Say everybody have you seen my balls

Someone on Bluesky linked to a really interesting article, came out in April last year but I didn’t see it until late December:

The new right is a great purveyor of images. Our new Secretary of Defense revels in taking off his shirt and displaying his tattooed, muscular chest. Andrew Tate is much the same, but poses with a cigar and a raw steak while he lectures millions of young men about the right way to treat a woman. Meanwhile AI or OnlyFans or Instagram delivers you an endless stream of dewy girls with flowing hair and glossy lips just barely parted at the camera.
The internet offers a psychedelic dreamscape of gender, perfected. Men with bulging pecs and gleaming biceps. Tradwives bursting out of their cottagecore dresses, slowly whipping batter and cream. You know the aesthetic I’m talking about. You see it on the news every day—or on YouTube, or Tiktok, or wherever visual content is sold. We are all drowning in it.
I call it reactionary camp. Fox News Face, the pancake makeup and bleach-blond hair that every female Fox News anchor is required to adopt. GearBod, the puffed-up look men get on too much synthetic testosterone, veins writhing beneath their skin like grey worms.
It’s not enough to just be a man or a woman. You have to crank the dial up till it breaks. Every stereotype must be magnified to the utmost technologically possible. And I do mean technologically. I’m just saying what everyone knows. “Hard work and good eating” will only get you so far. And you’ll watch guys who took the “hard work and good eating and mail-order meds” option rocket past you.

It goes on in that sort of vein about how this sort of “reactionary camp” (great term for it) requires taking masculinity and femininity to a sort of excessive extreme, and I meant to post about this about a week ago, but I’m so glad I didn’t cos I think we just got the greatest example of it—assuming that it’s serious—in the form of the photo at the top.

Now, “Man Cereal” is an actual thing, in that there’s a website and an Instagram for it; the extent to which it may or may not be some sort of joke is something I don’t know, but the website indicates that they are serious but also self-aware and there’s quite some degree of irony involved… the question then becomes: how seriously do The Manly Men of the right take this “man product”? Do they get the apparent joke? And how much of a joke is it, really? The person who posted the picture also posted this grab from the website…

…and, well, those are some pink balls. I don’t know what to make of it all, though I can’t say I don’t find the whole thing greatly amusing…