What Covid Did to Men

The official reaction to covid accelerated the dawn of the "Boys vs Girls" era in politics and culture

Covid Kitsch

A recent article in Vox (yeah, I know) highlighted the growing cultural power of what the author describes as the “anti-woke tech bro”, a mutation of the old style Libertarian and described as follows (emphasis of the final sentence is mine):

They regurgitate the gospel of tech overlords like Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen and the creators who interview them — Joe Rogan and his many imitators. They love tough-guy sports like MMA and Brazilian jiu-jitsu but are worried about vaccines, seed oils, and the mainstreaming of trans rights. Their worldview is often a paradox, full of irony and sometimes hypocrisy…

Since the Obama administration, two things happened that changed the way these men (and they are overwhelmingly men) think, look, and behave online: the overhaul of acceptable political discourse caused by the election of Donald Trump and, of course, the pandemic…

The article is wrong and silly in all the predictable ways but that last part is true and worth dwelling on. Two of the deepest shadows overhanging our culture are the unaccounted for psychic toll of Covid, and the fact that men and women are diverging politically. What’s not always noted is the obvious conclusion that the former crisis fed the latter: that establishment reaction to Covid in the west alienated men and continues to act as one of the key drivers of current sex-based political polarisation. The idea that the approaches adopted by all important bureaucracies and interpretative institutions during the plague years seemed based on a set of values foreign to many men, and accelerated male withdrawal from respectable cultural spaces and the creation of alternative ones explains an awful lot.