No Honor Among Mutuals

In 2012, when I was 21, I got a job in Mallorca. I’d been working there for a couple of months when Jonathan, a Cuban my same age who had emigrated to Sweden, joined the group. From the day he arrived, there was tension between us. Jonathan was an alpha-male type, assertive, a bit arrogant, and so was I—so we were competing to occupy the same social space. Our rivalry was heightened by the fact that my Italian girlfriend at the time was his supervisor, and they couldn’t stand each other. One evening, while a group of us (boys-only) were hanging out in the residence where we all stayed, he insulted her in front of everyone by calling her a “whore”.

My response was to spit in his face: a gesture I’m not proud of. He threw a fiery punch in return, which missed. Stefano, an Italian from Rome, immediately intervened to separate us, but it wasn’t necessary. An understanding between us had already occurred. We went to sleep without apologizing to each other, and the next day, it was like it had never happened. We became good buddies for the rest of the summer. He started acting nicer towards my girlfriend, and we stayed in touch for years after, far longer than with anyone else in the group.

Recently, I found myself in a similar confrontation with a girl at the gym. She was a little younger than me, fit, and, as I was about to find out, assertive. She walked up to me and tried to tell me that it was her turn to use the station I had picked. I had my earbuds on and couldn’t hear what she had said, so I just said “no”, assuming she was asking if I was finished. But then she put her towel down. I took my earbuds out, thinking she had misunderstood. She hadn’t. She told me she had been using two machines and expected me to let her use that one now. I calmly said to her that she had to wait. When she saw that I was willing to keep arguing (better than she probably expected), she finally asked, “So can I use it?” I said “no” again—this time more firmly. As I did, I instinctively smiled at her, not to flirt (I felt no attraction towards her), just to let her know I had no intention to escalate. She said “Ok” and walked away.

This girl wasn’t a co-worker like Jonathan, and obviously not a man. But in a way, she was doing something similar. Maybe she saw an opportunity to engage. Perhaps she saw one to feel good about herself. Or maybe she just wanted to use that machine, and genuinely thought she was entitled to it. All I knew was that from the moment we started arguing, we were competing. She was trying to gain the upper hand, and I wasn’t prepared to let her have it.

As she walked away, I felt good about winning the dispute, but I was also relieved that she didn’t escalate. What would have been the next step? I started playing out scenarios in my head: I’d never hit a woman, so physical confrontation wouldn’t have been an option, and I wouldn’t have wanted to let a member of the gym staff mediate. The only response I could think of as “appropriate” was to make her feel dumb and inferior. I wouldn’t have enjoyed that. But what were the other options? De-escalating with kindness and understanding, maybe. But was I in the mood? Was she? And were there any good reasons for doing it?

This is how I feel about social media. It’s one big gym, and everyone in it is like me and that girl. The only difference: no one is actually there, and you only get one shot.

Anyone who has spent enough time on social media will have witnessed many instances of two male “mutuals” brawling over some cultural or political issue, only to end up blocking each other, and possibly becoming enemies. Why does this occur? One explanation is that they weren’t really friends to begin with. They’d interacted long enough for two people to consider themselves friends in real life (IRL), but all it took was a single, often trivial disagreement, and it’s over. Maybe they were rivals all along and were only tolerating each other. However, as my experience with Jonathan shows, even confrontations between rivals in real life can produce a more profound understanding.

Social media constantly incentivizes disagreement and also demasculinization. In the real world, if two men strike up a conversation, unless they’re looking for a fight in the first place, the basic incentives are to seek common ground, as the possibility of physical violence is always on the table. If a dispute arises and one party escalates, body language kicks in to prevent a physical confrontation or to signal that one is coming, such as with posturing, hand gestures, and facial expressions. Words tend to be secondary to tone and demeanor.

Online, it’s the other way around. If an account disagrees with you “in public”, you can try to de-escalate, or talk in private, but that’s not how to farm engagement. The incentive is always to escalate—and not only to escalate, but to seek out disagreements in the first place. Unlike IRL, where it often takes a while to identify a point of dispute, every controversial statement online is archived. As such, scrolling through someone’s timeline will always reveal an issue of contention. This is part of what drives “purity spirals”; people train themselves to spot every disagreement. It also contributes to the crisis of masculinity by disincentivizing men from behaving as they would in IRL situations.

In an online confrontation, body language doesn’t play a role. All we have are words. And not even that many words: 180 written characters, with no italics. The chances that you can communicate exactly what you mean, the way you mean it, as you mean it, and that it will come across as such, in a tweet, are slim too none.

Online confrontations lack the threat of physical violence and, therefore, cannot be “masculine”. In the realm of the virtual, the only way to escalate a confrontation is to engage in forms of essentially feminine violence: emotional bullying, innuendo, gossip, and group exclusion, just as I imagined in my hypothetical scenarios at the gym. This is why all online spaces eventually tend to manifest an anti-masculine dynamic. Hence, the more men spend time cultivating their following, the more they become prone to creating dramas.

A feedback loop is forming in which the incentive to disagree, combined with the forms of feminine violence enabled by social media platforms reinforce each other. If the only way to ascend in an online hierarchy is to behave in an unmanly manner, then there’s an incentive to masquerade unmanliness as disagreement. How many of the online rivalries we assume to be caused by genuinely differing “beliefs” are really motivated by the logic of competing in the same niche?

None of this is to say that friendships between men cannot develop online, nor that escalating a confrontation with physical violence is good; masculinity and mutual respect are about more than the capacity to establish boundaries, just as femininity is about more than feminine “violence”. But social media engagement depends on how well we can exaggerate our compliments and mean our insults, and there are no downsides to the latter. How are we supposed to develop respect for one of our “mutuals” out of an online confrontation, if the only way we can escalate is by acting like teenage girls?

Jonathan and I didn’t become friends to avoid getting into a fight again, nor on account of guilt over insulting each other. Instead, we had developed a mutual respect through a physical confrontation. That night, he learned that I was willing to pay a price to defend my girlfriend’s honor, and I learned that he was willing to pay one to protect his own. We had bonded over an ancient code. It took a few weeks before we got close, but we knew it already the following day.

What would have happened if, instead of taking place face-to-face, the whole thing had unfolded online? Most likely, we would have insulted each other on the timeline for a while. Perhaps we would have blocked each other and never spoken again. Or maybe we would have become “online enemies” from that point forward. Almost certainly, we would not have become buddies.

I don’t know if I’ll ever meet that girl from the gym again. Her face as she left suggested that if we ever do see each other, she won’t get near me. But who knows? Maybe next time she’ll say “hey”, and we’d go back to being another two regulars at that gym rather than people who dislike each other. If a similar dispute with her had unfolded online, I wouldn’t have been able to de-escalate with a smile; we probably would have just blocked each other, and that would have been the end of it.

No research, as far as I know, has been published directly studying the impact of social media usage on testosterone levels. But studies have found that heavy social media usage spikes cortisol, a stress hormone that suppresses testosterone production and secretion. Lower testosterone production and secretion also lead to a decline in DHT, a steroid sex hormone that is primarily responsible for male sex differentiation and the traits most strongly associated with masculinity.

Because these biochemical changes are occurring on a large scale, they are transforming society. They’re creating different default modes of interaction, and we are all too busy participating to notice. Virtual modes of confrontation have already spilled into the physical realm. Online patterns of speech already circulate IRL. I recall a friend telling a joke at a bar in New York. One guy responded with: “lol”. I assumed that it meant he found it funny. But looking back, he wasn’t laughing. At one IM event in 2024, I tried to introduce one of my “mutuals” to a friend of mine, but he wouldn’t let me because my friend had him “blocked.” Whenever two people start an argument in public, there’s a good chance someone will pick up the phone and start filming. Almost everyone is aware of that and has adjusted, either becoming more cautious or else more theatrical, fighting effectively for a chance to go viral.

How long before every IRL interaction will respond to social media incentives? We human beings are driven to reveal who we are, what we want, and how we feel from birth; we learn to control, conceal, and manipulate others’ perceptions of ourselves as we grow up. Before the age of social media, we generally understood the incentives and could recognize the moral logic behind acting in a certain way. But today, the ethical reasoning of the new incentives is less clear.

The capacity to cultivate virtues is part of what makes us human. Online interactions disrupt those capacities. We can’t see into each other’s eyes and determine whether we really mean what we say. We have no natural ways to discern someone’s true character, nor to shape our own positively in the process. No man that respects himself, for instance, would ever gossip and spread rumors, and no society in history has ever respected any man who does. Yet many of the male “accounts” elevated online engage in dramas, some to a hysterical degree.

Is it their fault, or is the nature of the platforms? Self-importance, contempt, and arrogance is rewarded online. Virtue isn’t. In this way, technology is inverting many of the incentives for developing character. It’s no wonder that society is now fixated on identities. When discerning character and reputation becomes impossible, the only form of judgement left is based on signifiers. Did the girl at the gym see an opportunity to dominate a straight, white male? Was she trying to engage in a conversation, and all I saw was a feminist?

To regain a sense of control online, I recently established a couple of rules for my social conduct. When I meet someone that I think could make for a good buddy or a romantic partner, I propose a phone call, and continue to suggest it as a primary mode of communication until I know that I couldn’t radically misunderstand texts between us. If I find myself wanting to disagree with someone I know, I try to imagine that argument taking place somewhere cool. How would I act if we were discussing this topic in person after a couple of Negronis?

We should also recognize that online interactions and the networks that arise from them are, in many ways, valuable and necessary. It’s also understandable to want to farm engagement, when the goal is to make a living. It can also sometimes be necessary to escalate an online confrontation. But we need to tread carefully. The risk we run whenever we’re interacting online is that the platforms we use are subtly reverse-engineering us; causing us to misunderstand compliments as insults and insults as compliments; making enemies out of people who could have been friends and poisoning interactions with women who could have been wives—all for the sake of just one more hit of dopamine.

Jonathan and I were competing with one another. What we didn’t appreciate was that competition has rules. Those rules were inscribed in our DNA: we discovered them by engaging with each other as humans. But what are the laws of the online game? Moderators, algorithms, or AI cannot enforce masculine virtue. We have to impose it upon ourselves. Perhaps the reason it’s so difficult for men online is that, as we are competing with one another, we are also competing with, and against, our nature.

Mark Granza is the founding editor and publisher of IM—1776. He can be followed @markgranza.