Who Is Joe Rogan?

This is a very interesting profile of a very influential guy in the landscape of 2019 masculinity.  Here's a great sample:

The bedrock issue, though, is Rogan’s courting of a middle-bro audience that the cultural elite hold in particular contempt—guys who get barbed-wire tattoos and fill their fridge with Monster energy drinks and preordered their tickets to see Hobbs & Shaw. Joe loves these guys, and his affection has none of the condescension and ironic distance many people fall back on in order to get comfortable with them. He shares their passions and enthusiasms at a moment when the public dialogue has branded them childish or problematic or a slippery slope to Trumpism. Like many of these men, Joe grumbles a lot about “political correctness.” He knows that he is privileged by virtue of his gender and his skin color, but in his heart he is sick of being reminded about it. Like lots of other white men in America, he is grappling with a growing sense that the term white man has become an epithet. And like lots of other men in America, not just the white ones, he’s reckoning out loud with a fear that the word masculinity has become, by definition, toxic.

As a white man, I am both exasperated and sympathetic to some of this. If you know you are privileged and you act and think through that lens, then you shouldn't be threatened by those assailing privilege.  You aspire to be the best man you can be, and that's that.  Still, a casual dip into my Twitter feed would be enough to agitate someone less secure than I am.  My security is based not on any special virtue, but simply a product of my physical experience and most importantly, my age.  At 52, I'm simply not invested as much in how others see me. 

Here's another graph that speaks to what is a problem:

In the more progressive corners of culture, it’s become a familiar rallying cry to wonder out loud, “What are men even for now?” That’s an excellent question, but you can maybe understand why it rings a bit more ambivalently in the ears of men trying to find their footing in this new world. A brighter and more virtuous future? Wonderful! If you need anything from us, we’ll just be over here peering into the void. Meanwhile, the irony is that so many of the men who demonstrate a level of intelligence and empathy worth aspiring to—they’ve pretty much all been on Joe Rogan’s podcast.

If you want to engage men, demonizing them, belittling them is a very poor tactic to take.  Young men, in particular, are almost by definition oppositional.  Arguing a point with them will usually make them cling to that belief even more.  As the author notes, Rogan's main flaw is a flaw that men in particular have in spades: a lack of empathy.

Empathy is a dying virtue (if it ever was one).  That's not Rogan's schtick, even if some of it is pretty good.  There is some laudatory appeal in making a masculine space for men to explore what that means in a world that is changing faster than they can adapt, but if it comes without genuine empathy, then we are selling men short.