Part One: The History of American Masculinity Grifters
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What's Menendez, my brothers? I'm Robert Evans, the host of Behind the Bastards, a podcast where every week I sit down with Miles Gray and go, did you see that new Menendez Brothers show? How are we feeling about that? The one where they're all hot for each other? The one where Javier Bardem is their dad. Yeah, I love that. I know there's a lot of reasons to have issue with that. I know the brothers have taken issue with that show's depiction. I will say, I think it fundamentally...

the killing as justified because if I walked into a house, any house, I just rewatched No Country for Old Men and saw Javier Bardem there, I'm open and fire. Oh yeah. It's not even about the other stuff. It's just about like, he's terrifying. His Anton Chigurh energy is too much. I could go to a fucking charity fundraiser for orphaned children and if he was hosting, I'd be like, dude, I'm sorry. Lighten him up. Broke.

I'm sorry, I cannot sheath my blade until it has spilled blood. He could have a cattle bolt gun anywhere. Anywhere. And even if you handcuff that son of a bitch, he could get you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Freaky, he's freaky. He's terrifying. He's a terrifying man.

He was in that movie, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, and he's supposed to be- Hey, hey. He was. He was charming in that movie by a pedophile. He was supposed to be, but I was like- Is that what it's about? No. No, no, no. It's about- It's Woody Allen. Kind of polyamory. Oh, it's Woody. But polyamory as depicted by Woody Allen. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, no stumbling blocks detected for that concert. No, no. You know who's not terrifying or who is terrifying but terrifyingly talented is Miles Gray, who I already introduced. I don't know why I'm doing it twice. Oh, shit. Thank you. How are you doing today, Miles? I'm great, Robert. How are you doing? I'm doing good. Miles, you're a man. Sophie, I got to ask you. Yeah. The Lakers, you feeling good based on what JJ Reddick's been saying?

I mean, I really appreciate that he's feeling so confident, but I'm not. Okay. I'm not. I'm not feeling discouraged. That's what we do. That's what we do as Laker fans. Okay. Sorry. I had to just interject. I don't know. The Lakers famously all men, you know, miles. You're a man. Manly man. Manly man. I'm a man.

Yeah. So a lot of us are men. And I think if you're a man whose brain is not pudding, you have probably had the feeling often in the last like five or six years where you'll like see something about young people and like what influencers are popular today, like Andrew Tate and go like, what the fuck's happening with dudes? Right. What's going on? Something seems really awry. And this feeling is kind of

exacerbated by the fact that I feel like every year or so, each of the big publications, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, you know, the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine will do like a masculinity and crisis article, right? Where they're trying to talk about like, why are men getting more conservative? What's wrong with young men, you know?

I wanted to look into that. And specifically, I wanted to look into like the history of moral panics over masculinity in the United States, because as a spoiler, about every 30 years, all of the like columnists in the country get convinced that masculinity is in crisis. And this has been happening for decades.

roughly 120 years. Oh, so it's the same as like, nobody wants to work these days. Yes, yes. This is exactly that kind of thing. There's some slight changes in how it gets expressed based on the time. But what hasn't changed is that every time there's a crisis of masculinity, a crop of grifters rises up to make a bunch of money off of the fact that men don't feel good about being men anymore.

So we're going to talk about that this week. This is a week where we talk about the manfluencers, a word I'm going to use a lot, even though no one likes it. Nobody feels good about the term manfluencer. We all kind of. Yeah. How do you feel about manfluencers?

I don't care. The episode started. Yeah, I mean, fine. Look, I don't know what we're going to talk about every time I agree to be on the show. So I'm just glad it's something that I've personally invested a lot of my own money in. So I feel like maybe I can bring a little bit of balance to this conversation. Don't just let you, Robert, just tear down the whole fucking movement, bro. Now that you've admitted you never read our emails about the subject, I'm excited to have you on for our new episode. Miles reads a series of actionable threats at elected officials.

Dear Senator Schumer. Whoa, what's this one about? Wow, Miles, you came with his address. I didn't even have that in the script. I don't know. Somebody just asked me to look up a name. I did it. We all love Chuck Schumer, I assume. Love you, Chuck. Anyway, cold open, done.

Sometimes where a crime took place leads you to answer why the crime happened in the first place. Hi, I'm Sloane Glass, host of the new true crime podcast, American Homicide. In this series, we'll examine some of the country's most infamous and mysterious murders and learn how the location of the crime becomes a character in the story. ♪

Listen to American Homicide on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, Bo. Hey, Matt. Are you ready to tell the readers about the extra special episode we have coming up? I think we have to let them in on our little surprise. Yeah, if you haven't already figured it out, the queen of Christmas herself, can't believe this, Mariah Carey, will be joining us this week. Wow. Readers, publicists, Katie's, and finalists, tune in to maybe the most unforgettable episode of Lost Cultures this yet.

Listen to Las Culturistas on Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm going deep undercover. It's hard to visualize you with hair. To expose the secret world of professional shoplifting. So you can make $1,000 a day shoplifting. Yeah. And I end up outside the mansion of the shoplifting queen herself. I hear the cops. Dude, I think we should go. Listen to Queen of the Con Season 6, The California Girls, on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

It's been 30 years since the horror began. 911, what's your emergency? He said he was going to kill me. In the 1990s, the tourist town of Domino Beach became the hunting ground of a monster. We thought the murders had ended. But what if we were wrong? Come back to Domino Beach. I'll be waiting for you. Listen to The Murder Years, Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

The nightmare of what happened to a family inside 999 North Rodeo Gulch Road on a perfectly ordinary afternoon and the burning home a killer would leave behind and the river of blood that police would find leading all the way to the deep end will stay with you for a long, long time.

And it's just one of the homes waiting for you to enter on season three of Murder Homes. So step inside to hear the story of a day that will always be frozen in time. Binge the full season of Murder Homes now on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. We're hot now. The hot open has begun. Oh, yeah. Can I just say? What?

I'm concerned about men. We're all concerned about men. We're all concerned about men. Just to say, because men are concerning. We are. Yeah, they are. Get in line, sister. Yeah, I do feel, Miles, you and I, when were you born?

Oh, wow. You never ask a bro his age, dude. First rule of man fluency. Well, Miles, your face doesn't show it. You don't look a day over 23. I have the exact same birthday as Prince Harry. I just turned 40 years old. Oh, really? I wouldn't have guessed. I literally remember that you are his birthday twin every time I see him. That's interesting because a lot...

I really think I, cause I graduated in 2006 from high school and I think I was in a sweet spot that like only lasted for a couple of years where I

I think very briefly, really just for the last two years of high school, things kind of were very healthy with young men compared to how they were before and after. There was a switchover that happened between junior high and senior high for me where when I was in middle school and junior high, like I would get bullied a bunch for being the kid who had like D&D books or whatever or played Warhammer and shit. Like I got tons of shit for being- Painting your own Warhammer figures during recess. Didn't go always. I was like 15, 15, but yeah.

Like that didn't go well for me. And then when I was in my junior year, World of Warcraft came out and suddenly all of that stopped. And it was right at the same time that like people started getting a little less shitty and then suddenly a lot less shitty towards like queer kids in school. There was this like brief period where all of the trends for, and I think I was, I was kind of right on the cusp of it because I just noticed that

all of the weird kids stopped getting as much shit when I was about 16 years old. It doesn't seem like that lasted very long, but yeah, I don't know. Yeah. I mean, I remember in high school we used to, we used to give swirlies to the D and D kids. I got, I've got some swirlies until I, until I had a growth spurt at around age 14 and then suddenly like,

I was too big for swirlies, but yeah. Got a lot of terrible eye infections as a result of those swirlies. Some rough days. Some rough days in my early years. No, but I think I know what you mean because too, like there was also like for my age, it was like Eminem was also like the guy who was rapping and you were just...

hurling the F word around like with Reckless Abandoned. We let Eminem get away with a lot. A lot, folks. Spotify threw me a couple of his songs the other day and I was like, Jesus Christ. You're like, what did you just say? Wow, this man was out of pocket. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But that was the thing. You could like, you know, but if you're like a black guy doing that, then they'll be like, we need to talk about censoring music. But then, you know, like Eminem. My mom liked Eminem. Moms love Eminem.

Moms love Eminem? Yeah. My mom didn't, but my mom also didn't. I don't think my mom knew who Eminem was probably until 8 Mile. And she's like the white guy from the rapping movie. Yeah. Anyway, so Miles, a few days before I sat down to write these episodes, a video started going viral. And this is not the first time I've seen this video go viral. It's happened at least once more, like a year or so earlier.

But it shows a... You may have seen it. It shows a group of soggy men in their late 20s to early 30s standing by the ocean holding sledgehammers awkwardly. Like, while a dude who appears to be about 20% trinbolone acetate and creatine by body weight hurls abuse at them. And I'm going to show you a segment of that clip. And before I do, you should know that each of the wet dudes getting yelled at paid $12,000 for a three-day course. So everyone standing there getting screamed at has...

has settled out 12 grand for the experience. You don't fucking deserve to be here. Fucking quit. You piece of shit. I want to be a better man. I want to be a better husband. I want to be a better father. I want to be a better you fucking whiny piece of shit. None of you deserve to be here. Back. You better move with a fucking purpose. Belly. Feet. Back. Back.

That's embarrassing. That's just embarrassing. That's just embarrassing. These guys can't even lift the sledgehammers and they're just like, please abuse me. No, Sophie, I do think you should click the first link that I gave you and show that video too now that we've seen the first one because these are all fun. So the first one that I had keyed up the first time? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

I just love watching Ben pay money to get screamed at and know that like every dom that I know would charge a lot less and then you'd be with the pretty lady. Yeah, exactly. It's just a much better deal. Someone who smells good and takes the profession seriously. Right. Enjoy this. And like, if you know any of these guys, please tell them to see their dermatologist because I see a lot of eczema. We're fine.

- What is going on? - Oh man, absolutely not. Incredible way to spend $12,000. - The way that they understood when he was like feet.

belly. Yeah. Yeah. You can buy, if you're this kind of guy, for one thing, the very nicest firearms that exist in the country, you can all buy for less than $12,000. Truly. You can buy a pretty good Toyota Prius for $12,000. You can just have $12,000 and not get screamed at for $12,000. There's so much you can do with $12,000. Put that in a high yield savings account. Right. Right. Exactly. Exactly.

put it under your bed. Any, anything but spend it to get screamed at. Yeah. By some guy who's fucking dad failed him. So yeah, let's just repeat the cycle together, guys. Yeah.

Now, this is a video from the Modern Day Knight Project, which exists to take upper middle class men who have money but no sense of self-worth and put them through an intense, unpleasant, but also short and manageable experience so they feel like real men. Their website even includes a very depressing banner ad right at the top that says, Attention, the Modern Day Knight Project is only for entrepreneurs, executives, and leaders.

Wow. Your family deserves the best version of you as a leader, husband, and father. Your family also deserves $12,000. Yeah, right. Exactly. Now, this is all, this whole course is based on a kind of the public...

understanding of something called Hell Week that the Navy SEALs do, which basically, if you're going to become a Navy SEAL, there's a part of the training that's a week where you spend all of your time doing very miserable, torturous exercises, generally in and around the ocean and like not really sleeping. And it sucks because

but it's also part of like job training, right? Like you are training to do a job that you will be paid for as opposed to paying $12,000. And it's also, I think there's a lot you can, one can debate is Hell Week really necessary for training Navy SEALs? But what you can't debate is that like,

Navy SEALs go on to do a thing as a result of this experience, as opposed to nothing at all. Right. Yeah. You get to fight in America's Imperial fighting forces. Yes. This one, you just go and just fucking scream at your partner.

Yeah. And there's this misunderstanding too. And we get the same thing with like boot camp, right? Where people focus on like shit they saw in Full Metal Jacket. The drill sergeant screaming these creative insults at you, all the like mental and physical abuse.

And they're like, wow, that's what makes soldiers. And ignore the fact that like both for Navy SEALs and for regular soldiers, the getting yelled at is a small part of like months. And in the case of the Navy SEALs, like literally years of like learning technical stuff, like how to use explosives, how to use firearms in different ways, how to do all of the weird boat shit that you have

to do as a name. CQB and the like. There's a bunch of actual technical training that is a much bigger part of the whole experience than getting screamed at. And then when you finish getting trained, you get to go do that job instead of going back to selling used cars in Encino. Now,

I don't think there's a big point in me critiquing these places on like merit, though, because the modern day night project and so many other boot camp style programs for adult men are part of a network of what you can call manfluencer programs, all of which capitalize on the feelings of inadequacy and weakness that seem to be endemic among mostly white dudes who have more money than self-confidence.

When you look at the marketing materials around all of the products in this category, you see a couple of things over and over again. Modern society has made it nearly impossible to be masculine, and this is literally killing men. That's how this is all framed. And here's a clip from their big advertisement video on their website that honestly looks like it was coded in 2008. It looks like the Drudge Report. It's like administering chemotherapy to a cancerous area of the body.

And it's going to unearth and expose who you are. The physical challenging that you go through is purpose-driven. Every single evolution is purpose-driven. Every single evolution creates opportunity for four things: to lead, to show emotional discipline, to communicate, and to problem solve. So the project is here for a purpose: to help you become the man you know in your deepest heart that you're meant to be.

And all we're going to do as instructors over the next 75 hours is administer the project. No different than a doctor would administer chemotherapy to a cancerous body part. This is so fucking stupid, dude. The music's great, though. I take some home. Yeah.

My parents both died due to complications from chemo. So for one thing, like, I don't know, bro. Chemo's not really, like, are these guys in such a, are these guys admitting that by doing this, they're in such a desperate strait that they will literally die if a man doesn't scream at them on a beach?

Because I don't think that's their issue. I think their issue is they didn't do a job that led to them shooting people. And because our media entire – because like a lot of media, particularly the media guys like this consume, entirely focuses on violence as like a way to prove your masculinity. They have no way to feel like they're men, right? Violence is a love language actually is what we want to give the men who are in dire need of chemo violence.

Or as I say, pissing on them. Yeah, amazing stuff. You would do a much better job by just giving them chemo, right? That's a real near-death experience. Seriously, and even like the irony too of like chemo like decades ago where they're like, this radiation might come boomerang back around in a few decades and cause...

like serious illness again. Super other cancer, yeah. This could be also, yeah, it's like, yeah, it might help now. Or maybe you're gonna raise somebody who's gonna turn to a mass murder. I don't know. Yeah, a non-zero number of these guys took their sons out to the beach the next week and made them hold a sledgehammer while they screamed at them, right? Right. Here's another segment from that video. The blood that people spill together who go through adversity together is thicker, creates a bigger bond, a deeper bond,

than the water of the womb, meaning people who have shared the same womb. The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb. - Cool, bro. - What? - What the fuck, man? - What a cool guy. - The blood of the covenant? This is a covenant? - Right. Do any of these men even understand the gestational process either? Will they be like, "It's a water womb?" What's that part again?

This is we're calling this a covenant because everyone paid 12 grand to get yelled at on the beach together. That's a fucking covenant. Honestly, you better. God, for 12 grand, they better be calling it a fucking covenant. Yeah. If it's just like a bunch of cool guys hanging out, getting pissed on at the beach.

Then it doesn't sound as good. It's funny. Obviously, what they're playing with here is something very real, which is that when you experience actual trauma and adversity with a group of people, it can, in fact, bond you to them, right? The idea of having... And it's very attractive to a lot of men, this idea that...

I can go through this very manageable version of the experience that it is not so like actually joining the military and fighting is not a manageable experience, which is why so many people who do it wind up killing themselves later. Right. Sure. Or coming back and being like, do not do that.

Don't do that. Yeah, don't do it. Like whatever you want to call it, it's not. They're fighting some other person's war and it's not fucking worth it. It is a chaotic and dangerous thing to do. Right. As opposed to this, which is not really all that dangerous other than the danger of a guy who is taking like black market fucking gear, having his heart explode as he does fucking sledgehammer pushups or whatever.

But this idea that you can do this very manageable thing that really just costs money and takes three days. And then there's this large, you hope, influential group of men that you share an intense bond with, right? That is attractive to a kind of guy, a fairly normal kind of guy today, because it's very normal for men today to be overwhelmingly lonely. A study by the Survey Center on American Life in 2021 found that one in five single American men report having no close friends. And that's a catastrophe.

That really is like an existential threat, because when you have young men who are miserable, it's very easy to convince those young men to do terrible things. This has been a problem for all of human history. I've seen this cycle happen a lot of times. Like you got bored young men or people who have taken up arms previously and have nothing to do. And like, hey, what do you guys what are you guys up to?

Yeah. Nothing. Miserable and alone paying 12 grand to get screamed at on the beach. Huh? Huh? Yeah. Jesus. 12, four. So what? My math, three, four grand a day, four grand a day. Something like that on the beach. And you think you're entering some fucking covenant with other people who have

the same terrible problem solving skills you do, or you thought this was the way out of whatever your problems were. And then you think you're going to be able to open up to the guy who said you're a piece of shit over and over when you have any kind of problem that might need any kind of nuanced advice. Yes, yes, yes. Sign me up.

Someone lend me 12 grand. Yeah. Now, there's a very good Vice article on these camps and on the Modern Day Night Project in particular by Brendan Burrs. It does a pretty good job of describing some of the sorts of guys who find programs like this appealing and why. I'm going to quote from that now.

The first time that Vikram Deol, a 39-year-old real estate agent and recent divorcee, met Bedros Kaluian, he was at a three-day business workshop hosted by Kaluian. Seeing Kaluian's tattooed sleeve, his square-set jaw, listening to his gruff, gravelly voice, Deol thought, this is a man I want to be like. His thoughts kept tumbling. Am I man-crushing this dude? Holy shit.

This is a good example of what you might call the shallow appeal of this program and the men who run it, right? These guys all look like the special forces dudes I watch in movies. I wish I was that kind of guy because I've kind of been taught that that's the only way to be that has any value. Now, feeling that way, it's not something to be proud of, but I wouldn't say it's shameful. It's extremely common. Most men go through a period of time where they're like, I either should try to find a way to go fight or

Or I wish I had. Right. That's not an uncommon experience for men. And there's a lot to be said about the idea that like it's probably healthy as a society to have various rituals that are widely recognized that like

signify the passage into adulthood that like societies that build something like that in avoid some problems that we have in our society. I'm not against that idea. I just think you probably shouldn't have to pay 12 grand for the privilege, you know, barrier to entry. Yeah. Yeah. Um,

Now, Brendan writes about another attendee, Keith Schmidt, a 49-year-old veteran and firefighter who was struggling with mental health issues. Quote, he had his demons, childhood trauma full of sexual, physical, and mental abuse, plus PTSD from serving in the military. But he'd shoved that crap down somewhere deep, shut off from the rest of them, because as he'd always been taught, that's what a man does. A man doesn't cry. A man compartmentalizes. If a man accessed any emotion, it was anger. A fuel Schmidt knew too well.

He first described its power when his grade school teacher, Miss McGrath, told him one day that he wouldn't amount to anything more than a garbage man. "Fuck you," he responded. He'd get back at Miss McGrath, his mother who belittled and hit him, the mentor who molested him. He'd get back at all of them with the sweet revenge of success.

And like that is so sad because that is that is a man in desperate need of like mental health care that 12 grand could provide a lot of a lot of good therapy for $12,000 for four grand. One day, one day is cost of that screamo camp. Didn't you put that into therapy? Yeah. Shit. You might make some progress. Right. Yeah.

And Schmidt is one of the guys who will claim repeatedly that this program improved his life, maybe even saved it. And who am I to argue with him here, right? There isn't much point anyway, because as silly as these programs and the ones like them are, they're not the most poisonous outgrowth.

of what is an industry devoted entirely to the crisis of American masculinity, right? Unlike the most influential voices in this industry, guys like Andrew Tate, Kalouian isn't tricking guys into an MLM or so far as I can tell, ranting about race science and the evils of the 19th Amendment. He's just selling them the fantasy that their problems are rooted in the fact that their lives don't share enough of the aesthetics of an action movie from 2011. Right.

Yeah. Which is funny because, you know, the irony to me is that this whole obsession with SEAL boot camp, that's from G.I. Jane. It sure is. That's a lot of it. That's from a fucking movie where a woman went through that journey

like Bud's training for seals. And that, I, that was what I think one of the very first mainstream depictions we got of what Bud's training looked like for Navy seals. So it's, it's interesting too, that we're also referencing a movie to define masculinity. That was about this woman who went through it and became a Navy seal. And it's like, yeah, dude, like that, man. But for us, it's so, and it's, it's such a, again, I have a lot of friends who still,

particularly in like the Marine Corps, probably the closest friend I have who did and who then went on to fight, like described it to me because I asked him about boot camp and he like his description was so very different. This kind of shit. He was like, oh, it's a game. It's like a very silly game. And you realize the rules of the game early on. And you realize that like,

Most of the instructors, the ones who aren't out of their mind, are playing a game too. And if you play along, then like you can get the thing that you want out of it, which is being done with it. Right. That was his attitude. I also have a friend who shot himself in boot camp. So like boot camp contains people have wide varieties of reactions to it. But just the idea that you would voluntarily pay money to have this experience is fucking nuts to me. Yeah.

Right. I mean, it's convenient too to think that rather than interrogate your own beliefs or trauma that might be informing like where you're at in life,

it's just easier to be like, yeah, dude, I think I just give this maniac 12 grand. $12,000. And I don't even get to fire a fucking machine gun. No, no. But I can hold a sledgehammer for five minutes above my head. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of my friends who went through bootcamp got to fire an automatic grenade launcher, which is worth 12. Now that's, that's approaching a $12,000 experience, right? It's like, yeah, we got to use a China Lake M79. Yeah. Wow.

Now, a writer who isn't me, but whose name I have long since forgotten, Mudd's described kind of what we're seeing with these camps as cargo cult masculinity.

Now, if you haven't heard the term cargo cult, there's a couple of things that can mean. It's actually a much more complicated term than it usually gets boiled down to. Generally, when people reference it, they're talking about a specific cult called the John Froome cult, which was found like spotted in a bunch of Melanesian islanders after World War II. And the gist of what had happened is for years during the war, they'd

gotten airdrops of supplies as soldiers had billeted on the island. And a bunch of the shit that was sent to those soldiers, including Western food and technology they hadn't seen before, wound up being accessible to the locals as well. When the U.S. pulled out

Some locals engaged in this kind of cultic behavior, trying to emulate some of the practices they'd seen soldiers engage in. They'd done like parade ground marches with like faked rifles carved out of wood. They'd ritually use these kind of like hand wave landing signals and fake control towers and stuff. They'd like carved headphones from wood to try to reenact what they'd seen the soldiers doing that had brought the plane.

Because they didn't really understand fully what was happening, because these are people that just had not been a part of the technological world prior to World War II. So cargo cult masculinity is people applying that same kind of logic to the idea of being a man. You're carving the headphones out of wood.

to try to pretend like you're in a command tower because you don't understand what it actually is that's going on. You want the sleeve tattoos and the beard and you want to own the gun that you saw in the movie because you don't actually understand what it means to be a man. There's nothing to it to you but these kind of signifiers, right? Right.

So this week, we're going to be talking about the men who have made servicing this cargo cult into an industry. And to talk about where that industry started, we're going to have to go back a century or so to a time when modern masculinity gurus assure us men were real men who worked hard, didn't complain, avoided seed oils, and went over to Europe to fight in World Wars every couple of years. Yeah, we'll be talking about the seed oils guys later. So.

Speaking of seed oils, you know who won't make you take a seed oil because seed oils kill your penis? Me. Oh. And our advertisers.

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I'm journalist Sloane Glass, and I host the new podcast, American Homicide. Each week, we'll explore some of this country's most infamous and mysterious murders. And you'll learn how the location of the crime became a character in the story. On American Homicide, we'll go coast to coast and visit places like the wide open New Mexico desert, the swampy Louisiana bayou,

and the frozen Alaska wilderness. And we'll learn how each region of the country holds deadly secrets. So join me, Sloan Glass, on the new true crime podcast, American Homicide. Listen to American Homicide on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, Bo. Hey, Matt. Are you ready to tell the readers about the extra special episode we have coming up? Sweet. Yes. I see. So, but you can do that kind of spooky scary. Well, yeah, but it's also because it's a ride. Yeah, I know. But you're in it, you know? Yeah, exactly. You're in the spook. I think we have to let them in on our little surprise. Yeah, if you haven't already figured it out, can't believe this, Mariah Carey will be joining us this week.

I say, oh, I want to go work with such and such from across town. Yeah, from across town. My girl across town. Yeah, across town. I know a guy across town. I know a guy. Readers, publicists, Katie's, and finalists, tune in to maybe the most unforgettable episode of Lost Cultures this year. There's one more question, which I promised myself I would ask.

Can you drop that grunge album? I'm so mad that I haven't done that yet. But you don't have to be mad because you're in control. I am, but who do I drop it with? Should we start a label? Maybe. Wow. Listen to Las Culturistas on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Yeah.

But she's just a worker bee. I actually confront the real shoplifting queen herself. Just wanted to see if you'd be interested in talking to me about charges and stuff. No, I have no comment. A mother of three orchestrating all her crimes from a secluded hilltop mansion. We're walking around the perimeter of the house now.

I hear the cops. Dude, I think we should go. Let's roll. We're running from the cops. Listen to Queen of the Con Season 6, The California Girls, on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Gosh, if I was one of those California girls, I'd be sweating. It's been 30 years since the horror began.

Three decades since our small beach community was terrorized by a serial killer. In the 1990s, the tourist town of Domino Beach became the hunting ground of a monster.

No one was safe. No one could stop it. Police spun their wheels. Politicians spun the truth. While fear gripped us tighter with every body that was found. We thought it was over. We thought the murders had ended. But what if we were wrong? Come back to Domino Beach, Courtney. Come home. I'll be waiting for you.

Listen to The Murder Years, Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

We're back. We're back. And hey, if you want to kill your penis, you know, because fucking vas deferens, getting those clipped is expensive. Just eat some seed oils. I guarantee you can't get someone pregnant if you eat seed oils. You can sue the iHeartRadio Corporation if you get pregnant after eating seed oils. That's a promise. Just get a fuck ton of rubber bands, too. We could probably do that, too. You can, in fact, do that, Miles. So.

The early 1900s is like in manfluencer lingo, this is the ideal time to be a man. This is when everything was better. Today, if you listen to these guys talk about what went wrong with men, they'll talk about the first half of the 20th century as almost this perfect time. Men were men. Everything was better. This is largely because their attitudes of what it was like for men in this period of time came entirely through the lens of film and television.

It might surprise people to learn that the 1920s, the turn of the century to the 1920s was the site of our first real crisis of masculinity in the United States.

Now, my main source here is an excellent article on what's called male compensatory consumption by Terence Witkowski for the Journal of Macro Marketing. It starts by making the case that back during the colonial period, popular notions of masculinity tended to focus on either the wealthy slaveholding heads of planter dynasties or men's like Jefferson's mythic yeoman farmer, right? Heroic artisans, which is the term Witkowski uses, who lacked wealth but were skilled, physically strong, and self-reliant.

By the early 1800s, this had started to morph into a recognizable phenomenon: the cult of the self-made man. By the end of the century, the American ideal had solidified into something still very recognizable to us: the independent homesteader or small business owner, carving a place for himself out of the wild frontier or the chaos of the city. Nearly all manfluencers today model themselves on one of these two archetypes.

In fact, these attitudes have been so consistent that back in the 1970s, a psychologist named Robert Brandon summarized the four themes of masculinity in American society. Number one, no sissy stuff. Number two. Wait, is that actually number two? Yes, yes. Basically, he's like, it's being scared of being gay. So fucking stupid. I mean, I think he's got it on the money, right? Fear of being seen as gay is a big attitude of masculinity. No, no, no. I just love it. Number one, no sissy stuff. No sissy stuff, right? And we all know what that means.

Number two, the big wheel, right? That's a reference to the need to be the provider, right? The source of wealth and financial success that like the people in your life are reliant on. Number three, the sturdy oak, right? That's like the protector, defender of your family. And number four, give them hell, right? This need to be seen as like a fighter, you know, to some extent, at least capable of fighting for yourself and your family and whatnot, right?

Now, this understanding of the American man was the product of generations. It was a thing that was like formed over time, a great deal of time and a great deal of like media, right? But it met its first existential conflict during the tail end of the Victorian era, ironically, as a result of the strict separation of women and men's fears of existence during that period.

Terence Witkowski writes, The late Victorian-era doctrine of separate spheres, where husbands left for work in factories and offices while their somewhat sequestered wives managed household consumption, meant that mothers monopolized the better part of child-rearing, and boys lacked the benefit of close male supervision they once had when most fathers worked closer to home. Moreover, women were taking charge of public education, at least in the lower grades, and thus further socializing boys in non-manly ways, according to gender alarmists.

So this first panic about gender in the U.S. comes about at the end of the 1800s, early 1900s, as suddenly people are like, wait a second, women are raising all of the kids and they're teaching them too. They're going to teach them how to be women. You know? You know how that works. Women only know women things. They only know girl things. And that's what they transmit to the boy. Ah, why did we send all of our men off to die in coal factories? Ugh.

It is interesting that also, and this is up to the present day, all of these crises in masculinity start as a result of like

bad things capitalism does because right it is bad for like children to never see their dads because they're working in the poison factory you know like that's terrible yeah right and why is that oh well you know they have to exploit his labor I made 15 cents a day standing in a pile of cyanide up to my nipples couldn't raise my kids we ate asbestos covered apples for lunch yeah

And this brings me to the most influential right wing moral panic of the modern era, because I think it relates exactly to the kind of panic you saw at the turn of the 19th century. And I'm talking about Gamergate. Now, if you happen to be under a rock or too old or too young to spend time in places like 4chan during Gamergate, I'm going to summarize what happened. They missed out, huh? Yeah. Oh, you guys lost it. Uh.

You were just talking about that sweet spot in 06. And you're like, oh, were you on 4chan for Game Brigade? It really was. We had about eight years. So a young man got angry at his ex-girlfriend, who was a female games developer who had made a video game about depression. I'm not using their names. You can find them easily. I just think these people have had their names stuck out there often enough.

he alleged that she had slept with a gaming journalist and she had dated a guy at a website called Kotaku. Now, that guy had not written about her game. He had like quoted her once in an article before they started dating, but he had not actually reviewed her game, which is what they claim the whole problem was, right? That this was proof of this insidious women are sleeping with men and it's polluting the hobby, right? Like it's causing all of these games to get unfair reviews, right? Now,

What had actually happened is that gaming had become the most popular form of recreation in the country. And that also made it popular among women and men who weren't assholes. And this led to a broadening of what games could be. You really saw in this period of the early aughts this like explosion in all of these independent games that had very different ideas on like what...

what gaming ought, or like what a game could be that did not comport with the big AAA games and stuff that had been huge in the past. And like these games didn't stop there from being AAA games where you murder people. That's still the most common kind of video game. In fact-

I just finished replaying Cyberpunk 2077. Games where you murder people are better than ever. We've gotten so good at games where you murder people. We've perfected it. Yeah. Now you can be pretty much any three-letter agency you want to be too. Like there's probably a game for that too. Yeah. There's a game for whatever kind of murder you want to commit, guys. You're fine. Yeah.

Yeah. But yeah, there was this attitude that like women were ruining games. And it's really – it is the same fear. It's like, well, because men need to make money and they need specifically to make money by laboring in factories and offices because we have changed the economics of the country in a way that's more efficient and profitable for a very small number of people, right? Right.

the people taking care of kids are women. And now we're going to have... Express this panic towards the idea that, like, that's going to make mid-womanly, right? Well, what happens at Gamergate, and it's a much...

more kind of autocathonic, you know, raised from within the community sort of experience rather than something imposed outside by these kind of moral busybodies. But you do have a lot of people who are scared that like, oh, if women are involved in gaming, it's going to change gaming, right? And that's going to destroy the only place that men have to really be men anymore. The only place.

It's one of the things you see if you read, like if you go back to a lot of those original posts on 4chan at the start of Gamergate is this attitude that like the only place I socialize and like meet friends is in like the lobbies of different games. And if there are women there, if I don't feel free to use slurs or make the kind of jokes I used to, then there's like, this is a harm to me. I am being attacked. Then who am I? Right? Yeah. Yeah.

If I'm a white teenager who likes to use the hard R N word while playing Call of Duty, then I have no soul anymore. Yeah. Yeah. And obviously the claims that they made that like this was about ethics and video game journalism, this was about like, you know, corruption in these companies, that was all bullshit. But they very successfully used that as a screen. Right. And so when –

when it became clear to the media that they needed to report on Gamergate, an awful lot of journalists did fall for, well, let's talk about how valid the allegations are, as opposed to let's look at the harassment campaign that's being executed. And as a result, no one did anything about the harassment campaign.

And that harassment campaign has gone on to become the standard right-wing playbook for how to do everything. This is the only way conservatism really works in the United States anymore. I found a succinct explanation for how these efforts are carried out in a Quartz article by Ari Waldman. Quote,

The Gamergate playbook is simple and direct. First, identify a vulnerable target, usually a woman, person of color, or member of the LGBTQ community. Then highlight their vulnerabilities so that disaffected, mostly white young men can attack them. Continue the attacks until someone pushes back or the platform of choice shuts it down.

Now, if you've spent any time online today, you've just watched the right-wing panic over DEI as it's led to teachers being harassed out of jobs and schools closed by bomb threats. This is all the Gamergate playbook, right? Which is, again, entirely how the right-wing culture war machine works these days. Now, we're going to talk about how that happened later, because this was very much an intentional process, right? There were people from the beginning who saw the potential in utilizing this community of angry young men this way. Yeah.

He's in jail right now, I think. Yeah, he is in jail still currently. Mr. Bannon. Yeah, we'll be chatting about him a while. It's one of these things I've been reporting about stuff downstream of Gamergate for years. I brought it up on the show a lot. I didn't realize until recently that back in the early 1900s, there was this fear over female teachers and like moms raising their sons.

That really is, it's the same. There's girls in this space that should just be boys and it's going to ruin boys. Right. You know, we have to do, and it's the fault of the women, right? Who have forced themselves into these areas, right? And we have nothing as men anymore. In both cases, it's just like capitalism saw that a lot of women were buying video games, you know, capitalism, right?

Put men in factories, right? Where's the market? Where's the labor? There we go. Off you go. We're going to be kind of flitting back and forth from the past to the future here. I just felt like that was the best way to do it. Hopefully, people will be relatively fine with this. But to return to the 1900s, right? Once the suffragette movement started picking up steam, the kind of men who didn't trust the concept of a female teacher got even weirder. And I'm going to continue with a quote from Witkowski here.

Their presence challenged those men who felt deserving of political entitlement. During the bicycling craze of the 1890s, women constituted about a third of the market and thus became a visible kinetic reminder of changing gender norms.

And this gets us, Miles, to one of my favorite moral panics in American history, the panic over girls and bicycles. Now, the gist of the issue is that with bicycles, single women were for the first time able to travel long distances on their own, right? Like and without needing to have a lot of money, right? If you have a bike, you could travel on your own and you could travel quite far.

You don't need to have horse money. You don't need to have a guy who will let you use a horse. You don't need to be- You need carb money. Right. You just need carbohydrates. Right. Yeah. You just need calories. Yeah. Now, this change happened during a general boom in employment for women. So suddenly women are working and they are taking themselves places.

And also the necessities, just the physical realities of how bicycles work led to changes in women's clothing. This is part of why the layered and complex women's wear of the Victorian era went away, right? Because it's just not as convenient when you're cycling, right? And this is, bicycling is one of the things that led to women wearing pants. It's not the only, like that's a more complicated story than that, but bicycles are a significant part of that, right? Do you think there were like some terrible accidents where they're like,

Look, honey, if you're going to ride a bike, you wear your gigantic skirt with underskirt stuff, and that's not going to get stuck and caught in the chain or anything. Don't worry about it. Yeah. Yeah. If you've got... You can't get out, go out the door with less than 30 pounds of whale bone on your body, right? No, no, no. Before you get on that two-wheeled abomination. Yeah. And obviously, like, it gets...

The degree to which Victorian clothing was like these insanely complicated, that gets exaggerated some. But it's generally agreeable that like the fact that cycles are in the mix now is part of why it becomes more common for women to wear stuff like pants. Right. Now, all of this freaks out a lot of people. And this generation of medical grifters, of like doctors who see that men are really not happy with women bicycling, rise up to kind of profit off of that.

right? And these are guys who are like, I can explain. You're not happy with this because you just don't like women doing things, but I'm going to come up with a medical justification for why you're really in the right for not wanting women to ride bicycles. They started arguing, there's like papers on this, that bicycles literally change women's skeletons, cursing them with bicycle hand or bicycle foot. Right?

Bicycle hand? Bicycle hand! Where was the grifter who was like, oh, I hate, I mean, I know you think I'm lying. Come over here. Check this out. Brenda, show me your hand. Ah! Fuck! Wait, what am I looking at? It's a hand. It's a hand. A bicycle. It's a hand with some muscles on it, you know? She's not just sitting in a room with yellow wallpaper waiting to die. Those are some thick thumbs. Thick thumbs. Ah.

To grip that shit. Oh, no. In an article from McGill University's Office for Science and Society, Jonathan Jerry writes, it was thought that women were mentally and physically impaired by the demands of their reproductive apparatus and menstruation cycles.

Writing around on a tricycle was considered fine, but on a strenuous bicycle? Why, it might cause a woman's finite physical energy to be extinguished. Medical journals at the time would seek out anomalies linked to bicycle riding and confuse an association with a cause-and-effect relationship. Although perhaps the confusion was a little bit voluntary. Riding a bicycle could cause appendicitis, they reported, internal inflammation and swelling of the throat from all the excitement.

and teenage girls whose reproductive system was still developing were thought to be at risk of displacement of the uterus, physical shocks, and all sorts of bodily transformations brought about by the bicycle that would render them unable to bear children. Now, to

Today, Miles, if you're an awful crank with a terrible opinion, you can probably get the New York Times to write a very sympathetic profile of you if you went to a good school with the New York Times reporter. Back in 1894, the Times was still at the cutting edge of endorsing nonsense. That year, they published an article titled Lunacy in England. It argued, quote, there is not the slightest doubt that bicycle riding, if persisted in, leads to weakness of mind, general lunacy and homicidal mania.

General lunacy. General lunacy. Just general lunacy to kind of catch all the things. Yeah. I mean, it is true that when you add cars to the mix, bicycles do cause some people to become homicidal, but it's not the cyclists in general. No, no, no, no. Not at all. No. General lunacy. I love that. Those are my favorite terms when like...

You could just grift off of just sort of like a, I'm going to combine some words. I mean, obviously you understand what I'm saying, lunacy, but general. So if I ever see something, I'm like, well, that woman, she's stronger than me. It's like, well, general lunacy has obviously taken over from the confidence you got on a bicycle. And I mean, this is a problem now.

Now, Miles, in 1920, women had come to make up about 20% of the workforce. We know women had always been a massive part of the economy, but now they held formal jobs in a world of offices and factories that had been nearly all male since their inception. This caused another panic, one that resembles modern panics over migrant workers as employers realized women could handle a lot of the same jobs

that men could, and they could pay women half as much for their labor, right? It is weirdly like very similar to the panic you get over migrants. And it's all focused on the fact that

Capitalists, again, are saying like, well, we can just have women do the same things and pay them half as much. Like there's no one's going to get angry at us fucking over these ladies. And men start getting pissed that like, well, women are taking these jobs that used to be held by – And specifically, this is not factory work. Women aren't replacing men in coal mines. This is jobs that had been held by educated men, right? Like bookkeepers in stores, right? These guys are – a lot of these men are replaced by women in cash registers in the 1880s.

The actual impact in the daily lives of male workers would have been small because only about a third of employed men in 1910 worked for companies with a workforce that was more than 5% female. But because of the kind of men whose jobs were disrupted and the kind of men who feared they'd be next were white collar types, the cultural response to this disruption was an obsession with manliness, right? And it came about in a large part as a result of like guys who worked for newspapers and

expressing the anxieties of their class, of like educated men who didn't get their hands dirty, right? Right. Witkowski writes, social historians have contended that many American men engaged in myriad forms of gendered consumption behavior to compensate for threats to their masculinity by an increasingly administrative and allegedly feminized culture.

As Rotundo put it, "When changes in the workplace caused men to feel uncertain of their manhood, their primary response was to seek new forms of reassurance about it. Strenuous recreation, spectator sports, adventure novels, and a growing cult of the wilderness all served this need."

Right. And this is a period of time we've talked about Bernard McFadden, right? The manliness guru who came out with Physical Culture Magazine, which is kind of the first like muscle magazine. You know, he comes out in the early 1900s. He's very much riding this wave. Teddy Roosevelt, you know, to an extent, a lot of his popularity comes out of this, right? Because he's this stereotypically manly man who is in a lot of ways, not just like a presidential candidate,

But an ideal of masculinity for a lot of men, you know, in this period of anxiety, a lot. Yeah, I'm hunting big game in Africa. You're like, whoa, there's a man. I'm a fucking I'm a fucking like basically a guy whose job used to be to count shit at a general store. And now I don't have a job. You know, I'm going to fucking fantasize about being like Teddy Roosevelt and I'm going to get into weightlifting, you know, exactly. Grow a handlebar mustache.

Yeah. Now, these guys are followed very quickly by a swarm of grifters selling products guaranteed to make insecure men feel more like Bernard or Teddy. This included a variety of quack products that feel extremely modern in the present day. Here's Witkowski again.

K. Leo Minges of Rochester, New York, founded the Cartilage Company to peddle up a dubious stretching program using arcane machinery that promised to increase men's stature up to several inches. His company advertised heavily in national publications such as Munzee's Magazines and Popular Mechanics and in many other print vehicles, featuring headlines such as How I Grew Tall, How to Grow Tall and Broaden Your Shoulders, and from 1904, Every Woman Admires a Tall Man.

The illustrations often showed women towering over short men.

And again, you see like what the, what's really happening here. This is not a widespread anxiety. Guys who are coal miners are not insecure about their masculinity. It's like short dudes who work in the city and feel like, ah, women are taking the jobs that I thought would be safe for me. And also I feel scared around them because my mom never let me talk to women until she died when I was 28. I just don't understand how to deal with the world. Yeah.

Right. And I'm so frightened. Yeah. And I think all these other men I'm around, they're using these machines to lengthen their corporal size. I could get taller too by buying this machine from the fucking, from a magazine. Gotta keep up. Yeah. Now,

Now, none of this machinery worked, right? But in the 21st century, Miles, we've come around to actually having a way you can do this, right? Making yourself taller is with it. As long as you've got money, you can, in fact, pay to get taller. And an unthinkable tolerance for pain. Yeah, a massive, yeah. If you are willing to permanently injure yourself and forever be less physically capable in every way that matters, you can become taller. Yeah.

Hey, you want to be tall? You down with just one question, man. You down with bone extensions? What? Yes, Miles. That's where we're going here. I want to introduce you to one of my favorite TikTok accounts. Height lengthening with 123,000 followers and almost 6 million likes. This is the account for Dr. Shahab Maboubian, probably the top name and funniest name in surgical height enhancement today.

Let's take a look at one of his most popular videos with 7.3 million views and like half a million likes. I want to warn you now that watching and hearing this video made me want to die. He underwent the height lengthening procedure on his femurs last week to permanently get three inches taller. Oh, great content. Incredible stuff. Thank you, TikTok. Now,

In that TikTok, my favorite response to the video itself was one guy, Captain B. Maxwell saying, that sounds painful, honestly, and bad for the bones. Good news, Captain. You are correct. This is bad for the bones.

What was that song that's playing? I don't know. I don't know why that decision was made, but Dr. Maboubian seems to be making enough money that I assure it works. It's a great Euro dance track. Yeah, yeah. He knows his business. Dancing, ironically, a thing you won't be doing once you get leg extensions. No, no. They tell you you'll absolutely void the warranty on getting femurs if you deign to dance like a sissy. Now, speaking of sissies, no, sorry. Here's ads.

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Hey, Bo. Hey, Matt. Are you ready to tell the readers about the extra special episode we have coming up? Yes. I see. So, but you can do that kind of spooky scary. Well, yeah, but it's also because it's a ride. Yeah, I know. But you're in it, you know? Yeah, exactly. You're in the spook. I think we have to let them in on our little surprise. Yeah, if you haven't already figured it out, can't believe this, Mariah Carey will be joining us this week.

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Yeah.

But she's just a worker bee. I actually confront the real shoplifting queen herself. Just wanted to see if you'd be interested in talking to me about charges and stuff. No, I have no comment. A mother of three orchestrating all her crimes from a secluded hilltop mansion. We're walking around the perimeter of the house now.

I hear the cops. Dude, I think we should go. Let's roll. We're running from the cops. Listen to Queen of the Con Season 6, The California Girls, on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Gosh, if I was one of those California girls, I'd be sweating. It's been 30 years since the horror began.

Three decades since our small beach community was terrorized by a serial killer. In the 1990s, the tourist town of Domino Beach became the hunting ground of a monster.

No one was safe. No one could stop it. Police spun their wheels. Politicians spun the truth. While fear gripped us tighter with every body that was found. We thought it was over. We thought the murders had ended. But what if we were wrong? Come back to Domino Beach, Courtney. Come home. I'll be waiting for you.

Listen to The Murder Years, Season 2, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The nightmare of what happened to a family inside 999 North Rodeo Gulch Road on a perfectly ordinary afternoon, and the burning home a killer would leave behind, and the river of blood that police would find leading all the way to the deep end will stay with you for a long, long time.

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Miles, so obviously leg lengthening didn't start out as a grift for insecure men. Like the surgery itself comes from a good place, which is there are men who are born with one leg like longer than the other, right? And that, I mean, I have a cousin who's got this and like, yeah, it messes up like the way that you walk, right? And having a surgery that can deal with that, the trade-offs can be worth it, right? Or if you've like been injured seriously, you know, as the result of like a lot of guys get injured in war, right?

and they wind up after they get rebuilt with one leg shorter than the other, and maybe they'd want to do this, right? In that case, the trade-offs are, at least for some people, worth it, right? And that's what the surgery was used for for decades. But within the last 15 to 20 years, enterprising doctors like Maboubian have realized how much money there is in taking advantage of insecure men. He told BuzzFeed, "'It's become a big part of my practice. "'It's the thing the most people are interested in. "'That's where I get most of my consultations.'"

Now, if you're wondering how this surgery works, don't worry. I have another upsetting TikTok video that explains it all. This nail will be implanted in the patient's femurs to permanently make him three inches taller. Now we're getting ready to insert our precise nail. I always check it and make sure it's nice and tight and it's not loose before we put it in.

great does that seem like a reputable medical professional to you miles no also like what it looked like one of those shitty like closet coat rack doesn't look as strong as my current bones kind of telescoping it kind of flimsy bony like it looked like a drain snake yeah yeah it looks like a fucking drain snake

No, but that's actually your new femur, which is consequently supposed to be the strongest fucking bone in your body. It'll be fine, probably. Yeah, you're good. Well, look, dude, you want to be a fucking short king? Yeah, do you want to be a short king your whole life? Absolutely not. Or do you want to finally be five? Do you finally want to be five six?

Now, when you read profiles of the guys who get these surgeries, they tend to focus heavily on how they are perceived at work and by women as shorter men. From an article in the New Zealand Herald about one of Maboubian's patients. Before Scott's surgery in January, he was 5'7 and said he was constantly ridiculed because of his stature. I was not treated with respect. Every single workplace I've been in, there have been several situations where people commented on my height to discredit me entirely as a person, the 25-year-old recalled.

That, coupled with demeaning social media and pop culture discourse about men of a lesser stature being garden gnomes, drove him to seek out the $75,000 procedure. Garden gnomes? Garden, I've never heard that in my life. I've never heard that. I'm not saying guys who are short don't get shit, right? Especially when you're in school. We all get shit for something, though, brother. There's not a person. I know people who are like professional models.

that have horrible insecurities about aspects of your body, you would never guess because some dude made fun of that part of their body when they were like 15. Right. That's just life. That's just being a person. You just got to deal with it, man. Right. You don't have to. Yeah. You hope, you hope you have some kind of support system around you and the ability to sort of like take these things on without it turning into, you know, this shit. That's why it's like the kind of sad part about all this shit too, is that like,

You don't get there because you're just like a dude. Like it's, it's, it's multiple levels of failure. Then, then you sort of end up in this really fragile mind state. Yeah. You probably don't have a lot of like people that are just that you care about and there's nothing transactional about that relationship in your life who,

you know, maybe you could add, because like, that's part of how you get over insecurities is like having people who care about you and you love that allow you to have a sense of that help you build up a sense of self-worth that let you realize how irrational the things you were obsessed with were. Exactly. That's like just part of becoming a person, you know, is getting that. And when people are denied that and the loneliness epidemic, I think is a part of that, then they do shit like pay Dr. Mabubi and $75,000 to get their legs through it. $75,000. It's wild.

That's a nice car. That's like a fully kitted out Land Rover from a nice year, right? Yeah, like maybe four. That's like one of the, like almost any car worth having. You can get for 75 grand. I feel like, but nowadays, like 75,000 is like a, like,

base model Silverado truck. Well, yeah, but that's not really worth having. No, I know, but I'm just saying it's weird how 75,000 will get you what it used to these days. Go to bringatrailer.com. You can get a fucking left-hand drive Land Cruiser with a diesel engine for less than that. Get a Japanese work truck. Get a micro work truck. Yeah, exactly. That'll actually turn heads. Nobody's going to look at another Silverado. Get you one of them Japanese fire trucks. People look at those. Yeah, what's that? It's like, oh, this? It's actually a Honda Acty.

Ever heard of it? No, it's a five speed four by four. Anyway, fuck out of here. You can

You can get some of the cheaper Unimogs for 75 grand. Those are cool. Yeah. So my favorite of these articles was an ABC News piece that interviewed a guy and introduced him as someone who, quote, at first glance says he could be mistaken for Dwayne the Rock Johnson. And I'm not going to pull up this guy's picture. I'm not going to make fun of his looks, but he doesn't. What he means by this is that he's super jacked and he wears designer clothing. Now, I'm not going to put up a picture of the guy.

because again, I don't want to edge on mocking someone's appearance, but I will laugh a little at his explanation for why he felt that his natural height, five foot nine, perfectly average. That is not a short man. That is a man of normal height. Okay. Right? Yikes. This is why he felt his height was insufficient. Quote, I'm not average. I don't like to be average. So, yeah. That's depressing, bro. Oh.

Man. Sorry, dude. Like I, and I bet, guess what? I don't even think your little femur extendo that you're about to throw on there. It might do that. I don't know if that's going to do the trick either. Nah, man, that's just going to make you a guy who spent 75 grand to ruin his legs. Now you can't do squats anymore, homie. And then what do you do? Like, and would a guy like that openly tell, you know, a woman? Cause again, it's all about being this like macho portrait of master. I guess.

And there's like this thing in the article where he's like, well, now I can have a kid now that I'm not like dealing with the shame of being five foot nine.

How much does this bone surgery cost on average? 75,000. 75,000. 75,000. Honestly, let's do it. Just like get therapy and lie on your dating profile. Add two inches. We know. You know what? You know what? I'm not going to say there's no women who would prefer to be with a guy who's three inches taller than a guy who has 75 grand and a high yield mutual fund or something. But I'm going to guess...

The vast majority of men and women prefer the person with a degree of financial stability to the one who permanently ruined their legs. They're like, hey, you can be with this guy who walks like Edgar from Men in Black. Who's going to have murder arthritis by age 44. Or this guy who's 5'8 and has $75,000 in the bank. Some of this comes from the shit you get with the insoles where they're like, there are these locked in stone physical features and if you don't have the

Perfect version of all of them. You will never know love. And like, again, maybe this is just me coming out of like non-monogamy communities, but I know so many short guys who get laid to a degree that would make these people's fucking heads spin. Oh yeah, you'd cry. And like, it's because they know how to do shit like drive forklifts. And like, they wound up doing, like showing in a public situation that they had some sort of cool knowledge and that got someone interested in them, which is the way most people get people interested. Or despite that, just walking around

Walking around with the air of self-acceptance. Yes, yes. That's not even like you need to demonstrate like, yeah, I can parallel park a big rig. Like, no, no. Just if you walk in, people notice, you know, when someone is just not on some like superficial, super fragile ego shit.

People are generally attracted to folks who go out, and this is men and women, attracted to folks who do cool things in the world. And you have, with 75 grand, you can pay for training to do any number of cool things that you don't currently know how to do. It's even cheaper to be able to laugh at yourself, too. That's another underrated quality that people like. Not being this kind of guy who is so angry at his being 5'9 that he destroys his physical health for life. Yeah. Oof.

Yeah. Anyway, so grifters like the Cartilage Company and Dr. Maboubian are products of a society with a lot of access to easy money and deep widespread insecurity on behalf of the people with the most of it. When the Great Depression hit, a lot of these vanity products and magazines shilling them collapsed because no one had the money to pay for this kind of bullshit. Widespread unemployment also had a negative impact on the self and image of many men. And this was like a period where you actually saw this kind of crisis in masculinity that

spread away from the kind of moneyed, educated class to like working class men, right? And for a reason that is much more sympathetic, you know, than a guy feeling like he's not tall enough, it's because like suddenly I can't support my family, right? And the only thing that's ever given me a sense of worth in this society is that I can support my family, right? And that I have a lot of sympathy for, right? Like that you're not a, that's not evidence of like a personal weakness. That's the society itself being sick, you know? Yeah.

There's documentation of this. Sociologist Mira Komarovsky interviewed families of 59 unemployed men from the winter of 1935 to 1936, and she described that men who had lost their role as provider and their self-confidence with it tended to isolate themselves.

They pulled out of men's lodges and unions and stopped socializing, even with family. Sexual activity also plummeted, although this may have just been a way of saving money because condoms weren't really that much of a thing, you know, at the time. Ooh, rich guy over here with the condoms. Yeah, you can afford to have sex and not make more kids that you can't pay for. Yeah. Now, what I found really interesting about this study is something that Witkowski summarizes here. Yeah.

Men out of work or underemployed had additional time on their hands. A wide selection of inexpensive home leisure activities, from playing solitaire to assembling jigsaw puzzles to building model kits, became quite popular. Considering the meaning of hobby consumption, Young and Young observed, their most important contribution during the Depression years was a capacity to impart a sense of self-worth to the hobbyist.

Jobs might be scarce, but working hard at a hobby fulfilled the need for self-esteem. That's what a person was doing had value and that the hobby itself took attention away from the economic difficulties of the day. Wow. I find this interesting because it's like this seems to be sort of hinting at the role that gaming, which is today the most popular hobby for young men in our culture, is

It was going to play in radicalization, right? Because when you lose, when you feel like you don't have, you can't do any of the things that make you a man, you're not making enough money to take care of anyone. In a lot of cases, you don't have a family to take care of. You saw back in the Great Depression, a lot of the men experiencing this turn towards like hobbies and games. And I don't think that's...

to what's happening now. This shit like Gamergate, right? I think there is a line there, right? Yeah, for sure. If you, if you aren't able to demonstrate some ability of being potent and whatever financial options you are, you have, then yeah, fuck it, dude. Like I'm going to prestige a bunch of characters and call of duty or I'll build a ship in a bottle. I,

It's also the sense of these guys in the Depression had had, again, their whole world, their job cut out from under them. A lot of young men in our society, their good jobs just haven't ever existed. There's never been the hope of being able to get a house for yourself, of being able to raise kids. That's just not a practical thing. Then you pair that with a lot of the isolation that the internet age has brought on upon young men.

Yeah, I'm not surprised. I'm not surprised that the first big explosion of like organized angry young men as a political force in our culture came out of gaming. Right. It's not weird. Yeah. No, not at all. No. And Steve Bannon was one of the first guys to realize that this was on the offing.

In 2015, in the immediate wake of Gamergate, he saw the angry young men who'd been so easy to rile up harass and threaten young female developers as a ready base of support for Trump's nascent campaign. He bankrolled and supported the career of early influencers like Milo Yiannopoulos, who had gotten their start making media to service the community of enraged video game nerds Gamergate had started to organize.

Now, Yiannopoulos is still unfortunately kind of with us. He pivoted successfully to the alt-right, which as a cultural product was a direct descendant and refinement of the basic elements present in Gamergate. This cultural product was wildly successful at thrusting a lot of these tactics for manipulating mass media and harassing opponents into silence into mainstream Republican politics.

And that's a dark thing on its own, but there was a darker side to Gamergate because the communities the alt-right came out of had only been momentarily useful to guys like Bannon. He wanted power, and Milo and other influencers who kind of came up as a result of his money wanted an audience of people who weren't just freaks mailing dead animals to girls they hated.

They left those guys behind as they started courting senators and governors. But the fever swamps remained, and the people inside them did not handle abandonment and the passing of their cultural moment well. Now, one of the websites that came out of Gamergate was 8chan, right? Gamergate really gets kind of started being organized in 4chan. 4chan eventually kicks these guys off for all of the harassment and lawbreaking. And so 8chan gets created.

Like 2014 as a place for these people as refugees to go. And 8chan very quickly becomes a place dedicated to harassment, right? Particularly to harassment of women. And one of the board's poll gets more extreme than that. It becomes just a straight up place for Nazis to organize on the internet. And I was the journalist following this, right? I was the guy who was really reporting on a lot of this stuff.

before most other people got around to it. So I watched from 2014 or so to 2019 as these people went from like,

guys who were really angry about women in their online spaces and games to guys who were talking about wanting to mass murder migrants, you know, who were like non-white and creating genocide, right? Or doing a white genocide by moving to other countries. This kind of culminated, I'm sure a lot of people are aware, in the Christchurch mass shootings and several mass shootings that followed in 2019 in Poway and El Paso in the United States.

The Buffalo shooting was related to all of this. You know, there have been a couple others, one in Norway that got stopped.

And when I was writing about this at the time, I used a term called the gamification of terror to describe the process by which young men socialized largely online in games, used things like Twitch and first person cameras to stream their massacres. Right. It was taking now all of these elements that had been present in the gaming that had kind of brought them together and putting it into these real world massacres. Right. Because it made them insidious.

In part, it made them more familiar. It made it feel like something that was more a natural outgrowth of what they were already doing. And it was just something they understood. It was the way that they communicated, right? And all of this was very surprising to people at the time. The idea that someone would stream first-person video of them shooting women and children in a mosque. Right.

But if you followed these people, it really wasn't strange at all. You know, it was the only way things were ever going to go. And that's kind of what's scariest to me about it is like there's a lot more that's like that of like, well, we can all tell anyone who's following knows where

This shit's going next. Right. And there's just nothing to do. It feels like, but like watch the ships head towards the rocks. Anyway, miles, that's the episode. That's part one. How are you doing? Well, as usual, when we end part one of a two parter, I feel optimistic. I think we're going to turn around in part two.

All the guys get therapy and all the girls get to be not near any of those guys. And maybe in part two, Robert will pronounce the guy's name Milo. We don't know. It doesn't matter. Fuck that guy. Fuck that guy. I'm sorry. I don't care. Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter. I almost talked about Davis Arini today, but I decided not to. Maybe next time, friends. Maybe next time. Miles, you have anything you want to plug?

Check me out every day. Just lamenting about not lament, celebrating the downfall of our society and also funny stuff, too, on the Daily Zeitgeist, which is fun with Jack O'Brien. Check that out. Yeah. Hell yeah. Well, anyway, we're done. Go to hell.

Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com. Or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com slash at Behind the Bastards.

Sometimes where a crime took place leads you to answer why the crime happened in the first place. Hi, I'm Sloane Glass, host of the new true crime podcast, American Homicide. In this series, we'll examine some of the country's most infamous and mysterious murders and learn how the location of the crime becomes a character in the story. ♪

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Hey, Bo. Hey, Matt. Are you ready to tell the readers about the extra special episode we have coming up? I think we have to let them in on our little surprise. Yeah, if you haven't already figured it out, the queen of Christmas herself, can't believe this, Mariah Carey, will be joining us this week. Wow. Readers, publicists, Katie's, and finalists, tune in to maybe the most unforgettable episode of Lost Cultures this yet.

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It's been 30 years since the horror began. 911, what's your emergency? He said he was going to kill me. In the 1990s, the tourist town of Domino Beach became the hunting ground of a monster. We thought the murders had ended. But what if we were wrong? Come back to Domino Beach. I'll be waiting for you. Listen to The Murder Years, Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

The nightmare of what happened to a family inside 999 North Rodeo Gulch Road on a perfectly ordinary afternoon, and the burning home a killer would leave behind, and the river of blood that police would find leading all the way to the deep end will stay with you for a long, long time.

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