Here are the four gentlemen who are in charge of beloved sadkid blog The Awl.
So: which of these gentlemen strikes you as the picture of quintessential masculinity? (Note: Balk picture may not be Balk. Who knows.)
The correct answer, of course, is “that question is fucking gross and reactionary and terrible and you should feel ashamed for asking it.” And yet it’s a question that’s directly inspired by Alex Balk, a guy who’s built a career on turning sadness into a tool of aggression, with this ridiculous bit of aggregation.
Why do self-styled intellectual-type dudes—the grossest, most ineffectual, least appealing specimens of masculinity, the kinds of guys who even in their twenties are walking advertisements for the “low-T” scam the pharmaceutical industry is trying to pull on the flagging libido of the American male—gravitate to David Foster Wallace?(I dunno, MAJOR MISDIRECTED OVERCOMPENSATION?) And how sad is it that they think he will help? God, I could not feel sorrier for you straight ladies, given what you have to put up with these days.
A majority of the world’s people would, if forced to sort them into one category or another, probably see the Awl’s male staff as what Balk is complaining about here. A majority of the Awl’s male readership would, if we were to entertain this bullshit, warmed-over, pickup artist alpha/beta male nonsense, get sorted into that category. That’s not an insult of any of them. It’s an indication of what a terrible, gross, self-aggrandizing impulse it is for Balk to engage in it this way.
And listen: I guarantee there’s someone about to pipe in “It’s ironic!” Fuck that. Seriously. If it’s a joke, it’s just as ugly and gross as if it’s straight, and I’m sick to death of the idea that people can weasel out of the consequences of what they write by layering on the meta and the irony.
Here’s a few points.
- I don’t think Alex Balk is anti-Semitic. But I think most of these endless contemporary complaints about “weak” men, or nerdy men, or beta males, that come from supposedly progressive (!!!) New York City writerly types are barely-coded anti-Semitism. Just like complaints about “hipsters” are barely-coded homophobia.
- I’ve been called a bro since I was 18 or so. Back then, it actually had a meaning: backslapping, sports-loving, dude-do-you-want-a-brewski, backwards hat-wearing performative masculinity, typically married to homophobia, anti-intellectualism, and binge drinking. Now, it means… guys who are too into David Foster-Wallace? What? How can that be? This whole thing is so indicative of people for whom moving to New York is indistinguishable from crawling up your own ass. Come bike with me up Slayter Hill on a weekend this October. Pedal past the frat houses with me. Listen as they shout homophobic slurs from the porch. Those, my friends, are bros, if there’s such a thing as a bro. Any term that can encompass both those dudes and some lit guy who has the terrible failing of liking a book is a term without meaning, other than “this person reminds me of myself in a way that I find profoundly discomfiting. Just like hipster, which means both overdressed dandy and dressed-down lumberjack, and thus means nothing besides “person I feel socially threatened by.”
- Why have I been called a bro for so long? I dunno. Probably because I’m 6’1 and 200 pounds and lift weights and wear t-shirts. That’s the best I’ve got for you; it just started happening at one point. And the fact that I’m a poetry-reading, theater-raised, arty kid type who only ever wanted to read and write never really factors into it. Of course, online, I’ve always gotten the precise opposite — haha, he named his old blog after a Camus story, he talks about “the dialectic” unironically, what a dweeb. Offline bro, online nerd. The point of which is to say that these broad categories into which people constantly sort each other are bullshit, they’re driven by the worst kind of pathetic passive aggressive insecurity, and not one person in the world can be spared from mockery if we insist on sorting everyone by these broad social signifiers that are based on cruelty and petty personal fear.
- Dear New York City #CONTENT providers (including beloved industry navel-gazing too-cool-for-school types): no one, in the world, who is not one of you cares about this stuff. No one who isn’t currently employed at a Slack-enabled click farm gives the slightest fuck who you find cool and who you don’t. No one who isn’t part of your endless media Twitter circle jerk is remotely interested in the fact that this one time you dated this one guy who you didn’t like and he had a copy of The Corrections so really it’s OK to call English majors beta males. Every one of you who has ever complained about hipsters would be identified, by 99% of the hipster-aware humans on earth, as a hipster. Every one of you media guys who complains about “nice guys” would be identified, by 99% of the people on earth, as fitting that stereotype. Has it ever occurred to you that you’re so annoyed by other people around you because you’re just like them?
- As a friend of mine points out, the house style at the Awl wouldn’t exist without David Foster Wallace, which gets conveniently left out of all of those “Choire invented the internet’s language!” stuff.
- I don’t even fucking like Infinite Jest. Which I read, being the bro that I am! That’s what us bros do, we play softball and pound Natty Ice and talked about chicks and read 1000 page doorstop experimental novels.
- How is it that people who hate themselves so much have such tiny capacity for self-reflection?