Much current hoopla about the crisis in maleness. What’s wrong with the boys? we’re asked. Is simply being masculine toxic? Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you.
Woo, woo, woo.
Amidst all the hand wringing and teeth gnashing over the defective xy chromosome cohort, this little gem from a couple weeks ago finds its way into my social media consciousness:
What I don’t know is if this is a symptom of What’s wrong with boys these days or a root cause of the malady.
Two grown-ass men, well into their 50s, gleefully embracing the idea of an AI model, Elon’s Grok in this case, generating dirty jokes, essentially. ‘Vulgar roasts’ to use the world’s richest man’s words. Something humans have been doing for, I don’t know, at least a couple millennia now, dating back to Catullus in the first century B.C. Up through the court jesters during the time of royal absolutism, personified in the character of Feste in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Fart jokes and face-fucking references throughout the ages.
In the modern era, there were the Friars Club Roasts, comedians letting fly at a designated guest of honour, initially presented behind closed doors in order to go off-leash, gloves off, free from the wider public eye and fear of giving great offense and umbrage. Later sanitized for network television in the form of the Dean Martin Celebrity Roasts. Censor-approved, off-colour jokes for primetime television audiences. And of course, there’s the legend of the world’s ‘dirtiest joke’ – The Aristocrats!! – shown in the 2005 documentary film that was, perhaps, the only time in my life I found Bob Saget funny.
But now, you see, Grok’s going to take it to a whole new level. Take a picture of somebody at a party and instruct Grok to deliver up a vulgar roast about that person. The crowd will go wild! Make it more vulgar, Grok. No. Even more vulgar!
Look,
I’m no puritan on such matters. I love scatological humour as much as the next 8-year-old. On the cusp of getting my senior’s discount on the TTC, I still snicker when someone uses the word ‘duty’, a reflex response I stole from a South Park episode decades ago. A badge I wear with honour.
But I’m stupefied by the giddiness to which these two man-children react to the concept of machine-learned expletive spouting. ‘Make it more vulgar!’ Elon exhorts. ‘IT’LL ONLY GET BETTER!’ Rogan repeatedly bellows. See! Grok dials the poo-poo and pee-pee up to 11!!
Indisputably, two of the most successful public figures, in terms of popularity, influence and wealth on the planet today. Paradigms of the limitless possibilities for straight white maleness. Role models to a generation of up-and-coming men snickering at the advanced technological future of robotic piss-taking.
In this, our supposed discriminating age of anti-male bias with its heaping dose of anti-whiteness repression, two wholly empty-headed and empty-souled white guys with nothing more than a preternatural ability for shameless self-promotion have foisted themselves into the epicenter of cultural and political discourse and thinking. Their respective successes tautological in nature; a variation of they’re famous because they’re famous. Musk and Rogan are considered successful because they’re successful.
Joe Rogan was little more than a bit actor and 4th-tier standup comic before ascending to the top of the heap of the podcast mountain on the wave of ‘Just asking questions here!’, mixing in reactionary politics and anti-science sentiments with heavy supplement shilling. Elon Musk emerged from a group that cashed in on the initial internet boom, investing in a couple start-ups that blew up real good. He adroitly parlayed that into purchasing the Tesla car name, making the brand a symbol of our collective commitment to saving the world from impending environmental disaster and wrapping himself in the comic book hero worship of a real-life Tony Stark to stoke his public image of a billionaire brain genius.
Basically, two now rich white guys, savvy to be sure, in terms of making headlines and oodles of money, but bringing nothing much else to the table. Except frozen-in-amber puerility and, inexplicably, a boatload of lingering resentment and antagonism toward a system and order that has bestowed upon them unimaginable wealth and utterly unearned prestige and veneration from large swaths of the population. Largely, large swaths of the male population.
A man-ifestation of toxic masculinity created by a mix of unfettered capitalism and a social media landscape that rewards bad, transgressive behaviour above all else or just Peter Pan men refusing to grow up, forever unbridled by responsibility or any other obligation to anyone else except to themselves? Peak or disfigured manhood? A sign of the times or a tale as old as time?
Not so much questions of boys being boys but about the lack of responsible adults, adult men, being in the room.
