Johnson’s fans are not alone. As economic anxiety reshapes American masculinity, a growing subculture of young and working-class men is turning to maxxing out their bodies as a way to reclaim value in a labor market that increasingly devalues physical work. Working out isn’t enough. It’s how they eat, dress, and sculpt—especially how they eat. And their staple food isn’t expensive biohacker supplements; it’s ground beef, the cheap, protein-dense “boy kibble” endlessly promoted by fitness influencers.
The history of our obsession with beef and masculinity goes back at least 140 years. In 1886, the great novelist Henry James published his novel The Bostonians, in which the unsympathetic Southern patriarch Basil Ransom thunders: “The whole generation is womanized, the masculine tone is passing out of the world; it’s a feminine, nervous, hysterical, chattering, canting age, an age of hollow phrases and false delicacy.”
Then, as now, economic changes, fundamental shifts in family life, and evolving domestic relations all combined to make many young white American men feel anxious about their identity, and desperate to prove their masculinity in a world they perceived as increasingly sapping their virility.
These observations sound familiar because at several times in our history, observers have declared a veritable crisis among American men. The transition from farms, the open range, and artisanal workshops to offices and large, impersonal, factories was seen as sapping virility—just as our tiny cubicles and remote workstations are said to do today. Rapid immigration, alongside the entry of women and people of color into new sectors of the workforce in the early 1900s, arguably caused as much alarm as those same groups do today.
The Boy Scouts of America (co-founded in 1910 by Ernest Thompson Seton), and the Boone and Crockett Club (founded in 1887 by Theodore Roosevelt before becoming president) heralded the “strenuous life” as virtual boys’ liberation movements. Even the great psychologist and early manfluencer G. Stanley Hall, coiner of the term “adolescence” in 1904, wrote, “you cannot have a firm will without firm muscles.”
Today’s manosphere revives an old script
Today’s masculinist influencers warn that masculinity is under siege and argue that modern society has made men dangerously weak. British-American social media personality Andrew Tate claims that, “Society as a whole is telling men to be weaker and weaker, saying it’s somehow the solution to everything because being a man is toxically masculine. Being a strong man is bad,” he said on Tucker Carlson’s podcast. “To be a good man, you have to be a very weak one.”
Together, these men, alongside others including Myron Gaines, David Goggins, and Hamza Ahmed, compose the “manosphere,” a group that doles out advice online about how to toughen up and seduce women—in other words, to become “real men.”
The fact that such men are in short supply, and that this romanticized myth didn’t even remotely compare with the lives such men actually lived, is of little concern to today’s masculinists. Indeed, the language of conservatism is often the language of nostalgia. It’s not just to “conserve” what’s there, but to return, retrieve, reclaim, and restore what has been lost.
Think of MacFadden, “America’s foremost health crusader,” as America’s first masculinist influencer. Instead of podcasts and Instagram reels, MacFadden’s popular magazine, Physical Culture, and his best-selling books like The Virile Powers of Superb Manhood: How Developed, How Lost, How Regained helped instruct men to man up through diet and exercise. He even invented a “peniscope,” a small vacuum tube that was said to enlarge the male organ and thus help men feel more manly.
The manosphere is drenched in blood-red carnivorous encomiums. “They don’t want you strong. They want you weak. And that’s why they’re promoting this veganism garbage,” says Tate. “I eat beef and salt and water,” proclaims Peterson. “That’s it.” (A British journalist followed that regimen. It did not go well.)
You can’t eat your way to manhood
Of course, masculinity is complex. Beef is no longer “what’s for dinner,” as the old Beef Industry Council ad told us. Nor the ingredient about which one was always asking its whereabouts: “Where’s the beef?”
At the turn of the century, health reformers like J.H. Kellogg, C.W. Post and Sylvester Graham (he of the cracker) promoted whole grains and unprocessed foods as a sure way to prevent the scourge of masturbation.
Combine these carnivorous cravings with the compulsive bodybuilding and muscle-maxxing, and you have a cardiovascular nightmare. And add to that the newest craze of “looksmaxxing” by which men sculpt their physiques and faces (through cosmetic surgery, extreme diets, and even surgical altering of facial bone structures) and you can feel the desperation like anxious sweat.
Just as American men discovered a century ago, masculinity is not a diet nor a fashion accessory. It comes from within, being morally and emotionally strong enough to serve one’s family, community, and nation. That’s the meat of the issue.
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