To be honest, while his research certainly didn't do any of this any good, Masculinity as a concept has
always been in crisis and it's history winding through our various cultures is one of generations of men criticizing subsequent generations of men for their lack of "correctly" performing masculinity, and, more often than not; explaining how they may reclaim it with this new product that man just happens, by sheer coincidence I'm sure, to be selling. The Alpha/Beta/Sigma/whatever is just the newest and possibly most proliferating style of it, but it is nothing new. As long as men have been writing about Masculinity, they have been writing about other men's failure to embody it correctly. It seemingly only exists to do two things: allow men to demean one another in the public square, and to assist in the sale of products and services to men who feel emasculated in some way by civilized society.
The "start" of this (or at least, the earliest documented occurrences of it I know of) were body builders selling workout tips to men in the 1930's who lacked the physiques we decided were how men should look. And since then it's gone on to sell all manner of things: the SUV/Truck obsession we wrangle with was sold heavily on this, since men felt emasculated by minivans (because Detroit told them they were) and later, SUVs became too associated with moms so men get trucks instead now that are functionally identical to SUVs but I digress; the endless parade of supplements, testosterone boosters, hair growth formulas, pills that make you have more and longer erections, basically every workout product ever sold to men has some masculinity angle attached to it, all the way to the more ridiculous shit like dude wipes, which are baby wipes except MANLY, and Axe bodyspray which purports in ads to cause every attractive sub-25-year-old woman in a 2 mile radius crave your dick, on, and on, and on, probably IMHO at least, culminating in the new phenomenon of manliness camps where bros pay tens of thousands of dollars to be hauled into the wilderness (or an industrial park) and be made to perform all manner of bizarre rituals that will fix the hollowness society has engineered inside them, no but for real, this time we pinky promise.
Masculinity has always been in crisis and that crisis has been used reliably to sell men all kinds of stupid shit for a century and if we're honest, probably a LOT longer than that.
The "start" of this (or at least, the earliest documented occurrences of it I know of) were body builders selling workout tips to men in the 1930's who lacked the physiques we decided were how men should look. And since then it's gone on to sell all manner of things: the SUV/Truck obsession we wrangle with was sold heavily on this, since men felt emasculated by minivans (because Detroit told them they were) and later, SUVs became too associated with moms so men get trucks instead now that are functionally identical to SUVs but I digress; the endless parade of supplements, testosterone boosters, hair growth formulas, pills that make you have more and longer erections, basically every workout product ever sold to men has some masculinity angle attached to it, all the way to the more ridiculous shit like dude wipes, which are baby wipes except MANLY, and Axe bodyspray which purports in ads to cause every attractive sub-25-year-old woman in a 2 mile radius crave your dick, on, and on, and on, probably IMHO at least, culminating in the new phenomenon of manliness camps where bros pay tens of thousands of dollars to be hauled into the wilderness (or an industrial park) and be made to perform all manner of bizarre rituals that will fix the hollowness society has engineered inside them, no but for real, this time we pinky promise.
Masculinity has always been in crisis and that crisis has been used reliably to sell men all kinds of stupid shit for a century and if we're honest, probably a LOT longer than that.