A Good Male Role Model is Hard to Find

At least when you're looking on the internet

Telemachus and Mentor, Pablo E. Fabisch, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Andrew Tate has been experiencing a resurgence in internet airtime lately. Currently under house arrest while under investigation for a variety of alleged criminal conduct in both Romania and the UK, Tate has little to do with his time besides make videos, hang out in Twitter “spaces,” and make wild attacks about the attractiveness of the minor children of his critics (I wish I were joking). The recent attempted resuscitation of his reputation by people like Candace Owens and his other defenders inspired me to revisit a reflection I began some time ago about “male role models” and where to find them.

I was fortunate to have many good and great role models in my life as a young man. I was a Boy Scout in an active troop with many great leaders who guided a group of rambunctious boys toward virtue. I took martial arts lessons from a stalwart in the community who for many decades had encouraged his students to pursue virtue and self-control. I had many family friends who took me under their wing and taught me much. All of these men and more prepared me well before I headed off to college, and I think fondly of those years.

My former Scoutmaster passed away relatively recently, and I spent a good amount of time reflecting on his leadership and example in my life. Here I copy from my Facebook status on learning of his death:

He was an inspiration, honestly, performing physical feats into his 70s and 80s that many of us could barely manage as teenagers. In 2009, I went to “Northern Tier” in Ely, Minnesota, where my crew spent 9 days canoeing out into the wilderness and back, carrying all our gear and food and canoes with us. Mr. Hasbrouck wasn’t in my crew, but he was on that trip with a different crew, and I remember paddling into base camp against strong wind on our final day next to his canoe, him pulling as hard as any man half his age. I remember his kind instruction to boys through the years at camp, even when we were wild and undeserving of his patience. I remember his guidance as I and others in our troop worked on his lovely property in East Tennessee to earn money to fund our adventures. He taught us much, and modeled resilience in the face of adversity. His home burned years before he retired as scoutmaster, and I recall, on a drive up to Backbone Rock in Damascus Virginia, him candidly describing combing through the ashes of a long life in ruins, and then cheerfully outlining his plans for reconstruction, including a multi-story elevator on the assumption that he or his wife might require it in their coming years. I recall his legendary scary stories as the capstone of many an evening campfire on many a camping trip, and his measured but firm questioning in my Eagle Scout board of review. I wouldn’t be who and where I am today without my experiences as a Boy Scout in Troop 48, and those experiences would not have been what they were without Mr. Hasbrouck at the helm. He will be missed.

In reminiscing about Mr. Hasbrouck’s influence on me, I thought seriously about the dearth of male role models today and the complaints about the same. The alternating fury and fandom around Andrew Tate is the most prominent example of this. His rhetoric towards and about women, his means of making money (running casinos and producing pornography, if those sorts of things bother you), and his viral popularity all combine to make him quite a hated figure by many, but beloved by others, particularly young men.

Or, think of the now-past-peak popularity of Jordan Peterson and his applicable advice in his 12 Rules for Life. Peterson is no Andrew Tate, but the popularity among young men certainly bears a resemblance, and the vitriol directed at him follows as well. Peterson rose to prominence through academic lectures, then practical life advice (“clean your room bucko” and so on), and so one would be hard pressed to put him in the same category as the house-arrested pornographer, but he is nevertheless sometimes identified as one of these “negative” influences on young men.

My point here isn’t to assess necessarily whether the criticisms of these men are fully fair (although it’s no secret that I loathe Tate). My point is to respond to something I’ve seen often. When criticisms of Tate or Peterson, or Joe Rogan or whoever, are raised, a question sometimes follows: “well, what male role models would YOU suggest these men follow and look up to?” In other words, the assumption, perhaps a fair one, is that these figures are speaking to a need, hence their popularity. If you want to criticize them, the argument goes, you had better be prepared to offer a substitute in their place.

Sometimes people will rise to the challenge and offer alternative figures as more respectable models of life and character for young men. Two that are often invoked are Jocko Willink and David Goggins, both former SEALs, both proponents of physical and martial discipline, and both relatively prolific in terms of media production. If you want to substitute your Andrew Tate tik tok videos with other online resources, perhaps you should listen to some of Jocko’s podcasts, or pull up an audiobook of one of Goggins’ books, their fans suggest.

I don’t know enough of the work of either of these men to fully sign on to this recommendation, although I will say that what I have seen of them leads me to think their brand of physical masculinity and habit-formation has much to commend it. What I want to suggest instead is that we are looking in the wrong place to solve the problem. The internet is a distraction, and alternative media figures on parallel podcasts are hardly a sustainable solution.

The popularity of Peterson, Tate, and other figures who primarily appeal to young men is not an accident. Instead, the popularity follows from a lack or a need, the absence of some sort of character formation in the lives of these young men outside these semi-deified online content creators. It is easy, then, but no less true to say that the popularity of an Andrew Tate springs from an absence of real-life male role models. True enough, you might say, but that’s the point! They don’t exist, so these men go seeking them online.

I would suggest that one way we have failed men is by suggesting that this gap, this absence of male role models is a truer fact than it is. What I mean by this is, it may be the case that many or even most young men do not find positive influences in their daily lives. But to conclude from this that those influences do not exist would be a leap not based in evidence. These people exist, though they may be hard to find, in the sense that they require going outside your door and seeking them in the real world, rather than on the internet where the negative voices sometimes drown out the positive. They require doing the harder work of being involved in a real community, real organizations, real clubs and associations, real churches, places where you cannot hide behind a screen and must, to an extent, subject yourself to scrutiny and accountability. These male role models may not actually be scarce, but finding them may nevertheless be hard, because finding them requires doing uncomfortable things. In a world where many people seem to be content with their isolation, the positive male influences remain unknown.

There is a video of popular and controversial content creator “Sneako” (himself a one-time Tate collaborator) meeting young fans of his in a public setting, and the young boys immediately launch into expletive-laden rants about women and how much they hate them. Sneako responds something like, no no, we love women! But the horror on his face is apparent and the message couldn’t be more clear. He won an online following at great cost, namely by being more bombastic than is perhaps warranted by his true feelings, and his audience is extreme as a result. But if Sneako and those like him were men of character, they wouldn’t engage in the bombast to begin with. Playing a character on the internet is risky business, for as one contemporary philosopher has summarized Aristotle, “we are what we repeatedly do.” Or, as Kurt Vonnegut has said, we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.

The type of man most likely to gain an immense following online is, it seems, far less likely to be a man worthy of emulation. What draws an audience, what attracts views, what drives up subscriptions and revenue is rarely character. This rule comes with exceptions, of course, but odds are that whoever you find that is popular online is popular for some excess that attracts eyeballs, rather than for some virtue that inspires healthy admiration and imitation. The algorithms and incentives that drive these online platforms and the creators that use them are simply not tending to reward calm, wise, thoughtful content at scale the way they reward controversial, brash, gross, vulgar masculine influencers. I suppose all of this is a long-winded way to say, “touch grass,” as the internet people say. Seek your influences away from the influencers.