Zuck's initiation into manhood

Mark Zuckerberg tells a very familiar story of fleeing an overly feminized world into a brotherhood of men.

An “MMA octagon in the middle of the desert,” courtesy of AI.

Three years ago, I wrote a TV pilot called Mantown.

It’s a fictional dramedy set on a Joshua Tree compound owned by the billionaire tech guru Newman Adam. He calls it Mantown. Newman and his minions host men’s self-help workshops that preach prehistoric notions of masculinity with a New Age, influencer twist. There are drum circles, wrestling matches, and endless Instagram Lives. Also: loin cloths.

Newman claims that men need to seize back their manhood and reclaim masculinity from the “woke warriors of cancel culture,” I wrote. His workshop attendees think they are finding themselves, but they are really just being recruited into his self-serving cult of masculinity. The story was inspired by my reporting on the manosphere and contemporary men’s self-help workshops, which look a whole lot like what I described above. Reality is stranger than fiction, you know?

“Newman is Tony Robbins meets Elon Musk,” I wrote in my pitch doc. I added: “Mantown is the manosphere IRL. It’s what would happen if all of these various groups of men [PUAs, MRAs, MGTOWs, and incels] built a town together. It will happen, mark my words.”

More like a country, though, huh?

Like most TV pilots, it didn’t go anywhere, but I have been thinking a lot about Mantown this week, ever since listening to Mark Zuckerberg’s recent podcast interview with Joe Rogan. I know I already wrote about it over the weekend, but so many phrases and keywords in their conversation pulled up these old file folders in my brain from when I was writing that pilot and reporting on this kinda stuff.

And, given that Zuckerberg is reportedly going to be seated alongside Musk and Jeff Bezos on a special platform at Donald Trump’s upcoming inauguration, I think it’s worth examining his masculine propaganda more closely.

On the pod, Zuckerberg shares an origin story that could have been pulled straight from one of those real-life men’s workshops. He talks about being “surrounded by girls and women,” both in his childhood growing up with three sisters and now as the father of three daughters. Then, Zuckberg says, he found jiu-jitsu and mixed-martial arts. He started getting together with his “guy friends” to “beat each other a bit.”

This world of men—of mutual beating—helped him to discover himself more fully, he says. “It just turned on a part of my brain that I was like, okay, this was a piece of the puzzle that should have been there,” he explains.

Zuckerberg says that it also opened his eyes to the ways that the corporate world has been “neutered.” He realized that workplace culture could benefit from more “masculine energy” and the celebration of “aggression.” We’ve simply “swung” too far in accommodating women’s comfort at work.

In the parlance of the manosphere, you could say that Zuckerberg was red-pilled. In the language of men’s work, he was initiated into manhood.

In fact, Zuckerberg’s journey from being “surrounded by girls and women” to a brotherhood of men aligns perfectly with the rhetoric of both of those communities, which are frequently overlapping. Their shared onboarding document might read something like: the Industrial Revolution pushed fathers out of the home, leaving boys to the feminizing influence of their mothers. And now feminism has only further fucked everything up for men!

To understand contemporary men’s work, you have to go back to the mythopoetic movement of the 80s and 90s, which saw the rise of retreats where men would go off into the woods for ritual initiations. Foundational texts like King, Warrior, Magician, Lover found culturally-appropriative inspiration in “tribal” rituals that allowed boys to be “reborn” as men. As I wrote of this truly ridiculous book years back:

These rituals use “a specially constructed hut or house,” a “cave,” … into which the would-be initiate is driven… to find his manhood.” Most important, “this space must be sealed from the influence of the outside world, especially… from the influence of women.” Initiates experience “terrifying emotional and excruciatingly painful physical trials,” as they “learn to submit to the pain of life, to the ritual elders, and to the masculine traditions and myths of the society.” They learn to submit to masculine tradition.

I mean, damn. A special hut-slash-circle sealed off from the influence of women? Excruciating physical trials? I can’t help but think of the octagon cage used in MMA. Zuckerberg recently had one set up in his backyard, apparently without his wife’s knowledge. He then posted a text exchange about the cage with his wife, which was meant to be humorous but read like a sexist sitcom joke (it’s very “Whoops, got myself in trouble with the old ball and chain, what should I do?”).

Wrestling, as a source of bonding and self-discovery, is a common feature of contemporary men’s workshops. So much so that when I put together a visual guide for that Mantown pilot, the first image was one I’d gotten from the social media account for a real-life retreat: it featured a couple shirtless dudes locked in combat—shoulder to shoulder, head to head—like a couple of billy goats. In the framing of King, Warrior, Magician, Lover, wrestling is a way for men to access “warrior energy.”

That book is still hugely influential in contemporary men’s work, despite the fact that one of its authors, Robert Moore, killed his wife in 2016 in a murder-suicide. His supporters have tried to make sense of this violence by suggesting that Moore was overtaken by masculine “shadows,” as opposed to the “mature” archetypes that he spent so much of his life writing about.

Many men cling to his words nonetheless. The book is currently on Amazon’s bestseller list for “Men’s Gender Studies,” right alongside The Game.

There’s no telling whether Zuckerberg has read that particular book, but he certainly seems to have absorbed some of the ideas that it’s helped to spread over the decades. King, Warrior, Magician, Lover argues that men need “an adequate connection to the deep and instinctual masculine energies.” Masculine energy is the same phrase that Zuckerberg used. In conversation with Rogan, Zuckerberg similarly went on about the “feminine energy” that women “may naturally have.”

A pilot excerpt, featuring some Mantown men and a lady reporter who is trying to infiltrate. :)

Of course, Zuckerberg didn’t just spout off some essentializing ideas on one of the most popular podcasts in the world. Last week, Meta canceled its DEI programs, brought UFC CEO Dana White, a longtime friend of Donald Trump, onto its board of directors, and announced that the company was relaxing hate speech policies specifically to allow users to call LGBTQ+ people “weird.” The company also reportedly took tampons out of men’s restrooms in its offices, an obvious attack on trans and nonbinary employees who need menstrual products.

In all of this, there is a clear misogynistic and transphobic flight from feminism and femininity. This is the manosphere IRL. This is my fictional Newman character, who wants to “reclaim masculinity” from the “woke warriors of cancel culture.” It isn’t enough for Zuckerberg to have an octagon in his backyard. I guess he wants a Mantown—a Manland—of his own.

And if he and his billionaire “guy friends” destroy this country in the process, he can always retreat to his sprawling underground bunker. They can “beat each other a bit,” from here to eternity.