Zuckerberg’s Macho Posturing Looks a Lot Like Cowardice

I really, really wanted to like Mark Zuckerberg’s gushing appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast last Friday. Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, Facebook’s parent company, made some important points about the inadequacies of fact-checking as well as the troubling ways that governments can manipulate private companies.

Having grown up under an authoritarian regime, I cherish the right to free speech that Zuckerberg kept talking about. But having gone on to study the way that authoritarian regimes work, I know to focus on what people do, not what they say.

On the podcast, Zuckerberg told Rogan about how society had become too “neutered or emasculated” and gushed about “masculine energy” and his newfound devotion to jujitsu.

I’m not their target audience but I feel their vibe. A.C.L. tears, which they spent some time commiserating about, are pretty nasty. And I have a soft spot for martial arts content.

But one of the most recent actions that Zuckerberg’s supposedly emboldened company took was to banish tampons from office men’s rooms. (The products had been provided for transgender or nonbinary employees.) “Masculine energy,” my lady-parts — that is the most snowflake move I’ve heard of in a long time. If the men in your company can’t even handle the sight of a box of tampons, you’ve got bigger problems than an A.C.L. tear.

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