He sits shirtless, muscular, and shaggy, baseball hat turned backwards (of course) as he bites into a hunk of raw liver the size of a Shih Tzu. Brian Johnson, known as the Liver King, consumes and advocates for a steady diet of raw organ meat to maintain an “ancestral lifestyle.” Johnson has millions of followers on Instagram and TikTok who tune in specifically for this content.
Johnson’s fans are not alone. As economic anxiety reshapes American masculinity, a growing subculture of young and working-class men is turning to maxxing out their bodies as a way to reclaim value in a labor market that increasingly devalues physical work. Working out isn’t enough. It’s how they eat, dress, and sculpt—especially how they eat. And their staple food isn’t expensive biohacker supplements; it’s ground beef, the cheap, protein-dense “boy kibble” endlessly promoted by fitness influencers.
The rise of carnivore aesthetics, lifting culture, and hyper-protein diets reflects a deeper crisis of identity among men who see the traditional beacons of secure manhood—having a well-paying job, owning their own home, being a dad—dimming before their eyes. They’ve come to feel their bodies are one of the few forms of capital they still control. And, perhaps most interestingly, this obsession is nothing new. And, like the fads that came before, they’re following a path that is certain to leave them unfulfilled.
The history of our obsession with beef and masculinity goes back at least 140 years. In 1886, the great novelist Henry James published his novel The Bostonians, in which the unsympathetic Southern patriarch Basil Ransom thunders: “The whole generation is womanized, the masculine tone is passing out of the world; it’s a feminine, nervous, hysterical, chattering, canting age, an age of hollow phrases and false delicacy.”
Later, in 1909, Woods Hutchinson, a physician and health writer, wrote a bestselling book of health advice for young men, Instinct and Health, advising that men consume: “Meat! R-r-red meat, dr-r-ripping with b-l-lood, r-r-reeking of the shambles!”
Then, as now, economic changes, fundamental shifts in family life, and evolving domestic relations all combined to make many young white American men feel anxious about their identity, and desperate to prove their masculinity in a world they perceived as increasingly sapping their virility.
The solution? Beef. And this isn’t the first time Americans have sought to eat their way out of an existential crisis of identity.
These observations sound familiar because at several times in our history, observers have declared a veritable crisis among American men. The transition from farms, the open range, and artisanal workshops to offices and large, impersonal, factories was seen as sapping virility—just as our tiny cubicles and remote workstations are said to do today. Rapid immigration, alongside the entry of women and people of color into new sectors of the workforce in the early 1900s, arguably caused as much alarm as those same groups do today.
So, as now, many men followed the adage that when the going gets tough, the tough, well… toughen up. The first YMCA gym was built in 1869, the first dude ranch a decade later. An estimated one in five American men belonged to a fraternal order in the early 1900s, where they could relax in an all-male and all-white social space.
The Boy Scouts of America (co-founded in 1910 by Ernest Thompson Seton), and the Boone and Crockett Club (founded in 1887 by Theodore Roosevelt before becoming president) heralded the “strenuous life” as virtual boys’ liberation movements. Even the great psychologist and early manfluencer G. Stanley Hall, coiner of the term “adolescence” in 1904, wrote, “you cannot have a firm will without firm muscles.”
Old, bad ideas do not simply fade away. Sometimes they return as viral content. And that’s quite clear today, as the internet is awash with advice about what to eat, wear, pump up and slim down.
Today’s masculinist influencers warn that masculinity is under siege and argue that modern society has made men dangerously weak. British-American social media personality Andrew Tate claims that, “Society as a whole is telling men to be weaker and weaker, saying it’s somehow the solution to everything because being a man is toxically masculine. Being a strong man is bad,” he said on Tucker Carlson’s podcast. “To be a good man, you have to be a very weak one.”
Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson insists that “The masculine spirit is under assault. It’s obvious,” and, ““If you are not capable of cruelty, you are absolutely a victim to anyone who is.” Podcaster Joe Rogan echoes the familiar maxim that “Hard times create hard men. Hard men create easy times. Soft times create soft men. Soft men create hard times,” while fitness influencers like Liver King declare bluntly, “We have a soft man problem today.”
Together, these men, alongside others including Myron Gaines, David Goggins, and Hamza Ahmed, compose the “manosphere,” a group that doles out advice online about how to toughen up and seduce women—in other words, to become “real men.”
They’ve swallowed The Red Pill, and like their early 20th-century forbears, they’re incredibly nostalgic. They look back towards a mythic time when real men roamed the earth like dinosaurs—brawny men, physically strong, emotionally stoic, effortlessly dominant—men who worked with their hands, fought in wars, sacrificed for their families and endured pain and hardship without blinking.
