1. "Masculine Energy" or the Vengeful Rebuilding of Safe Spaces for Supremacists

Mark Zuckerberg appearance on Joe Rogan's podcast wasn't just a cringey bromantic validation, but powerful men telegraphing a deliberate retreat from accountability.

Photo by Johnson Wang on Unsplash

TikTok shut down last night, bidding its US creators and users farewell with a fawning appeal to Trump’s mercy. This came after a week of mocking commentary about Mark Zuckerberg and Roe Rogan’s “masculine energy” brofest. Together, however, these two events illustrate ongoing right-wing consolidation of media that serve to shut down diversity, critics of the administration, progressives, and protest networks.

News coverage is siloed so that these two stories have almost always been separated from one another and from three meaningful others: Meta’s eliminating fact-checking and removing important content restrictions, and the company’s ending Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives; in effect emulating X’s destructive path. Together, these actions restore a “more speech is good speech” culture, put the onus on users - including those targeted for harassment - to police content, and return to the idea that, in tech especially, “meritocracy” is better for business, even though it objectively doesn’t work that way. Put another way, they stem the “neutering” – Zuckerberg’s own word - and a Manosphere dog whistle, if ever there was one - of the company.

First, to get this out of the way, even though “masculine energy” comes off as loosey-goosey yoga speak it's thinly veiled code for the aggression, anger, ruthlessness, and decisiveness our society adulates in male leaders. It’s the preferred model for dominating and winning that makes patriarchal Capitalism run. This behavior isn’t “masculine” because it is inherent in men but because most women are quickly punished for acting in these ways. Plenty of women are capable of aggression, decisiveness, and competitive domination. In male-dominated spaces, one or two women, almost always white, are usually allowed to join the club. They’re the exception that prove the rule, the loophole women, the ones that aren’t “like the other girls.” For the most part, though, everyone knows what a woman with “masculine energy” is: a bitch, a ball-buster, bossy, shrill, mean, difficult, cold, irrational, power-hungry. These are all words for emasculating to men.

Second, “masculine energy” always features in opposition to “feminine energy,” which is how Zuckerberg framed it. It signals nostalgia for Meta’s origin story: the moving fast and breaking of things, a corporate ethos that is itself gendered to its core because, especially at Meta, it always assumed a traditional masculine privilege: that “someone” will move more slowly and fix them. The company, like the industry, is deeply occupationally sex-segregated; this means legions of men fill less visible positions in technical and product development roles while women fill roles in support, PR, content moderation, marketing, customer service, and legal roles – women, as one employee told me for an interview, who do the “housekeeping work” of the company, picking up the pieces after people get hurt. You know, feminine energy.

It is in these contexts that Zuckerberg generously tipped his hat at “feminine energy,” which, in men, almost always leads to bullying and dismissal in words like weak, sissy, gay, mama’s boy, soft, Beta, and far worse.

All in all, he traded in commonly held gender stereotypes as well as oversimplifying the complexities and range of masculinities in the world. In so doing, he also handily obscured the blinding whiteness of his claims. Today, a Black man with “masculine energy” is far more likely to end up incarcerated than be part of Meta’s US leadership team (where, in 2022, Black people made up less than 5% of senior executives.) Even as president, Barack Obama couldn’t openly exhibit Zuck’s “masculine energy” the way, for instance, Donald Trump does. An entire comedy routine was built around his “anger translator.” By promoting "masculine energy," Zuckerberg and others casually and subtly deepen racial hierarchies that free men like themselves to do as they please while limiting others to stereotypes that pervasively restrict them and their opportunities.

In a brief exchange, Rogan and Zuckerberg managed to convey a vision of masculinity that exploits women while faux-rewarding them for being pervasively relegated to support roles, while also erasing the reality of systemic bias and racism. At least the two men talking did it while more or less asserting with straight faces that men’s power and status have been cruelly stifled in corporate America.

This gets us, second, to Meta's putting the nail in the coffin of vitally important DEI programs: a recommitment to “meritocracy” and "performance." Like “soft” and “feminine” cultural norms - including remote work options that enhance both racial and, given enduring care imbalances, gender diversity - these programs also “neuter” corporate life, making competing and winning more difficult.

Today, 88.8% of CEOs and CFOs are of white/European descent, and 88 % are men, a cohort that comprises less than a third of the US population. In 2023, there were only eight Black CEOs in the Fortune 500 1.6%. This list included two women and six men, and the number was even fewer than in 2022. And yet, seventy percent of white men feel disadvantaged and oppressed by efforts to correct the effects of historic discrimination and that jobs that “should” be theirs are going to less qualified people. These feelings don’t mean that they are, in fact, owned jobs, left out, or oppressed, especially in tech and media. White men, for instance, control 98% of VC funds and distribute those funds to people who look just like them. Women receive less than 2% of VC money. Black founders 0.48% percent. Black women? 0.34%. LGBTQ+ founders get less than 1% of total available VC funding.

Either you truly believe straight men, mostly white, are superior in every way – as coders, idea generators, business people, leaders, and workers – or you understand that, as a society, we have a systemic problem of inequality of access and outcomes that desperately needs to be rectified. You might even feel a moral or ethical obligation to address the issue. The logical extension of the essentialist “masculine” and “feminine” energy argument, however, is caring for others and striving for a better society - morality and ethics - are only a concern if you possess ovaries.

Third (sorry, long-winded second), reducing moderation is also about “masculine energy” in that it restores an ideal of free speech: an individualistic, aggressive, competitive, dominating, survival of the fittest speech. Having fewer moderation policies is a policy that systematizes dehumanization and facilitates hate. It means, for example, that non-hetero and non-CIS people can freely be called sick, deviant, and mentally ill and that women will again be described as toasters and tables, pets, or whatever else debate-me misogynists decide. People who fight this “free speech” approach know it’s not free at all, but it comes at a massive cost.

Pressing a company like Meta to move beyond the individual and consider the political and social impacts of this ideology has also long been considered a “neutering” feminization, perceived as women telling men what to do and trying to control them.

I know this from long, personal, and expensive experience. A brief but relevant detour: In 2013, Laura Bates, Jaclyn Friedman, and I spearheaded a global campaign demanding that Facebook address, by the terms of its own policies, hateful and threatening content depicting women as prey, dehumanized objects, or permissible targets of abuse and violence. The platform freely allowed content glorifying stalking, rape, domestic violence, and drugging women.

For example, one page was titled “I Love the Rape Van.” There were popular memes showing smiling men carrying limp girls with captions like "Rohyphnol: When Traditional Dating Methods Just Aren't Cutting it!" One page, “I Kill Bitches Like You,” featured a gun and men talking about women they wanted to hurt. "Raping Babies Because You're Fucking Fearless" stayed up for more than a month. At one point, I was sent a video of a woman being stopped on the side of a road, dragged into a van, and brutally raped. Another, of a woman being beheaded, had more than 900 comments, many by men commenting on the woman’s underwear. When I talked to Facebook about a page dedicated to the corrective rape of women soccer players who were lesbians in South Africa, no one knew what I meant.

To make matters worse, Facebook was simultaneously removing content about women’s health (breast cancer checks, breastfeeding pictures, and abortion information, for example) and censoring women’s political speech if it involved their using their own bodies. Women-originating non-sexualized depictions of breasts or even internal body parts, like the cervix, were by default pornographic and frequently removed without nuance or contextual consideration. I personallychallenged many examples of these restrictions.

This was the environment in which women - particularly writers and politicians and their supporters - were being threatened with lynching, gang rape, and death for talking about, well, anything. In 2013, there was virtually no way to appeal the content, and “moderation” more or less meant a comments battle on the targeted person’s own pages.

Feminists had tried for years to work with Facebook to no avail, so we bypassed the company and asked consumers to use the hashtag #FBrape and directly contacted advertisers to inform them what their dollars were sponsoring. A Duracell battery ad, for example, appeared on "I kill bitches like you;" Vistaprint was selling stationery on "Domestic Violence: Don't Make Me Tell You Twice," filled with images of women beaten, bruised, and bleeding. My personal favorite was a page called Sexy Arab Girls, "Join our page for more porn videos,” which featured an ad for an event, "Honoring Cardinal Timothy Dolan." Typically, Facebook handled pages like these by adding “[Controversial Humor]” to the title and walking away. The designation very literally turned the threats and violence into a joke.

Our campaign, supported by over 100 global women’s rights organizations, worked. Within a day of intense media coverage, Facebook contacted us asking that we stop, something we had refused to do without public promises. A week later, the company issued a public statement agreeing to enforce its moderation guidelines and improve its content review processes. It also committed to working with anti-violence women's advocacy groups to identify better and remove hate speech, particularly content that incited violence against women. We also set up a global escalation channel to bring critical cases to the company’s attention.

At the time, the #FBrape campaign was a significant effort in a much broader movement against hate speech online. It demonstrated that collective action and public pressure could drive corporate policy, especially in the realm of ad-driven social media platforms. The campaign and others we initiated and supported set a precedent for holding tech companies, including Twitter, accountable for the content they host. We were under no illusions. We won a victory but remained wary, for obvious reasons.

These efforts were global and were overwhelmingly led by women. In its wake, for almost eight years, I organized dozens of us working across borders, disciplines, organizations, and philosophies in an informal but effective network called the Safety and Free Speech Coalition.

Any advances we made in that direction have been largely wiped out in the past three years by X’s calculated descent into misinformation, harassment, and, now, Meta's reversions. These two platforms are doubling down on a well-worn libertarian vision of free speech that relatively few people can exercise without high costs.

And they are doing it just as TikTok, with its army of progressive voices, is being shuttered. It’s a page right out of the authoritarian playbook.

Silicon Valley has never been particularly interested in what free speech is for. American free speech jurisprudence, for instance, is centered on three primary values: autonomy, truth, and democracy. For example, effective moderation enhances free speech by creating the mechanisms necessary for people to be heard; it’s a commitment to ensure the free speech of more people, more diverse people, and ideas without fear of violence or abuse. This, in turn, results in a richer exchange of ideas. Dehumanization and harassment distort truth by marginalizing or entirely removing voices altogether. Unmoderated platforms degrade autonomy, particularly for women and minorities, by rewarding a climate of fear that demands unbalanced self-censorship. When less powerful people—socially, politically, and economically—are excluded from conversations because of fear of harassment, they are personally hurt as speakers, but the entire democratic process suffers. The problem is, of course, that the internet's economic model undermines these principles. Engagement metrics have always mattered more than user safety; viral mis- and dis-information and hate are more profitable than thoughtful dialogue and social trust.

In the end, “masculine energy” isn’t about corporate culture or free speech in an essential political sense but the right to say or do whatever one wants without accountability or care about the consequences. It’s a permission structure that has, in the United States, mainly benefited powerful white men but that is flexible enough to accommodate other men by promising domination over others - women, immigrants, and LGTBQ people, within constrained parameters.

The most profound irony of all of this, though, is that so many conservative men, including Rogan and Zuckerberg, delight in rejecting “safe spaces” all while actively building male flight platforms that are subsidized bunkers for misogynists, white supremacists, homophobes, and transphobes. Under the illusory guise of neutrality and diverse opinions, these are places where denigrating and regressive ideas thrive and where, today, speakers with ill intent are once again more protected against any meaningful challenge. The “two sides” and "open dialogue" communities both men profit from are echo chambers that generate and amplify engagement around misinformation and dangerous speech.

Today, more than ever, it’s important to recognize and resist the media’s lack of structural thinking, framing problems in zero-sum ways, and proliferation of damaging false equivalences. This example is as good an example as any.

Understood together, “masculine energy” + “more speech” + killing DEI = A 101 in White Male Supremacy. It’s a vengeful pick-up-my-toys, fuck-around-and-find-out gambit that dares silenced people to push back in the knowledge that no one more powerful than a macho fascist president has endorsed this agenda. It manages to be all of these things while perfectly illustrating that male supremacy ultimately depends not on men’s risk-taking and bravery but on their toeing the line and doing what the Strong Men tells them to.

For instance, Trump will almost reinstate TikTok, which will have to accede to his terms and conditions, extending the profound harms being perpetrated by a kiss-ass global broligarchy.

So, no pretending that “masculine energy” is benign woo-woo channeling of Zuck’s spirit animal or some mythopoetic mandate. It’s powerful people investing in stereotypes, people, and power structures that systemically threaten, impoverish, and endanger entire classes of people who are not white, are not straight, are not men, laundering white male supremacist ideals in plain sight. Which, thankfully, tomorrow’s inauguration won’t be.