

35:48Alexandra Schwartz:So we've been talking about these depictions in largely popular art, but of course, it's also happening in real life as portrayed to us by the media, these ideas about masculinity in the broader culture. Alex, maybe to start to tease that out, I know that you watched an interview with a certain man whose name is Clavicular. And I would love to hear your analysis of Clavicular and his fellow travelers in the minds of looks-maxing.

36:21Vinson Cunningham:So Clavicular is a name that I would say I had never heard before, I want to say like March 20th, 2026. And since roughly that date, I've heard it between 300 and 400 times. Clavicular's real name is Braden Peters. He's 20 years old. He's from Hoboken, New Jersey. These are some facts about Clavicular. Just like Frank Sinatra. I didn't realize he was a Hoboken boy. See, I knew I'd be dropping things that you had not yet known. There we go. Hoboken, indeed. You probably don't know he's from Hoboken because his whole brand is Miami. Everything about him is I now live in Miami. It's Florida to the max.

36:56Vinson Cunningham:It's Florida to the max. So he has come to prominence through TikTok and Kik, a platform, again, that I was not aware of before Clavicular brought it to my attention, for looks maxing. And for some people who listen to the show will know exactly what that is. I suspect others won't. Basically, it means for men improving your physical appearance to a point of perfection through cosmetic surgery, through taking things like peptides, which are amino acids that you can inject and are readily available on what some people call the gray web. It's going to turn you gray of a gray you. It's not like getting bricks of heroin from Silk Road, but nor is it like ordering Tylenol from Amazon.

37:42Vinson Cunningham:You know, it's somewhere in between the peptide business. You gotta cross A border, yes. Yeah. Clavicular has, as I learned from listening to his interview on Impulsive, Logan Paul's podcast, has been on testosterone since he was 14 in an effort to, as he says, puberty max. Because clearly, this young man wanted to make himself into the most, to his mind, masculine person he could. but he is all over the internet tapping on his face with various hard objects, including hammers, but also I've seen a kind of like, it almost looks like a Little League trophy, a baseball thing that he's just smashing on his cheekbone with so that he can create micro breakages and regrow his jaw in a more masculine way.

38:27Vinson Cunningham:He's called clavicular because of the breadth of his collarbone. I have not yet seen any reporter actually measure this thing, but his own measurements are out. You can choose to trust them or not. And I, yeah. Wrong collarbone. I mean, he has a nice clavicle, I guess. So Clavicular was doing this interview with Logan Paul and his co-host of his show. They asked to be rated by him on his personal scale of sexual attractiveness. One of them is rated a 3.75, a devastating sexual attractiveness rating.

38:59Alexandra Schwartz:Yeah, can you tell us why? So, yeah, mostly because his interpupillary distance. It's like how close his eyes are. And also the longer midface would be the main.

39:17Vinson Cunningham:The seriousness with which Clavicular approaches this task, it is as if he's, you know, a jeweler examining them under a microscope to tell them about the flaws in the diamond, and it's just a fact. Physical perfection is of the utmost importance, and I find that interesting for a few reasons. One is that I do think in, like, traditional ideas of masculinity, that stuff was not supposed to matter. That was girly stuff. Like, oh, you're going to spend all this time, like, I just rubbed some Irish spring on my face and I'm out the door being a lumberjack. That was a version of masculinity that was around for a very long time.

39:49Vinson Cunningham:What are you doing with your ointments and your potions? How feminine to pursue physical beauty through all of these cosmetic and surgical means. Now men are there. So, like, women didn't climb out of that freaking hole. Men just, like, dove right down into it. Welcome. Welcome. Welcome, boys. Welcome. It's Helen here. This is a fascinating thing to be reckoned with. Like, this kind of world of ratings and scales that used to be applied by men to women and now are applied by men to themselves. And to women. And to women, of course. Of course. Goes without saying.

40:22Naomi Fry:Well, I think it's interesting, the thing about, like, the violence that is being turned inward, you know. So we can't also forget the violence turned outward in this kind of manosphere environment. You know, someone like Andrew Tate, who is being investigated in the U.K. for rape, sexual assault, and human trafficking, and in Romania on a host of similar charges. Right. And we should say that he has denied all of these allegations. Of course. But, you know, the respect the cock thing, respect the cock and tame the cunt, which was obviously kind of a, you know, a satirical over the top depiction in Pete D.

41:09Naomi Fry:Anderson's Magnolia. This is like the tip of the iceberg of what we're hearing right now. But it does seem, yeah, it does seem that there is this resurgent reactionary notions just of what gender is.

41:26Alexandra Schwartz:I mean, you see it. There's always these two sides of the coin where this focus on the male body, I at least, and it's probably because all of my apps know that I'm a man, And I'm inundated by ads, especially when I watch sports, but not just then, for dick pills, hair supplements, the company Hymns, which already is talking about these things in the construct of gender his and they have hers. There seems to be just a total upswing in the number of these things. And of course, you know, then you look on Hollywood runways and you see that there's, it seems to me, an increasingly violent and punishing return to ideas about the female body.

42:09You know, I mean, we can talk about all the reasons for it.

42:12Alexandra Schwartz:Ozempic might be one, but it's not just that. These aesthetics of extreme skinniness are back. And so the body starts to write these scripts that we've seen again. But I'm wondering, it's interesting because, yeah, there are the androtates of the world and the claviculars of the world. As we mentioned, we've been talking about this kind of two roads thing. I'm wondering if we see the other side of it in culture, but I'm not sure if we see another road in real life.

42:41Vinson Cunningham:My God, it's like Pedro Pascal and that's it. It's like, Pedro, carry us on your shoulders.

42:45Alexandra Schwartz:Pedro Pascal, Coleman Domingo. These are real guys who say, okay, we can kind of queer our notions of clothes and how we present ourselves and not be like super macho. And this is the other thing on Instagram. They're always telling me how to be jacked. There's a guy named Body by Mark who goes up to people. I don't know if you've seen this Instagram account. I haven't.

43:05Vinson Cunningham:Who is Body by Mark?

43:07Alexandra Schwartz:He goes up to people and all he says is, you look jacked. Tell me how you work out. People who are really fit what they do for their workouts and you are jacked. Eight. Calisthenics. Seven days. Not touch weight. You do? Lightweight. So how many days a week are you doing that? Three days.

43:22Naomi Fry:One meal a day.

43:22Alexandra Schwartz:What are your strongest lifts?

43:23Naomi Fry:Well, overhead press is a strong lift divide. How much? Normally it can go up to 100. I didn't want to be like a skinny fat person. I want to have a superhero body. I've been training for like 20 plus years.

43:35Alexandra Schwartz:We're back in this moment of like, you've got to be a He-Man or you've got to be like a waifu. Something has happened where like the comic book almost is back.

43:44Vinson Cunningham:Vincent, I think you're totally right. I read a really fascinating article this week in the New York Times called Why So Many Men Are Obsessed With Testosterone. And I really recommend that people read this. It is totally fascinating. It makes the point, which is very interesting, that the Trump administration is super pro-testosterone, pro-making testosterone supplements very widely accessible after a long period of time in which you had to be prescribed these supplements by doctors because you had a low testosterone count. Now it's going to be easier than ever for people to access extra testosterone.

44:16Vinson Cunningham:It's really fascinating because it gets to the heart of this contemporary idea of what it is to be a man, that you've got to be jacked, you've got to be ripped. Look at heated rivalry. We love these soft men. They're hot as hell. Like, they're hot as hell. They're peptided up. I can't say that for sure, but they might as well be. So I don't think we have a ton of viable alternatives. I watched that documentary that you guys might have heard about Louis Theroux's Inside the Manosphere on Netflix. This has not gotten a ton of praise, this documentary. I think the general consensus is too little, too late.

44:50Vinson Cunningham:Louis Theroux goes around with a bunch of these guys who have made fame and fortune by selling these same ideas to young men. The main point I got from it was that these guys are salesmen. And they talk about themselves that way and they very much identify that way. and you're selling the idea to men that if they want to be viable in the sexual marketplace but also very much the economic marketplace, they need to do these things. They need to become a certain type of person. And there's a scene where one influencer, he runs into two young guys who say, you have shown me the way. You, because we are born without value.

45:28Naomi Fry:What do you mean, life as a man, you're born without value? Nothing in the world is given to you. You have to work for every single penny. Do you think women have it?

45:36Alexandra Schwartz:I think they're born with their value through beauty. Exactly. Because a woman can be stunningly beautiful at 20 years old and get invited to ride in that car or onto a boat or be flying to Miami or whatever because it's pure beauty. Nobody's going to invite him on a trip to Miami. They're not going to fly him out. He has to create value in the world. He has to be valuable to other men. Otherwise, nobody cares. And that's a fact.

46:02Vinson Cunningham:Of course, my heart breaks when I see this because every person has value. So everyone has value. Let's start with that. You know, what a brilliant idea I just had.

46:12Naomi Fry:No, I mean, I think a return to the values of humanism is, we love those.

46:19Alexandra Schwartz:But really, what is to be done in the political, cultural, or even just the personal realm? Are there any solutions that you see sort of shooting up, green shoots of promise in this area?

46:32Vinson Cunningham:Yeah, I think, Vincent, to your point of are we seeing solutions in culture? I don't think culture is really there to provide solutions. I know you don't necessarily think that either. I do think we're getting very interested damaged men being shown to us and not damaged in the stereotypical toxic masculinity way. I have mixed feelings about Half-Man, and one of those mixed feelings is that I think the show's somewhat didactic point is like a strong he-man is hurting, too. And I get it. Something that I think a lot of people love is the pit. We've talked about the pit on this show before, and you have Dr.

47:08Vinson Cunningham:Robbie right there aching and hurting, a man who's absolutely falling apart. Not a he-man at all, a very competent carer who has a really broken life. And we're seeing a portrait of male trauma, of someone who has taken and taken and taken more than he can hold and has no outlet for it and is breaking. It's a very sad portrait of a person. And it's, I think it's also helpful in this discourse.

47:37Naomi Fry:I think really, you know, in my younger years, I feel like I was much more combative and I see it in my teen daughter as well. And I think it's important. I totally appreciate it. For instance, like going nuts about manspreading. You know what I mean? Like stuff like that, which is small. Obviously, it's not we're not talking like anything. But I – this is obviously just a small example. But I'm trying – and I know this is a funny thing to say as, like, the chief hater of this podcast. I'm trying to, like, advance with love. Like, I don't know if, like, just saying I don't want to have anything to do with these assholes is going to totally help.

48:26Naomi Fry:And I think, you know, there has been discussion about, like, is the term toxic masculinity, like, doing more harm than good at this point, right? You know, giving these young men who feel like they have no alternatives but to be, you know, hateful and dominating and et cetera, et cetera, because they feel they have no value otherwise, expressing our, you know, our own anger and frustration as women, which is completely earned. I mean, it's certainly in a lot of ways justified and more satisfying, certainly, and does much maybe in the way of kind of consciousness raising, I guess, oppositionally.

49:07But in terms of kind of moving forward, I wonder if there's another alternative.

49:14Naomi Fry:I want Vincent to tell us how to be a man. I know. Oh, yeah. Let's ask Vincent. Vincent? And Vincent, can you, as the man in our midst, a wonderful man in our midst.

49:24Alexandra Schwartz:Thank you very much. I appreciate that.

49:25Naomi Fry:Could you tell us what the secret is? How does one be a man? You know, I'm much like Dante.

49:34Alexandra Schwartz:I'm halfway down life's journey. I'm still trying to figure it out. Don't know. But I will say this. If I'm ever asking what would a man do in this situation, I'm usually thinking the wrong thoughts. like usually if i'm thinking about being a man it is in a uh self-reproving or self-indicting way that is not helpful to the situation i can still remember every time a teacher when i was a kid like put their face in my face and told me to be a man it happened a lot i think most men that i my acquaintance in my generation maybe i should say have a voice like that in their head and it It has to do with messages that have been directed at us for a long time.

50:15And so when you're asking how to be a man, often the real answer is just how to be a person.

50:29Alexandra Schwartz:This has been Critics at Large. Alex Barish is our consulting editor and Rhiannon Corby is our senior producer. Our executive producer is Steven Valentino. Alexis Quadrado composed our theme music, and we had engineering help today from Pran Bandy with mixing by Mike Kutchman. Remember, we're working on a new edition of our advice series, I Need a Critic. If you need some cultural advice, just record a voicemail on your phone and send it to us at themailatnewyorker.com. That's themailatnewyorker.com, subject line, critics. And as always, you can find each and every one of our episodes at newyorker.com slash critics.