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What immediately strikes you about Ben Hurst is that any man would want to look like him, to move like him, to attract attention like him. Any straight woman would want to be with him. He’s tall and articulate, handsome but approachable, both a man’s man and a woman’s man. Hurst is a masculinity educator. His job is to talk to boys and young men about what it means to be a man. Which is why on this summer’s day we’re at a school in London (which I’ve agreed not to name), where Hurst is set to host a workshop on manliness. Or how to be a good man, and whatever that means.
The boys act like boys: feral and uncontained by the playground in which they’ve been instructed to line up. Hurst stands at the front, looking like an off-duty PE teacher: grey trackies, slip-on Vans and a hoodie, offset with a pearl necklace and sunglasses. While the boys – 15- and 16-year-olds – jostle and call out mean nicknames, they ignore the writer in their midst, which I’m grateful for. I admit to Hurst that I have always felt unsettled around teenage boys. They’re Freud’s id in a hormonal mass; no longer innocent children but without the moral compass of men. Anything could happen at any moment that might shape their entire psyche and have consequences for the rest of their lives.
“Kids are super malleable,” Hurst replies. “Do you know what I mean?”
Inside the classroom, the boys arrange the chairs in a circle. They’re apprehensive around their new facilitator. Naughtier boys make spicy comments to win his attention. “Bet you don’t even watch TV,” says one boy to Hurst, while they’re talking about what they like to watch. “You been in my house?” he retorts. A teacher couldn’t command this respect, neither could a parent. Hurst is used to a cynical audience, and understands young men as well as anyone. It occurs to me that Hurst has the potential to be the closest thing to an anti-Andrew Tate figure we’ve got in Britain.
Hurst asks the class to introduce themselves one by one and to say how they’re feeling. The one rule is they can’t say “hungry”, “tired”, or any variation of “fine”. Each of them, of course, shrugs that they’re “hungry”, “tired” and “fine”.
What are men expected to be? Hurst asks. Slowly, and only when prompted, the boys give a list that Hurst writes on the board: strong, no emotions, provider, dominant (in sex and work and family life), intelligent, intimidating, alpha. “Women want men that look cut, innit,” one says.
Who expects men to be these things? Women, other men, society, their parents.
Who feels like they already possess those qualities? None of them put their hands up.
The list could have been taken from an Andrew Tate post. Since his emergence in 2016, Tate – the self-styled “top G”, currently in Romania awaiting pre-trial evaluation of charges against him including rape and human trafficking (accusations which he has denied) – has become a shorthand for a certain kind of regressive hypermasculinity.
The influence that Tate has on young men can’t be downplayed. Nearly eight in ten 16-17 year-old boys in the UK have watched Tate’s content, according to a survey by the anti-extremism group Hope Not Hate, with just over half viewing him in a positive light. For many boys, he is more recognisable a face than the Prime Minister. Before Tate was banned from TikTok last August, videos with the hashtag #AndrewTate had been viewed on the platform more than 13 billion times. Female teachers report male students mimicking his teachings in class, and in some cases outright refusing to be taught by a woman.
“I’m not naturally an early adopter,” Hurst says. “But with Andrew Tate we had to be because he was coming up so much in boys’ conversations.”
It’s not just Tate that Hurst has had to be educated about: there’s a host of other toxic and toxic-adjacent personalities emerging from the “manosphere” – the self-help tinged, often misogynistic corner of the internet – into mainstream culture. Like the creators of Fresh & Fit who claim to host the number one men’s self-improvement podcast in the world, and have said that being monogamous is a woman’s job, while it’s “natural” for men to sleep around, and highlighted various “tricks” that women use to get money out of men. (Fresh & Fit did not address GQ’s request for comment). Another is Hstikkytokky, a British fitness influencer, who has claimed that mental health is “just another excuse to be average” and that Black girls are “clapped” (ie ugly, have slept with many people) and “butters” (very ugly). (He later apologised for and retracted the latter comments.) Hurst does a surprisingly good impression of Hstikkytokky vlogging as he flips a water bottle in one hand. “I banged two birds and ran out of money,” he says, mockingly, then looks back to the boys. “What is it about these men that entertains or interests them? That’s the big question.”
Hurst tends to meet five types of children. There are the uninterested, who don’t know why all this relates to them; the sceptics, who pick apart everything (these are Hurst’s favourites, because they’re ready for debate and learning is predicated on honest conversation); the attacked, who are already at their limit being told men are inherently toxic (they tend to be the ones who say women expect macho qualities of men, Hurst says); and the engaged, a small group who probably have politically-minded parents, who want to be helpful but aren’t yet sure how. Then there is the group that Hurst relates to the most: the confused. “They don’t disagree, but they just don’t get it,” he says. “They’re like: ‘I don’t know what I’m supposed to think. Everybody says what I think is wrong, but I don’t really understand why.’”
That’s who Hurst was, growing up as part of a patriarchal Christian church in Ilford in east London. He considered becoming a minister, but saw strong female role models around him who contradicted what he was taught. All young men, Hurst thinks, need spaces to work out their feelings around masculinity. When boys say something problematic that would see them cancelled online, Hurst listens, tells them he hears what they’re saying, asks them where they got that idea from (it’s usually not their own feelings on the matter) and puts forward some alternatives.
The one thing that Hurst says unites all these boys is that they desperately want to know what masculinity is and how to do it.
I’ve long tried to imagine an ideal man. When I was a teenager, the docket was brief (likes music and has floppy hair). The must-haves later expanded to include the broad qualities of “hot”, “funny”, “kind” and “generous”. When I turned 30 that eventually developed into an A4 handwritten list of requirements, terms and conditions made of my own volition, in order to help finally manifest something suitable. “Ability to articulate his own feelings” and “navigates conflict effectively” would now be at the very top, regrettably far above “hot”, now of only middling importance.
I’ve dated gym guys, softboys, intellectuals, himbos, men who don’t read, but I’ve never dated an Andrew Tate – and as his devotees will no doubt tell me, an Andrew Tate would never date me. I’m a 31-year-old writer with male friends who hates cleaning; Tate has said he prefers 18-19-year-olds, ideally virgins, who he can leave his “imprint” on, and has stated that rape victims should “bare [sic] some responsibility” for their attacks. (A representative for Tate told GQ that the media has taken his statements out of context, that Tate is “against violence or abuse in general”, and that his influence on young men is “overwhelmingly positive”.)
One of the strangest paradoxes of Tate’s rise is that I’ve never come across an adult woman who is attracted to him, yet that hasn’t stopped Tate from creating a pocket economy dedicated to his teachings. There is “The Real World” (previously branded “Hustler’s University”), Tate’s so-called “educational platform” on how to be rich and successful. Or for the true believers, there is his Fight Club-esque community which purports to help dudes who want to be freed from “socially induced incarceration” – including, according to a report by Rolling Stone, by encouraging them to get their wives and girlfriends into online sex work. (Tate has vigorously disputed the report and denied any wrongdoing.)
Tate inspires devotion. Matt Shea, a British reporter, interviewed the influencer for his Vice film The Dangerous Rise of Andrew Tate; when one of Shea’s friends found out Shea was making the film, he was almost in tears. “He was like, ‘Please don’t ruin his life, he’s a good guy’,” Shea says. “It was weird because this is a guy who’s my age. He’s not some radicalised adolescent boy. The adoration for Tate goes beyond a sport or music fan; they stan him so hard it’s semi-religious.”
I was surprised when I watched Shea’s documentary and Tate’s exhaustingly dull interviews with Piers Morgan. For someone with such boyish main character energy, the man has little original to say for himself. He stumbles into contradictions, fails to deliver satisfying answers and crumbles under pressure. He’s bossy and he’s stacked – a plus? Tate seems like an angry vessel: Pitbull’s looks, minus the reggaeton bangers, David Brent without the jokes.
Studying Tate’s persona reminds me of my own school experience: boys who got their dicks out in class to challenge the teacher. Once, a boy passed around nude photos of his then-girlfriend and posted them around the school, leading to the girl being ostracised and zero meaningful punishment for the boy. A former boyfriend of mine would routinely watch porn in his bedroom when he knew I was coming over and be in no hurry to turn it off when I entered the room. I remember believing that boys were more likely to be bad people and resented that the adults around them felt like enablers. On reflection, it’s obvious that these “masculine” behaviours were about control. Be toxic, get rewarded.
For Shea, Tate is symbolic of this dark side of masculinity – just on steroids. “We’re regressing back to levels of misogyny that even our parents and our parents’ parents would be disgusted by,” Shea says, calling me from Seattle, where he’s working on a follow-up to his Tate film. “All this talk about Gen Z being ‘woke’ – we have to be cautious because the opposite is also true and it’s coming.”
Although they have been a little less visible on Instagram and TikTok, there are men preaching a more evolved take on manhood. These are the “positive” masculinity influencers. The “good” guys.
I meet Jamie Clements (16.7k Instagram followers) in a garden centre cafe in Fulham, surrounded by mums and their prams. The 29-year-old couldn’t be further from the cigar-smoking, supercar-garage-owning image of the toxic masculinity bros; for one, he is drinking a decaffeinated oat latte. “Do I seem weak to you? Some people might say ‘yeah’, and that’s their prerogative,” he says, laughing softly.
Clements is quiet and unassuming, and, like the others, is on a “healing journey”. Before becoming an influencer, Clements was an emotionally shut-down rugby lad, which led to relationship problems with women. By his mid-twenties he struggled with suicidal ideation, and after a male friend later died by suicide, Clements realised he had to examine how his rigid masculinity was affecting his own mental health.
During the pandemic, Clements made his first podcast series, Man Down, about his experiences. “It felt like, now that I look back on it, an expression of that phase of ‘masculinity bad’,” he says. But rejecting anything that could be deemed “toxic” – anger, aggression – backfired. “What I unknowingly did was reject masculinity as a whole,” he explains. “I was like, I’m going to focus on what people might call the ‘feminine’: emotional awareness and regulation, feelings. I became very empathetic and good came from it. Then a couple of years ago I realised I’d lost some of the good that we might associate with masculinity: taking decisive action, leadership.”
He’s working on a second podcast series which will demonstrate his new ethos: that masculine strength should be combined with feminine softness to create a more comfortable, well-rounded man.
His story is aligned with that of 42-year-old Ben Bidwell (32k Instagram followers). Zen and tanned, in a plain white T-shirt, he has just got back from hosting a retreat in Greece and returned to the grind of one-to-one work with clients and content creation. “I’ve found myself taking a step back from social media, not wanting to constantly give,” he says serenely. I write down the first problem facing the positive masculinity movement: reluctance to make content.
Bidwell himself once had a life of partying, shallow relationships with women, and a successful career. Growing up on an ’80s diet of Rambo and The Terminator, Bidwell says, taught him at an early age that to “thrive” as a man meant repressing one’s emotions, getting girls, and being powerful. “I never saw my dad and older brothers communicate,” he says. “I don’t hold any blame or shame over the man I became in my twenties because I was following the information I saw around me.”
But there was one problem: “I always struggled to orgasm in sex,” Bidwell says. “That’s my truth, there’s no getting around that.” Doctors told him there was no physical problem, and through accessing his emotions in hypnotherapy, Bidwell’s issues began to ease; he opened up to his mother and his relationships with women improved. If he could change, he thought, who couldn’t he help? So he rebranded himself as The Naked Professor. “My whole brand started off as naked images of me trying to ‘lay myself bare’ or ‘strip away my masks’ and ‘letting myself be seen’ and ‘baring my soul’ and all these clichés,” he says. “Sex sells: I may not have been seen if I hadn’t chucked these hooks out there.”
Bidwell now hosts breathing workshops, has been featured in Forbes, and, when we speak, is preparing for an appearance at Russell Brand’s wellness festival (Bidwell was interviewed for this piece before the allegations surrounding Brand were public). In his classes, Bidwell encourages participants to picture “masculine archetypes” and breathe like them. There's the Warrior (purposeful, aggressive, emotionally detached), the Lover (feeling, empathetic, artistic) and the Magician (less Harry Potter, more spiritual). Then there’s The King. “There are so many men stuck in the Warrior,” he says sadly. “It’s only when we embrace each one that we start to become our King. It hurts when you’re not your own King. And hurt people hurt people.”
It seems like a problem that when I ask these influencers what masculinity means, nobody has a definitive answer. The phrase “toxic masculinity” is now common parlance, yet we still seem unable to agree what masculinity is, drained of poison. The lack of consensus chimes with what former Royal Marine James Boardman, aka The Man Coach (10.1k IG followers) tells me: “For me masculinity comes down to an individual identity. We have to create our own ten commandments… regardless of everyone else.” In other words, a (broad) shoulder shrug.
As a woman who dates men all I can say is that I know masculinity when I feel it. It’s Paul Mescal in a vest and tiny chain while talking about his feelings. It’s The Rock pushing a torpedo off its path in the Fast & Furious franchise and it’s The Rock shedding a tear on live TV as Rob Delaney talks about the death of his son. It’s Tom Hardy saying he’s obviously slept with men and women in his personal life because he’s an actor. Incidentally, “masculine” is in my top five qualities on the latest ideal man list.
Most – perhaps all – straight women I know crave masculinity in “the other”, though that is something we’re not supposed to say. It feels regressive, a betrayal of the men who have worked on their mental health or leant into their emotions like we asked of them. It could be misconstrued as a desire to return to the patriarchal “Before Times”. Maybe it’s taboo because women have fought against our shackles for so long, that to admit a desire for men to be masculine is to put those restraints on the opposite sex. It’s unfair, but it’s true. But most women, I think, would also struggle if they had to explain what healthy masculinity looks like.
Canadian influencer Mark Groves (59.8k IG followers), frequently speaks about the way that this complexity presents itself in relationships. “Evolutionarily, women desire men who are powerful, protect, provide, and procreate,” Groves says. If a man is overly emotional, Groves believes, women might subconsciously read that as a sign he isn’t able to protect them. “I don’t know that women have been socialised to trust vulnerable male emotion, especially if vulnerability has been used to manipulate.” Vulnerability, when not used to manipulate, connect or control, will feel integrated and safe to women. If men are to be more emotional, then both men and women need to know how to handle it.
Other masculinity influencers overseas take a more aggressive approach. Traver Boehm of Man UNcivilized (27.4k) is an ex-MMA fighter based in Colorado in the US. “I’m not a shaman, I don’t have mystical powers, I’m a white dude from Connecticut, you’ve seen what I look like,” he tells me. I Google photos of him quietly; he looks like he could bench press all my male friends, pummel them into a jus and drink them like whey isolate.
Boehm feels that confining our ideas of masculinity to either the “alpha male” or the “sensitive New Age guy” is a false choice. “We’ve told men that masculinity is bad and we just need 190lb hairy women walking around who are super sensitive,” he explains. “Most men in society look to the left and to the right and say, ‘I don’t want to have to pretend to be a Navy SEAL entrepreneur porn star or – this will get me a lot of shit for saying it but – a vegan feminist poet’. A lot of men sit down in the middle and collapse. The work is thinking what parts do you want to combine to make your own?”
Outside of the manosphere, it’s only recently become acceptable for men to address men on this topic online. “If I speak about men, women love it. If I speak to men, it really upsets a lot of women. That’s a societal conundrum: how dare you speak to the perpetrators?” Boehm says. “I’m not going to get them to not be perpetrators if I don’t speak to them.” About five years ago, his followers on Instagram were 70:30 women to men. Women messaged him, he recalls, saying, “‘I’m not allowed to say this publicly, but this is the kind of man I want. I want a man who will lead. I want a man who’s strong. I want a man who has a healthy sex drive, but is also conscious about consent and trust.’ Now it’s 60:40 men to women because I started dialling in to address men, like, ‘Men, this is what you need to do’.”
What Boehm finds more interesting is that in the last two years his leading demographic has gone from 40-50 years old to 25-35 years old. “For my generation and a bit younger it was waking up at rock bottom that was the call to change. I think that so many of these younger guys are in that level of pain already,” he says. One study recently found that men between 18 and 24 have been having significantly less sex in recent years than they did two decades ago, while another attributed such changes in part to drinking less, playing more video games, and living with their parents longer. No wonder they’re growing up more isolated.
Influencers like Boehm lean towards macho branding – red and black colours, barbed wire, A LOT OF CAPS LOCK – and host paid communities that are called Brotherhoods or Tribes or Warriors and so on. It’s a similar concept to Tate’s “War Room”, but with more of a focus on empathy. “I don’t know if it’s the hyper-independence of the US or whether some of the main [masculinity] writers were here but there was more permission for men to develop here,” Boehm says. “#MeToo originated here. Our last president was about as toxic masculine archetype as you can get. I speak to guys in England and they’re like, ‘We have the stiff upper lip thing’.”
When Boehm asks me to send a British man to the masculinity workshop he’s leading in London the following month I can’t think of a single person who’d be available and open enough to try it. Decades of lad culture has meant that in the UK, the very act of going out with your guy friends is a layered performance. Admitting you want help in that department seems like pretty much the least masculine thing you could do.
The problem facing the internet’s nice guys is simple: saying the right things doesn’t matter if nobody is listening. Tate’s cigar-chomping, get-rich-quick approach has attracted billions of views; a lot of the men I meet in the positivity space struggle to get a fraction of that. “The internet rewards extreme behaviour,” explains Taylor Lorenz, a journalist who writes about internet culture for The Washington Post. “Whether that’s lifting 600lb or running really rapidly or having big muscles or exaggerated features, that stuff performs very well with social media algorithms so they’re more likely to get shown. Success snowballs.” This trope also extends, Lorenz says, to the leading LGBTQ+ influencers, who tend to be “hot” and conform to certain norms.
One night I laid down on my bed and listened to hours of positive masculinity podcasts. They inspired you to muse on systems and structures. It was nuanced, and encouraging, but I didn’t especially know what I was supposed to do with their advice. “People want to scroll through and get tips and they want those to be direct and clear,” Lorenz says. Inviting men to think about being a man was not the same as telling him how to be one.
Part of Tate’s appeal is that he offers men a simple solution: that it is the world that is the problem, not them. Rather than grapple with changes in gender dynamics and the place of men in a post #MeToo world, Tate denies it’s happened at all.
It isn’t just Tate’s simplistic message that has led to his success. Over 100,000 people were at one point signed up to Hustler’s University, according to its site; The Guardian reported that members were financially incentivised to share Tate’s videos, by being offered a commission for any subscribers they drove to the platform. (This affiliate marketing programme is no longer active.) Any attempt to stop the proliferation of Tate clips made by his fans is like playing a game of Whac-A-Mole.
Ironically, by rejecting anything that might look feminine, Tate creates a caricature of masculinity – men who don’t “do” manliness to attract women, but enact it to showboat to other men. The cars, the cigars, trolling Greta Thunberg online for likes, then getting owned: it’s status posturing, men speaking the language of men. “Some of the men I met in the Andrew Tate circles say they don’t even enjoy sleeping with women, they use women as a trophy to show their dominance to other men and gain power,” Shea says. “There’s a sort of campness to Andrew Tate.”
Hurst isn’t ready to be a fully-fledged masculinity influencer, despite him being an ideal model. It seems like a sensitive subject. “Viral content has to be punchy or controversial or in opposition to something. I don’t feel super comfortable with that,” he says, shifting in his seat. It’s an afternoon off at home in Dagenham, east London, for Hurst, his cockapoo vying for his attention in the adjoining room. “I always worry that if we start creating the trend of ‘anti-misogyny influencer’ or ‘masculinity influencers’ that it will end up being Ekin-Su and her Oh Polly deal,” Hurst says, referring to the Love Island winner who was dropped by a fashion brand when the collaboration reportedly failed to reach its target audience.
Trying to make money from “positive” masculinity would risk selling out, in the way that commercial interests commodified feminism in the 2010s. It’s not hard to imagine a kind of basic bitch, #girlboss-ification of men. Someone like me would probably overindulge in this bland content buffet. Women are culturally encouraged to be codependent; we’re taught to learn everything about men and our relationships in order to feel in control. It reminds me of something Groves said, about how if women want to support men’s growth, then we should instead celebrate the brothers, sons, boyfriends we do admire, as a way to clarify masculinity for ourselves and others.
In the past few years, there has been a shift in the discourse around “internet boyfriends” towards men like Pedro Pascal, Timothée Chalamet and Oscar Isaac – men we collectively wish we could date for their positive attributes (or ones we project onto them) of sensitivity and inclusivity. But those celebrities aren’t the role models for teenage boys. It would be great, Lorenz told me, if people could change the alpha notions of manhood, but she doubts if influencers will be the ones to do it. I’m not sure if it will be women either.
Hurst, at least, believes that British men are not widely using social media for spiritual guidance on manhood. “What I’ve noticed over the years is the message resonates [online] more with women than it does with men, so there’s not much point having the conversation on platforms unless you’re trying to build a following of women – and my work is to have conversations with men,” he says. “You look at the analytics of [social media] and it’s not actually doing what it’s supposed to be doing.” Hurst doesn’t feel the need to be an influencer because then he’d be talking to women, whereas at least in schools he can actually talk to the people who need it.
Hurst is, however, considering writing a book called something like Give This Book To Your Boyfriend. Women often approach him quietly after public speaking events to ask if he’d recommend any material for their boyfriend or husband. When I told the British guy I’m dating – someone who, in fairness, already embraces his masculine and feminine qualities and probably does not need this book – he said calmly, “If you gave me that book, I’d drop kick it across the room.” It was very manly of him.
Illustrations by Rui Pu
Animation by Kevin Fay
