Suzanne Harrington: Bro, do something useful...love yourself

I’ve been steeling myself to watch the Louis Theroux documentary, with the same enthusiasm you’d have for clearing out a dead person’s house or doing your tax returns.

The manosphere sounds a lot like a banging club full of leathermen and Tom of Finland clones joyously pumping to hard house and Hi-NRG, the air thick with poppers and man sweat and hedonism. 

If only. Instead, it’s at the opposite end of the joy spectrum, a place from which all the joy has been drained and replaced by po-faced protein-bros with their cars and steroids and cartoon misogyny.

I’ve been steeling myself to watch the Louis Theroux documentary, with the same enthusiasm you’d have for clearing out a dead person’s house or doing your tax returns. 

Within minutes, I’m wincing. It’s just so cringe, all that self-hatred masked by so much fakery — fake values, fake relationships, fake ownership, fake masculinity.

Bro, getting your validation from flash cars is fake self-esteem. Denigrating women as objects to dominate is fake heterosexuality. 

Using all your energy to hoard money is fake purpose. And injecting steroids into your groin or your brain or wherever is fake masculinity. It’s pitiful.

It’s just like how in the real world, hanging onto a woman by her throat does not make her yours; nor does it make you a man. It just makes you another abuser. 

Grimly owning expensive objects does not make you interesting or funny or clever or kind. 

Speaking in jargon taken from an old Keanu Reeves film does not make you a member of some kind of cultural elite – it just makes you another lost fanboy, looking for belonging.

We are all looking for belonging. We are human herd animals, not the lone alphas of your pumped-up imagination — mate, you are not a lion, you’re from the net-curtained dullness of semi-detached suburbia. 

The spaces in which we choose to belong say everything about us — and the poisoned Ponzi scheme of the so-called ‘man’osphere is saying all the wrong things about you.

Halfway through the Louis documentary, my phone pings with some terrible news. A friend has died. Cancer, in her 30s. 

All her adult life, this woman had worked tirelessly with genuinely lost boys — unaccompanied teenage refugees. 

She’d set up a youth centre for them in Calais on the wasteground that used to be called the Jungle, a youth centre made of pallets and tarpaulin and belonging and hope. 

After the Jungle was demolished, she worked with boys and young men who made it across the Channel in dinghies.

A wave of disgust washes over me as I watch these self-involved capitalism-addled muppets on Louis’ documentary homoeroticising all over their stupid shiny cars, their stupid shiny lives. 

Bro, do something useful. Love yourself. Love others. 

Seeking self-worth and validation in external possessions is like building your house on the edge of a cliff; holding onto things with a vice-like grip — literally, in the case of your pretend girlfriend — does not confer ownership. 

It just makes you look deeply, deeply insecure. And a dick. 

Let go, bro. Explore yourself. Meet yourself. Find other bros doing the same thing, away from the stupid clamour of the online grifters. 

Step out, step up, step forward towards genuine, non-performative masculinity in all its glorious forms. Have a laugh as you’re at it. 

And do stuff for other people — chicks love that shit. They might even fancy you.