Elon Musk's baby mama drama matters
There is so much jaw-dropping weirdness in the Wall Street Journal report about Elon Musk's apparent baby-making fetish. Musk reached out to random women he's never met, and asked to impregnate them. He bribed women to have babies with hints of massive paydays, but then reneged on the deal when they asked for normal father behavior, like acknowledging paternity. He demanded one baby mama have a C-section, because he thinks vaginal delivery shrinks baby brains. He wanted to hire a fleet of surrogate mothers, so he could build a "legion" of children by keeping many women pregnant at once. And low-key what made me laugh hardest, Musk texted a right-wing influencer he'd knocked up with, "Men are made for war. Real men, anyway," which he followed up with, "I am in full war mode. Going to the front lines today. Must win PA." (He was referring to his speech at a campaign rally for Donald Trump.)
Musk's behavior is a symptom of a growing problem in the MAGA world: The obsession with masculinity, fueled by social media, is getting stranger.
But what struck me — and often strikes me in the coverage of Musk's spiral into a total crank — is how the richest man in the world seems lonely. He's alienated from normal human interaction, which unmoored him from reality. He's trying to build a compound in Austin, Texas, "where Musk imagined the women and his growing number of babies would all live among multiple residences," like he's a polygamist Mormon in the Warren Jeffs mode. But it seems he has few, if any, takers to live near him. His interactions with the women and their children seem mostly through lawyers and his financial manager. He keeps one small son around all the time, but calls him an "emotional support human," as if he's an object and not a child. Musk has over a dozen kids, but doesn't seem to have a family.
As many liberals predictably rushed forward to point out, it's hard to square Musk's behavior with his hero status on the Christian right. This hypocrisy is nothing new, from the same people who treat Donald Trump like he's a Christian prophet, despite his three marriages and chronic adultery. But by this point, it should be obvious these folks never cared about "family values," but rather male dominance. A rich guy paying scores of women to have his babies reads as "alpha male" by MAGA, so the Christian right is largely staying mum about it. In fact, there's already at least one would-be Christian influencer selling courses on "bibilical marriage," by which he means men get to have multiple wives.
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If anything, Musk's behavior is a symptom of a growing problem in the MAGA world: The obsession with masculinity, fueled by social media, is getting stranger. In the online competition for attention, people constantly seek attention with extreme and outlandish behavior. Combined with the hyper-focus on "proving" manhood on the right, it's resulting in a "top this" attitude that leads men to scale up their aggression, exaggerate their gender performance in cartoonish ways, and, of course, try to "win" at being the cruelest misogynist. In the process, these influencers are encouraging their audiences to act in ways that are harmful not just to others, but to themselves — often primarily to themselves.
The most obvious manifestation is how the toxic masculinity of MAGA redefines "health" as comic book levels of muscularity, which can often only be achieved through risky means like steroid abuse and cosmetic surgery. For example, "fitness" influencer Brian Johnson — aka the "Liver King" — who pushes a meat-heavy diet to his nearly three million Instagram followers and, well, looks like this.
Off w/ the head!
Real men exact revenge, and it's primal AF!
Never let another man take from you w/ impunity.
Masculine emotions like:
-Rage, -Revenge, and
-Ruthlessness...
Have great utility, when used in proper context and fair balance. pic.twitter.com/CzhLZ40kkY
— Liver King (@liverking) January 25, 2024
It's the male version of the "Mar-a-Lago" face, where right-wing people distort their looks to exaggerate gender to the point of grotesquerie. The diet trends pushed in the "manosphere" would give any doctor a headache: Mostly meat, very few vegetables, and often eating food raw, which is risking illness. Even a scrawny "manfluencer" like Jordan Peterson was claiming to eat a beef-only diet, which would destroy your bowels and is terrible for your heart. Trump's HHS Secretary, Robert Kennedy, mucks around in this world, unpersuasively claiming his over-muscled frame is merely due to diet and exercise and making ludicrous claims that frying food in beef tallow is good for you.
Along with the body dysmorphia of MAGA social media is the radical "advice" to male audiences on the proper relations between men and women. To compete for audiences, influencers keep trying to outdo each other with escalating demands of female submission that aren't just immoral, but unworkable in anything resembling a real human relationship. There's Andrew Tate, of course, who built his audience by bragging about keeping a harem of submissive girlfriends that sounds quite a bit like sex trafficking, which he was eventually charged with, along with rape, in Romania. (But lucky for him, the Trump administration came to the rescue!) There's the disturbingly popular "Fresh and Fit" podcast, whose dating "advice" is shockingly misogynist, where the hosts tell men that women will flock to them if they're hateful and abusive. And Sneako, who instructs viewers that "a woman’s worth is what she looks like and a man’s worth is your masculinity." Or Matt Walsh, who lectures that a woman's place is as a "helpmate" and men don't — or shouldn't — want a partner who has money or a life of her own.
This stuff is gross, but it's also about the worst possible advice you could give to men. Being a jerk doesn't win women over. It chases them away. Vera Papisova, describing herself as "Republican-curious," spent a year meeting men on a right-wing dating app and wrote about it for Cosmo. She told CNN, "They are the most insecure men I have ever sat down with. It was really difficult to have some of these dates because they were so insecure, because they don't really know who they are — and they don't know how to figure that out."
We keep hearing about the male loneliness epidemic. It's not so surprising that some men have trouble connecting to women, making friends, or doing well at work, when they're flocking in large numbers to online influencers telling them to behave like antisocial freaks. Musk's story is extreme, because his wealth means he never faces meaningful pushback for his erratic behavior. But what's disturbing is that Musk still has millions of fanboys worldwide. Musk famously treats everyone like garbage, comparing other people to the non-player characters in video games. He's rich, so he'll always have a supply of greedy people who put up with it in exchange for cash. Most men, though, will find that being like Musk means being alone. Hell, even with all his money, Musk is finding it hard to get women to acquiesce to his abusive behavior, which is why his longed-for "compound" sounds like it will be a ghost town.
Not that the MAGA male influencers care, of course. Angry, alienated men are their audience. They can't be having men find romantic success and develop robust social lives. Then who would consume their content?
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