It's...boyishness
In search of a non-toxic masculinity
There’s not much to do where I grew up. You had to make your own fun in ruralish Connecticut, which explains the ritual that my friend Jake and I dutifully discharge whenever we’re back: house some beers and watch YouTube long into the night.
We’ve done this for almost fifteen years. Our usual genre can be described as feats of extreme consumption: Shoenice’s legendary liquor slams or LA Beast getting tased after he chugs a gallon of milk. This may be the most male activity I participate in.
Watching stupid videos was a hallmark of my adolescence. (Come to think, “Stupid Videos” was literally the name of a pre-YouTube site that hosted…..you get it.) Once, it felt transgressive for me and my guy friends to waste time on eBaum’s World. Now, on the far end of the pivot to video, it feels transgressive to avoid the frenetic edits of brat fancams and Twitch streams and RHONY clips.
Because the free internet has given way to the feudal internet, users are served content in exchange for time tilling the algorithmic fields of our tech overlords. I can rarely see what’s going on one or two plots over, let alone who’s fomenting rebellion on the other side of Kingdom Zuck. In 2018, I could read about the inchoate alt-right in prestige media: Bari Weiss’ profile of the “intellectual dark web” in the New York Times felt like that “we demand to be taken seriously” joke from Arrested Development. Joe Rogan pops up in the profile as “an MMA color commentator,” and now of course he and his brethren are being credited with helping Trump storm back into the White House.
Who are these right-wing media bros who helped deliver Trump the presidency? Don’t ask me. I can’t pretend to know who Theo Von is.
Maybe it’s only because I’ve battened down my YouTube permissions so that I can’t be mainlined into the manosphere. But the other side of my commitment to undermining the algorithm is acting on the recommendations of my flesh-and-blood friends. So when Jake asked me if I had heard of “I did a thing,” we were off. “I put a gun on a robot dog” was uploaded to YouTube 2 years ago and has since racked up 7.1 million views.1
“I did a thing” is the channel of Alex Apollonov, an Australian YouTuber whose titular thing is making things (such as a boat engine) out of other things (such as a fish). It’s MacGyver meets MythBusters.2
Alex appears in a lot of “Boy Boy” videos. He might even be one of the two boys? Unclear. The main boy at least is Aleksa Vulović.3 The pair made headlines in 2017 for their trip to North Korea to test its draconian haircut laws (3.7 million views). “I Snuck Into A Secret Arms-Dealer Conference” (3 years ago, 3.3 million views), meanwhile, is exactly what it sounds like.
The main event for me and Jake was a 48 minute video (5.7 million views) from May. Alex and Aleksa attempt to walk into Pine Gap, a super secret CIA base nestled in the Australian Outback. Instead of filming a reaction video for you (this is a real micro genre unto itself, like monks commenting on other monks’ marginalia in illuminated manuscripts), I’ll recreate my thoughts:
48 minutes sounds like way too long of a video
Why does everything sound so cheeky in these accents
How have I never heard of these guys before
Wait a minute…..what is the CIA doing with a spy base in Australia?
Boy Boy have the energy of merry pranksters as they explore ways to infiltrate Pine Gap. They don suits (identical, unfortunately) and try to rawdog it through security. They do the Vincent Adultman bit of stacking themselves up under a trench coat. They kick around a soccer ball until it bounces over the fence so they have a bit of pretext for breaching the government agency that overthrew Salvador Allende in Chile on Richard Nixon’s orders to “make the economy scream.” It’s all mischievous, charming, and male. In a word, boyish.
Alex and Aleksa remind me of my friends from back home. (Joe Rogan does too for that matter.) They’re curious and conspiratorial, adventuresome and rash, impish and swaggering. They seem like they’d be fun to house beers and watch YouTube with.
I am the only son between two sisters, so it was those friends from childhood who taught me how to be a boy. I’ve always been a bit scared of my masculinity and all the ways it comes out toxic. But if existence is not essence then let’s keep asking the question -- how do we be men?
We already know what happens when critics of conscience abandon masculinity wholesale. The reactionaries have found a way to curdle brawn into grievance. We need a new theory of masculinity. Maybe boyishness can help.
Burn After Reading
I very much enjoy reading
on the gender wars. She really holds no prisoners and asks for more from all of us in 21st century sexual relations.
That’s a lot of views! But it’s not MrBeast numbers: 131 million views over two weeks, in his most recent upload.
Missing boy cred: the only episode of MythBusters I can remember seeing is the one where they use a katana to slice off the tip of a machine gun. I’ve also never seen MacGyver, just Will Forte in SNL skits.
Skim Aleksa’s Wikipedia page. It’s a trip! His aunt survived falling 6.31 miles out of the air in the 70s when the plane she was working on was bombed, maybe by Croatian nationalists. He himself was born intersex and had his ovaries removed, as if his life is a pat plot twist in a 2024 movie.