6
Masculinity Consultants and the Threat of Men’s Expendability
Society has changed. But female nature has fundamentally not changed. Female nature, just like that of men, evolved over hundreds of thousands of years and will not change anytime soon. If men are to live happily with women, they must peel back the scales that society tries to place on their eyes and appreciate life for what it truly is, not what it is advertised to be. We must open our eyes and learn from fallen men.
Masculinity consultant Jacob Aliet (2022a: 40–1)
When I asked him about his favourite book on masculinity and manhood, Philemon Otieno, author of biographically inspired self-help books, social media personality, and childhood friend of Samuel and Arthur, told me to read Brett and Kate McKay’s The Art of Manliness: Classic Skills and Manners for the Modern Man (2009). He had showcased the book on his WhatsApp status on a few occasions, sometimes while surrounded by a few of his younger male friends who considered Philemon their mentor. The Art of Manliness is a collection of advice on how a man should behave in daily life and in extraordinary circumstances. It teaches the male reader how to dress, how to shave, and how to greet people like a man, but also how to save a drowning person, how to make fire without a lighter, and how to take care of your pregnant wife. The authors set the stage with a description of contemporary gender relations:
Discouraged from celebrating the positive aspects of manliness, society today focuses only on the stereotypical and negative aspects of manhood. […] Many people have argued that we need to reinvent what manliness means in the twenty-first century. Usually this means stripping manliness of its masculinity and replacing it with more sensitive feminine qualities. We argue that manliness doesn’t need to be reinvented. The art of manliness just needs to be rediscovered. (2009: 2)
This diagnosis resembles migrant men’s critique of the money-oriented distortion of the narrative of the male breadwinner. Instead of discarding this narrative, many male migrants attempted to reclaim its beneficial essence. Some migrant men tried to rediscover this inner core of masculinity, their ‘deep manhood’ (Kimmel and Kaufman 1993: 8), by engaging with Kenyan masculinity consultants. Through workshops, self-help books, social media, and personal meetings, these masculinity consultants gave Kenyan men advice on issues related to masculinity, such as how to deal with the experience of economic pressure or how to overcome the anxiety of not performing well enough sexually.
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Figure 10 Self-help literature sold in a bookshop in Nairobi’s central business district. Photograph by the author, 23 February 2022.
By answering what attracted Kenyan migrant men to masculinity consultants and their advice, this chapter responds to the explosion of a market for, mostly but not exclusively US-American, self-help books such as Joseph Murphy’s The Power of Your Subconscious Mind (1963), Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad Poor Dad (1998), Rollo Tomassi’s The Rational Male (2013), and Jack Donovan’s The Way of Men (2012). In an informal chat, the owner of a bookstore along Moi Avenue in Nairobi’s CBD that regularly advertised books by Kenyan and Western masculinity consultants, for instance, confirmed that self-help books on masculinity were in high demand among young Kenyan men looking for guidance and male mentorship. Self-help books did not only constitute more than half of the books on offer in most Nairobian bookstores and among people selling books on the streets of the city’s CBD (figure 10). They also circulated as illegal soft copies among many male and female migrants in Pipeline who littered their WhatsApp status with motivational quotes from self-help authors.
To understand the craze for self-help books, masculinity consultants, and relationship advice across Nairobi and Kenya (see Kamiri 2017), the first sections of this chapter discuss the life and worldview of Philemon Otieno, a 30-year-old male migrant from Homa Bay County to whom Samuel and Arthur introduced me in late 2019. In contrast to jo-pap who socialized masculinity and the gym members who focused on achieving a masculine appearance, Philemon conceptualized masculinity as an innate and God-given potential that must be nurtured through a cognitive mind-set characterized by vision, perseverance, and entrepreneurship. Nurturing one’s God-given masculine core would ultimately result in economic success and thereby ease the experience of pressure.
After analyzing Philemon’s religiously inspired activities and advice, the chapter hones in on two groups of Kenyan men who, influenced by Rollo Tomassi’s secular and pseudo-scientific red pill movement, participated in a globally connected backlash against feminism. Using the metaphor of the blue and red pill from the ‘Matrix’ trilogy, followers of the red pill movement hold the opinion that the world is ‘femicentric’ and that men need to swallow the red pill to be ‘unplugged’ from the false truths of feminism (see, for instance, Aliet 2022a). So doing would allow men to reclaim their natural role as powerful and self-sustaining leaders who are needed by women. Though these two groups operated with and applied the language of the red pill movement, they did so in different ways. A small and non-hierarchically organized group of men loosely spearheaded by local self-help book authors Silas Nyanchwani (2021a, 2022) and Jacob Aliet (2022a) offered its members not only personalized advice but also a protected platform or, as one member called it, a ‘safe space’ to be vulnerable. In contrast, the social media personality Amerix, a Kenyan healthcare professional who has become popular among Kenyan men over the last five years and had over one million followers on Twitter in 2022, gave the almost 100,000 members of his Telegram channel rather standardized solutions that they were not supposed to question.
By discussing these three ways in which local masculinity consultants offered solace to male Kenyans under pressure by reassuring them of men’s supremacy over women, this chapter ethnographically illustrates how migrant men, against the background of the fear of their expendability, sought advice and explanations for their miserable economic and romantic situation (for an overview on Kenyan masculinity consultancy, see also Schmidt 2022a). By performing practices of wasteful masculinity in pap or by lifting weights in the No Mercy Gym, male migrants tried to evade women’s pressure-inducing expectations in a nondiscursive way. In contrast to these nondiscursive forms of evading pressure that were often accompanied by emotional rants about specific women, or women in general, masculinity consultants provided men with an ideological critique of contemporary gender relations, which helped their male readers and male followers of their social media accounts to make sense of their relationships with women. Instead of continuing to feel pressured by female expectations, masculinity consultants taught men that women’s expectations were an inevitable result of female nature that, once understood, could be turned to men’s advantage. Their pseudo-scientific and religiously bolstered claims about male superiority and the female nature assured migrant men that they, despite what they felt society was propagating, were not dispensable. Men, that was the message, just had to become men again.