Tiktok's Toxic Testosterone

Mending the political divide between young men and women.

I am convinced that TikTok knows I’m a man, and so do Instagram and YouTube. Because I’m a man, the content that algorithms feed me is gendered accordingly. A mostly innocuous though not entirely unannoying example is that I get recommended more football videos and ads for male grooming products than my partner. The same is true of reactionary political content, despite me purposefully ignoring it. Having seen more than enough male peers — and crucially, no female peers — be seduced by ‘alt-right’ influencers like Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate, this surprises me little. Simply being a man seems like a good indication of one’s likelihood to click on a 2-hour-long video titled ‘Brainwashed liberal gets rekt by facts and logic’. 

Unfortunately, my personal observations testify to a real and growing divide between young men and women illustrated in a striking graphic produced for the FT by John Burn-Murdoch. Whereas in the ‘90s and early 2000s, men and women aged 18 to 29 had only been separated by a few ‘ideological percentage points’, they now stand miles apart. In Germany and the UK, young men are now 20 points more conservative than young women. In the US, this divide exceeds 40 points. And in South Korea, where plummeting marriage and birth rates indicate a deeper malaise, it spans 50 points.

But what explains this divide? It’s hard to deny the role played by social media awash with ‘podcast-bros’ who, along with trying to sell you ‘male vitality supplements’, also want to sell you on the idea that masculinity is under attack by nefarious forces, whether that be a loose grouping of progressive feminists or a well-organised cabal of liberal elites bent on destroying Western society through the deliberate feminisation of men. Alt-right agitators, however, cannot magic up eager audiences. Algorithms help by consistently serving up red meat to male users, but there are underlying reasons as to why men become not only occasional viewers but avid apologists of personalities like Andrew Tate — a rather unsavoury bloke, to put it mildly. 

We must consider the typical profile of a person who gets enthralled by the internet ‘manosphere’: typically a young down-on-his-luck straight man. He is lucky enough not to be dogged by overt systemic oppression but unlucky enough to grow up in a world where he cannot reasonably expect to be more well-off than his parents and which increasingly places no explicit value on his gender or sexuality. This causes him to scorn progressive ideologies which, at least in their most ‘chronically online’ variations, seemingly pay no attention to the problems he and his male peers face, e.g. high rates of suicide and a growing gap in educational attainment. It’s unsurprising, then, that he is vulnerable to being manipulated by reactionaries who ostensibly agree with progressives that the system is in dire need of reform but who cater specifically to him as a straight man.

So how might we mend the divide? There exists a loose community of content creators, known colloquially as ‘BreadTubers’, who routinely counter the efforts of alt-right influencers by providing sympathetic progressive analyses of the same problems. However, this is not enough. The disaffection which makes young men vulnerable to reactionary rhetoric in the first place deserves confronting. Of course, most people are in no position to solve men’s ‘woes’, which presumably require shifts in policy and social attitudes — a positively Byzantine task that must be tackled without undoing the monumental social progress attained in the last century.

Instead, we should take individually manageable steps to recognise and mitigate these problems (rather than scoff at them), as well as overtly decouple masculinity from the toxic conception on which alt-right ideologues trade. We should make it abundantly clear that misogyny, sexual aggression, and uncompromising stoicism do not make a good son, boyfriend, or father and that they only worsen men’s problems. This should not be a task borne exclusively by women, either. In fact, the responsibility of ‘policing’ masculinity falls squarely on the shoulders of men themselves; it is we who shape masculinity. Taking a page out of Minnesota governor Tim Walz’s playbook: men should call out toxic masculinity as distinctly weird and unmanly, dissuading young boys from ever idolising figures like Andrew Tate.

Image from Wikimedia Commons