Men! Do you yearn to be healthy, virile and handsome? To become herculean in stature, and to live a long life while retaining the vim and vigour of youth?
With its promotion of ice baths and youth-restoring callisthenics, it is remarkable how similar Manly Health’s guidance is to that offered by the many current manhood gurus in the booming industry of male wellness. Whitman blames the beleaguered state of masculinity on the “artificial” lives led in modern society – sedentary “indoor employments”, disconnection from nature – and suggests solutions might lie in earlier modes of living.
This is not the only overlap between Whitman’s wellness recommendations and the odious world of the “manosphere”, that grab-bag of aggressively heterosexual,podcasts, websites and message boards wherein masculinist ideation becomes fused with misogyny, conspiratorial thinking and anti-establishment sentiment.
Jones was first launched into the mass millennial consciousness after his memeified “gay frogs” rant – a depopulation agenda conspiracy theory which posits the government spiked the water supply with hormone-disrupting chemicals in order to “feminise” men . He is the business-savvy brains behind far-right fake news website Infowars, which generates the majority of its considerable revenue by selling its own brand of dietary supplements to the website’s millions of monthly visitors.