Before Sex Comes Brotherhood
The language through which young men now rank one another makes the fraternity’s informal hierarchy unusually easy to recognise outside the fraternity house. To “mog” another man, in the vocabulary popularised through looksmaxxing communities and more recently through influencers such as Clavicular, is to defeat him through the visible superiority of one’s face, height or physique. The term is usually deployed jokingly, sometimes to the point of absurdity, but its humour depends upon an immediately intelligible comparison between men: one possesses the physical attributes that confer masculine status and another does not. What appears from the outside as an intensely heterosexual culture of male self-improvement is consequently organised to a remarkable extent around recognition from other men, who photograph, rank, imitate and ridicule one another according to standards they have collectively learned.
The dependence of masculine status upon an audience of other men is hardly peculiar to online culture, and fraternities provide an unusually concentrated setting in which the same process can be observed without assuming that the institution simply creates the attitudes associated with it. Among 772 men followed from before college through their second year, heavier binge drinking and more permissive attitudes towards casual sex predicted subsequent fraternity membership, while joining was itself followed by increases in binge drinking, perceptions of sexually aggressive peer norms and the likelihood of sexual aggression. Men who enter fraternities may therefore arrive already more receptive to particular sexual norms, only to find those dispositions reinforced within a social environment where acting upon them can itself become a source of recognition among other men.
The position of women within this economy of recognition becomes clearer through Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's theory of male homosocial desire, developed in Between Men. Adapting René Girard's erotic triangle, Sedgwick argues that rivalry between two men over a woman cannot adequately be understood as two separate heterosexual relationships, since each man is also oriented towards the other: the rival's desire helps establish the woman's value, while defeating him provides recognition of one's own position. Competition over women can therefore sustain relationships of rivalry, identification and attachment between men even where those relationships are emphatically heterosexual. Sedgwick places them on a continuum of homosocial desire while examining the homophobia through which male societies police the boundary between acceptable intimacy among men and homosexuality, a tension particularly relevant to institutions in which heterosexual performance carries social prestige. Fraternity members who perceive greater peer pressure to have sex and greater peer approval of forced sex are subsequently more likely to report sexual aggression, suggesting that the judgement of other men can become implicated in behaviour directed towards women. A man's sexual success can consequently affect his standing within the fraternity itself, as sexual behaviour becomes subject to the expectations and judgements of other men, while willingness to pursue sex under increasingly coercive norms can become evidence of conformity to the group's expectations of masculinity.
Andrew Tate’s online persona carried this relationship between sexual success and male recognition into a setting where the audience of men was no longer confined to a fraternity. The women who appeared throughout his content were rarely presented independently of the lifestyle whose desirability they were supposed to confirm; their presence formed part of the same performance through which Tate displayed himself as a man entitled to wealth, attention and deference, and therefore as someone whose advice about masculinity possessed authority. That performance was reproduced on an extraordinary scale through Hustler’s University, whose affiliates could earn commissions by recruiting new members and circulating provocative clips, helping videos bearing Tate’s name accumulate 11.6 billion TikTok views by August 2022. What circulated with those clips was an image of heterosexual success in which a man's apparent command over women could be read as evidence of the masculine status Tate claimed to embody.
As manosphere communities expanded, some of their most influential subcultures began to offer a more deterministic explanation for why certain men attracted women while others did not. The pickup-artist industry had rested on the reassuring premise that sexual success was teachable, encouraging men to treat rejection as a problem that could be overcome by changing how they looked, behaved and approached women. Within blackpill and incel communities, however, repeated rejection was used to discredit precisely this promise of self-transformation, as users increasingly searched for explanations in characteristics they regarded as fixed and quantifiable, scrutinising height, facial structure and genetics for evidence that attractiveness had been determined before any technique could alter the outcome. Across 28.8 million posts from manosphere forums and subreddits, researchers identified substantial movement away from older pickup-artist and men's-rights communities towards newer incel and MGTOW spaces, accompanied in parts of the network by increasingly misogynistic language. Male rejection could consequently be interpreted within these communities through an increasingly rigid taxonomy of physical traits, while differences in individual romantic experience were recast as evidence for a broader system in which women were said to concentrate their attention upon a small group of genetically advantaged men.
Looksmaxxing carries this fatalism into practices that still appear to promise self-improvement, encouraging young men to exercise, groom themselves and alter whatever features they can while subjecting those they cannot readily change—height, facial proportions, bone structure—to increasingly elaborate measurement. “Mogging” turns the resulting judgements into a social comparison between men, whose faces and bodies can be placed beside one another and immediately read as evidence that one has surpassed the other. The significance of these comparisons changes once blackpill communities use them to explain relations with women, since physical differences between individual men are made to support much larger claims about how female attraction supposedly operates. The familiar “80/20” rule, for instance, presents women as concentrating their attention upon a small minority of exceptionally attractive men, while blackpill accounts of “hypergamy” extend the same assumption to status more generally.
The empirical basis for this elaborate system of classification is remarkably weak, and, at times, almost nonexistent. That physical attractiveness can influence dating hardly establishes that women obey a fixed 80/20 distribution, still less that measurements of a man's jaw, height or eye shape can reveal his predetermined position within a universal sexual hierarchy; the theory converts variable and highly contextual patterns of attraction into rigid laws by simply assuming that the categories devised within these communities correspond to how women actually choose partners. What begins as men comparing jawlines and height can thus acquire explanatory ambitions far beyond anything those comparisons can sustain, turning the experience of being ranked by other men into supposed evidence about the behaviour of women as a class.
Once female attraction has been imagined as a system that systematically advantages some men over others, feminism can be invoked to explain why women's greater freedom of choice supposedly intensified that inequality. Women's greater economic independence and sexual autonomy have reduced the material and social pressures that once constrained their choice of partners, but parts of the manosphere reinterpret that expansion of choice as a deterioration in men's position: women, now supposedly free to select only the most desirable men, are blamed for producing a growing population of men excluded from sex and relationships. An already dubious theory of attraction can thereby become a political account of social change, in which feminism is held responsible for inequalities that the manosphere has itself constructed through categories such as the “80/20” rule and hypergamy.
Across more than 300 million Reddit and YouTube comments, users in several manosphere communities were more likely than matched users to participate subsequently in alt-right spaces, although the relationship varied considerably between communities and most users made no such transition. The overlap instead appears where explanations of romantic and sexual failure begin to exceed relations between men and women altogether, locating the supposed erosion of male status within feminism, liberalism and broader changes to the social order. This causal leap is extraordinary: women's increased ability to choose whether and whom to date is transformed into evidence that society has been reorganised against men, allowing individual experiences of rejection to stand in for a diagnosis of structural male dispossession.
The assumption that the fortunes of men can reveal something about the health of the society around them long predates the contemporary manosphere, and forms an important part of George Mosse's The Image of Man. From the late eighteenth century, what Mosse calls the “masculine stereotype” joined the appearance of the male body to assumptions about inner character, so that physical proportion, discipline and self-control could signify courage and moral solidity and, increasingly, the bourgeois ideal of “respectability.” Its boundaries were established through what Mosse calls “countertypes,” representations of men as effeminate, weak or degenerate through which the qualities assigned to proper masculinity could be made more visible by contrast. The political possibilities of the stereotype emerged once these judgements ceased to describe individual men alone. A society believed to be producing weak, effeminate or undisciplined men could itself be represented as weak or decadent, so that the masculine ideal no longer provided only a standard for judging men but a language through which the condition of society could be judged.
The absurdity of “mogging” is easy to recognise when two faces are placed beside one another and a comment section solemnly decides which man has won. Less amusing is the worldview that can be built around the same demand to rank: once masculine worth depends upon establishing superiority before other men, failure invites explanations for why the hierarchy has supposedly become unfair. Across parts of the manosphere, those explanations have repeatedly been supplied through misogyny, reducing women to a homogeneous class governed by crude rules of attraction and recasting their autonomy as an injury to men; at their political margins, the same grievance can sit comfortably beside reactionary accounts of feminism and liberalism as forces of social decline. The distance between an internet joke about jawlines and a political ideology remains enormous, and most people who participate in the former will never approach the latter. What matters is that both can draw upon a way of seeing masculinity in which the judgement of other men becomes unusually powerful, and in which resentment at failing that judgement can be redirected towards women and eventually towards the society accused of allowing them too much freedom.
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