You Don't Have to be a Try Guy

decency and integrity do not grow out of performative harmlessness

Rebecca Traister has been in the game for a long time, and her beat is feminism and gender relations. Yet this piece for New York magazine, on seeing Tim Walz and Doug Emhoff as models for modern masculinity, suggests that she’s missed the past fifteen years of male feminism - in particular, how a generation of progressive men made being unthreatening a core part of their public persona and failed to make the world safe for women in doing so. In fact, those very men often proved to be vectors of abuse themselves. But let’s start at the beginning.

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As an elder Millennial, I’ve spent the last two decades watching my cohort’s communal attitude about how to be a good person evolve. Once synonymous with “the youth,” the term Millennial technically refers to a range of birth years but has long served mainly as a collection of social signals and associations stitched together by a generational cohort that grew up online. The Millennials were the first generation to experience young adulthood under the gaze of the modern internet, spending their/our formative years commenting and being commented on, always the next big thing, an object of relentless obsession for the world’s media and marketing departments… until we got old, that is. People are still getting used to that idea, but I’m afraid the fact that our beautiful youth now exists only in memory will only become more insistent with time. As all generations must, the Millennials lost the spotlight, and today Gen Z rules. For now. For now.

Being online, as I have spent too much of my career documenting, invites a kind of intentionality into the formation of the self. In the late 2000s and the 2010s, when the modern internet was being born, Millennials very publicly wrestled with their public-facing identities, and in particular, their public-facing values. The generational cohort spent an awful lot of time figuring out how to be good people, with “good” a somewhat loose construct. Core to this long, public, messy process was the embrace of self-trivialization as a mass strategy for life. By self-trivialization, I mean the tendency among certain anxious types to reflexively inject jokiness into their lives in a way meant to deflect negative attention by insisting that everything is a big joke anyway, so why bother to be mean to little old me? It’s fundamentally a type of avoidance that operates under the dubious logic “If I never take myself seriously and insist that no one else should take me seriously, they will find nothing in me worth mocking.” It’s a very popular approach to modern life, among a certain strata of overeducated and professionally anxious person, and it has various permutations.

Hipster guys drinking cheap beer ironically while clad in shirts bearing the image of their own faces, that was self-trivialization. Bo Burnham being able to explore the depths of depression and meaninglessness only through the straightjacket of explicit jokiness, and the fans who are trapped in just the same way, the same. L’Epic Bacon Reddit Guy is one version of self-trivialization. The Irony Boy, who sits on Twitter and lobs blank sarcasm at everyone and everything no matter how stale the material is or how old he gets, is another. There’s your typical redpilled meme-politics doomers, who imagine themselves to be something different but aren’t. There’s 40-year-olds posting about doggos and puppers and there’s grownup Bluey fans who can’t wait for someone to suggest that Bluey is just for kids, so that they can go on some over-rehearsed rant about how Bluey is serious business. And another version of this approach to adult life is the Try Guy.

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The “Try Guys” are a group of YouTubers whose gimmick is… trying things. They make a lot of the usual YouTube dross, disposable overedited videos of the Guys engaged in some mundane activity that inspires them to laugh at an improbable pace, with plenty of mugging at the camera to let you know you should be having a good time. The Try Guys, who have been working their shtick for a decade now, built their brand using a simple but effective template: being relentlessly, performatively, embarrassingly unthreatening. Though the various Guys have their own quirks and features, they’ve all embraced that basic approach to internet celebrity, building it through cartoonish inoffensiveness, relentlessly avoiding anything like an edge. In a world increasingly defined by adults who have no capacity to weather the most ordinary bumps and bruises, the Try Guys of the world say hey, don’t worry, in me you will find one who never means harm, to anyone. I am doggo language in human form, I am that magic skeleton tweet, I am a sentient Upworthy headline. And all have smiles on their faces.

And this, I think, speaks directly to the Millennial approach to being a person. Confronted with an increasingly loud social directive that decent striving types should embrace social justice, and all too aware of conventionally aggressive and macho visions of modern masculinity, the Try Guys and armies of Millennial men like them decided that the best thing to do was to self-emasculate. “If you fear my balls, m’lady, I would be more than happy to ritualistically remove them.” As with that famous Facebook post where the guy declared that he was protecting an elevator from sexual harassment, this approach so melds a particularly fretful vision of masculinity with the marketing of the person embodying it that the line between the self and advertising collapses. The Try Guys are Nice Guys, but are the Try Guy guys nice when they’re just guys? Hard to say. The mask eats the face.

All of this reliance on a very 21st-century approach to being publicly good was brought to a head when one of the Guys - I don’t know which one, they’re all pretty interchangeable - Tried cheating on his wife, in what was described as a consensual relationship with an employee. The other three of the Guys Who Try responded by firing the cheater. For reasons that are utterly bamboozling to me, this became a massive news story. Perfectly mainstream publications, the stuffiest newsgathering outfits, put out endless pieces about the Try Guys “drama.” (Always “the drama.”) For internet celebrities, there’s no such thing as bad press, and Try Guys Inc. proceeded to milk the resulting attention for all it was worth. They got out in front of the scandal and put out a self-aggrandizing video in which they expressed their incredible shock that a man would use his professional success to fuck a woman who wasn’t his wife. I imagine it’s the only one of their videos in which they don’t spend half the time laughing at the camera, letting the viewer know that there’s nothing too serious going on. (The reflexive insistence that one doesn’t take themselves too seriously is a Millennial calling card and universally a branding exercise.) But in the months that followed, they apparently made jokes about the situation at a relentless pace.

Personally, I’m not interested in the infidelity of strangers, particularly internet celebrities. Infidelity is bad, don’t get me wrong, and if the chipmunk-faced former Try Guy philanderer wanted to date my sister, I would intervene. But he’s not, and I will never meet him, and I just don’t give a fuck, and it’s absolutely bizarre to me that his infidelity became a big story. Cheating on someone is morally wrong and shows low personal character and you shouldn’t do it. But a) I don’t know that dude or his wife so it’s not my business and b) cheating isn’t and can’t be a form of sexual misconduct of the type that we’ve become more sensitive to over time; in fact, conflating infidelity with sexual harassment or assault is dangerous because it risks trivializing the accusation. (Looking at you, New York!) I just don’t get why some minor internet celebrity’s marital failings became headline news. I definitely do understand, though, why the Try Guys had to make such a fuss out of how offended they were by the accusations: nice is their brand, nice is what pays the bills, nice keeps them in enviable NYC apartments, nice pays for their iPads, and infidelity is definitely not nice.

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The fact that the Try Guys slithered out of Buzzfeed is too perfect; Buzzfeed epitomized the emptiness that lay inside of progressive Millennial culture. (I understand that Buzzfeed technically still exists, but that’s a strong “technically.”) Festooned with social justice liberals, the company nevertheless embraced the toxic hustle mindset that has always defined Wall Street; it seems dog-eat-dog culture could fit in quite comfortably in an ostentatiously Nice™ Millennial workplace. During its heyday, Buzzfeed had a notoriously competitive internal culture, which the company seemed to cultivate despite their performatively laid back ethos. The content wasn’t going to mine itself! The company’s workforce was divided up into an absurd hierarchy where they had several different levels of intern, then several different levels of employee, and within those groupings you had different levels of pay and job security and (most important of all) ability to get on camera. As the Try Guys demonstrate, spending your professional life making videos about which Powerade color goes best with caviar can be quite lucrative. And because Buzzfeed was “cool” - my keyboard does not have enough quotation marks to indicate my derision there - many, many ambitions young Millennials pursued jobs there. This meant that the workplace culture was terribly tense and the pressure to perform enormous.

Which led to a bunch of interns drinking piss.

Apparently, a lot of the videos which involved people trying something new required volunteers from around the office. Ordinarily, when the video was typical Buzzfeed fare like making ramen in a humidifier or whatever, this didn’t involve much of an ethical dilemma. But at some point, someone came up with the idea that Buzzfeeders should try to drink their own piss. The video would draw from volunteers, as usual. But since drinking your own urine is in fact very unpleasant, and potentially dangerous, it’s no surprise that none of the people who appeared in the video were actually employees. All of the volunteers, it turns out, were “volunteers,” people on the bottom rung desperate to scrabble up. That’s right! The entire cast of a video about drinking your own excrement was made up of interns. And because these were ambitious young people who were desperate to catch on at the company, the intense competitive pressure to participate in something like a piss-drinking video made a mockery of the very concept of voluntary participation. It’s exactly the sort of capitalist dynamic that left-leaning people have been critiquing forever. Here the professional and social pressure that compelled interns to debase themselves was so obvious it should be used as an example in sociology textbooks. Incredibly cool, Buzzfeed!

This is, to me, a Rosetta Stone for early 21st-century liberal politics, an impossibly perfect symbolic object. A bunch of young idealistic Millennials who tweeted all day about intersectionality and dismantling patriarchy worked for an organization that thought nothing of exploiting its internal culture of immense professional pressure to compel vulnerable interns to drink piss.

And my disgust with that story is very redolent of why I view the whole Millennial cringe approach to masculinity with such contempt, because it reflects the same failures of critical thinking, the same willingness to accept self-presentation at face value - Buzzfeed’s self-presentation as a home of hip progressives proving no defense against exploitation, the ostentatiously harmless progressive man who acts that way in order to provide himself with opportunities for future harm. The tendency of feminist men to use overwrought apologetics to conceal a deeper predatory nature is such an old story that it’s amazing that we’re still getting these endless endorsements of The New Enlightened Man. Why would Rebecca Traister, or anyone else, remain credulous to performative nice guy-ness in 2024? As Ross Douthat writes in a recent essay on liberal struggles with masculinity

I would have thought that by now liberals would be hesitant about proclaiming the special personal virtues of the male feminist, the enlightened pro-choice dude. After Bill Clinton, Eliot Spitzer and Harvey Weinstein, after MeToo case studies too numerous to count, surely we can say that sleaze percolates on the left and right alike, that predators can exploit liberated mores as easily as traditional ones, that the “deferential” and “committed to partnership” guy can be subject to the same temptations as the conservative male breadwinner.

I’ve spent most of my life in academia in one role or another, and let me tell you, I’ve known many loudly feminist, ostentatiously nice guys whose unthreatening demeanor was tied to a fundamentally predatory approach to women. These were the guys who would go to conferences, raise their hands during Q&A and, after apologizing for taking up space, ask the speaker how they could do a better job of not oppressing women. Then when everybody went out for drinks afterwards they’d always be the ones aggressively pressuring drunk women to come back to their hotel rooms. Is Tim Walz one of those guys? Doug Emhoff? I sincerely doubt it. But I certainly don’t know, and neither does Traister. That’s the whole point, right - that in the last couple decades we’ve learned, or we should have learned, that all of that supportive ally branding is just marketing, somewhat literal marketing in the case of politicians but still just marketing even for those men who are only marketing themselves on Instagram or in the workplace. Tim Walz isn’t predatory because of his smile? Doug Emhoff is genuinely feminist because of his professional accomplishments? Traister would never fall for such claims, plainly stated that way. And yet her essay and so many like it seems incapable of understanding that men who mean women harm are perfectly capable of absorbing the 21st century feminist perspective and exploiting it.

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But then, we live in a world in which every political debate is assumed to be divided into two equal camps, made up of people whose positions are diametrically opposed to each other in every particular and along every dimension. So perhaps our people just can’t ponder the encouraging possibility that there are more options than sending dick pics to unsuspecting coworkers or posing with a lollypop and an eight-year-old’s haircut to signal your blamelessness. Let me save a certain segment of whatever’s left of X.com the trouble - “Freddie deBoer says the Try Guys should be Joe Rogan manosphere bros instead!” This is an expression of that inescapable modern logic, and I think some version of it buttresses all of these many odd endorsements of unthreatening liberal masculinity. After all, if the only alternative to the Try Guy is the weird postmodern traditionalist, conspiracy theorizing, and synthetic androgen use of too-online manliness, then obviously a lot of people are going to choose the former. But this is just another application of the forced binary in which we are all artificially constrained, the kind that responds to arguments about Democratic fecklessness and petty corruption and says “What? Do you want Donald Trump to win?” It is not in fact the case that the only options are a guy who sells mawkish affected male feminism as his profession or some roided-up 40-year-old reactionary with a big distended belly and leathery skin.

It would be convenient to lay out what I think the better alternative to both is, but I really don’t want to: I think the whole problem is too much explanation, too much theorizing. There have been far too many “What should a man be?” thinkpieces in the last several decades. We have too much fucking discourse. I don’t think masculinity can be derived from a longread. And in particular, I think the entire concept of male feminism should be a kind of Schrodinger’s cat situation or whatever. I don’t think men should feel that they can just declare themselves to be feminists. A college kid interviewed me this past spring and asked me if I consider myself a feminist and I told her that I didn’t think it was a useful question; my stances on issues related to feminism are just about 100% in line with standard feminist attitudes, but I’m frequently told that isn’t as important as I’d like for it to be. You can call me aspirationally feminist if you feel like you have to call me anything, but many people will disagree vociferously and I’m not in a position to make a stronger claim. Too many men displaying their feminism like it’s a limited edition Funko Pop in their awful living room and far too many explicit considerations of how to be a decent person. I decline.

But since we’re talking about this New Right-aligned online masculinity, let me borrow one of their ideas: I don’t think you should soyface. It demonstrates low character and many people have a natural revulsion towards it. Stop.

soyface

Soyface is embarrassing not because it violates traditional gender norms or portrays men in a vulnerable light or fails to convey an appropriately aggressive masculine visage. Soyface is not embarrassing because real manly men don’t do it. Soyface is embarrassing because it is the behavior of men who want to be excused from the work of being people, from the fear of being differentiated. The whole point of soyface is to avoid having to simply strike a pose and have your picture taken. Doing that, just standing and smiling for a picture, would present the world with a target, and many of us don’t particularly feel great about ourselves. It hurts to be seen! But that’s life, and being seen for what you are while doing your level best to maintain a sense of dignity and self-respect in the face of insecurity and self-hatred is much better than doing this, which is to attempt to wriggle out of being seen by self-defensively adopting the face of a shmuck. Soyface is a very pure expression of what I mean by defensive self-infantilization, a preemptive all-consuming jokiness that has the fundamental purpose of avoiding being targeted. “You want to make a joke at my expense, but I’ve already made a joke out of myself!” It doesn’t work and it shouldn’t. It is our curse to be seen, so endeavor to be something that you yourself would like to see. Other people will sort themselves out if you do.

Contorting your face into a rictus of childishness and orthodonture is something you do to avoid harming yourself; contorting your self into a creature of unthreatening marshmallow male feminism is something you do, ostensibly, to avoid harming women. But both operate under the same bad logic. It’s understandable, the thinking that goes “The world is hard on everyone and worse on some, and so I will be soft so as to never be the hard thing.” But it only has value if it works, and it doesn’t work. We are always the hard thing for other people sometimes, no matter how pure our intentions, and the mask of harmlessness only occludes our understanding of the relentlessly complex ways in which we hurt each other. There are forms of gendered violence that are very real and sexism exists and it hurts and good people should endeavor not to contribute to it. But of course, then you get back to the busywork of being a person and you find that you hurt people in entirely non-gendered ways. The best you can do is be a person first. And this is exactly what a lot of these professionally unthreatening dudes want to avoid.

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Here’s the reality, for women and everyone else: you can’t actually determine someone’s character from their costuming. None of us can see past every mask, every time. If guys who yammer on about how white men need to just shut and listen for awhile were reliably good people, if they never DM’d teenagers or put their hand on a woman’s ass on the subway, the world would be an easier place. But I’m afraid that sometimes Try Guys cheat on their wives with subordinates, and sometimes nice guys are only nice until they can get women into a vulnerable position. Sometimes lunkheaded Joe Rogan-worshipping video-gaming men who complain about woke Star Wars and belong to Barstool’s shirt of the month club are fundamentally moral beings who don’t want to hurt anyone, even if they have stupid politics. And sometimes vice versa to all of that. The point is that you don’t know someone’s character until that character is revealed to you in a way that’s entirely separate from the performed, self-conscious aspects of a person. This, again, is another aspect of human social life that’s made harder in the internet era, given that there is no such thing as an affect-free presentation of the self online. Decency and integrity can only be discovered through the process of actually getting to know someone; they are not superficial virtues but instead deep, in-the-bone qualities that reveal themselves only slowly and with effort. Rebecca Traister doesn’t know Tim Walz’s character, and while sometimes a Try Guy is just a scared man trying to navigate an evolving social world as best he can, sometimes a Try Guy is a predator. You don’t know until you know.

A decent man does not have to put on an elaborate performance of being sexless and unthreatening towards women, in part because he understands that such a performance is no guarantor of safety at all. Very often, such affects are the very tools of predation. Nor should any of us operate under the impression that because some men are strong in the commission of abuse then the problem is the strength and not the abuse. It would probably be more convenient if good and bad came to us labeled and prepackaged, but they don’t. Sometimes the best men are some of the least ostentatiously feminist men, but only sometimes. You just have to live with someone long enough to find out when nice is only Nice. As Little Red Riding Hood taught us, nice is different than good.