Taking on Masculine Energy

Pitting men and women against one another is just f*cking useless

For me it was all about the neck girth. I know a lot of people couldn’t help but focus on Mark Zuckerberg telling Joe Rogan he wanted to see more masculine energy in the workplace, but I had to pause Rogan’s podcast when he began complimenting Zuck on the strength of his manly thick neck. Is that a thing men go around doing? Admiring one another’s head poles?

Is neck girth now the epitome of masculinity? Because that’s what I want to write about today. Masculinity. I just didn’t expect to be writing about thick necks. But that’s what got me during my three hour listen of Rogan’s podcast interview with Zuck.

As I pen this my husband is dropping all three of our kids off at school. That’s some hardcore masculine energy to me. He also put two of the three of them to bed last night and got up at 3 am when the baby took off her diaper, threw it across the room and peed in her crib. That’s some STRENGTH in the face of a recalcitrant baby. Do you think some weak ass bitch is getting that butt back in a diaper?

So fucking manly!

And his neck, as far as I can tell, is a perfectly normal sized neck.

I’ve been thinking about what we call “masculine” and “feminine” ever since Mark Zuckerberg (intensely masculine, manly man of man-town) went on the Joe Rogan show to do a peacock dance courting the bro-sphere. How else to explain his remarks about bringing “masculine energy” into the workforce other than his desperation to make the media man-o-sphere and the political brofest include him in their cock fights.

I listened to the whole interview (I am worse off for this and I will never get those three hours back, but I was pretty high on Dayquil when I did it) and my take is that Zuckerberg feels like an outsider in the modern day bro-niverse. It felt a lot like those scenes in a John Hughes movie where the “nerd” agrees to be a lookout while the cool kids push the other nerds’ heads into a toilet.

You’ve seen the headlines by now. On the show Zuckerberg argued that corporate environments have become too culturally neutered and advocated for reintroducing masculine energy in the workplace.

He expressed his belief that corporate America has become overly sanitized and lacking in certain energies traditionally associated with masculinity. This comes after he says that he comes from a family with all sisters and is raising three daughters. He makes a careful nod to being surrounded by female energy and then seems to dismiss it.

He further elaborated: "It's one thing to say we want to be kind of like welcoming and make a good environment for everyone and I think it's another to basically say that 'masculinity is bad,' and I just think we kind of swung culturally to that part of the – the kind of – the spectrum"

This came after he went on a long rant about his experience with martial arts. That’s where the neck girth came in.It was awkward.

Both men agreed that MMA and the intense pain of fight training is needed for men to take the “edge” off things.

"I think having a culture that celebrates the aggression a bit more has its own merits that are really positive," Zuckerberg says.

Rogan says, “along with it you get a skill where you can kill people.”

Yup.

“A lot of our society has become neutered,” Zuck says.

Zuckerberg credits martial arts for helping him reconnect with masculine energy, stating that having an activity with male friends where they can "beat each other" has been a "positive experience" for him.

I kept thinking about this Tyler Durden line from Fight Club:

“I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.”

Many men are broken. They’re insecure, they’re flailing, they’re lonely and they feel like they don’t belong in a progressive functioning society that isn’t constantly at war, and raping and pillaging villages in far off lands. Watching football and boxing and MMA just isn’t scratching their ball itches any more.

As Paul Krugman recently wrote in his substack, many billionaire men in particular are painfully insecure. “I’ve seen this phenomenon many times, although I can only speculate about what causes it. My best guess is that a billionaire, having climbed to incredible heights, realizes that he’s still an ordinary human being who puts his pants on one leg at a time, and asks, “Is this all there is?” So he starts demanding things money can’t buy, like universal admiration. Read Ross Douthat’s interview with Marc Andreessen, in which the tech bro explains why he has turned hard right. Andreessen says that it’s not about the money, and I believe him. What bothers him, instead, is that he wants everyone to genuflect before tech bros as the great heroes of our age, and instead lots of people are saying mean things about him and people like him.”

But so-called “masculine energy” in government and at work, or at least how it is being defined definitely isn’t the answer to fixing any of the many problems that plague our society.

I’ve experienced shitty men in the workplace and shitty women. Some of my worst bosses were women who tried too hard to behave like men, the ones who were desperate to be seen as just one of the guys, the ones who bullied their staffs and put their egos first.