Mark Zuckerberg Wants to Increase Facebook's 'Masculine Energy'

What the hell does that even mean?

One of my big New Year’s resolutions for 2025 was to make more of an effort to actively follow tech news, something which I haven’t done previously as much as I would like to. When I made that commitment, what I wasn’t expecting was the sheer amount of stories that’d kick off the year.

In hindsight, I probably should have seen this coming. January 2025 marks the inauguration of America’s new president, and his promises for the tech industry in a lot of ways mark a 180 from the policies currently in place.

There’s scrambling all across corporate America to respond to the changing situation, and the most high-profile of these cases is without a doubt, Facebook (now Meta) and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg. It cannot be understated how much of a juggernaut Meta is in the social media space, and the extent to which its influence has made it a target for many politicians.

The Democratic Party rather infamously blamed its prior election loss on Facebook, and subsequently took a rather aggressive posture towards the company — putting it under immense pressure to police misinformation, most notably with respect to the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, we saw various token gestures taken by the company in line with what would appease the outgoing president and his allies. So far, the demands seem to be to (selectively¹) loosen restrictions on speech rather than add new ones, but we’ll see what else transpires over the next four years. Given the new president’s history of threats towards social media platforms, I’m not particularly optimistic.

Zuckerberg has wasted no time seizing on the moment to cozy up to the new administration — he’s already taken steps to selectively alter his platforms’ ToS to carve out exceptions for speech more favorable to the Republican Party.

If this just seems like the usual sucking up, that’s because it is. However, Mark wishes to paint a different story. A couple days ago, he went onto Joe Rogan’s podcast, portraying himself as a man so pushed to the brink by left-wing extremism, that it caused him to undergo an ideological evolution.

And, oh boy, did the press pick up on it.

Throughout the whole three-hour episode, there was one specific section that’s been popping up a ton in my feed. It was about midway through the interview², where the two begin discussing their history with martial arts and the lessons they took away from the experience. Zuckerberg uses this as an opportunity to tie this personal experience to the changes he was making in his own company. He criticized modern corporate culture for being “overly feminine”, and not having enough of the “masculine” principles he picked up from jiu-jitsu.

Out of everything said in that three-hour podcast, this right here was what seemed to spark the most outrage. Liberal commentators shot back to argue he was wrong, but because to them corporate culture is clearly too masculine.

If you’re not tapped into this sort of discourse, a lot of this might sound bizarre — so let me try to explain. Zuckerberg is alluding to the trope of the “feminized HR class” that’s gained steam among right-wing intellectuals as of late. According to the theory, a lot of the characteristics associated with “institutional wokeness” (censorship, quotas, moralism) are due to the overrepresentation of women and personality traits associated with them (risk-aversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness) in these spaces. With this context in mind, one can get a clearer picture as to what Zuckerberg means by wanting to “balance masculine and feminine energies”.

Now, while a lot of these thinkpieces tend to be based on incredibly dubious science, he didn’t pull this idea out of thin air. After all, the reverse argument has long been argued by feminists — that women’s presence could transform the moral character of institutions for the better:

Feminists have always found themselves torn between arguments that minimize the importance of sexual differences and arguments that run the risk of exaggerating them… By the end of the nineteenth century, most of them had come to favor the claim that access to the ballot box and the professions would enlarge the domain of women’s distinctive capacity for love and nurture. Once women gained access to the world of men, they argued, ruthless competition would give way to care and compassion.³

Then really boiling it down, we’re really just left with the sorts of back-and-forths that could go (and already have gone) on for ages. Are masculine or feminine values more suited towards leadership? What does a balance of the two look like? How “masculine” or “feminine” is current workplace culture?

But instead of getting lost in those weeds, I’d like to focus on a much more basic question. Why are we even assuming that corporations can have a gender? When I search up Meta, the first thing I’m seeing isn’t a face, it’s this:

Unsurprisingly then, the very same arguments that have (rightfully) been used against corporate feminism can just as easily be turned against this new wave of right-wing corporate “masculinism”:

Putting women in charge of corporations, law firms, newspapers, publishing houses, TV stations, universities, and hospitals does not make those institutions more democratic and humane. It does not soften the masculine drive for competitive achievement with the feminine gift for friendly cooperation. It does not make capitalist institutions more loving and maternal. Those institutions have a life of their own, quite independent of the qualities of the people who manage them. They obey the laws of the market, not the golden rule. They have only one overriding aim, to show a profitable return on investment; everything else is incidental.⁴

Facebook is not your dad. Facebook is not a single person, nor is it a political movement. Legally speaking, Facebook has one interest in mind, and that is to deliver as much revenue as possible for its shareholders. As I wrote about many, many years ago, capitalism already has its own system of incentives built into it. To argue we can infuse it with a “masculine” or “feminine” spirit presupposes that it even has a soul in the first place.

Maybe taking up jiu-jitsu has been a journey of self-discovery for Zuckerberg. Maybe Biden staffers screaming at him over the COVID issue personally soured him on the Democratic Party. But when you cut through all the talk and actually focus on the company’s actions there’s really only one thing that mattered towards affecting the shift. The levers of power in our government changed hands.

It’s not just that Zuckerberg has taken to “making his companies less woke”. Stuff like deleting messenger themes or removing tampons from bathrooms are ultimately token gestures, they don’t really tell us much about what really matters to the company. What is more telling are the things the press hasn’t focused on: bankrolling campaigns to outlaw competitors, lobbying for Trump to strongarm the EU into repealing unfavorable regulations, and explicitly advocating for America to prioritize its companies.

Zuckerberg went onto that podcast looking to rebrand himself as an ideological maverick, but the truth is that he’s there as a CEO providing a marketing spin. When even his opponents spend time focusing on the man himself — his history, his quirks, his politics — they end up falling for the narrative set up by the company. This narrative that the company can be humanized, related to, and rooted for.

Ironically enough, it was Tim Sweeney of all people who seemed to hit the nail on the head:

Link to original tweet

Let us not forget that even prior to Trump’s re-election, Meta illegally colluded with Google to undermine their competition in the ad space. What about the time when they ran an illegal buy-or-bury scheme in order to crush competition coming from other social networks?

On Rogan’s podcast, Zuckerberg makes this big show of criticizing Apple for its lack of innovation, platform fees, and closed-off ecosystem. What he fails to mention is that Meta is arguably even more complacent and devoid of innovation than Apple, his own platforms charge even higher fees for app developers, and that Facebook is one of the worst walled gardens on the entire internet.

Similarly, where Zuckerberg criticizes TikTok for its lack of privacy, he speaks as if his own platform isn’t — yet again — one of the worst offenders. Isn’t it rather convenient that all of these grand moral stands he takes seems to only be against his company’s business rivals?

The world of elections and Beltway discourses are by nature never going to fully reflect reality as experienced by the rest of the country. What it chooses to focus on will always be bound both by what a government could realistically expect to accomplish and what matters most to the types of people most likely to be “highly politically engaged”.

Political campaigns shape their messaging around what they believe can build winning coalitions. For a coalition to work, it has to show promise both in terms of numbers but also institutional power. When the Democrats of the 60s campaigned on race or the Republicans of the 90s campaigned on religion, there was a conscious decision made that this would help provide the ideal cross-section of voters.

As demographics change, and old factors such as race become less central to people’s identity, parties are scrambling to find something else to latch onto. This, likely, is why there was so much clamoring about the upcoming gender divide in politics. (Of course, this is rather curious given the actual presidential results seemed to tell a different story.)

Perhaps it’s worth noting that for the politicians, consultants, and the press class — who make their careers out of spinning words — the reality they experience is not the same reality most of us do. A lot of the people in this space from a relatively similar class background, both culturally and economically. Should it come as a surprise then, that the sorts of divisions that they do focus on are the ones which personally resonate with them?

And this is where what I have taken to calling “gender-coding of politics” comes in. Gender cuts across class lines. Even those at the absolute top of this country have experience with being a man or a woman. In some ways, it’s even more pronounced for them, as those are the exact kinds of environments where the mundane, practical aspects of gender are most likely to give way to its abstract, ideological forms.

“Masculine” and “feminine” are incredibly vague words. They refer to a loose collection of sentiments, and in some cases little more than an aesthetic. From that angle, it becomes incredibly easy to deem something “masculine-coded” or “feminine-coded”.

Whether it’s Democratic senators tying women’s issues to infrastructure or right-wing media pundits blaming gender politics for American foreign policy blunders, gender-coding provides a convenient framework whereby one can discuss whatever issue they want in a fashion that’s always targeted towards half the population. By playing these association games, anything from cryptocurrency to raw milk can be roped into the culture war.

And doing so also frames the discussion in terms whereby actual tangible change to how our systems work is completely unnecessary. Russia flouting international norms in its invasion of Ukraine? According to Boris Johnson, that’s because guys like Putin are giving too much “toxic masculinity” and the solution is more women in power. Corporations struggling to balance their bottom line with acting in a responsible manner? According to Mark Zuckerberg, that’s a sign the “masculine energies” are off-balance.

The end result is that we might shuffle around the talking heads in power, maybe change the language we use or “commit” to a different set of principles, but ultimately the change is superficial. The real cost is in that all of this discourse provides a smokescreen to stop us from discussing and addressing the problems that affect real people on a real day-to-day basis.

Social media has become centralized in a way that even something as simple as a site’s moderation policy becomes a massive, never-ending political tug of war. Yet none of our politicians are pushing for decentralization or the breaking down of walled gardens — only that they get to be the ones to control the “giant propaganda machine”. Nearly every major service provider online collects obscene amounts of data on us, yet we still don’t see either party make a serious push for privacy laws. Online commerce continues to erode the independence of small businesses, yet there seems to be no solution in sight.

Instead, we get to watch two factions of the elite class argue over who gets to be the face of our institutions and who plays the heel. Meanwhile companies like Meta will run to the bank, continuing to post profits year after year.

1. Despite being marketed as a “principled stand” in the name of free speech, the changes to the ToS have very specific carve-outs for specifically the types of previously-restricted speech more commonly associated with the political right. There still remains a policy of censorship regarding other forms of speech, as the EFF discusses in further detail in this article.

2. The full interview can be found here, the relevant section starts at 1:28:57.

3. Lasch, Christopher. Women and the Common Life: Love, Marriage, and Feminism. Edited by Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn. 1st ed. New York: Norton, 1997, p. 121.

4. Lasch, Christopher. Women and the Common Life: Love, Marriage, and Feminism. Edited by Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn. 1st ed. New York: Norton, 1997, p. 116.