The Hollywood Reporter this week published a cover story that celebrates “the triumph of the beta male”—prompting right wing ideologues to blame “modern feminism" for everything from “virtue signaling on the Internet” to a decrease in worldwide amphibian populations
In its cover story, HBO’s “Silicon Valley” star Zach Woods championed the “tender quality” he sees in his fellow cast mates. “I'm among my tribe of, like, beta males," Woods told the Hollywood Reporter.
That story and the Hollywood Reporter’s cover photo—which features four of the stars of “Silicon Valley” with their hands in each other’s pockets—infuriated right wingers like InfoWars’ Alex Jones.
“They’re saying if you act like a domesticated, twisted version of an effeminate creature, somehow you’re going to end up in dominant positions in the corporate world,” Jones fumed on a YouTube video posted to his conspiracy website InfoWars.
Jones went on to lament “globalists” like Jeff Bezos, as well as plastic, which he claims is causing a “synthetic transformation that has been engineered over the males.”
Conservative commentator Steven Crowder took the Hollywood Reporters’ rejection of toxic masculinity personally, launching into a tirade on his blog about “shrill feminists” and “beta” males who “seem to spend most of their time whining on the internet.”
But anger over the Hollywood Reporter’s cover wasn’t simply relegated to fringe corners of the internet. In an op-ed, the Federalist’s Bre Payton complained the article “says a lot about how bad things have gotten for men in America.”
“There’s nothing women like more than self-aggrandizing male feminists whose feminism starts and stops at virtue signaling on the Internet,” she wrote after plugging Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s widely-mocked series “Men in America.”
Read some more responses below:
