Why So Many Men Are Unraveling

Galaxy Brain

In this episode of Galaxy Brain, host Charlie Warzel interviews writer Jon Ronson about his book 'The Castle,' a narrative exploring the unravel

Key takeaways

The erosion of traditional male roles due to deindustrialization and shifting cultural norms has left many men without a clear sense of purpose.
Online communities and influencer culture have amplified competing, often extreme, visions of masculinity, contributing to confusion and disorientation among men.

Main topics

The crisis of modern masculinity
Impact of deindustrialization on male identity

Notable quotes

"You can't act in this kind of disinhibited ways where you get to do whatever you want and screw everybody else. Like, you can't."

Conclusion

Ronson's journey into the castle reveals not just one man's descent into fantasy, but reflects a

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) So I think beginning with, you know, deindustrialisation, the death of factories, office life eroding, men realising that certain privileges they had, they don't quite have the same, you know, the same way anymore, feeling kind of tossed around in a sea of conflicting ideologies about what being a man actually means, should you be more stoical, should you be more vulnerable? You know, all of these men's health influences giving these... differing, contrasting ideas. And so this is a huge societal shift in many different ways. And I think that's what's happening. You've got men responding to these changes by bowing out, and then you've got these other men who are responding by spiraling. Speaker 2 (0:47) I'm Charlie Worzel, and this is Galaxy Brain. And today, we are headed down a rabbit hole that includes ominous castles, public shaming, YouTube, White House cage fighting, all to answer one of life's burning questions. Why is it that so many men are unraveling these days? Is this part of a changing economy, part of a bad job market? Is it fallout from the pandemic? Or is it part of something bigger, a societal failure of some sort? or an outgrowth of what some people have called the masculinity crisis. Now, those words, masculinity crisis, can cause some people to roll their eyes. Men, of course, continue to enjoy all kinds of societal privilege and gender inequities abound. But what is clear, I think, if you spent any time engaging with modern politics and culture, is that over the last few decades, there has been a very real, if hard to define, debate over what it means to be a man. Jobs and gender roles, they've changed, and culture along with it. Much of it for the better. But that change has also created some uncertainty for the men who have been used to being at the center of every household, every office, every institution, marketing campaign, and political decision. And it's in that uncertainty that all kinds of voices, pickup artists, politicians, incels on 4chan, Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson, you name it, they've all jumped in to offer these competing visions of masculinity. Now, some of this is taking the form of toxic, misogynistic, manosphere bullshit. Some of it is just positive or harmless. Dudes rock kind of stuff. And so many of these lessons, they end up being taught or absorbed, for better or for worse, in online communities and communicated by people who may or may not have ulterior motives. So what happens to regular men in this bizarre online stew that we're all in? My guest today, the writer and podcaster John Ronson, explores that in his new book, The Castle. Ronson, to be clear, isn't really writing about the manosphere or the high-profile grifters or the wild extremes. Instead, Ronson focuses on ordinary people who tend to find themselves in extraordinary situations. For the past three years, Ronson has been reporting on what happens to men when institutions die, when technology lets a million influencers bloom, and culture changes rapidly. What I find so useful about Ronson's work is that it is curious and it is funny. but it's not overly ideological. The castle is written partly as a mystery and partly as a work of anthropology. For the last decade, Ronson and I have crossed paths on stories numerous times. Like me, his work is always trying to understand what pushes people to believe strange or awful things and all the ways that technology warps culture, which in turn warps real human beings. So, are men okay? Has the internet driven us all insane? Turns out this is a very complicated question, and Jon Ronson joins me now to talk about it all. Speaker 2 (3:49) Jon Ronson, welcome to Galaxy Brain. Speaker 1 (3:52) Jon Ronson, Galaxy Brain. Charlie, it's a delight to be here. Thank you. Speaker 2 (3:55) So your newest book, the reason you're talking to me right now, it's called The Castle, and you've written it in such a propulsive narrative way. But the story is also unique, I think, in that it found you. So tell me a bit about The Castle and how it entered your life in what is clearly an extremely personal way. Speaker 1 (4:15) Yes, I am asleep and I wake up and there's a series of texts from my son, who was in his mid-twenties at the time. And so I read the last text first and the last text says something like, it's okay, that was completely fucked. but we got out and we're safe now, or something along those lines. Every Speaker 2 (4:36) parent wants to hear that, yes. So I frantically Speaker 1 (4:39) read the other text, and what I gather is that him and three friends have been invited to a party being held by a stranger that one of them had met on Tinder. So it's like three hours drive outside of New York City into the Connecticut countryside, and when they turn up, this man's house is a... vast, newly built Gothic castle, which is ostentatious even by Gothic castle standards. It has way too many turrets. And so they tentatively cross the drawbridge over the moat and enter to discover that there is no party. They'd been lured there for some mysterious other reason. So... the castle owner comes out and they say, I'm sorry, but where's the party? And he said, oh, no, I've invited you here to take part in my reality show. So they said, what's the name of your reality show? And he said, it's called 101 Princesses. They asked what the core concept of 101 Princesses was. And he said, I'm the Lord. I'm looking for my queen. And I've got 101 princesses to choose from. Filming began and it became very clear. very quickly that this wasn't a real reality show. He had another agenda. Anyway, that's basically where their story ends. But I then went to the castle. I was so intrigued by what the hell was going on in there. I went to the castle. And a strange and increasingly ominous cat and mouse game begins between me and the castle owner. What I thought was the story was that, okay, this guy is trying to be Hugh Hefner. He's trying to get his, like, you know, princesses in his castle, like the Playboy Mansion. He's trying to be Hugh Hefner at what is the worst moment in human history to try and be Hugh Hefner. You can't lord it over your princesses and your castle like it's the 1970s anymore. Throughout the book, I return to the castle to try and find out what the hell is going on. And what I learn gets increasingly... dark and, you know, extraordinary. But I also tell this wider story of unraveling men failing to adjust to changing times. Tell Speaker 2 (7:02) me a little bit, the castle owner's name, I believe it's Chris Mark, right? Is the name of the castle owner. He is a very particular type of character. Tell me a little bit about him and what immediately caught your eye about this guy. Speaker 1 (7:18) Yeah, well, he's the great-grandson of a... Gilded Age steel tycoon. That's where his money comes from. His great-grandfather, Clayton Mark, made a vast amount of money manufacturing steel. And then the money is filtered down from generation to generation. And Chris has used his portion of the money to build this giant castle and try and create this kind of fantasy bubble inside of his castle where he could be the lord and he invites all of these women. But... He doesn't handle my sudden intrusion into his life very well at all. And by the way, it's not an intrusion. I told him I was a journalist and he invited me over. But after I leave the castle, I start to get these ominous messages from him. First legal threats, threats that he had a team of investigators investigating everything about my life. And then he told me that he had two murderers on his payroll called Carlos and Brandon. And if I ever wrote anything negative about the castle, Carlos and Brandon would be very angry and I didn't want to make them angry. They've only just got out of prison. But clearly, this is a difficult situation I'm now in. Speaker 2 (8:35) Hey guys, it's Charlie here. A quick interjection. After we recorded this interview with John Ronson, Chris Mark, the central character of the book, spoke with the Guardian and pushed back on some of the assertions in the castle. He told the Guardian that he'd been presented in, quote, a profoundly misleading manner, end quote. Mark denied deliberately deceiving people into coming to the castle, adding that, quote, the gathering was related to a proposed creative project that also had a genuine charitable purpose, end quote. He added, quote, I strongly dispute any characterization suggesting that I groomed, conditioned, or manipulated women into sexual activity, end quote. And he denied that the text messages referencing Carlos and Brandon in any way constituted a genuine threat. Quote, I did not intend to instruct anyone to physically harm John Ronson. With all that Speaker 1 (9:24) said, back to the interview. Speaker 2 (9:27) Was that a moment for you? Because it feels like in the book where you haven't decided to make this your next big project, and yet the amount of protestation from him, the intensity of that, is that the moment when you say, okay, there's something real here. I need to devote a lot more time to this because clearly anyone who's willing to speak this way to me, there has to be something. than just an eccentric man in a castle here. Speaker 1 (9:57) Yeah, there was definitely an element of that, but also it was kind of frightening to get these threats. And I remember times in the past when I've done stories which were genuinely frightening. And on each of those occasions, I realized that doing something that's completely out of my comfort zone, something I would never do if I wasn't a journalist. Quite often, the stories that last for years and years are the stories that I'm most proud of. They're often the most extraordinary stories, and this one truly turned out to be one of those. Speaker 2 (10:30) Yeah, this is exactly where I want to go here, because the story about Mark becomes this through line that animates this bigger story about, I mean, I guess to put it frankly, it's what the hell is going on with men in this era, right? And there's this personal element. that you refer to a couple times in this, this sort of paralyzing fear in your own life, in your own career of any kind of stagnation, right? Being a writer when you don't have the idea, you know, you feel purposeless and useless. Have you felt in your own life a masculinity crisis inside of you that allowed you to connect with a lot of the people in this story in this way? Speaker 2 (11:14) unraveling feeling. Is that something that's always kind of been a factor in your life and your work? Speaker 1 (11:20) Well, I would never have put it in terms of the word masculinity. Like, I don't think I've... I don't think I, until I started writing this book, I ever said the word masculinity out loud. Like, that's how little I identify with masculinity. I discovered a statistic right in the book that... 10 % of people feel the same way I do, that we just don't identify as, you know, strongly masculine or feminine.