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Why Gender Norms Nostalgia Is So Dangerous — and So Insanely Potent
It’s more than just longing for a past that barely even existed
Netflix’s new documentary, Untold: The Liver King, is exactly what you’d expect: lots of raw organ (and genital) eating, laced with pseudoscientific ramblings and a heavy dose of performative, ‘caveman-style’ masculinity.
Brian Johnson, better known as the titular Liver King, is a supplement salesman turned hypermasculine lifestyle guru who insists that ‘the modern man is weak’ and must reject modern inventions — such as medicine or… vegetables — in favour of the ‘ancestral’ way of living, all while secretly pumping himself full of decidedly modern steroids.
It’s tempting to write him off as just a cartoonish caricature, the ‘muscle Andrew Tate,’ as some have dubbed him. I certainly can’t think of anyone in my own life who would take him, or his ideas, seriously. And yet. Despite being publicly exposed for his deception, Johnson continues to command a massive online following: nearly 3 million Instagram followers and over a million YouTube subscribers at the time of writing. And he’s hardly alone in this grift. Dozens of other self-proclaimed ‘alpha males’ and wannabe cavemen profit off selling rigid notions of masculinity, centred on dominance, aggression, and emotional…
