The Hollywood Reporter, The Beta Male Conspiracy, and the End of Mankind

Any great geo-political strategist or ancient Chinese mainland war theorist understands that the direct assault is the single least effective form of attack against a superior enemy. Scrappy underdogs hell-bent on victory always choose a combination of asymmetrical warfare and attempts to undermine the stability of the enemy from within. This broadly explains how Russia seeks to destabilize far more economically powerful nations via electronic subterfuge. Also, how ardent feminists are seeking to overthrow the archetypal male and his anthropological reign of man-terror.

Most women and some portion of men seeking to emasculate modern society are high-minded do-gooders who earnestly believe they are working to make the world a better place. You ought loathe these idealists because it is the mythical delusion of the Utopians that often leads to horrendous practical fallout, but you can’t quite label them malicious. In contrast, there is some smaller segment of the population, again, almost entirely female, who simply despise men and wish to remove the male personality from the landscape of life. Not so different than the subset of damaged men who feel anger or undue animosity toward women. About the same percentage of blind haters in each gender.

If you happened to believe that classic masculine behavior led to subjugation, degradation, and even violence toward women, you too would be apt to erase it from the culture. Were you a cunning tactician, you might  recommend a two pronged approach: first, work through the public education system to redefine classic gender roles, rewarding traditionally non-masculine behaviors and punishing aggressiveness; and second, provide for a reshaping of male characters in popular media and entertainment to be less in-charge and far more submissive and helpless. It’s a war without any shots fired, but a more subtle washing of hearts and minds.

NFL Linebacker, James Harrison, famously dismissed participation trophies for his two sons back in 2015:

 

“I came home to find out that my boys received two trophies for nothing, participation trophies! While I am very proud of my boys for everything they do and will encourage them till the day I die, these trophies will be given back until they EARN a real trophy. I’m sorry I’m not sorry for believing that everything in life should be earned and I’m not about to raise two boys to be men by making them believe that they are entitled to something just because they tried their best…cause sometimes your best is not enough, and that should drive you to want to do better…not cry and whine until somebody gives you something to shut u up and keep you happy.”

The now cliché joke about self-esteem trophies for all participants in schools and kids sports leagues provides the tip of the iceberg for a truly profound transformation in how male children are being raised in our country. While there’s clearly a divide between states and localities as to the levels of this neutering, there’s no doubt that the new normal is to provide a new model for rearing of boys alone, and boys in regard to girls and questions of gender differences. Summarily, the new doctrine pushes boys toward aspirations of traditionally lauded female behavior: sharing, caring, performing tasks in groups, emotional IQ, thoughtfulness, and restraint. In contrast, previously standard male behaviors of aggressiveness, competitiveness, physical activeness, and anything domination or individual success are punished. The latter either by methodical penalization of lower scores, rebukes, and time outs, or more formally with the address of pharmaceutical compounds prescribed to reduce acting out or speaking up.

According to the still best mainstream piece written on the subject, the 2014 Esquire article on the drugging of American boys, nearly 15% of young male students will be diagnosed with hyperactivity disorders by the 8th grade. Most of these will be prescribed powerful popular stimulants to counter-balance their active behavior, to dull them back to restraint. Because of the relative newness of this massive drug program on our nation’s boys, the long-term effects have yet to be fully understood. Though there are suggestions that massive depression, anxiety and other ill effects, up to and including potentially the rise in mass school shootings, could be likely. Common sense alone informs that the temporal impact of providing prepubescent boys powerful amphetamines for years and years isn’t nil.

Drugging the most aggressive boys in the population is something heretofore reserved for scientific studies on lab rats and obliged research primates. Now we’re doing it to our human population in the name of curtailing harmful masculine behavior. The boys not drugged are reminded daily in school of their need to be less traditionally male, and seek victories not in competition or adversarial situations, but in making peace, bridging divides, and comforting others. This massive gender-based overhaul to the rearing of schoolchildren may seem noble in its intentions, but the science of altering human instinct in such a relatively rapid time period is anything but understood, with fallouts likely devastating to wide swaths of the population. Our nation’s schools have been a source of brainwashing of children since the dawn of their existence, not entirely for illicit purposes. Though nothing so unnaturally grand as removing archetypal male behavior from half the population has even been attempted.

In symbiosis with re-educating boys before puberty, modern entertainment pushes a narrative in popular entertainment and commercial content of the hapless buffoonish male who could not exist without a mommy figure, often his wife or girlfriend. You need only watch any consumer products commercial to see this dynamic. It’s the pervasive standard in advertising for anything from orange juice to homeowners insurance. Clownish male who can’t tie his shoes; head shaking intelligent woman and kids cheerfully mocking their hapless father. It’s comical, only in the sense that women might laugh at a commercial portraying women as gold-diggers or harpies or other such demeaning gender stereotypes. So, not comical, much darker.

The same is true in the entirety of the television world, from Kid Disney up to more grown up far on primetime. Fathers are submissive no-nothings who face a laugh track of derision for their lovable, but obvious shortcomings. Dads are present, but not needed. This is slightly better than in modern animation where dad is usually dead or gone, but not by much.

I like to share the personal story of my time working at Disney, the modern entertainment leader in the undermining of classically male archetypes. While pitching concepts for a story for one or another of the longstanding Disney properties, I suggested a scene where a father seeking to make amends with his son takes the boy outside to play catch. Hardly novel, but still somewhat powerful in the Rockwell tradition of America. The lead male executive, in a majority female run program, suggested I was off my rocker and that dads haven’t played ball with their sons since the 50’s. Nobody would relate. An outdated trope at best. This objectively warped comment by way of a powerful media executive who clearly doesn’t spend his weekends trying to find parking at the crowded local Little League. Yes, they still exist. But to the Disney senior staff, it’s either imagined, or if real, distasteful. We could imagine that scenario entirely anecdotal, but it’s not.

The rise of the Beta Male is a new twist in the efforts to dismiss masculinity as unseemly, hurtful, or downright toxic to a well-ordered society. The Alpha Male concept is far more pop culture fanciful label than rightful scientific application to the human species. But it’s a standard enough colloquialism to employ as the target of attack for its supposedly immense destructive properties. Anything from rape and enslavement to female subjugation and global warfare are assigned the auspice of Alpha Male insidiousness. Pretty heavy blame for the strong silent type who played some ball in high school. Naturally, the traits of confidence, commitment, ambition, guardianship and chivalry are entirely lost from the conversation. Merely the deleterious effects on crime stats, hate, and domination.

Men run regions and nations around the world where this is perpetual war and assaults and rape. Also, they have developed nations where everybody has cable TV, cars, and you can obtain 4,000 calories of delicious cheeseburgers and fries for about three bucks. Political groups and aligned media outlets push the premise of a limitless rape culture in America, despite their claims being counterintuitive to all stats. When dirty jokes and men peeking at women’s behinds in Spandex  becomes rape, we have a rape culture. This while actual sexual assault statistics are down substantially in the nation for decades. Nobody flees America to other nations to find improved public safety and lower assault rates.

The concept of Beta Male is the neat solution which allows men to continue being a part of a polite society. Through emasculation, they achieve acceptable male norms. This is not to be confused with homosexual men who may or may not be effeminate in personality. This is heterosexual males whose role in society is that of caring and comforting partner to a female companion and communal employee in a supportive and empowering place of work. Not a submissive per se, but docile, tame, and considerate, with a need equal to women to call out aggressive male behavior as sinister and unsettling. As I explain in my book, Man Rules, masculinity isn’t an either-or proposition, it’s a scale, with all three to four billion guys on the planet scoring somewhere on a range. There are no Alpha or Beta males, merely an approximation of masculinity, wherein you might consider the Beta Males on the lower end of the scale. Some by rearing and genetics, others by complete personal choice to group well into the modern world, most especially professionally and socially on the coasts.

The Beta Male provides a place to go with anti-masculine theology painted as something other than anti-male theology. Women may cover their distaste for men with the adoration of the softer and more sensitive men who in turn promote the specific cause of women. It’s equivalent to a particularly angry man asked to name strong women and coming up with the names of Victoria’s Secret models. The man holding a grudge against women comes up with the names of women who might serve his own particular vision of the more perfect world order. In similar manner, a woman who detests confident or aggressive men will come up with the name Judd Apatow, as a well known example of a literally bearded male apologists. Terry Crews could be substituted if for no other reason than it expresses how Beta Males can be physically strong as well. I hate to use only Hollywood references, but when you need fishing gear, you go to an outdoors store, when you need Beta Males, it’s the entertainment industry.

The Hollywood Reporter, like many movie and TV industry trade magazines, has shifted from print to digital and under the desperate need for clicks has run with the industry zeitgeist of oppressed females, victims in their own ten million dollar homes. The outlet provides daily headlines about female empowerment, female professional victories, and the never-ending ill behavior of the industry patriarchy, such that that can be defined in something other than purely emotional language. Digital magazines and leading blogs in the media industry largely employ young women who easily comply with and likely agree with the pretense of toxic masculinity. Such is the outcome of being 25 years old and having been indoctrinated for all of those years on the subject. In the cute apartments of the major cities you have a perfect social and professional bubble of media content producers and editorial managers feeling pride in their outing of the truth about men, as delineated by the women who have no need for them.

In the Hollywood Reporter’s recent edition they highlighted the Triumph of the Beta Males as symbolized by the cast of HBO’s Silicon Valley. Once again, the Beta Male terminology is conveniently misapplied. There’s a desire to intermix tech nerd and Beta Male as if one in the same, though one represents a tiny segment of well-above-average engineering minds, and the other merely an emotionally sensitive male who fears confrontation. They may appear superficially the same, but understand that the mathematically astute have always been socially awkward, often less physically equipped men. In contrast, the Beta Male phenomenon is largely a recently invented media cultural phenomenon, such as the Hollywood Reporter cover photo featuring the cast members of Silicon Valley dressed kitschy retro and sticking their hands in one another’s pockets. It’s a obvious association of “gayness” with the Beta Males which is again is rather misplaced, if not offensively outdated. But this is an age where agenda out ranks intellectual honesty in every single step.

Silicon Valley’s characters are not submissive males; they are computer engineering nerds with noteworthy professional accomplishments. Even as stereotypical geeks they seek out members of the opposite sex rather unapologetically, as well as money, power, and corporate control. It’s easy to label a Zuckerberg or Gates or Bezos a Beta Male by appearance, but in fact they are all hyper aggressive businessmen with blind ambition stored in their genetics. They may be very genteel with women, but so are the Marlboro Man and Clint Eastwood in his serape gunning down bad guys. These tech CEO’s are corporate barons.

The modern media elevation of the emasculated male as hero and the traditional male as obvious butt of all obvious jokes conspires with the other elements of anti-masculinity to produce a deleterious environment for the male of the species. Chain-smoking, domineering, sexist men may have thrived in 1618 and even 1918, but that does little to ease the assault on the male gender in 2018. An assault is an assault; nobody believes they’re righteously attacked because their grandfather killed your grandfather back in Sicily and now the vendetta has come due. The American ideal is that we judge the actions of each individual, not their class, and not their class historically by any means. There is an appropriate manner in which historical discrimination can be righted. That does not include accepting a sweeping, demographic label counterattack as a deserved punishment.

This entire Beta Male phenomenon and the overall attack on masculinity by educational and cultural and media institutions could be written off as simply another largely hyped radical progressive cause of the day. The largest impacts of the emasculation are felt and seen in the coastal metropolises where group think and discrimination have been the norms of the social structure for centuries. But there are real hard facts regarding male outcomes that simply can’t be explained away so cavalierly.

Measured over the past three decades, testosterone levels in American males are declining remarkably. The precipitous drop is only partially explained by poor health choices such as overeating and lack of exercise. And even that is a chicken-egg relationship as low testosterone levels in men can lead to lethargy and weight gain. Pharmaceutical medications likely play a role in the three decades and rolling decline in male testosterone levels, including all those drugs prescribed to hyperactive boys to make them less aggressive. The third wheel likely has to do with a changing cultural landscape as described in this article, wherein masculine or “testosterone linked” behaviors are being punished more and rewarded far less. The human animal did not reach the top of the food chain without remarkable abilities for adaptation. Cut off the food supply of a pet dog and they will likely die; do so to a human and they will invent another way to get fed. Feminization may be that new food source.

The decline in male testosterone not only leads to obvious outcomes such as a dramatic document reduction in male physical strength, but less clearly tangible results such as lack of ambition, fatigue, frustration, depression, and rises in addictive, anti-social behaviors. These tendencies are in large part responsible for the relative decline in educational achievement for men, long term unemployment, failed relationships, workplace and school shootings, and subsequent noteworthy increases in drug addiction, obesity and diabetes, and successful suicides. For the first time in modern history, the life expectancy of the American male is decreasing.

On the margin, the decrease in testosterone across the male population may lead to less insidious aggressive behavior. If you partially neuter tens of millions of men, there will be thousands of fewer assaults by male. It’s simply a chemical fact. But you will have affected an entire population in a manner of eugenics that we thought we’ve intellectually and morally outgrown generations ago. When an antediluvian sensibility judge insists that a drug addicted mother before his court be made forcibly barren, almost all of us collectively cringe. The specific harrowing case may cause sympathy for the sterilization position, but we understand the danger of this policy lest it ever advance wider. The same is true for the American male. Less than one percent of the adult male population will ever commit a violent crime, but we are tacitly treating all of them as potential violent criminals in need of re-engineering.

Anti-masculinity efforts are definitely a boon to women, largely upscale Caucasian women by demographic, who are the leading voices in cultural, media, and educational positions capable of marketing the anti-Alpha Male message.  As a group, these women are dominating high school graduation rates, college entrance rates, professional school degrees, health and lifestyle and mortality outcomes, and higher starting salary occupations relative to men. You wouldn’t know it from the hashtags, but women, at least this majority Caucasian demographic subset of women, are doing quite well. You have to dig deeper into minority women stats to see a real mixed bag, but these population segments are not generally the groups leading the charge to turn Alpha Males into Beta Males. Minority women more so than their non-minority female counterparts value the traditional roles of men in their family. It’s not a racial bias, it’s a class bias. Those raised in relative affluence are more likely to feel unburdened by the real world consequences of rejiggering human nature.

Since the release of my book, I’ve come to communicate with many Millennial aged females, well into the dating and relationship portions of their lives, completely frustrated with the potential mating pool. These same women oppose ogling, sexism, and otherwise rude or overly aggressive male behavior. But they all to a woman lamented the overly dependent, overly needy, emotionally effusive males presented to them as potential future husbands. The term effeminate is not applicable; the term non-masculine certainly is. The fairytale romance of cowboy and frontier woman waiting to wooed by said cowboy is not merely fairy tale nonsense; nor are they pure imaginations of the patriarchy without consult from a female audience. Men don’t read romance novels; women read them by the millions. Peruse their storylines. It’s easy to mock women who fall for classic romantic tales, less easy to understand what drives this innate satisfaction in tales of manly men and feminine women. It’s been cooking in the genes for eons. Human instinct can modified to a degree by new cultural norms; but a wholesale rewrite of primordial design is invariably going to cause unpredictable levels of destruction.

The Beta Male is not a real thing. Nor is ADD/ADHD, not nearly to the levels its diagnosed, and certainly not to the levels it’s so nonchalantly treated with powerful pharmaceuticals. Understand that the forces pushing for the eradication of masculinity are typically well-intentioned, even if dramatically flawed in their science. But there are a subset of detractors completely out for eradication of masculinity for very sinister and self-serving purposes. The consequences to bending to these anti-male designs are not merely more ignoramus sitcom fathers, there are real detrimental consequences to both the men and women of the species. These are the kinds of things that The Hollywood Reporter portrays so flippantly in Silicon Valley television show co-promotions, but have society-altering impact in the grander scheme.

It’s not pretty what’s happening to men, the raising of the issue alone is labeled as anti-women by people who use such terms to shout down honest conversation. In Hollywood, you couldn’t mention any of the facts in this article without being cited for misogyny and likely never to work again in the main industry. Apparatchiks walk among us maintaining the supremacy of the dominant cultural doctrine. I’ve always compared this to a religious zealotry, where faith to the source documents outweighs even the concept of debate. Men are suffering by the numbers, and attempts to emasculate the gender from kindergarten age on is not going to end well. All such Final Solutions have historically ended in misery.