A growing barrage of reports is showing girls are suffering. A CDC report earlier this year found that a majority (57%) of female high school students reported sustained sadness and hopelessness and 30% said they had seriously considered suicide in the previous 12 months. This compares to 29% and 14% respectively for male students. Everyone is wringing their hands and desperately trying to understand why.
Blaming Social Media?
Some suggest it was the pandemic, and that girls suffered more mental and physical abuse by being locked up with their families. No doubt that contributed. But as social psychologist Jonathan Haidt points out, the worrying acceleration of girls’ mental health decline began a decade ago, in 2012, long before any bugs were to blame. He points an increasingly accusing finger at social media and its noxious impacts. The academics are fighting it out what’s wrong, trying to isolate a single variable in a sea of ills, so they can fix it.
But look at the men leading the world and dominating the headlines. They are the role models for a generation of boys hungry to prove themselves in a money- and power-adulating world. The same boys that girls are looking to as future lovers, husbands and fathers for their children. And they are horrifying images of immature, unethical and uncaring toxic masculinity gone awry.
Now two of the most powerful men on the planet are flirting with settling their companies’ differences with a fight. In a cage.
The Cage We Are All In
Twitter boss Elon Musk, unhappy with Mark Zuckerberg’s now-classic copy-cat launch of Threads, tweets a taunt and invites him to settle their scores… outside. Outside of all normal, rational, civilised behaviour that is. Elon Musk is a 52-year-old man, not a 9-year-old. Because this is how the richest man on the planet (worth an estimated $245.6 billion), living in one of the most privileged countries on earth, finds it appropriate to deal with his frustrations over his own failures. Oh yes, and he’d like to have their score-settling, gladiatorial combat in … the Roman Colosseum. His tweet, pitching this idea, got 60 million views.
The 39-year-old Zuckerberg, father of three daughters, husband of the seemingly sane, former pediatrician Priscilla Chan, responds as any 9-year-old, unsupervised by their mother, would: “send me location.” But then, we should have known that he’s long been lusting for a Roman-themed fight. His three daughters have all been named after… Roman emperors (sic). The eldest is Maxima (after Maximus), the next August (Augustus Ceasar), the youngest Aurelia (Marcus Aurelius). We wish them well, but wonder what they will make, one day later in their lives, of their male branding.
(Musk, by the way, is a father of 10 (two of whom are called X and Exa) born of three different women. He thinks the world needs more babies and seems to be taking that challenge on too.)
So our tetchy titans of tech are now graduating to gladiators scrabbling in Italian sand for a claim to heroism. Berlusconi would have loved it. If it feels like a Monty Python sketch, it sadly isn’t. This is what the leading men of our age are coming to in our populist, increasingly macho era. Differences being settled in the dirt, with violence as sport and girls imprinted (and probably raised) with the legacy of male emperors. Fate, at least for now, has spared us a Zuckerberg son named Caligula.
Marc Andreessen, a Meta board member, thinks this meta-fight is a marvellous idea, a salutary “return to how humans have historically defended themselves.” In his dystopian view of the future, he’s recommending that “all parents train their children in martial arts in anticipation of an increasingly violent and uncertain world.”
And we are wondering why girls are depressed? Listening to these men who head up companies that influence millions – in Zuckerberg’s case billions – of lives and livelihoods, through the common spaces in which our online lives are spent, is enough to put any girl off her dinner – not to mention her date.
The rise of toxic male models, teenage boys’ porn-addled notions of romance which lean towards strangulation, the loss (in much of the USA) of their (grand)-mothers’ hard-won rights to reproductive choice, the frog-in-the-boiling-pot era of climate warming, the rise of male autocrats around the planet – depression sounds like a very sane response to reality.
Not Just Girls. We All Lose
But let’s not forget. It’s not only our girls who are suffering. As Richard Reeves has amply documented, boys are suffering just as much from the loss of any clear aspirational vision of what they might become when they grow up. These role models may excite or amuse a minority, but they pollute the air we all breathe.
Then there is added confusion from the contemporary suggestion that sex is just a social construct. As Reeves notes, male aggression and risk appetites are biologically baked in. Civilised societies have spent centuries trying to channel them constructively. That effort continues, and yet the proposed cage fight gives you some idea of how uncivilised our times are at risk of becoming.
How can young humans distinguish between this toxic aggressor-dominator view of masculinity and the more noble specimens we dreamt would emerge from the post-feminist reshuffling of gender norms? The kind that contribute and protect their community and their families, respect and empower their women, and gender balance their businesses. Continuing to conflate money, muscles and immaturity with masculinity is leading to a profound disconnect between women and men – at all ages.
The only grown-ups in this room are likely to be the women. Maye Musk, Mr. Musk’s mother, recently tweeted “Don’t encourage this match!” complete with frowning emojis. I wonder what Maxima, August and Aurelia will be advising their dad. If they are anything like all the other girls watching this debacle, their thumbs, like those of their imperial namesakes, should be firmly turned down on this Roman farce.
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