Pithy turns of phrase for dysfunctional personalities
Tim Miller of The Bulwark appearing the other day on MSNBC used the phrase “emotional support cougar” to describe the over-made-up groupies who decorate Donald Trump’s Mar-al-Lago resort. The term seems not to have originated with Miller, but perhaps with comedian Carla Collins. Miller deployed the phrase to reference Trump’s regular need to run home to them in his Florida safe space.
But the desperation behind the need is broader than Trump, his sons, and his hangers-on.
Over at The Garden of Forking Paths, Brian Klaas explores the epidemic of toxic masculinity embodied by Trump and guys like Elon Musk. The day after Gov. Tim Walz modeled a healthier masculinity in addressing the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, a professional purveyor of the destructive kind, Andrew Tate, was placed under house arrest by a Romanian judge for human trafficking in minors.
Klaas describes the type with a few more pithy phrases:
On the one hand, Tate—a fool so dense that light bends around him—embodies what is often referred to as “toxic masculinity,” a whole suite of severe character flaws.2 For our purposes, I’ll focus on a subset of Tate’s destructive deficiencies which are much more widely held, a specific model of masculinity that pretends one can only be a “real” man if they engage in constant abusive performative insecurity.
In this world, men must not only constantly be peacocks, but peacocks who overcompensate for their lack of genuinely magnificent tailfeathers by buying big guns and flashy cars while confusing women for property and wrongly conflating high wealth with high value.
Tate sells this form of warped masculinity as a product, including a $50 monthly subscription service to the “Real World”—previously known as “Hustlers University”—where he will teach young disciples how to get rich quick on the internet. Or, for the low, low price of just $7,979, you can join The War Room, an online community of Tate superfans that is billed as being “a global network in which exemplars of individualism work to free the modern man from socially induced incarceration.” What an erudite wordsmith one must be to create so much meaningless ambiguity with so few words of drivel!
The fact that internet vipers like Tate are so financially successful indicates that there is a social malaise among rudderless young men; if there weren’t, nobody would pay him absurd amounts of cash—or for this demographic, cryptocurrency—to tell them how to amass control over more worldly objects (which includes women in Tate’s antediluvian mindset).
As James Bloodworth writes, for the men on Andrew Tate’s courses, “Women are viewed as a resource on a par with sports cars and infinity pools – something to show off and deploy to convey your alpha status to other men. The contemporary manosphere has taken the concept of the trophy wife and expanded it into the trophy harem.”
How alpha must Trump be then? He doesn’t have to buy emotional support cougars. They pay him for admission to his club!
What’s particularly spooky about Tate (both British and American) is how well known he is in England where “one in five young British men — have a ‘favourable’ or ‘very favourable’ view of Tate.”
Tate’s strategy of trying to capitalize on the social angst of young men is nothing new. It’s simply dressed up in a new guise and packaged in a slick digital offering. What Tate is bottling up and selling online is an emotion that the sociologist Michael Kimmel identified a decade ago as aggrieved entitlement.
This concept refers, essentially, to the rage-filled sentiment among some men—particularly white men in the West—that they are the innocent victims of a world that’s becoming fairer by race and gender. Some report feeling emasculated by women holding any power. Many believe they are entitled, through fake pseudoscientific allusions to biological determinism and the grace of their genes, to being on top. Andrew Tate’s favored moniker, Top G, is no accident. The chumps toil at the bottom. The champs climb over whoever they need to in order to regain the top.
And at the top, it turns out there’s a lot of performative insecurity: fast cars, big guns, plastic bodies—the empty trappings of a broken person’s idea of what it means to project the illusion of a successful life.
Emotional support cougars, aggrieved entitlement, performative insecurity. Otherwise known as a public health crisis like “deaths of despair.”
It’s a poison in modern society. Not only are these abhorrent, backward views associated with higher rates of gender-based violence that leads to men beating and murdering women, but they are also killing young men, too.
It’s tough to muster sympathy for men who have adopted assholery as a lifestyle even if it’s killing them.
Walz is the counterpoint, Klaas believes, arriving not a moment too soon:
Beyond the biography, though, Walz represents one important rival model of masculinity to Andrew Tate. And it’s not just that he looks like—and is—a Midwestern Dad who likes football and knows how to fix cars and makes lame jokes while posting photos of his pets on social media.
Instead, it’s that Walz inverts the Tate philosophy on every front. For Walz, the chumps are those who speak a big game but are losers because they do nothing to strengthen their communities. The champs are those who need no praise or vanity to help others; who acknowledge their weaknesses and thank those who they’re indebted to; and are those who are never afraid to showcase emotional vulnerability. (The fact that Gus Walz’s unscripted tearful excitement in honor of his Dad became a lightning rod for ghouls in the Tate-adjacent MAGAsphere as an indication of beta male emotional weakness only underlined how utterly broken those men are inside). And, crucially, Walz feels empowered, not emasculated, to be working with a powerful woman.
You don’t need an extortionate online course to teach you how to be a good neighbor, a kind friend, a caring partner, or a community leader, either.
Walz therefore offers a form of quiet, inspiring masculinity that transcends traditional gender roles because it has a powerful message: being a good man and being a good person are the same thing.
If you want a perfect encapsulation of the conservative world view, I wrote early in my tenure here,
you need look no further than “A Boy Named Sue,” a song made famous by Johnny Cash and (ironically) written by the late Shel Silverstein, a writer of children’s books.
“Son, this world is rough, and if a man’s gonna make it, he’s gotta be tough…
It’s the name that helped to make you strong”
Not a good father. Not a good husband. Not a good citizen. But strong. It’s all that matters.
That and having a few cougars hanging on your elbow.