What would you do if you were a white male with billions of dollars and seemingly a lot of extra time on your hands? If you answered anything other than “destroy a social media app and buy a U.S. election” or “go on a podcast to complain about companies not being man enough,” then you’d be wrong! Sorry!
On Friday, Joe Rogan released his latest podcast episode featuring Mark Zuckerberg, the billionaire founder of Facebook, now Meta, who’s recently made a somewhat whiplash-inducing pivot from being a vocal critic of Trump to becoming another ass-kissing sycophant. In their nearly three-hour interview, Zuckerberg talked to Rogan about his passion for hunting invasive pigs in Hawaii and complained about how companies just aren’t masculine enough anymore.
“Masculine energy I think is good, and obviously society has plenty of that, but I think that corporate culture was really trying to get away from it,” Zuckerberg said. “It’s like you want feminine energy, you want masculine energy. I think that that’s all good. But I do think the corporate culture sort of had swung toward being this somewhat more neutered thing.” Must be hard to be one of the top five richest people in the world and still be a whiny little bitch.
What if I told you there’s room to do the things you deem masculine, things you deem feminine, and still identify as yourself? People like Zuckerburg speaking like he has everything figured out when he can’t even deconstruct a false dichotomy is some peak pseudo-intellectualism.
It’s so weird. I am cis male and I have never felt like I was anything but a man, but I do not buy into any of this macho bullshit and I never have. I have never felt the need to prove that I’m the biggest and the strongest and the roughest and toughest. I like reading and classic cinema and playing word games and stuff, nothing “manly.” I don’t feel like less of a man because I never played football or even roughoused as a kid, never went hunting or even shot a gun, could not give less of a shit about sports in general, and I don’t even lift bro.
I could not give less of a shit about “masculine energy.” I’m secure enough in my gender identity that I don’t need it.
And it makes me wonder why Zuckerberg things he does.
For real. Imagine being that rich and powerful, yet still being so deeply insecure. Can’t you afford to just be yourself without worrying about whether every little detail jives with your gender identity? Isn’t that the sort of freedom that “fuck you money” is supposed to buy? Now I kinda wonder whether he actually has any interest in MMA whatsoever or he just got into it because the testosterone-laden meatheads all go nuts for it as being a supremely “manly” thing, and he’s too insecure to be into something that might be more interesting to him like drone racing or baking because they’re not the manliest thing he can think of.
Imagine being one of the wealthiest people in human history and being so creatively and emotionally and socially bankrupt. If he weren’t such an insufferable asshole, I might feel sorry for him.