The Daily Telegraph - Features
Why do grown men feel the need to fight?
As Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg face off, Roland White explores our fascination with male aggression
It was quite easily one of the most embarrassing moments of my life, and many years later I’m still not entirely clear how it happened. I was in a student bar and chatting amiably to somebody about his new girlfriend. She and I had been at school together, and I was explaining what an excellent choice he’d made.
The next thing I knew, we were outside, throwing punches at each other. Or rather, we were pushing and shoving and saying “Yeah?” and “Come on then?” as a crowd began to gather.
I was rescued by my girlfriend at the time, who was about 2ft 6in in her stockinged feet. She distracted my opponent by kicking him hard in the shin with her Doc Martens, then dragged me off into the night for a severe reprimand.
Oh, the shame. I now realise that this incident was very clearly an egregious example of toxic masculinity and must be condemned in the strongest possible terms. This sort of brawling is just wrong. And yet, I’m surely not the only person who is greatly looking forward to the most unlikely punch-up since Hugh Grant hit Colin Firth on the head with a dustbin lid in Bridget Jones’s Diary.
Two titans of the digital world have been squaring up to each other across cyberspace. In the red corner: Twitter tycoon Elon Musk. In the blue corner: Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook. It began when Musk poured scorn on Zuckerberg’s plan to launch a rival to Twitter, provisionally called Threads, and matters quickly escalated. When somebody warned Musk that the Meta man was a serious devotee of jiu-jitsu, Musk replied immediately: “I’m up for a cage match if he is”. “Send me the location,” Zuckerberg replied.
Both men have dabbled in the combat arts, and there is a suggestion that Musk won’t be sticking entirely to Queensbury Rules. “I have this great move that I call The Walrus,” he says, “where I just lie on top of my opponent and do nothing.”
There is a raw fascination about fighting. Not for nothing does the most famous scene in the 1969 film Women In Love feature the two leading men, played by Oliver Reed and Alan Bates, wrestling naked in front of a fire. Somehow, Bates and Reed made fighting look manly, primaeval and romantic. What usually happens in real life is more like Firth vs Grant.
The scrap between George and Jerry in Seinfeld is even more accurate: pushing, shoving, and a profound sense of looking very silly. It’s no surprise, by the way, to see somebody dimunitive like George getting into a fight. As any nightclub doorman will tell you, it’s not usually tall, well-built chaps who cause problems. It’s always the little ones you have to watch.
Why do men fight? There are two theories. The sexual selection theory says it’s in our nature, and that we’re competing for the chance to reproduce. Social-role theory says that our behaviour is learned.
As is often the case in Britain, class plays its part. A 2009 Brunel University paper explains: “For high-status men, the costs of aggression (potential for a decrease in social status and risk of physical injury) may outweigh the potential benefits. For low-status men, the relative benefits may outweigh the cost. Success may not only protect one’s reputation, but also increase one’s access to valued resources (social status and mating opportunities).”
My own policy on fighting is very strict: avoid it if possible, however tempting it might seem.
But some men go out of their way to look for a scrap. A friend who is a broad-shouldered six-footer was at a bar one evening when a Scottish man sidled up to him and very politely asked if he fancied a fight.
“He was about as wide as he was tall,” said my chum, “and I didn’t fancy it. I said no thanks, but he virtually begged me to come out in the car park.
“We saw him later that evening with a huge cut over his eye. ‘You got your fight then,’ I said. ‘Aye,’ he grinned. ‘And I got a right pasting’.”
Hark! Is that a loud, dissonant crashing sound we hear coming from a certain mansion in Montecito? Could it be that sustainably-sourced, eco-friendly crockery, yours for a very reasonable $250 a soup plate plus a donation to an indigenous cause of their choosing, is being hurled Chez Sussex? Imagine the aggrieved exchanges between Meghan and Harry as another deal falls apart amidst harsh criticism from industry insiders:
“WHAT? They actually expected us to WORK for the money? Don’t they know who we are?”
The Duchess thought she had put all that kind of tedious hard graft behind her. After marrying the fifth in line to the throne and establishing a base in the States, she and her husband would trade on their royal fabulousness.
Pious podcast platitudes about female empowerment – well, one female’s empowerment anyway – would be a sizzling hot property. Glittering guests would line up to take a largely non-speaking role in madam’s Archetypes show. Hundreds of millions of dollars would be strewn in their princely path simply because hereditary power gave them the magical ability to spin self-pitying chaff into gold.
It was a genius idea. Harry and Meghan would be the first non-working Content Producers in history. The “content” they sold to Spotify and Netflix would be themselves. By prostituting their royal credentials to the highest bidder, they would be raking it in for years to come.
Except the Duke and Duchess failed to take one crucial thing into account. Hollywood is a ruthless place. You can be dropped in an instant, your contract cancelled, the lustre chipping off your stardom like week-old nail polish.
In the UK, Meghan and Harry’s royal status might still have commanded respectful treatment (despite what they say about the tabloids). Not in LA. “F---ing grifters,” is what Bill Simmons, a Spotify executive, called the couple after the streaming giant pulled out of its $20million (£15.7million) deal with them after just one series. Simmons, who is head of podcast innovation and monetisation, did rather blow a hole in the “mutually agreed to part ways” story. On his own podcast, the splendidly frank Simmons said: “I have got to get drunk one night and tell the story of the Zoom I had with Harry to try to help him with a podcast idea. It’s one of my best stories… F--- them. The grifters.”
Grifters is an American term which roughly translates as petty swindlers out to make a fast buck. The one thing Americans dislike more than a grifter is a “whiner”. Somehow, the Sussexes have pulled off the double-whammy of being whiny grifters.
Here’s the marvellous Bill Simmons again: “You live in Montecito and you just sell documentaries and podcasts and nobody cares what you have to say about anything unless you talk about the Royal family, and you just complain about them.”
After such stinging, spot-on criticism, it is starting to look like open season on the deluded pair.
An author, invited to be a guest on Meghan’s podcast, said that when she arrived she was interviewed by a producer. Allegedly, the recording was then “edited” with the Duchess’s voice spliced in to pretend she had carried out the interview herself. How rude, how utterly lacking in class.
Add to that the rumoured “brainstorming” session with Harry in which the Duke suggested he should interview big names such as Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump to talk about their childhood traumas and the effect it had on their mental health. Thereby improving “world peace”.
So, what next? At a time when the Prince of Wales is launching a serious scheme to abolish homelessness, his younger brother is a laughing stock. Harry & Meghan was Netflix’s biggest documentary debut ever, but mining their personal grievance-lode offers ever-diminishing returns. Harry’s autobiography, Spare, was successful because someone else wrote it. Meghan’s animated children’s film has been cancelled, sparing us its tooth-rotting worthiness (“the adventures of a 12-year-old girl who finds inspiration in a variety of influential women throughout history” – “Mum, can we watch Mission: Impossible?”).
The Sussexes’ deal with Netflix runs until 2025, but the Wall Street Journal talks about a “graveyard of video projects that were never made”. The couple are said to have “struggled to make content beyond their own experiences”, the paper claims. Well, yes, obviously. Trapped in a velvet-padded echo chamber, Meghan and Harry have a hard time grasping that anything exists beyond their own privileged experiences. Denied the deference that was once theirs to command, they now stand cruelly exposed as workshy and entitled in both senses. Allegations of racism and tantrummy flouncing out won’t rescue the situation in the US.
The sharks scent blood. The royal credit card is maxxed out. Ginge and Whinge are in trouble.
Denied the deference they once commanded, the couple stand cruelly exposed as workshy