With Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration fast approaching, the tech billionaires of the world are getting their hyper-masculine affairs in order. We’ve already seen Elon Musk veering further into the political sphere and forming a closer relationship with the president-elect in recent months, and now Meta co-founder Mark Zuckerberg seems to be following suit.

Speaking on a recent episode of Joe Rogan’s podcast, Zuckerberg argued that workplaces needed to embrace more “masculine energy”.

“I think a lot of the corporate world is pretty culturally neutered. Masculine energy is good, and obviously, society has plenty of that, but I think corporate culture was really trying to get away from it,” Zuckerberg said. “I think having a culture that celebrates the aggression a bit more has its own merits that are really positive.

“It’s one thing to say we want to be welcoming and make a good environment for everyone, and I think it’s another to basically say that ‘masculinity is bad’,” he added. In the nearly three-hour episode, Zuckerberg also credited his martial arts experience for helping him to redefine his own relationship with masculinity, explaining that hanging out with his male friends while they “beat each other” has been a “positive experience”.

Zuckerberg also praised Trump, saying: “He just wants America to win.” So, it’s no surprise that Meta has donated $1 million (£820,000) to the president-elect’s inauguration fund.

Along with comments that sound as if they’ve been copied and pasted from a ‘manosphere’ subreddit, Zuckerberg announced a series of changes to Facebook and Instagram. Meta will no longer use fact-checkers to regulate its content and it has scrapped many of its diversity and inclusion policies. According to an internal memo at Meta, these policies were being scrapped because the term ‘DEI’ had become “charged”, as it was being “understood by some as a practice that suggests preferential treatment of some groups over others”.

In addition to getting rid of fact-checkers, Zuckerberg also said he would alter algorithms to once again promote political content, reversing a policy that’s been in place for years and had limited political posts. Facebook and Instagram will now follow Musk’s X in using a system of community notes written voluntarily by platform users.

Zuckerberg is truly living by his motto of “move fast and break things”. But when the man who originally created a website to rank his female classmates’ attractiveness is revealed to still be a misogynist, are we at all surprised? Yes, a lot of these recent changes and comments about masculinity are likely political pandering in order for Zuckerberg and the rest of the tech bros to stay rich and in the good graces of the incoming US administration, but the consequences of this exclusionary and hyper-masculine culture remain the same.

Men like Zuckerberg and Musk oversee corporations that directly impact our digital lives. When their attitudes and behaviours veer further towards the red-pilled manosphere, it’s a worrying issue: the ideas in the manosphere traditionally exist in the dark corners of digital spaces such as YouTube, Reddit, podcasts and other social media platforms, and they cement their legitimacy by entering into the political arena.

For example, Andrew Tate forming a political party won’t mean he’ll become the UK’s next prime minister but it is a political threat in the sense that the established political parties may alter their policies or swing further to the right of the political spectrum to combat the Tate effect.

Zuckerberg’s push for more masculine energy in workplaces will only legitimise what many of the men in the manosphere already believe: that masculinity is in crisis. When powerful billionaires are spouting the same harmful and misogynistic rhetoric, it emboldens others to continue in their sexism and misogyny and move these attitudes and behaviours from private conversations into the public sphere. These aren’t hidden or secret behaviours anymore.

And who will once again feel the consequences of these behaviours? Women and marginalised communities.

When you can’t really name a country where women are safe, free and equal to men, it’s a problem. When one woman or girl is killed every 10 minutes by their partner or family member, it’s a problem. When the gender pay gap keeps getting wider and women are more likely to experience burnout, workplaces have a problem. And when rights and freedoms are being reversed in several nations, there’s a critical issue of misogyny. No country has achieved gender equality in 2024. At the current rate of progress, it’ll take another century to achieve gender equality worldwide.

Arguing that workplaces need to embrace masculine energy implies that feminine energy or women have taken over, which is certainly not the case. If feminism had taken over, we wouldn’t have a widening gender pay gap. Women wouldn’t lose their lives at the hands of partners or family members. Reproductive rights wouldn’t be continuously eroded and rolled back. But those things are happening – and at an accelerating and alarming rate. And so, what workplaces – and wider society – definitely don’t need is even more masculine energy or any celebration of aggression. I would argue that workplaces need softer, more feminine, energy to foster more inclusive and understanding environments where people are able to thrive in their jobs, but not at the cost of their mental health or personal lives.

Misogyny and violence against women and girls is a global and dangerous crisis, and Zuckerberg has now further fanned the flames of the already burning fires of misogyny in order to keep hold of his money and his power. Shame on him.

Images: Getty