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.

To begin it’s worth reminding ourselves how men and women felt about Covid and Covid restrictions.

Polling carried out by Gallup during 2020 highlighted that men were:

• less concerned about catching covid;

• less likely to wear a mask in general, as well as less likely to wear one in or outdoors;

• less likely to follow social distancing guidelines, and more likely to never follow them.

The report noted that

… looking at the last two months of data, it is clear that differences between men and women are related to partisanship, but they also transcend it… there are still clear gender differences that go beyond party. Strong gender differences are observed among Republicans… such that men tend to be less concerned about and less likely to take measures to prevent COVID-19 transmission than women within their same party.

The biggest poll I could find on the topic was this one from PNAS, a prominent American scientific journal, which surveyed 21649 people across 8 countries and asked respondents

how much they agree… with each of the following measures: closing schools, closing nonessential shops, postponing elections, prohibiting nonessential travels, stopping public transportation, using cellular phones to trace people’s movements, imposing a curfew, imposing quarantine on people entering the country, closing borders, imposing self-quarantine at home, prohibiting meetings of two or more people, imposing quarantine away from home on people infected by COVID-19, and closing nonessential economic activities and institutions… conducting systematic tests on the population and mandating the use of face masks in public places.

The survey was conducted in multiple waves and found that:

One pattern is nearly universal… women were more likely than men to see COVID-19 as a very serious health problem in each wave and in each of the eight countries. Substantial gender differences are also present in individual attitudes toward these restraining measures.. in each country and each wave, women were more likely to agree with these measures than men. Substantial and statistically significant gender differences exist in each wave for nearly each of the index’s components. Some of the most important differences concern closing nonessential shops and postponing elections, in both waves, and mandating the use of face masks in public places, in the second wave.

In these surveys, as in media coverage generally, men’s differing attitudes and behaviours are always seen as a problem to be solved, stemming mainly from misinformation and buttressed by natural cruelty, slovenliness, lack of reflection. But it’s at least as likely that these differences result from a different set of values, and with some thought it’s possible to reverse engineer a set of values from the polling results. Those values include things like: 

• The importance of accepting whatever level of risk and consequences are necessary in order to live a life worthy of the name;

• Since difficulty is a normal part of life, the necessity of living with even quite punishing difficulty without complaining, becoming visibly upset or offloading the cost of that difficulty on to others;

• The importance of preserving owned space (psychological, physical, behavioural) from incursion by others;

• A feeling that it is profoundly morally wrong and personally disreptuable impose the cost one’s own fragility on everyone else - especially where you feel that fragility stems in part from something that is within your control, such as obesity or general unfitness;

• The importance of never centering one’s identity around potential or real victimhood or vulnerability, even where you acknowlege those are considerations.

To take the last two as an example and to make the question of values and psychology more concrete: men make up the vast majority of deaths by suicide, and a large proportion of suicides are attibutable to men feeling that they have become a burden or hindrance to those around them. If that’s how men see the world, what did it mean for them that we created a years-long period in our lives where we demanded that they impose the burden of their health as a limiting factor on the world at large?

Even men who consented to various Covid restrictions and who were in the end happy to do so will recall the tug of these impulses as restrictions took hold. So will most women of course, but as the polling reflects the feeling was much stronger on average in men.

With the exception of Pharmaceutical companies, big tech and a few others, no one got what they wanted out of how Covid was handled. But in the West, the party of restriction won a lot more victories than it lost. Even if we accept that was greatly to the benefit of all in terms of lives saved, psychological red lines were crossed that cannot now be uncrossed; more often than not, the boundaries that got bulldozed were of greater importance to men. The winsome and sentimental way in which an open-ended mass curtailment of civil liberties under threat of imprisonment was communicated to the public during the crisis certainly won’t have helped.

It’s likely that what mant men took away from the crisis was that the respectable world despises your way of seeing the world, and will not tolerate it; and you need to find or make your own spaces where you can’t be reached as an urgent priority. A simultaneous rejection by and flight from respectability and the mainstream was an existing trend before Covid, but Covid turbocharged it. The Vox article is a good summary of the topics, people and institutions that have benefitted from this boost:

… personalities like Rogan have entertained a bevy of other junk ideas about health, often peddling their own questionable products. Energy drinks and longevity supplements in particular are a cash cow; listen to any podcast of this ilk and you’re likely to hear the guest plugging their own brand (Logan Paul has Prime Hydration; both Alex Jones and The Daily Wire have vitamin companies)…

… That’s created an enormous industry for heterodoxy entrepreneurs on every level of scamminess to hawk ideas about “seed oils” supposedly turning everyone ugly and sick, why masturbation is making men weak, and how raw beef liver is the one true alpha diet…

…Hence the interest in sports like MMA and Brazilian jiu-jitsu, which combine individual competition with combat. Mark Zuckerberg, Rogan, and Fridman, for instance, all have either blue or black belts in martial arts…

(You’ll have to ignore the bad faith editorialising.) We can see a central focus on health and well-being and the personal responsibility to maintain and maximise them is a direct reaction to the Covid policies that regarded those things as evil. The individuals and companies mentioned have all built businesses or personal brands that act as alternatives to the institutions which discredited themselves during that period, either through overreach or by indicating they were working in a foreign moral framework. For the record I’m not a fan of lots of these people, but that’s not the point.

The repulsive crankishness of much of what is mentioned above is both a bug and a feature. All spaces that seal themselves off from outside will concentrate and exaggerate the common traits of the people in those spaces and reward the most dedicated isolationists. But to take the UFC as an example - the (unfair) mainstream perception that is revoltingly male, and its product tantamount to human cockfighting, means that no one is interested in gentrifying it: there is nothing to work with. That is the exact thing that ensures it cannot become another institution turned against its stakeholders, and will remain a refuge. In other words, the fact that a writer for Vox doesn’t like it is a massive positive signal for its future growth and ideological security.

The UFC is a great example of what has happened with male-oriented institutions since Covid. Donald Trump routinely attends fights and receives rapturous receptions; Dana White spoke at the most recent Republican convention; and fighters have used recent post-bout interviews to demand the release of the Espitein client list and encourage viewers to read Ludwig Von Mises and Hans Herman Hoppe’ s “Democracy: The God That Failed”.

It’s easy to look at the above and develop the false impression that the world was split into two Covid camps - men who thought it was a psyop and wanted to let her rip with no concessions, and women who wanted to impose a permanent medical-totalitarian tyranny. That’s wrong and unfair to everyone. There were plenty of either sex on both sides of debate; most people’s attitudes on restrictions and interventions were a mixture of agreement, disagreement, uncertainty and disinterest depending on the measure under discussion, the how long the crisis had been in effect, and the need to satisfy and protect those around them. Once restrictions and requirements were in place many felt an obligation to comply with them from the simple perspective that society can’t function if people arbitrarily decide which rules they will or won’t follow, even if they disagree with the individual rule. To go back to the UFC as an example, while they never mandated vaccines they did hold events in empty venues, tested fighters for the illness and cancelled fights on positive results - so even hardcore “male” institutions complied to a significant degree.

Nevertheless, if we accept that sex-based political polarisation is a bad thing, and that Covid accelerated it, you might also think that a full accounting for the psychic toll of Covid might help. That includes things like public inquiries commissions where everyone gets to acknowledge it was a crazy time, mistakes were made in good faith but also that things were said that can’t be taken back. In truth, popular culture - TV, movies, books - is a better place to have that conversation. But that hasn’t happened and won’t happen. Geoff Shullenburger wrote about this last year, in the context of a Curb Your Enthusiasm episode where Albert Brooks is exposed as a Covid hoarder. It’s worth quoting at length:

Those who insist that covering faces and regulating access to public spaces by vaccination status are no big deal prefer, at least for now, not to have these novel realities represented on screen… Perhaps representing the realities of contemporary life in Los Angeles and New York City back to their denizens as entertainment would make the dystopian character of, for instance, minimum wage workers being charged with enforcement of public health measures that in effect exclude much of the disproportionately unvaccinated working class from public life too evident. At minimum, the preference for unmasked entertainment is a tacit admission of a point often denied by advocates of strict Covid measures: the concealment of the human face carries a cost. 

…An even vaguely realistic representation of the current cityscapes of Los Angeles, New York, and other coastal enclaves would show an uglier picture: ubiquitous TSA-style security theater, the biopolitical reinforcement of class stratification, and a culture of fear, blame, and scapegoating. On the other hand, contrary to Larry David’s interview remark, there is a modicum of dark humor to be found in this situation, as his “Covid hoarder” scene hints at: both Albert Brooks’s fragile vanity and the vindictive self-righteousness of the mob that descends upon him are reminiscent of the qualities the pandemic has consistently brought out in our elites. But as with Brooks when his faux funeral turns sour, this isn’t a spectacle they much want to see reflected back at them.

Shullenburger accurately captures that the official Covid approach that was caring in theory but often hate-filled and capricious in practice, especially towards anyone who did not espouse sufficient commitment to the cause. There will be no public walkback on that attitude so no reconciliation with the people who fled from it.

As with other pieces on the political disalignment of the sexes written in mainstream outlets the Vox Article contains a tone of panic underneath the snark. Journalists are right to be worried. The psychological spaces outlined in the article are not just addendums to mainstream culture but existing parallel to it; and in fact are so large and popular they call into question the validity of the mainstream/ alternative categorisation. Perhaps we should understand sound of a Logan Paul energy drink sales-pitch as, to use Matthew Arnold’s phrase, “a melancholy, long, withdrawing roar”; only, unlike Dover Beach, the withdrawal is not into oblivion or obscurity but to a secure, self-sufficient and busy place where the withdrawer cannot be policed. Paul (or Lex Fridman, or whoever) might be a joke, but the consequences of that development are real and serious.