Planet of Person Guys

I take it that the Catcher in the Rye discourse has reared back up again. I find that exhausting and I haven’t even seen any of it directly. I wrote all I want to about Salinger and those specifics here. What it really provokes in me is an even deeper sense that contemporary social culture is deeply dependent on the Person-Guy, and I will never be free of him. The Person-Guy is the term given by Sam Kriss to an internet genre that you can’t possibly have missed; it’s the type of essay that posits that some actual human beings are in fact members of a broad archetype whose traits are both predictable and boring and, more than anything, cringe and annoying. The Person-Guy is the type of person you never want to be. The Person-Guy is a collection of embarrassing traits and lacks the self-knowledge to know it. And crucially, the Person-Guy is by dint of being a Person-Guy someone who is not subject to the same rules of universal charity and kindness that the rest of us are. A Person-Guy essay is about defining a type of person - usually a type of person really only familiar to well-educated and culturally-savvy urbanites who spend way too much time online - but more important is about how you’re allowed to hate that type of person. Without pity.

The LitBro may be the canonical example. (Many or most Person-Guys are some kind of bro.) A communal dissection of a particular version of precious literary lad, the LitBro is simultaneously effeminately coded in body type, interests, and attire - and, I suspect, that is his greatest sin, though no one would ever cop to it - and yet guilty of typical masculine sexism in his tastes, of disdaining women’s literature and literary women through his very existence, and presuming the superiority of writers who are (often erroneously) coded by the Person-Guy’s critics as masculinist. He thinks he’s an aesthete, but his aesthetic arrives pre-mocked; if you have books he likes on your shelf, burn them. This is confused, and confusing, because none of the archetypal LitBro authors or books reveal anything like a coherent literary sensibility. David Foster Wallace, Charles Bukowski, JD Salinger, the Beats, George Orwell…. Nothing joins together the LitBro canon, in literary terms, at all. But of course, the Litbro construct does not exist to say anything about literature itself. He exists for people of a certain educational strata to collectively, performatively hate, to dictate the lines of their social culture. I would have thought the LitBro would be little talked about by now, given that this was always a truly tiny set of cultural affectations and one tied to a now-disappeared youth culture associated with Brooklyn in the mid-to-late 2000s, but he still pops up, not because he’s real but because he’s convenient.

You see, a Person-Guy exists to reassure anxious people about what they are not. They are a totem, an unclean one, a voodoo doll that anyone with a smartphone can stick a few pins into. If you are the second-to-last member of the Stonecutters, the Person-Guy is the last, who like a zombie in a shitty movie exists because none would judge you from destroying it. Person-Guy essays are always fundamentally a type of service journalism; they’re a reliable click-generator because they perform the essential task of providing the socially-insecure with a tangible vision of what not to be, indeed, of what they already are not. To write one, you simply look out at your potential audience, assess all of their fears and insecurities, and try to actualize it, like the ooze that runs under the city in Ghostbusters 2. And you want your readers to look at what you’ve put down and wipe their forehead, happy to not see themselves there. The whole point of Person-Guy thinking is to number the types of human being, dismissing one after another as dumb and bad, until what’s left is a tiny elect who have somehow avoided that fate, the fate of description, of being put to paper. Readers love it because they are always the Person-Guy’s judge, never the Person-Guy. The Person-Guy is anti-aspirational, the obverse of a role model. The whipping boy is not a type of Person-Guy but every Person-Guy is a whipping boy.

Some other classics in this odd bestiary include the more contemporary figure of the Pick Me Girl, a young woman who is desperate for approval and attention and reaches for them by appearing overly solicitous and self-consciously special, doing with effort that which women are expected to do without trying; the podcast guy, a particular vision of a bearded urban sophisticate who has a podcast of varying cultural connotations but which inevitably signals the self-absorption and pretension of the podcast guy; the rockist, the bete noire of poptimism, a figure who believes that rock music is the only serious genre and uses the awesome, unchallenged power he wields in music criticism to exclude all other kinds of music, which is why pop artists never receive good reviews, get streams, win Grammys, or dominate our celebrity culture; the Joe Rogan fan, the Brogan or what have you, a gullible conspiracy theorist who does not have the decency to adopt a straightforward left-or-right wing persona but instead likes testosterone therapy and nootropics and ancient aliens; the horse girl, the gamer girl, the girl’s girl, the guy’s girl, the cool girl, the weird girl, the alterna-girl. There was a big one from the 2010s, the Young-Girl, that I confess I never understood, having never taken critical theory classes at Berkeley. The Manic Pixie Dream Girl was a bit of film criticism that quickly spilled over into describing real-life human beings and has survived despite its creator disavowing the concept years ago. In 2014 The Awl published a piece that I thiiiiiiiink satirized the Person-Guy phenomenon but may instead have simply been a particularly witless example of it. Like I said, these pieces were always steady performers.

The problems here are multiple. The first is simple: you are compelled to have a certain baseline of compassion for everybody, no exceptions. The implicit attitude of everyone who would come together to mock a given Person-Guy archetype when the attention machine rolled a new one out was to say, communally, “we release each other from the obligation to be compassionate.” Thankfully, it doesn’t work that way. Even if every Person-Guy essay described a real scientific phenomenon, one that you could pin down like a butterfly in a museum display case, fairly and certainly, it wouldn’t matter. Being an annoying stock character is not worthy of losing your basic humanity and right to kindness. And of course, nobody actually is any of these things.

The other issue, the analytic issue, is not just that these broad and vindictive stereotypes can’t ever really describe the irreducible complexity of a single human being, let alone thousands of them. The bigger problem is that people change but Person-Guys don’t. I made this point recently about how culture writers still (still) write about music, despite the absolute critical dominance of pop music - that a bunch of aging dads (Person-Guy alert) write music criticism, and aging dads all love Nirvana and Van Halen and Guns & Roses. As I said in that earlier piece, this is nonsense. Many, many of the kind of guy the aging dad stereotype refers to are now relentlessly enthusiastic fans of pop, hip hop, and music made for teenagers. I’m 42. Yes, I know some guys my age who still just listen to Tool and Sabbath like they used to. But I know more guys my age who are performatively obsessed with Kendrick Lamar and Olivia Rodrigo. This is core to understanding the basic fraudulence of the whole Person-Guy phenomenon: it rests on the assumption that all of us are static beings. It kind of has to, for fear of the critique going out of date. Well, that’s exactly the problem with assuming that every 40-something white guy likes alternative rock from 30 years ago; it’s demonstrably false, and in part precisely because that stereotype exists. I’m sure the aging dads who never shut the fuck up about loving Taylor Swift really like her. But I’m also sure their palpable need for you to know that they do stems from the fact that they have absorbed the aging dad stereotype and are desperate to not embody it.

I concede that this tweet describes the opinions of a musician, not of the people who work at Rolling Stone. But of course they’re highlighting those opinions because it’s 2024 and they’re Rolling Stone. That magazine is as pure an example as I can possibly imagine of living in fear of being a Person-Guy: because it was so famous for so long for keeping the spirit of the Allman Brothers alive, because its editors yearned for its pages to smell like the crowd at Woodstock, because it was such a font of Dad Music, now it must be the anti-rockist magazine, now it must ostentatiously, self-parodically embody everything that is the opposite of its assumed cultural place. This is what happened to music criticism in the span of about a half decade in the late 2000s, all of the “rockist” tendencies were quickly snuffed out by an new army - not an army of young women of color but an army of white guys who cannot stand the thought of looking like that kind of white guy. Now they pump out “Machine Gun Kelly’s Hair Literalizes Music’s Ongoing Misogynoir”-style articles so relentlessly because they’re afraid of looking like old dads. They have replaced giving glowing reviews to solo albums by guys who were in the Who with publishing the most sycophantic profiles of the most ephemeral of pop flavors. These are, of course, both opposites and yet expressions of the same bad ideas. And it’s no way to live.

Or consider the LitBro, who is the Person-Guy of most direct relevance to this debate. He was one of the most enthusiastically embraced stereotypes on Media Twitter, and if you search for him there you’ll still find him invoked all the time. This particular attachment springs from several impulses; ironically, part of the reason why people still talk about this mythical figure is that they absorbed their understanding of culture from when they were in their 20s and never evolved, which is a very Person-Guy thing to do. But the bigger reason is that the social salience of appearing to mock the right kind of person never went away even if the mocked type of person did. I’ve said before that the LitBro was always such a hyper-specific reference, understood by such a vanishingly small slice of the population, that I suspected that there was literally one guy in Williamsburg who had inspired all the derision. But regardless of its origins, and to the extent that they exist at all, the LitBro construct has lost whatever tether to reality it once had. That’s because if we insist on still recognizing them as real, LitBros long ago embraced literature by women and people of color, precisely because they are aware of the LitBro archetype. The guys who were once LitBros or are newly-minted LitBros don’t talk about David Foster Wallace anymore. They talk about Elena Ferrante and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. They need you to know they love Toni Morrison. The subscribe to little arty poetry magazines with all WOC staffs. They love women writers and women writing. And they do because they live in the same culture that you do, which contains the LitBro caricature!

This is one of the most frustrating parts of the whole Person-Guy phenomenon: it always depends on the flatly false assumption that people do not adjust their self-presentation in light of changes to their social culture. But that’s pretty much all people do. Nobody wants to be seen as a Person-Guy, in exactly the same way and for exactly the same reasons that nobody wants to be seen in skinny jeans.

You will not be surprised to hear me say that a great deal of the Person-Guy discourse is straightforward projection, the sum of someone’s worries about themselves. When Robinson Meyer defined the BernieBro (for The Atlantic, natch), it was as naked an act of sweaty projection as I have ever read in my life. The BernieBro was everything that Meyer feared he was, and so he poured all of those swirling anxieties into a little effigy and started rubbing too sticks together. Do you know the kind of people who relentlessly cite the aging dads who supposedly ruin music-liking because they still listen to the Strokes and Modest Mouse? It’s not, I think young Black women. It’s aging white men! They relentlessly traffic in those stereotypes precisely because they fear that they are the stereotype. They, not women or people of color, are the most rabid enforcers of the poptimist consensus because they are all too aware that the people skewered by the poptimist canon look an awful lot like them. This is, again, very natural, in fact practically universal, and nothing I should have to argue that hard about. People avoid those behaviors that their peers make fun of. Which is why every Person-Guy essay is out of date by the time it hits your laptop screen. Similarly, I guess the latest Catcher in the Rye pile-on (which, we can safely assume, most of the people involved have no read) referenced “red flags,” or traits that disqualify a potential romantic partner. I struggle to imagine an aspect of human life less conducive to the application of broad, inflexible categories than looking for love.

But that which fear inspires, reason cannot banish. Which points towards the ultimate source of all of this, which is something I’ve felt most of my life and yet never know how to express: the contemporary phenomenon of mass insecurity among the successful, insecurity’s ubiquity in elite spaces, its bite, its depth. I will never understand why social anxiety afflicts such a huge percentage of the people who are the most enviable in our society, at least aside from the truly rich and famous - those who went to competitive colleges and have moved on to cool urban spaces and steady employment in high-status fields, jobs that may not convey the promise of wealth but which at least present the opportunity for financial stability, along with a certain intangible desirability. These people are ostensibly succeeding in the game of adult 21st century life as well as anyone outside of various Kardashians, and yet as a class, they’re unusually likely to operate in a state of perpetual fear that their peer group does not respect, like, and admire them. I find it very strange.

Just look at how they want to appear to the world. If I ask you to predict the public affect of a given professional writer or journalist or pundit or creator, sight unseen, if I asked you to guess how such a theoretical figure would comport themselves socially and communicatively online, you’d be a fool not to make the obvious guess: that any random creative or political type acts endlessly superior, portrays droll disdain towards everyone, never betrays the slightest hint of vulnerability or surprise, not only already knows the answer but knows the question you’re going to ask before you ask it, is serially unimpressed, is relentlessly detached, is embarrassed for you, condescends to the whole world, orbits above the rest of us with an amused boredom, and always, always thinks that this what’s happening right now is very funny. This unholy spawn of Something Awful, early Gawker, Bush-era Daily Show, and thousands of copies-of-copies-of-copies…. Well. You cannot exist on the internet without coming across this performative, disaffected superiority, every day. And it is of course as blatant an example of simplistic, predictable psychology as you can imagine: this is the way a deeply insecure person interacts with the world. It is, to mangle John Updike, the mask that has eaten the face. And it seems like a strange endowment for those whom our society has declared to be winners.

Hard to write about insecurity, without people saying that you’re bragging, or that the insecurity is yours, or both at once. But like certain traditionally-mild neurological disorders that have become ubiquitous, the sheer prevalence of insecurity around us sometimes makes me wonder if I’m the only human being in the world who, despite some throbbing self-hatred and palpable neuroses and serial scandals and general haplessness, walks around thinking that he’s pretty OK and pretty OK with the world and that the world is pretty OK with him. Everyone in my PhD program in grad school professed to have imposter syndrome. All of them. Like literally all of them. It was like it was their badge. And when I would say well, to be honest, I think I’m talented and hardworking and that I belong here, inevitably it became clear that they thought that I was the one who was the problem. I liked almost all of them, personally. They were among the most motivated and bright quintile in our country, and (despite humanities stereotypes) they all went on to enviable jobs, tenure track academic gigs or in technical writing for IBM or running professional communications consulting firms or whatever. They were very ambitious people with the work ethic to match; they applied themselves and got most of what they wanted. Every last one was a wreck. It’s an obsession for me, the way people who have passed every social test exude social insecurity. Why is that? And can we change it?

Because I gotta tell you, I find this all fucking exhausting.