Cinemorphosis

Tag: feminism

  • Dumbbells and Demagogues: The Bizarre Battle for the Bros

    Dumbbells and Demagogues: The Bizarre Battle for the Bros

    In “The Battle for the Bros,” Andrew Marantz dons his flak vest and ventures into the testosterone-slicked minefield of online masculinity, where disenfranchised young men are drifting rightward faster than a Joe Rogan cold plunge. Bro culture, Marantz argues, isn’t just real—it’s a booming cottage industry of rage, raw meat, and red pills. It thrives on podcasts, YouTube channels, and Instagram feeds soaked in motivational bile, where carnivore diets, deadlifts, and conspiracy theories all count as self-improvement.

    At the center of this digital flex-off is the Rogan Industrial Complex, which has evolved from left-leaning curiosities like The Young Turks to its current stance of muttering about immigrants while gnawing on elk jerky and praising Vladimir Putin’s virility. Rogan isn’t just an influencer—he’s a cultural battering ram who can probably swing a presidential election with a few bro-ish shrugs and an anecdote about DMT. Meanwhile, the left is left blinking in the dust, coming off to many young men as smug, brittle, and somehow both humorless and condescending—like a human resources memo with a sociology degree.

    Marantz interviews Hasan Piker, a foul-mouthed socialist Twitch-streamer with cheekbones sharp enough to cut through the culture war. Piker wants to offer a leftist alternative to the Bro pipeline, but despite his 1.5 million subscribers, he’s still playing catch-up to Rogan’s podcast empire. Piker gets it: if you tell a broke 23-year-old living in his parents’ basement that he’s “privileged,” don’t be shocked when he rage-clicks his way into the arms of Andrew Tate.

    The tragedy—and farce—of this ecosystem is that much of it runs on ersatz authenticity. Grifters wear the costume of “real talk” while peddling warmed-over xenophobia and junk-science self-help. Marantz muses on whether the left can produce its own no-nonsense avatar of male angst—someone with enough swagger, wit, and working-class rage to compete. Though not mentioned in the essay, Bill Burr came to mind as I pondered a possible counterforce to the bro culture from the right. Burr is pissed off, principled, and perpetually exasperated—a man who could roast Elon Musk and filet toxic masculinity in the same breath. But Burr is sui generis, not a manufactured product. As Marantz rightly notes, you don’t summon authenticity with a PR team and a protein shake.

    The real kicker? In a post-truth world, what matters isn’t truth—it’s vibes. And right now, the right’s vibes are winning the war for the bros.

  • The Netflix TV Series Adolescence Explores the Incel Inferno

    The Netflix TV Series Adolescence Explores the Incel Inferno

    In her searing New Yorker essay “The Rage of the Incels,” Jia Tolentino charts the psychological freefall of young men who feel so broken, so undesirable, that they trade intimacy for ideology. These are men who live in the shadows—paralyzed by fear, consumed by resentment, and desperate to rewrite their own narrative of failure. Lacking the confidence to form real connections, they retreat into a warped fantasy of grandiosity and “absolute male supremacy,” hoping to drown out their self-loathing in the cold armor of systemic power.

    At the core of this fantasy lies a cruel sleight of hand: to escape the feeling of being disgusting, they dehumanize others—namely women. Online, where pornified, transactional, and violent depictions of sex are the norm, this dehumanization metastasizes with chilling efficiency. On the internet, there’s no need for empathy, just anonymity and algorithms.

    Tolentino highlights the gendered nature of this despair. When women feel undesirable, they tend to turn the blame inward. Men, however, often blame the system—or more specifically, women. This externalization leads some into the dark corridors of inceldom, where racism, misogyny, and white supremacy form the ideological bedrock of a movement built on grievance.

    The young men most vulnerable to this radicalization often come with tragic resumes: childhood trauma, social ineptitude, academic failure, economic hopelessness. They are digital shut-ins, living in their parents’ basements, marinating in their self-hatred and curating worldviews that feed their rage. With no jobs, no degrees, and no meaningful relationships, they rot—and rot loudly.

    This psychological spiral is embodied in Adolescence, the Netflix miniseries centered on Jamie Miller, a 13-year-old whose descent into incel ideology leads to horrific violence. The show doesn’t offer easy answers—it shows a boy abandoned long before he ever picked up a weapon. His parents aren’t just grieving the victim of his crime; they’re grieving their own son, whose silent suffering metastasized into something monstrous. The tragedy is not just what he did—but how long he was hurting, invisible to everyone.