The following piece is an opinion and does not reflect the views of The Eagle and its staff. All opinions are edited for grammar, style and argument structure and fact-checked, but the opinions are the writer’s own.
Editor’s Note: This article contains mentions of sexual violence, misogyny and antisemitism.
California Governor and 2028 Democratic hopeful(ly not) Gavin Newsom said it best: “roughly half of men in America have never asked out a woman in-person on a date.”
This phenomenon is well documented and well exploited. Fifteen percent of men report having zero close friendships — a fivefold increase from the 1990s — and at least six in ten young men identify as single.
The right have made major inroads with young men, harnessing the insecurity that lies where community does not. The 2024 presidential election elucidated this: 67 percent of young white men voted for Trump.
There are many theories as to why this is. I posit that conservative ideals are a convenient pretext for many men. Wanting a traditional woman — for example — conveniently provides these men with a relationship dynamic that asks from them comparatively little, particularly emotionally.
Most of the discussion post-2024 tends to blame straight young men for falling astray. In light of the extreme, harassing and increasingly violent speech from many men online, this feels fair. But as it takes a village to vanquish a monster, that monster had to be raised somewhere.
I recently started watching The CW’s “Gossip Girl.” I was struck by many things in just the first episode — flagrant displays of wealth, extremely questionable hairstyles, Blake Lively. Decidedly the most shocking to me, and probably many others doing a rewatch in 2026, was the show’s glossy Samsung Smartphone shrug at Chuck Bass, infamous date-rapist.
He does get punched by the brother of a victim of his — victim being a term the show uses with very little weight — but Bass does not suffer any sociopolitical fallout from his actions. Later seasons see said brother being friendly with Bass. His being a rapist gets no more scrutiny than it being a season 1 Chuck-ism.
“Gossip Girl” is certainly not a documentary. It is barely an okay drama. But the lack of pause that rape gave the showrunners or watchers in 2007 shows that we have undergone a shift in what we expect from or in how we speak about men. Chuck Bass’ example would not be in a TV show today with its utter lack of sensitivity or plot recognition.
This is good. We no longer tolerate the kind of masculinity that demeans and hurts so overtly. Institutions ruled by these men no longer cohabitate with our vision of society. Right?
Well, there were real wins of the Me Too movement and subsequent laws passed in the last 20 years. But progress has not been linear since.
We see today a massive uptick in the overtly cruel, horrid and unaccountable example of masculinity that “Gossip Girl” creators and fans casually accepted over 18 years ago.
The online right has been the catalyst and setting for this. The infamous self-described misogynist Andrew Tate ardently espouses to his millions of young male viewers that women are intrinsically lazy and overall worth less than men. Further, or perhaps accordingly, he stated that women should bear responsibility for sexual assault: a disgusting proclamation that got him banned from Twitter, to be later reinstated on Elon Musk’s X.
Tate’s example has trickled down to younger influencers on obscure spaces of Instagram Reels and TikTok, and mainstream spaces of X. Thousands of men have used the latter site’s image-generating AI ‘Grok’ to nonconsensually edit naked, suggestive or deeply perverted images of unsuspecting users, overwhelmingly women. This became so prominent as to become a trend on the site, with these posts getting thousands of engagements and positive affirmation.
The looksmaxxing influencer Clavicular is one of many Tate offshoots plaguing these depths of social media. He videos himself calling random women ugly, fat and stupid, while hurling racial slurs intermittently. His posts see thousands of engagements with thousands of young men idolizing him. Clavicular does all of this while sharing his extensive elective surgery journey to his young audience.
Browsing comment sections, hate is not only entirely excused, it is attractively funny and persuasively irreverent to the men whose algorithm catches it. The New York Times and numerous other outlets have done extensive profiles on him — an interesting decision considering that the harm in figures like Tate or Clavicular come from exposure.
This is all deeply disturbing. These online communities deepen and require hate for entry. To engage and be seen by other men in these spaces, men must learn and engage with bigoted and often violent rhetoric.
To their discredit, their hate portfolio is diversified: see here, a video of Tate, Clavicular, Nick Fuentes and other men over 30 years old singing Kanye West’s Hitler anthem while on a Miami club crawl.
Calling back to the “Gossip Girl” example, it remains true that this would not repeat itself today on TV with the same nonchalance. This does indicate that something has happened culturally. Some subsect of us does not accept blatant, hateful masculinity as it used to exist.
But when we outlawed this toxic masculinity — that stretches back to literally the first man — what did we put in its place? Who or what did we point men to as a positive role model?
Inconclusive. One recent survey found that young men are 10 percent more likely to cite their mother as their dominant role model than their fathers. This is not to say that mothers are less capable of directing their sons to adulthood, but fathers take a noticeably deficient reported role in men’s development.
Young men exalting their mothers also does not indicate respect for women. Many men idealize their mothers and use that image to devalue the other women in their lives.
My friends reflect a similar trend. I asked 10 male friends, ages 19-22, if they had a positive male role model growing up. Two said their dad. One mentioned a cartoon character. The rest had the same answer regardless of metric: zero.
This lack has led a whole generation of men to be deeply insecure and susceptible to hateful false-prophets. Said prophets capitalize on young men’s woe, ameliorating it with wrath. The result is a present moment with speech so profoundly disturbing that it required me to Google synonyms for evil.
We owe future generations of men positive masculine figures in their youth. Such an effort not only stifles admonishments from Gavin Newsom, but protects the women these men must respect.
That being said, the most pressing party is young men themselves and the figures that hold too much sway over them. Becoming an advocate for hate to replace whatever your parents did not give you is your prerogative. But much like the unregulated peptides these influencers inject and praise to their young followers, poison leads to damage.
Harry Walton is a sophomore in the School of Public Affairs and the assistant opinion editor for The Eagle.
This article was edited by Addie DiPaolo and Walker Whalen. Copy editing done by Avery Grossman, Arin Burrell and Paige Caron. Fact-checking done by Andrew Kummeth.
