The Good, the Bad and the Podcasts.
Trigger Warning: Rape, Sexual Assault, Misogyny
South Africa is no stranger to discrimination against women and femme-presenting people. In fact, South Africa is known as the rape capital of the world, with an average of 132 cases being reported out of 10,000 people. Such devastating statistics tend to overshadow the more subtle ways in which women can be oppressed. The expectations placed on women are endless – the way we dress, what we eat, and what our interests are supposed to be. These ideas are not new in any capacity, but social media platforms such as Twitter, YouTube and TikTok have created a unique phenomenon in the last decade in that these ideas can be spread at lightning speed, allowing harmful communities to develop completely under the radar of the average web surfer. One such community is the “alpha-male” community of the late 2010s and early 2020s.
The term “alpha-male” refers to the very outdated term used to describe the leader of a pack, typically a wolf pack. Like the mighty wolf, an alpha-male is seen to be fearless, aggressive and all-powerful, with thousands of “beta” (lesser) males and subservient “females” to choose from. Interestingly enough, recent research has proven that alphas take on more of a nurturing role in a wolf pack. Nonetheless, the term “alpha”, at least in this context, has become synonymous with misogyny.
The idea of an alpha-male is not new at all. In fact, in the early 2000s, a lot of alpha-male content could be better classified as (questionable) dating advice or pride in being a confident, money-driven man. However, what does it mean to be a man? Furthermore, when did putting down women equate to being a man, and a powerful one at that?
Gender theorist and philosopher Judith Butler has famously likened gender to a performance. In short, gender identities only exist through learned and perpetuated behaviour. Therefore, the construction of what a man and a woman should be is completely determined by the environment surrounding an individual. The idea of a man as a big, strong breadwinner and women having virtually no autonomy is one that has been perpetuated for centuries, and it is still rarely contested to this day. Hence, it is no surprise that with women reclaiming their independence in terms of their interests, bodily autonomy and opinions online in the last decade led to men seeking to reinstate those performative gendered ideals for their own comfort on the internet. Why work towards a healthier idea of masculinity when you can criticise feminine traits for hours on end, right?
One of the most popular of these hour-long rants about the wrongs of women is the infamous Fresh and Fit podcast, which garners about 165K views per video on YouTube from over 500,000 subscribers. However, the rise in the discussion of these podcasts comes from the myriad of clips found across YouTube and TikTok. These clips include such gems such as “women should not have Instagram”, women who are sexually active are “used”, insisting that women need to be “punished” for “bad behaviour” like a dog, or the demand for women to dress and act a certain way while blatantly deflecting from their own insecurities about appearance.
However, this does not mean that there has not been any kind of pushback toward this kind of content. TikTok users such as Drew Afualo and Kimber Springs have been putting misogynist men in their place – one Bearded Cutie filter, evil laugh and comparison to a heinous cartoon character at a time.
While men have expressed outrage at being shamed for hairlines that would put most exponential graphs to shame or a beard so patchy a quilt would be jealous, discussions about male appearance have brought awareness to the double standard of it all. It is comments like this that should make men realise that women should ALSO not be held to unrealistic standards of beauty which are based on things they can’t control. Alpha-male podcasts may be spreading misogynistic rhetoric based on contrived constructions of a gender binary, but hope lies in the women continuing to put so-called “high value” males in their place.