A man with a fairytale castle in upstate New York who keeps trying to make a self-produced reality show about "princesses" happen — and become a modern-day Hugh Hefner. A man who got famous on YouTube for lawn care who ends up filming himself as a baby — and has a SWAT team called to his house. These stories form the backbone of Jon Ronson's journey into the world of "unraveling men." Those two men's stories are exceptional, but they're also an entry point into a subject area I like to think of as "WTF is going on with dudes right now."
Join Jon and me as we avoid the usual discussion about "toxic masculinity" and go deeper into friend-less-ness, algorithms, purposelessness, Sad Dads, and male buffoonery. It's a wild ride that felt like the beginning of a much longer conversation (that I hope we can keep having in the comments)!
Anne Helen Petersen: Hi, everyone. So we have a quick list of the episodes we're working on so that you can submit your questions. We have two different episodes about influencers, but they're gonna be pretty different. One is about influencer culture in general, like what have you noticed, what's confusing you, how is the industry shifting?
And then the other one is specifically about journo influencers. So this is the self-styled independent creators delivering news on social media with or without traditional journalism training or any journalism training. So what are you observing? What do you see going on? What are you excited about or scared about? We can talk about all of it.
And then finally, we're having our friend Alyssa Morris back to talk about book trends. What are you seeing on shelves, on book covers, on social media, or in your own book club that is raising questions? As always, you can submit your questions at tinyurl.com/culturestudypod. That's also where you can submit questions and prompts for our subscriber-only segment, Ask Anne Anything. We always need those questions, so please submit away. Thank you so much for your help, and now enjoy today's show.
This is The Culture Study Podcast, and I'm Anne Helen Petersen.
Jon Ronson: And I'm Jon Ronson, author of The Castle, brand new book, Adventures in the World of Unraveling Men, and many other books like The Psychopath Test and The Men Who Stare at Goats and So You've Been Publicly Shamed, and then Adventures with Extremists.
Like, a lot of books.
Anne Helen Petersen: So your story starts, like, in a way that every journalist dreams of, right? It's like a phone call in the middle of the night. It's actually not a phone call. It's a text. You wake up to a series of texts from your son.
Jon Ronson: Yes.
Anne Helen Petersen: Tell us about the castle where your son found himself. And then maybe, like, did you think of this as a story?
Like, does this, did it feel like something that was just a personal crisis, or did it feel like something more?
Jon Ronson: Okay, so yes, I'm asleep, and I wake up, and there's a series of texts from my son. And the last text said, "We left. That was completely fucked, but we're okay now." Yeah. Oh, everything's okay now.
So I read the other texts frantically. And, yes, a friend of his had been invited to a party being held by a stranger that she'd met earlier that week on Tinder. So…
Anne Helen Petersen: Us olds are like, "Oh my God, no, no!" But yes, totally normal.
Jon Ronson: I know, right? But, they went. So, her and three other people, including my son, piled in a car, drove to this man's house, and when they get out of the car, it's a huge, newly built castle that's ostentatious even by ostentatious castle standards. It's got, like, way too many turrets and towers and gargoyles. Like, and they cross the drawbridge and enter the grand banqueting hall to discover that there is no party. It's a trick. They've been lured there for another reason. So then the castle owner comes out, and they say, "Sorry, where's the party?"
And he says, "No, no, no, I've invited you here to take part in my reality show." So they said, "What's the name of your reality show?" He said, "It's called 101 Princesses." So my son said, "What's the core concept?" And he said, "I'm the king, I'm looking for my queen, and I have 101 princesses to choose from." Then he said, "Go downstairs to my basement costume room," to the women, "Put on some princess costumes and then come back upstairs."
So they go downstairs to the basement. The costume room is next door to his nightclub, which has a pole dancing set up and cages, and that's next to his underground hot tub come botanical gardens, all purple tinted. So they put on princess costumes, come back upstairs. A videographer appears. Filming begins.
But it becomes quite clear quite quickly that this isn't a real reality show. One clue was that the videographer had this other duty, which was to cut up meat for the castle owner.
This giant slab of meat. And none of it was offered to the princesses, by the way.
Anne Helen Petersen: So he comes back and he tells you the story. He sits down and him and the friends, like, recount the entire story for you. And then you're like, "Okay, I'm gonna meet this guy." And you meet him, and like, we're not gonna spoil it.
Suffice to say, both Melody and I started reading the story and looked up, I don't know, 75 pages later and are like, "What just happened?" Like, how did I get drawn into this story? And it goes from this guy who owns the castle, whose name is Chris Mark, and you investigate some of his story and where his money is coming from, what he has done with his life.
But it's part of this larger, I think, exploration of, you know, the subtitle of your book is Adventures in a World of Unraveling Men. How did you come up with unraveling? 'Cause it feels perfect to me.
Jon Ronson: Yeah, actually, so me and my British editor just went back and forward so many times with what exactly is the right word here?
It is an adventure story. That was important to me, too, because… You know, Charlie, your partner, said to me, "What do you say to people who are walking down the aisle of a bookstore and think, 'Ugh, the last thing I wanna read is a book about masculinity.'" Right. And, and my response was, "I am one of those people."
"I wouldn't wanna read that book."
Anne Helen Petersen: Right.
Jon Ronson: So but this is a million miles away from this book. This is a thriller. It's a mystery story. So I had to put the word adventure in there, and I thought unraveling felt about right. So you asked me before what was the moment when I thought this is a book.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah.
Jon Ronson: I have to say, the first... When they started telling me this story, my first thought was, "This is the start of a book."
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah.
Jon Ronson: I had no idea where it was, where it would go. And then I think two things happened. Firstly was what I first thought about the castle owner, what I was told from some of the other women who'd been to the castle, was that this was about trying to be Hugh Hefner -
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah.
Jon Ronson: - during what must be the worst moment in human history to be Hugh Hefner.
Anne Helen Petersen: Right.
Jon Ronson: You can't lord it over your princesses in your castle anymore. Those days are, unless you're the crème de la crème of the man-o-sphere... you can't do that anymore.
Anne Helen Petersen: Right.
Jon Ronson: So I did think that was very funny, actually, that he was trying to do this.
I'm always looking for sort of absurd comedy in dark and serious places, and that felt like it fitted the bill. And I think, so I thought, "Okay, I'll write a book about all these other things that men can't do," while continuing to investigate the castle. And half the book is me investigating the castle, and finding out increasingly crazy things. But I think the other moment was the fact that this happened to coincide with me just coming out of hospital.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yes.
Jon Ronson: For the first time in my life, I'd spent a night in a hospital. I'd had a foot of my colon removed due to diverticulitis. And so I was feeling a little cut adrift myself.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah.
Jon Ronson: Life was passing me by. There's this moment when I was in the hospital when I overheard a nurse say to the man in the room next to me this old man, "What did you used to do back when you used to work?"
Anne Helen Petersen: Right.
Jon Ronson: And the man yelled out, "Irrelevant!" And I thought, "I don't wanna be that man. I don't wanna be...
I don't... Work is the most relevant thing about me, purpose and work." And, and so all of those things coalesced, and I thought, "Here's this guy in this castle who's desperately trying to find purpose in his life by having this Hugh Hefner-style fantasy bubble. He thinks life's passing him by, and he's trying to have purpose. I think my life's passing me by, and I'm trying to have purpose, and that's why I want to investigate this guy." So these two men who have a dysfunctional relationship with purpose are suddenly colliding, and that felt like the start of the book.
Anne Helen Petersen: And it takes you on all sorts of side quests. Like, you know, some of those side quests are to talk with some names in masculinity research, Richard Reeves, like, someone whose work I've read a lot of and sometimes agree with, and sometimes I'm like, "Oh, poor men," but also points out the fact that we are in this, like, fundamental point.
Things are shifting for men, and the way that they are reacting to the way that things are shifting for patriarchal power. Sometimes it's like retrenchment and trying to consolidate that power, and sometimes it's unraveling, as you point out.
Jon Ronson: Yes, absolutely. Richard Reeves said to me, "Everybody focuses on the men who are lashing out, but I'm much more interested in the men who are sort of withdrawing from society, bowing out. That's a much bigger problem."
So some of it's bowing out, folding in on themselves. Some are lashing out into disinhibited behavior, and some are creating these bizarre fantasy worlds for themselves, like my Castler, and, so I thought that was very interesting.
And by the way, I feel the same way as you. Like I felt like this isn't a book that I would wanna read. But that was what motivated me to write the book because I thought, "This is really interesting." Many times over the years, many, many times throughout my entire career, I've told stories about how things change up there at the top of society, and it ripples down and impacts the inner lives of those of us walking around down here.
Anne Helen Petersen: Right.
Jon Ronson: So in then, it was, you know, extremists and conspiracy theorists were the people who were walking around down here. And then in So You've Been Publicly Shamed, it's these private individuals getting torn apart for some, for some minor transgression. And so that's something that's always interested me, and I thought the same thing you thought, which is that, look, I wouldn't wanna read a book about this, but this is a really interesting subject, so surely I'm the person to write this book in the way that I write books, which basically brings this stuff alive in a more page-turnery, propulsive, beach read type way than other people can do it.
So, basically the pitfalls were what spurred me on in a way.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah. And I wanna talk about it as we go through the listener questions. I wanna talk about how one of the things that you do that I really appreciate is you take something that someone would look at like, "Oh, isn't this weird that this guy is making these type of YouTube videos?"
And you actually go talk to the guy and see, like, how did you arrive at this point that you're making these weird YouTube videos where you're pretending to be a baby? 'Cause it's a long story, and there's a lot going on there. So let's read our first question, which I think will tee us up to explore that more.
So a lot of the questions that we got are like, "What's up with men?" And so we're gonna historicize it a little bit with this question from Michelle.
Michelle: Is any of this weird dude behavior actually new? I'll preface this by saying I live in the very blue bubble that is Seattle, avoid a lot of social media, and don't actively follow the news for my own mental health.
But I have to wonder if this weird dude shit going on truly is new, or if it's the ongoing backlash to the audacity of trying to elect politicians who aren't pale, male, and stale, and we just notice it more because of social media. Or if it's that select men are trying to grab the spotlight back, and we're paying attention because they're men.
Please explain why there's something here worth expending oxygen on.
Anne Helen Petersen: I think that's a great question.
Jon Ronson: I think there is some newness occurring.
Anne Helen Petersen: Same. Same.
Jon Ronson: So because I am so work obsessed and all of my self-esteem is wrapped up in having purpose, and my purpose is about telling stories well, that's one of the kind of comic themes of the book.
This sort of sense of purposelessness that comes from the collapse of structures and institutions and all of these people segueing into becoming content creators. And by the way, I'm focusing on men in this book, but so much of this applies to women, too. I think that's new. I heard this statistic the other day that 39% of Americans now identify as content creators.
Anne Helen Petersen: Wow.
Jon Ronson: This is... Yeah. You know, there was this really funny moment, actually. I went to the cage fight at the White House last month. I've done it for GQ. But there was this really funny moment when I got access to the South Lawn. I got to watch the cage fight at sort of blood spatter distance.
But most people didn't. So for all the journalists who weren't allowed access, they got to see the cage a couple of days earlier. So I went along for the ride. I thought, I'll hang out with the shutouts for a minute. And so there's, like, 100 journalists standing on the steps of the Eisenhower Building, and this UFC guy comes over and sort of yells, "Okay, content creators and videographers to the left, print journalists to the right."
Where there was a vast exodus to the left, like 98% of the people there were content creators. The print line was, like, me, the Toronto Star, and Business Insider. Oh, my God. We were like such redundant dinosaurs. So that's the kind of thing that's new, right? Everybody's now being encouraged, as the structures collapse, everybody's being encouraged to be institutions of one.
Personal brands. Content creators. And I was very interested in what that was doing to people psychologically. Maybe another thing that's new, I mean, that really appeals to me because of my obsession with work. What other people have told me that they feel is new is that men feel kind of tossed around in a sea of conflicting ideologies as to what being a man actually means.
Be more vulnerable. Men's health influencers saying, you know, this is how to make it, this is how to reattach yourself to a society that's growing more, quote unquote, feminized. Be more vulnerable. Rip off your manly mask and allow your vulnerabilities. And then all of these men, and Brene Brown herself, will report that when men do try that out on dates, be more vulnerable, women recoil in disgust and horror.
So I thought that was, again, interesting and funny, this sort of conflicting ideologies about what being... That appeals to me less personally, 'cause I don't really care about masculinity, but I think that does impact some men, so I thought that would be another interesting thing to explore.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah, and you engage in the research around deaths of despair and how people are reacting too.
I like that you use purposelessness, because I think that's different than, like, "Oh, the jobs that we did are gone," and, that sort of, like, nostalgia, right? It gets to a more fundamental thing that I do think is very human, which is this feeling of rootedness, of groundedness. I also, in my own work, I've seen so much in terms of, like, the structures that used to give men community, whether that was religious organizations or civic organizations, so, stuff like Rotary, right? Or the Elks. Like, those things have loosened so much, and men oftentimes didn't develop the skills to make the connections outside of those structures. And so there's like this isolation that happens. And then you also have all of the tech stuff that not only encourages us to become content creators, but a certain type of, like, chasing the lowest common denominator of content creation, which might not actually be in line with your actual personal beliefs.
Jon Ronson: Yes. Everything you just said is entirely true. For some reason, men aren't as good at... You know, my wife's off with some friends in Massachusetts with the puppy right now. Like, she does that more often than I do. She's good at, you know, I think women… so I don't quite know why this is, but I think women are better at forming communities than men.
Men are more prone to isolating. And maybe that's why, many of the things in this book I think appeal equally to men and women, but the idea of, like, bowing out of society, something clicking, that's, I think, possibly a more a male trait. And yeah, and then you've got these tech gurus and these AI people who are trying to fill the gap with illusionary, you know, ChatGPT will trawl the internet looking for purposeless people and telling them, "No, no, no, come to us. You are purposeless. You are the greatest mathematician on the planet. You have an intellect bigger than Einstein's. You've just come up with the best reality TV show in history." And those are the actual examples of people I've spoken to.
So yeah, so AI companies are offering this, like, illusionary solution. Platforms like YouTube are offering a solution that's illusionary to most people. YouTube has kind of gained the reputation of being this wide open country wherever, where hitherto, previously left behind man can thrive through grit and perseverance as a content creator. But then what happens is, as my book shows, and this especially extraordinary story about this guy Greg Chism -
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah.
Jon Ronson: - is that when you cede your will to the algorithm and to what you think the viewers want, it can take you to some very bizarre and terrible places.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yes, which does feel somewhat new to me.
Jon Ronson: Mm.
Anne Helen Petersen: You referenced my partner Charlie, so his work shows up a couple of times in the book, which is interesting to me because I was with him reporting those stories, and you two have been acquaintances for a long time, and I remember him reporting this one about this YouTuber Greg. He was like, "Oh my God, there's this fucked up story of, like, how YouTube is not regulating these weird videos of, like, adult men acting like babies going after little kids, right?
And I was like, "What the fuck?" Like, just like this is so weird, right? And this is me referencing the fact that you actually go and talk to the person and say like, "How did this start?" And it starts with adult braces.
Jon Ronson: Yes. And then lawn care influencing.
Anne Helen Petersen: So can you walk through like his pathway to get to this moment of ridiculousness?
Jon Ronson: Yeah. I mean, this is, what a story this is. I could never do it full justice in this conversation because I give about 8,000 words to this story and every detail is important. So, you know, forgive me for doing a more truncated version. But yeah, Greg is exactly the kind of man who's most likely - this isn't a classy way to introduce him, but he's exactly the kind of man most likely to die a death of despair.
He grew up in a rust belt town, Granite City, Illinois, destined to be in a factory, but the factories all closed down. Then things got even worse. So he's let down by that kind of institution because the factories all moved to Mexico. Then he's let down by another institution, the healthcare industry, because at the age of 18 he has a terrible heart condition, collapses unconscious, has multiple open heart surgeries, ends up owing the health insurance companies $200,000.
So a kid with no prospects owing $200,000. Then he gets married, and then they split up, and she leaves him a single father with two children under the age of two. Like this could not be worse, all of those things piling on top of each other. So then he gives YouTube a try. He sees a YouTuber who's saying, "You've got a story. Tell your story." So his story is that he has overlapping teeth. He could never afford to get his teeth fixed when he was a kid, so he does this adult braces journey. And, that does well for him. Then he moves into lawn care influencing, and he becomes huge in the lawn care influencing world. Yes.
The lawn care GOAT.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yes.
Jon Ronson: He'll do these videos where he jumps out of his car and like a good Samaritan lawn care man who will like fix somebody's lawn and then vanish away again, like the Zorro of lawn care chores. And then he does lawn care ASMR.
He will mow up and down, and he's getting 100,000 views a week. But then through various circumstances, he realizes that his children are becoming very popular on YouTube. He does an unboxing video on his children, and he gets 10 million views, his kids, opening up a Barbie cruise ship and playing in the box gets 10 million views.
So now he's doing children's stuff, and it gets worse and worse and worse, not through any bad heart on his part. Yeah. I think Greg is a really good person, but he starts to listen too much to the algorithms, too much to what his viewers seem to want. And by the end of it, to cut a long story short, family services are called, the FBI surrounds his home.
He's being accused all over the internet of being, at worst, a pedophile, or at best, somebody who's just making some extremely poor choices. And his life completely unravels in the most extraordinary way. His trajectory is incredible. Now, Charlie, your partner came at the story at the end when you're sitting, you see him just as a baby crawling around on the floor with his two children just as babies. No wonder you're gonna think, "What the fuck?"
Anne Helen Petersen: Right.
Jon Ronson: But this story's kind of like the frog in slowly boiling water. Like, if you're with him from the beginning, each one of his choices makes sense.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yes. Absolutely.
Jon Ronson: So that's why I love the story so much, yeah.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yes, it makes sense. And also, the detail that YouTube University or whatever they call it, they were like, "You're really popular. Let's give you some tips. Like, here's what we think you should do." Like, it's not just the algorithm that was encouraging him, it was the actual institution of YouTube that was saying, like, follow this wormhole, essentially.
Jon Ronson: Absolutely. Yeah. And that's actually the part of the story I didn't quite realize until now, until I'm speaking about the book, how extraordinary that detail is for people. But yeah, as soon as he got one video that had 10 million views, YouTube contacted him. They assign him a teacher to teach him how to continue to be successful on YouTube. He has his own bespoke advisor, and eventually they hung him out to dry for the very videos that they were encouraging him to make.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah.
Jon Ronson: It's funny, you know, once the shit hits the fan, once people like Charlie discover the story and the shit hits the fan, they just hang him out to dry.
It makes me smile ruefully that YouTube presented itself as a hierarchy-free utopia -
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah ...
Jon Ronson: - where there's no gatekeepers, but as soon as trouble starts, a hierarchy suddenly magically manifests and kicks him out.
Anne Helen Petersen: We should also note here that this is not the first time that there has been a quote-unquote crisis in masculinity or unraveling men, and I think a lot of it happens when there are structures under threat.
And this goes back to the part of the question that says, like, there are just people who are not, what does she say, “male, pale, and stale,” who are taking power, wielding power, all of that. And can you just tell, I think of the 1920s as a really interesting time for masculinity in America because, with what's happening with movie stars and with masculinity on screen.
This is just in my own research. Also, like post-World War II, '60s and '70s. Like, what is it? Like, can you have a beard in public? Just those sorts of questions. What do you think of?
Jon Ronson: Yeah. Well, I, actually, one thing I discovered, so my castle owner, I wanted to tell the story of de-industrialization, but how to tell that story. But it turns out that my castle owner, Chris Mark, his money came from the fact that his great-grandfather was a Gilded Age steel tycoon.-
Anne Helen Petersen: It's so perfect. It's just like…
Jon Ronson: I know, right? As I say in the book there, that the Mark dynasty has gone from, just like America, the Mark family has gone from creating about the most tangible product imaginable, steel, to the least tangible product imaginable, a reality show that's very unlikely to get picked up by Netflix.
So that's, yeah, that's the trajectory of both this great country and also the Mark family. But so it turns out that Chris Mark's great-grandfather had built a utopian theme town for his steel workers to live in. And now it's a completely crumbling town where the only people left, or most is, many of the only people left are recluses and hoarders, and it's just this broken place.
So I do a chapter where I tell the story of Mark Town, which both teaches me more about the castle owner, but also about what's happening to men when the structures collapse. Anyway, that's a long-winded way of saying that Mark Town was based on these English villages.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah.
Jon Ronson: These utopian English towns.
One was called Letchworth Garden City, and one was called Welwyn Garden City. And they came up because of a whole different crisis of masculinity at the turn of the century, like 1900 in Great Britain. It wasn't that men were too violent, it was that men now weren't violent enough because Britain was fighting the Boer War in South Africa and the British soldiers were getting trounced. The men in Britain at the time were just incredibly unhealthy, they didn't have any teeth, they had varicose veins, and tooth decay and so on. And so that was a crisis of masculinity that created all of these utopian theme towns, was that men are unhealthy and just falling apart.
So there's been a mutation - crisis of masculinities have mutated in many different ways over the years.
Anne Helen Petersen: That's such a great way of putting it, and I love too that like, it's useful journalistically to tie the story together, but it's also just useful, like, when we're thinking about how society, ideologies, all these things work, is that nothing is isolated.
This is all working both the vertical way, like through time, and then also contextually what's happening in society at the moment. We have a question now from Adib, which also I think is gonna help us with some language. Here we go.
Adib: 10 years ago, it seemed like toxic masculinity was the phrase we used to describe the problems associated with the performance of masculinity, but that fell out of favor to not stigmatize being a man.
Then came terms like red-pilled and manosphere. Are these terms necessary to describe the problem, or are there better alternatives?
Anne Helen Petersen: What do you think about those words, red pilled and manosphere?
Jon Ronson: Well... Okay, so I have much to say about that question. Firstly, I hate the word manosphere. And red pills is just like a stupid… I don't particularly like that either.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah ...
Jon Ronson: My very first thought, whenever I set off on a big project, I always think, "What's the worst version of this project?" Because then you know which pitfalls to avoid. And for me, the two things I wanted to avoid more than anything else in this book were the manosphere and incels.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah.
Jon Ronson: They ... I thought if I set myself that rule, then I have to go to more interesting and unexpected places. And I do, definitely. In the same way that So You've Been Publicly Shamed, my last book, wasn't about Rupert Murdoch being shamed on social media. It was about some random person.
I wanted it to be about ordinary people, and I feel the same way about this book. But toxic masculinity I think is a really interesting thing. So, okay, so the American Psychological Association, brought out this report saying that traditional masculinity was, on the whole, harmful. And then this is a few years ago. Then they list all of these traditionally masculine traits that are actually toxic and harmful. And some of them are clearly bad, like misogyny. But there were others on the list that I do all the time. Risk, adventure, competitiveness. That was too many Ts. I do those things just while writing this book and -
Anne Helen Petersen: Right ...
Jon Ronson: - putting myself in risky... Not only did I think that those things weren't toxic, they're like my favorite things to go off and have adventures and get into risky situations and then write about it. And as I say, like, competitive, like, I wanna be the best.
You know, I wanna be better than every other nonfiction writer. And I don't think of these things as weaknesses. I think of them as strengths. It's like they're the wind behind my sails. But then, so I'm genuinely irritated by that report and, and feel exactly the same way that other people feel about the term toxic masculinity.
It's just something that's gonna just annoy people. However I suddenly realized, like, while I'm writing this book, that I'm pulling myself... I had major surgery, just a few days before, going into the car and driving off to the castle, and I'm in so much pain from my surgery scar that I'm, like, walking around this castle, like, kind of every time I move in the wrong way, I sort of like, you know, let out these like shrieks. Like, "Ah." Like, like I'm some tormented castle visitor from “The Masque of the Red Death” or Quasimodo at Notre Dame. And then it suddenly dawns on me, like, hang on a minute, that maybe the American Psychological Association, you know, were right after all. So they used bad words, but they're describing something kind of pretty real here.
So that's where I landed on with that.
Anne Helen Petersen: I also just think there's oftentimes we just don't have really good language for talking about a phenomenon, right? Like it just, because sometimes if you use phrases like that, it either becomes offensive and/or it becomes over determined and people really either work really hard to reject it whole scale or work really hard to embrace it full scale, you know what I mean?
Like it just doesn't allow us to get into the nuance very well.
Jon Ronson: It's a fault across our culture, I would say. Like, I don't like that word. I really don't, I really hate the phrase cancel culture. Because it... I mean, this is going off on a slight tangent, but the way that the phrase cancel culture encompasses wildly different sets of circumstances, from J.K. Rowling through to a politician who sexually assaults somebody, through to somebody with 75 Twitter followers who makes a well-meaning joke that comes out badly and is disproportionately punished. So it's a meaningless phrase. So yeah, I do think as a people, we're quite bad at our use of language often.
Anne Helen Petersen: Okay, we're gonna talk about fatherhood now, and I saw this, obviously in the fact that it starts with you responding to a text from your son. But there are other ways that performing fatherhood and the right way to perform fatherhood is really interwoven in the text. So I'm curious about your thoughts on this one.
It comes from Madeline.
Madeline: Sad dads. Pretty much 100% of the dads I know, I'm 44, are sad. I really don't think it is that they aren't getting the masculine family role that they expected. They embrace the idea of partnership in parenting and household labor. What is causing this rash of sadness? Or are they just as sad as sad moms, but we were socialized to have more ways of processing our emotions and feeding our emotional needs, i.e. therapy, hobbies, friends, reasonable exercise goals, et cetera.
Anne Helen Petersen: I see a fork between sad dads and then, like, hyper optimized dads who are like training for an Ironman, you know what I mean? Like they have to throw themselves into something. And maybe it's just midlife crisis, right?
Jon Ronson: So is a sad dad like someone, like I was a dad for my - I remain a dad, I guess. But, so what does sad dad actually mean? Does it mean like, you know, you just see these guys and they're with their kids, but they're not having a good time and they're just feeling... Okay.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah.
Jon Ronson: I mean, look, I've been to Six Flags with my son. So I've been, I've been that sad dad.
Anne Helen Petersen: I think it's also referring to, as someone who's 45, I think that it is referring to someone who is having somewhat of like the traditional midlife crisis, insomuch as they're like, "Oh, wait, I got the things that I thought I wanted, and I'm still kind of unhappy or unactualized or I'm stuck. Like I'm moderately successful in my career, but it doesn't feel like much." Like this to me seems very like Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, like our version of that, right? Like of the updated…
Jon Ronson: Yeah. Do you think that's more male than female? And in fact, before you answer, let me just caveat it with a moment, and then I wanna get back to talking about my own parenting skills.
I wanna finish with that with this question. But my... So Greg Chism, my Bad Baby guy, there's a moment in his story where everything has gone completely wrong. The FBI have turned up to investigate him, and he's become so, you know, miserable, that he's a single father. He'll wake up, he'll drive his kids to school, he'll go home, fall asleep, sleep all day, wake up, pick his kids up, and bring them home.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah.
Jon Ronson: And it's such... That's such a kind of tragic image. But one of the, my publicist, Anna, in London, brought that up to me and said, "So the only time he went out was when he was doing his parenting duties. Maybe this is why women don't fall into this quite as much, is 'cause, they can't."
Anne Helen Petersen: No time. They can't.
Jon Ronson: Yeah, no time. Yeah.
Anne Helen Petersen: Like, what I see with women is like, "Oh, must be nice to have a midlife crisis." Like, must be nice to have that luxury of being able to basically like, take your foot off the gas. And I think that's some of the frustration with the unraveling-ness, or like the statistic that's in your book that like the percentage of men who are just unemployed, who just -
Jon Ronson: Yeah.
Anne Helen Petersen: decided to, have dropped out of the workforce essentially.
Jon Ronson: It's actually gone up since I put the figure in the book. So, the figure I put is 6.7 million American men who aren't only unemployed, they aren't even looking for jobs.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yes.
Jon Ronson: Yes. I mean, I was aghast when I heard that.
But now the figure's more than seven million. Apparently, The New York Times just did a fact check on my behalf, and it's over seven million now. It's gone up.
Anne Helen Petersen: Well, and you look at the job creation numbers for the last two years, and there are jobs being created, they're just in so-called feminized positions, right?
So things like in healthcare, in nursing. Like, in childcare. So these jobs exist, it's just that men, like they're just not interested in them, for whatever reason, right? Like, they just see this as something that is not an option for them to move forward. But then I also wonder, how are they surviving?
If these men don't have jobs…
Jon Ronson: Yes! I asked labor economists that question, how are they surviving? And they're couch surfing. They're living in other people's homes.
Anne Helen Petersen: In their parents' homes too
Jon Ronson: Yeah, yeah. Their parents are doing it all for them, cleaning up around them and so on.
You know, their fecklessness is being enabled by others. There's no doubt about that. Can I just return back to my parenting though? 'Cause I've just had this kind of memory from when my son was four. So my father was like the typical father of the 1970s and '80s, where he was a little enchanting at the bridge club, a little enchanting at the golf club, and then slightly enchanting, but not that enchanting at home.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yes.
Jon Ronson: Basically, Mondays and Thursdays he'd play bridge. I think he'd like watch TV Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, then on Saturday he'd play golf. So I barely saw him. But, as a parent I decided I'm gonna do better. I'm gonna focus my the entirety of my enchantment on my son, on Joel.
And that didn't go well. There's this moment, I wrote, a long time ago I wrote this, there was a moment when I decided to dress up as Santa to enchant him. So I come into the room, you know, he's 17. No, I'm kidding. He's like four. And I come into the room and I go, "Ho, ho, ho." And he says, "Santa, stay with me forever. Never leave me, Santa. Santa, promise me you'll never leave me." So I said, "I'll never leave you. I'm gonna stay with you forever," doing a Santa voice, "forever and ever and ever." And then like cut to like three hours later, and I'm like, I'm getting hives 'cause the beard's so itchy. And I'm like, you know, "I think I need to take the beard off." I'm still like doing a Santa voice. And he's going, "No, Santa, no." And then finally I'm like, "I've gotta... Joel, like I've gotta stop now." And then he bursts into tears. So that's an example of me trying to be too good a dad. And then that totally falls apart.
Anne Helen Petersen: No, it, it also reminds - like in a roundabout way, it makes me think of this question just in terms of like, okay, so the women maybe can't show that they're suffering as much or that they're sad as much, but if everyone's sad, is it that we're sad under our current way of organizing life, especially in the US?
Like what do you think about that?
Jon Ronson: Yeah. Oh, I think so, yeah. At the end of the book, I talk about this thing that Durkheim, the 19th century French sociologist, I think invented sociology -
Anne Helen Petersen: Essentially, yes. Yeah.
Jon Ronson: Yeah, he came up with this phrase called anomie.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah.
Jon Ronson: Which is that in times of abrupt societal change, even if it's positive, interestingly, even if it's a positive change, people go crazy.
They lose themselves.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah.
Jon Ronson: You get a huge peak in suicide at times of societal change.
Anne Helen Petersen: Hmm.
Jon Ronson: So one example would be, Russia after the fall of communism. Even people who presumably hated living under communism were in despair when communism fell. There's this fantastic book, it's Oral History of the Last of the Soviets, talking about people sitting on the sidewalk and just in despair with their head in their hands because all of society's rules have changed. And that really impacts people. And I think that's what we're seeing now. We're seeing what Durkheim called anomie. So one of the chapters in the book is about how I was hounded, and continue to be hounded, by a former friend of mine called Graham Linehan, who's become this very disinhibited bully on social media, and he's attacked me thousands of times literally. And I equate him to a Durkheim scholar, said I should look into lottery winners, and I found this story of this girl called Brandi Bragg, whose father, delightful family, father wins $300 million on the lottery.
Cut to a year later, and their lives have completely collapsed. Brandi is in the back of the car smoking crack. Banknotes are flying out of the window, and who cares? Because nothing means anything anymore. She has all the money in the world. Nothing means anything. And I equate Graham's behavior towards me, like all of his insults at me, day after day of abuse, I equate it to the banknotes flying out of Brandi's car, like it matters more to me than it does to him.
He's just ripped off his face and just allowed his id to run wild.
Anne Helen Petersen: Right.
Jon Ronson: And I think that's a form of anomie, and it's a form of the sadness that so many of us are feeling now. We're bewildered. Society's roles are changing. We're all suddenly being encouraged to be content creators, personal brands.
Nothing’s the same as how it used to be, and I think that's what's causing so many people to feel sad.
Anne Helen Petersen: I was listening to Ezra Klein try to explain essentially how people keep misinterpreting something that he said in an interview with someone who has a kind of inflammatory platform.
He was talking about how when there is massive demographic change over the course of a short period of time, that yes, people react to it. And that was then, like, packaged as, like, "Oh, well, like Ezra Klein, like he endorses the great replacement theory or whatever," right? But he was just trying to say, like, no, when the way that life was organized changes very quickly, and we're talking about not only, like demographic change in terms of, like, who's going to college, right? And this goes back to Richard Reeves' work on ambition and like more women going to college and all this sort of thing, right? So like accreditation.
Also everything that's happening with AI undercutting the way that we understood what work is, where you're gonna find work, what education is for. Also the type of people that, if you had a relatively homogenous society and now it is increasingly less homogenous... And like you said, so, it can be for the better.
Like, we can agree that a less homogenous society is useful and also understand that people will react in certain ways to that.
Jon Ronson: Yeah. And it's good to... You know, Richard Reeves did say to me, like, as I say, I just want to say again for people who don't quite realize, that this is not a polemical book. This is a mystery story. It's like an adventure story.
Anne Helen Petersen: Well, it's a show don’t tell, right?
Jon Ronson: It's a real case study ... Yes. Yeah.
Anne Helen Petersen: It’s saying Look at all this, and then think about it. Yeah.
Jon Ronson: Right? Yeah. I'm a very show, don't tell kind of writer. Yeah.
But yes, Richard Reeves said to me, he sort of warned me that people may get the wrong idea. That this, you know, that he's had to work hard to convince people that he's not a manosphere wolf in academic's clothing. Yeah. And actually at the very beginning of me researching this, I went on TV in Australia.
I was on ABC in Australia, like a kind of political show. And I just sort of said, "I haven't really," and none of my thoughts had been formed at the time. But I just said, there was a question about men, and I just, almost just to try it out, to hear how, I said, "It's a strange time to be a man." And the presenter spun around and said, "Is it? Why?" So I…
Anne Helen Petersen: It is a strange time. I think it's a strange time to be a person. And that includes, it's at a strange time to be a man too.
Jon Ronson: Yes, exactly. Yeah. You know, I'm focusing on men in this book, but I honestly feel that almost everything in this book applies to women as much as it does to men. I thought because of, I guess, men and their sort of adherence to structure and the old institutions, it felt right to think of it in terms of men. But honestly, this book could be just as much about women.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah. Can you talk briefly about the guy who became the actor, like -
Jon Ronson: Oh, yes. Ed.
Anne Helen Petersen: - like the doofy husband. The doofy husband role. And that to me, it's kind of a little side quest, but it becomes representative in some ways of like the way that men have seen themselves. Like their self-representation has changed even, and it's been like…
Jon Ronson: Yes, absolutely. Yeah, I did think this was very funny, I don't need to tell you, you turn on the TV these days, turn on the ads, and it's an orgy of male buffoonery. Men falling off lawnmowers, driving off cliffs, leaving their babies on restaurant conveyor belts, sobbing because they're not allowed Doritos before dinner.
And the women of course in these ads, it's just as bad for the women 'cause, you know, the men get to be these idiot doofuses. But all that the women get to do is slap their foreheads and roll their eyes. They're like, "Straight, man." Right. So it's bad for everyone. And of course in the past, women were the idiots in ads, and now it's men.
Like if you look in the '40s it's like, you know, "Don't worry, darling, you didn't burn the beer." But now that's become passé, and now men are the idiots in the ads. So yes, I wanted to interview a man who plays doofuses in ads. So I met this man called Ed, who's a doofus in several ads. And he told me he did an ad for Scholl, the insoles, where he's walking down the street and he puts on a pair of comfortable insoles and starts galloping like a horse down the street. And he had to look pretty doofusy for that. So I said to him, "Like 50 years ago you had the Marlboro Man being stoical and masculine on a horse, and now you have to be the horse?"
And he sort of ruefully said, "Yep."
Anne Helen Petersen: Well, and this is where we get to the point, and so we got a lot of questions about this, and I just wanted to bring it up instead of doing a specific question. Where it's like, oh, so men are just now understanding the way that women have been treated for a really long time?
And this is how, like the whole looksmaxxing, supplement, guys have to look a certain way, but also look like, oh look, there's two ideologies conflicting and it's really hard to parse which one you should be. I'm like, welcome to femininity, right?
Jon Ronson: Mm.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yes. Do you think about that? Like, how do you put your head around that?
Jon Ronson: Yeah. Well, actually, Dolly Alderton, who's a great feminist author, she sent me a Zadie Smith clip. You know, a lot of times, I don't know Zadie Smith. I've met her once. I had dinner with her once, like, 20 years ago. But very, very often I think my thoughts and her thoughts seem quite aligned.
Like, she says things where I think, "That's exactly what I was thinking." And that included the clip that Dolly Alderton sent me, where she said, I think it's quite a famous clip. She's on stage somewhere and she said that her husband, who's white, was complaining to her, "Suddenly I'm a white man. Like, I've never been a white man, but suddenly I'm a white man." And Zadie Smith went, "See?" And the audience applauds, but then Zadie Smith, like, shushes them and says, "No, no, no, I, I think it's bad. I don't think this..." Like, and I just thought that was a very clever and, very wise and thoughtful way of putting it.
Anne Helen Petersen: Right. Like, instead of, 'cause this is, a, a lot of what's called whiteness studies is trying to show the ways in which whiteness is erased as a race, and people never, like, it's just the norm, right?
And every other race is race, and whiteness, just is. But wouldn't it be nice actually, instead of being like, "Oh, well, white people need to pay attention to their race all the time," like, everyone should be paying attention to their race all the time, wouldn't it also be nice if we didn't have systemic racism that made it so that everyone had to pay attention to their race all the time, right?
Jon Ronson: It would be lovely. Yeah. Yes, absolutely, 100%. And that's obviously the point that Zadie Smith was making as well. Yeah.
Anne Helen Petersen: Right ...
Jon Ronson: But I can't lie, like, I felt the same way that Zadie... You know, I could have been Zadie Smith's husband saying, "Suddenly I'm a white man."
Like, around 2017, 2018, I had those thoughts, no question.
Anne Helen Petersen: Totally. Yeah.
Jon Ronson: And it was irritating. But it was also a defensive posture on my part. Like, it's taken me a few years to seeing the world from Zadie Smith's husband's perspective, to seeing the world from Zadie Smith's perspective, actually.
Like, I'm there now, but I wouldn't say, I'm not so, I'm not so smart that it didn't take me a few years to get there.
Anne Helen Petersen: We're gonna end on a question that asks a little bit of advice. So, you know, as you said, this book is not prescriptive. It's not, like, explicitly ideological, right?
But I do think, especially as a dad, this is an interesting question. So this comes from Katie.
CLIP: "This winter, during one of those long mom text conversations with my best friend, where we were both bemoaning the state of the world while trying to manage stir crazy kids, I said to her, 'I'm just over here trying to make a plaster volcano and not raise an asshole.'
This has become my ethos, so to speak, for parenting in this moment. How do I raise my eight-year-old son to understand the diversity of the world, be respectful of people, but particularly women, be kind and thoughtful, and not get caught in this moment men are in? We are white, middle class, and from the Midwest, and I know that comes with particular challenges.
I also wonder how parents of other backgrounds are working to help their sons understand the world around them and not be assholes."
Jon Ronson: Yeah. I mean, these are all great questions and quite challenging questions too. Every time I've had a positive prognosis for the future -
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah.
Jon Ronson: - I've always been wrong. Like, every time I think, "Oh." So, let me caveat that. But when I was at the cage fight at the White House, I noticed three separate - and I write about this, I noticed three separate occasions when a man was no longer able to basically “my way or the highway.”
You know, this idea of men creating these bubbles to themselves, like, "I'm sick of cancel culture. I'm just gonna do whatever I want. I'm just gonna, and if you don't like it, fuck off. You know, this is…” I think that's dying. Okay, so I say I think that's dying, but I hope it's dying, and I saw several occasions during my week at the White House...
Well, I'll give you just one example just to show you what I mean. I was talking to this fighter, Sean O'Malley, who always, who often boasts, he's a bit of a UFC heart-throb. He kind of boasts on podcasts about his open marriage. But it's a one-sided open marriage. He's allowed to have sex with other women, but his wife, Danielle, isn't allowed to have sex with other men.
He said, "Andrew Tate explains it well. I have status." So I said to him, "You have an open marriage. Surely that doesn't work." And he said, "Well, it worked until it didn't." And he admitted to me that his wife has put her foot down, and he's no longer. She says, "No, no more." And he looked so baffled at this sudden change in his fortune. He said he has to have a closed marriage now.
And I wonder, this idea of man, this whole Andrew Tate... Okay, look, this is me moving out of my comfortable position as an immersive journalist who only writes about what I've personally experienced into the world of being a kind of commentator, where that's my Achilles heel and I'm quite often wrong. So I'm a very good storyteller, and I'm less good at being a polemicist. So forgive me if what I'm about to say is stupid. But a little bit of me thinks that that whole Andrew Tate thing is so ridiculous, it's so not how society works…
Anne Helen Petersen: Mm-hmm.
Jon Ronson: … that it surely untenable and won't last. And so my hope is that, is that the kind of thing that happened in Sean O'Malley's marriage, that he's not allowed to have a one-sided open marriage anymore, is just gonna become more the norm. Like, maybe the pendulum is gonna swing back to the middle again.
Anne Helen Petersen: On my most hopeful days, I see what is happening now as this last regressive gasp of trying to restore an order that never was, but the feeling of an order, right? Like, just responding to this feeling of anomie as you pointed out…
Jon Ronson: Mm.
Anne Helen Petersen: … with regression. And that maybe we'll get this out of our system, right?
Jon Ronson: I sort of think so, you know? I think when something becomes so bizarre and extreme, and obviously all of those kids pretending to be Andrew Tate at school, you had that sort of rush of stories. That is so bizarre and extreme, it's the kind of thing that historically doesn't last.
Anne Helen Petersen: Hmm.
Jon Ronson: And so that is my hope. So I guess the answer to the question, though, is just be a... I always say, like, humanity's more important than ideology. Be curious instead of prescriptive.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah.
Jon Ronson: Listen to people. Just, you know, be curious instead of judgmental. Just empathetic, kind, human. That's just the best way to be.
Anne Helen Petersen: You know, this person also said, like, "We're from the Midwest," as if that was, like, a negative component, right? And I actually think in some ways the Midwest is a really good place to be curious, right? That there are ways that you can explore and encounter people who aren't exactly...
Like, you can live less in the bubble that the first question asker on the show was referencing.
Jon Ronson: Absolutely, yeah.
Anne Helen Petersen: Right?
Jon Ronson: Yeah. And, like, well, I don't live in the Midwest, but I live in the Hudson Valley, so I live in a very mixed community. And it's a politically mixed community. I've got somebody down there has a sign saying something along the lines of, "You are entering armed response country."
And then up there is a sign, just over there, there's a sign that says, "This house believes Black Lives Matter. We believe in science." So, you know, my road is America. And I gotta say, beyond the lawn signs, everybody gets on very well. I chat to the man with the armed response sign. He's got a lovely dog called Daisy. We always have a nice chat. So, I agree with you. I think it's not a negative. It's actually a positive.
Anne Helen Petersen: Well, and I think this is where you said at the beginning, like, look for humanity. And this book, your book, you were looking for the humanity in the story of every single one of these unraveling men. And it is there. It is even there in the castle owner.
Jon Ronson: Yes. I think so.
Anne Helen Petersen: And I think that's a way - it's a really good way to not be an asshole, is to look for the humanity in others in some capacity.
Jon Ronson: Yeah, absolutely. Just try and meet people where they are. You know, when I went to the cage fight the other day, well, I guess a month or two ago now, you know, my friends here and my liberal friends or my progressive friends here were like, "You know, how can you do that?" You know, "Yeah, hope you're gonna tear them apart." And I said, "I'm gonna do what I always do, which is try and meet people where they are and try and see the world through their eyes." And I do, as I said to Charlie when he interviewed me last week, I have a baseline of how I view the world, and I tend to return to that baseline.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah.
Jon Ronson: But that doesn't mean you can't be curious, you can't be empathetic, you can't try to see the world from other people's perspectives. You have to make sure that you don't indulge cruelty or people harming people. But beyond that, just being curious and open and human is, that's what you do.
That's the way.
Anne Helen Petersen: I think that's a great place for us to end. If people wanna find more of you on the internet, where can they find you, Jon?
Jon Ronson: Well, I've just updated my website, which is jonronson.com. J-O-N, no H, J-O-N, R-O-N-S-O-N. It's all my speaking…
Anne Helen Petersen: Great website. Great website
Jon Ronson: Thank you. All my speaking engagements are on there.
Nice. I dip my toe in social media on Instagram. So, you'll find the odd picture of my new puppy, Bondi, with a sock in her mouth. But in general, I use social media just for promoting work. But yeah, so there you go.
Anne Helen Petersen: Amazing. Thank you so much.
Jon Ronson: That was a real pleasure.