“The fitness coach starts his very early morning routine by removing a piece of tape from his mouth,” CNN reports. The “manfluencer” in question, Ashton Hall, spends the rest of his day dunking his face in ice water, rubbing banana peel on his skin and chugging down “Saratoga Water”. This is apparently the modern western definition of hardcore masculinity.

Friends, maybe – just maybe – we should restart that conversation about western manhood because if it involves banana peel, you are not demonstrating what it means to be a human adult; you are culturally appropriating a clown.

Hall has nearly 11 million followers on Instagram. We had a good run as a species for a while, didn’t we? Although it is slightly embarrassing we had less time on Earth than a bunch of giant lizards that never even invented the internet.

I’m so old that I remember when the definition of masculinity was taking responsibility for yourself and others around you. Chainsaw-wielding billionaires like Elon Musk and his president-of-somewhere sidekick, Donald, are most insistent on their role as champions of Western Civilisation™, so I wondered how they missed the instruction that one should “not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment”. These are the words of the Apostle Paul in the Bible, so I guess the source is pretty niche.

How great that Maga identities have Project 2025 to explain to them the gender roles they’re so rigorously policing. Should we be concerned that the campaign to politically erase trans people – so en vogue both in America and among America’s political lemmings in the Australian right – is a symptom of their endgame of........

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