After a great depression and two world wars, this culture began to shift. By the nineteen-fifties, efforts were under way to nurture traumatized young men who had served overseas. More public schools were built, and veterans took advantage of the G.I. Bill. “We encouraged these men to move with their families to the suburbs, where they could have a little lawn and a barbecue,” Kimmel said. Another reorientation arrived in the seventies and eighties, in response to gay liberation, feminism, and greater workplace equality. In 1990, the poet Robert Bly published “Iron John: A Book About Men,” which spent more than a year on the Times best-seller list. “The grief in men has been increasing steadily since the start of the Industrial Revolution and the grief has reached a depth now that cannot be ignored,” Bly wrote. The book spawned the “mythopoetic men’s movement,” which sought a return to a “deep masculinity” through all-male wilderness retreats and the use of Native American rituals. “Mythopoetic man,” though, wasn’t quite as catchy as “alpha male.” Kimmel thinks that George W. Bush’s victory over Al Gore, in 2000, stemmed partly from this new dichotomy. “I remember Gore was called a beta,” Kimmel told me. “And Bush was alpha-male-ish.” The latter term, Kimmel came to believe, “means completely embodying the traditional notions of masculinity—the most important of which is being without apology.”
In 2022, the social scientist Richard Reeves published “Of Boys and Men,” which describes how men are falling behind in contemporary society. In the past forty years, men’s wages have decreased as a percentage of over-all family income, while broader wealth inequalities and job insecurity have grown. Girls now perform better than boys in high school and are more likely to enroll in college, setting them up for better careers. Men today are five times likelier than they were in the nineties to say that they don’t have any close friends. They are also much less likely to receive mental-health treatment than women, and four times more likely to die by suicide. “There are very good reasons for large numbers of young men to feel anxious, to worry about their future, including their relationships with women,” Raewyn Connell, a retired sociologist at the University of Sydney who is credited with co-founding the field of masculinity studies, told me. “That is perhaps what drives the circulation of the ‘alpha male’ idea.”
The alpha-beta framing now feels ubiquitous. A man in Maine recently filed a lawsuit alleging that his First Amendment rights were violated when he was told to stop calling attendees at school-board meetings “soft beta males.” Kimmel told me, “The tech bros and J. D. Vance fanboys and others seem to feel so put upon by wokeness, by political correctness, that they’re constantly being policed. The idea of being able to assert all of that and not have to apologize for being a man—boy, is that attractive to them.” Also attractive, Connell noted, is the business opportunity for “extracting money” and attention “from anxious young men.”
In 2008, Aaron Marino launched a YouTube channel called Alpha M. He was in his early thirties, broke, and the owner of a new camcorder, which he used to offer something that he hadn’t received in life: male guidance. “I didn’t care if you were gay or straight or what religious or political leanings you had,” he told me recently. “I just wanted to help you feel better about yourself.” Marino, who lives near Atlanta, built a following of millions of mostly young men who wanted to know “how to be a gentleman” and “what to do with butt hair.” He discussed sex, too. A recent Alpha M video reveals the “7 Everyday Habits KILLING your ‘Manhood’!”—Marino calls his penis Big Al—and cautions against erectile enemies like seed oils and screen time. All along, he told me, he has been trying to help create the “right kind of alpha male,” which he defines, generously, as “the best version of yourself you can be.”
During the pandemic, many of Marino’s subscribers left. “At my height, I had twenty-five million views a month,” Marino told me. “And that dropped off a cliff to, like, three million. I saw what was getting popular and what you had to say—and I just wasn’t willing to sacrifice my integrity.” Accounts run by male influencers like Andrew Tate, Andy Elliott, and Wes Watson were supplanting him. Watson, who spent nine years in prison for robbery, burglary, assault, and battery, offers the “unbreakable mind-set” to his followers on YouTube. He posts videos of his Bugatti, a romantic interest, and his buddies, most of whom, like him, have head tattoos and huge arms. “Show people that you’ve made a lot of money, have a hot girlfriend, drive a nice car, and there’s your following,” Marino told me. Also: post pejorative-laced challenges for your audience. “MEN are SOFT AF for ONE REASON!!” Watson wrote on Instagram recently. “THEY DON’T F*CKING Push Themselves Past Their COMFORT ZONE ANYMORE!!” (Last year, Watson was arrested again, for allegedly beating a man at a Miami gym where they were working out. He did not respond to a request for comment, but, in court filings, he describes the beating as “consensual.”)
