Pizza that nobody wants
Why is it so difficult to 'sell' the idea of healthier masculinity and gender equality?
I’m joining the UN Women UK again this year as a virtual participant of CSW (Commission on the Status of Women) – the biggest global policy-making body dedicated exclusively to promoting gender equality and the empowerment of women. The meetings over the coming weeks are the largest gathering of gender-equality advocates in the world.
As we go into this year’s CSW, I wanted to share something that’s stayed with me from the last one: a phrase I heard at one of the CSW side events, Catalysts for Change: Breaking down gender stereotypes in media and advertising.1
The event was hosted by the Council of Europe, the foremost human rights organisation in Europe (which, for the first time in its seventy-five-year history, is a women-led organisation). Chaired by Marja Ruotanen, Director of Human Dignity, Equality, and Sport Values at the Directorate General of Democracy, it brought together representation from key authorities, civil society, and the media and advertising sector.
[This post is a bit longer than my usual, so I’ve given you some delightful subheadings. You’ll see that the fact the post is long is part of the problem I’m about to write about].
Men as active allies in achieving women’s rights
It having been International Women’s Day yesterday, you might expect me to share some of what the women had to say at this event. But actually, I want to use this space to highlight how important it is that men also take a stand for women’s rights and do the work of championing gender equality and tackling toxic masculinity.
One of the event panellists was José Campi-Portaluppi, Director of Communications & Advocacy for Equimundo – a research organisation transforming intergenerational patterns of harm and promoting care, empathy, and accountability among boys and men throughout their lives. Equimundo believes that male-identified individuals must be active allies in achieving gender equality and full rights for women, girls and non-binary individuals. The organisation partners with global brands to inspire them to embed new representations of masculinity in their adverts, social media, and branding, rather than getting stuck in the stereotype tunnel.
The Manosphere
Part of Equimundo’s work is to encourage brands to ‘meet people where they are’ in their thinking, and outside of traditional media. Unfortunately, where a lot of people are is the Manosphere.2 Equimundo defines the Manosphere as ‘a broad collection of websites, forums, and other online spaces characterised by their misogynistic and anti-feminist content, which swoops in with clear messages to help men make sense of a changing world, particularly around gender and gender roles. Many of these spaces exist on platforms like YouTube, Reddit, and TikTok, notably aboveground –increasingly permeating mainstream media – rather than hidden on the dark web.’
Campi-Portaluppi shared that: ‘The Super Bowl this year [2024] had 122 million people watching in the US; Mr Beast has 244 million people watching his YouTube channel. So there is a great divide on the largest media moment in the United States of America when you see that any influencer online has double that reach on a daily basis.’3
The impacts/ripples of the manosphere are serious and far-reaching. If you’ve read the UK news this week you’ll have seen the story that the misogyny promoted by influencer Andrew Tate has fuelled crimes of the worst kind. (See, for example, – and with a content warning – the BBC article ‘Murders show online misogyny can cause real harm’).
What is a healthier masculinity? What does that look like? (This is the pizza bit)
The struggle to ‘meet people where they are’ is not just about profile/platform size, numbers of followers, or people engaging with content, but, as Campi-Portaluppi shared, the fact that there is a huge struggle in easily defining and sharing what a healthier, positive, feminist masculinity actually is and what it would look like in daily life and in the media. He says:
More often than not, the folks that I work with will say, ‘Well, it can be everything; the idea is about the potential to become everything, the idea, the conversation is nuanced, it’s not a clear thing, there’s not just one way of enacting that masculinity or representing that masculinity.’
And that is very hard to tweet, that is very hard to translate into a commercial, that is very hard to ground into a media piece that is thirty seconds long.
We need to be clearer, we need to speak the language that people are speaking, to be less jargoney, and have less of an expectation for everything that we want to fit into 150 characters, because that is simply not possible.
And the people that we are up… I wouldn’t want to say ‘up against’ but it sometimes feels like that’s the case… the people like the Tates of the world and the Petersons of the world; they have quite a formulaic approach, they have quite a clear and concise idea of what good masculine is for them. And for us, the ‘product’ that we are selling seems to be very complicated. Someone was saying to me this morning, ‘It feels like sometimes we’re selling pizza and people do not want to buy it’. I feel more that we’re thinking that we’re selling pizza but we’re really not sure of what we’re selling, how we’re selling, and what we’re saying.
So, just to say, let’s try to reach an agreement of what that positive masculinity – or what that alternative to the stereotypes is – that would mean a great deal, I would anticipate, for those working directly in the media to be able to convey that.
And this is what I notice can be the case when I try to write about ‘how to do better’ in terms of gender equality. I started this post a year ago, but didn’t feel like I could share it, as I didn’t (and still don’t) have a succinct way to express these ideas. The thought – that a new, healthy version of masculinity is as feel-good and easy and crowd-pleasing as pizza … but remains a tough sell – has stayed with me all year. By my writing desk, there’s a Post-it note (now curling at the edges) that reads ‘Pizza that nobody wants’ to remind me to keep thinking on it. It’s so obvious to me that a healthier, non-stereotypical masculinity is good for everyone, but my writer’s block around it is proof to me that it’s going to take quite a bit of work to get it into pizza shape.
I’ve noticed that same feeling when just chatting about it with people I know, or even thinking my own thoughts. That sort of voice that says, ‘someone else has probably got better answers than me’ or ‘I’ll have to live my life as a perfect example of what I’m preaching before I begin to ask others to do the same’.
Advocacy in our own homes and online spaces
So why am I writing this post now? There’s the guilt of having let a year go by and not having said anything about it. But there’s also the belief in my belly that advocacy in our homes, in our WhatsApp groups, on the social media we use (and that uses us) is in our hands. And even when advocacy is imperfect, it at least starts the conversation.
Although Campi-Portaluppi’s recommendation (to reach agreement about a definition of positive masculinity) is directed at people who, like him, are working in gender and/or for Civil Society Organisations, it is not just the responsibility of organisations like Equimundo to influence the media and create this change. The media is part of our daily life (whether we like it or not), but we are each (I would hope!) part of our every day too, and that of our colleagues, communities, friends, and families. Each of us can find something that can make this pizza be ‘more pizza’. Even if it feels futile, or like it’s for someone else to do; it’s not, and it is for us all to do.
People at the UN meetings are ‘just’ people; in fact, Campi-Portaluppi opened by saying: ‘I come from a small rural Indigenous community in the Andes in the middle of Ecuador… and then [I’m] here having this conversation [laughs]. So there’s always a bit of imposter syndrome’.
The media are people too. In the past, and sometimes still now, I’ve pictured The Media as one mega mean thing. Campi-Portaluppi says how it’s easy to think of it as ‘Mr Burns from The Simpsons trying to machinate how to destroy society or reinforce stereotypes’. But the media is not an amporphous creature, a single evil entity; it is a collection of humans doing human things like tapping away on a keyboard as I am doing now, or talking to someone, or telling a story about something.
So here I am trying my best – despite the discomfort and without the answers – to share some words that I think are important.4
I recommend tuning into the UN events (which are happening now and year-round) on the UN’s channel webtv.un.org – to open up understanding of the way the human world works and how decisions get made. The live stream of the Opening of CSW69/Beijing+30 is on Monday at webtv.un.org/en/asset/k1p/k1pls3ef9m
You can also find the recording of this week’s celebration event for International Women’s Day, featuring some powerful speeches from incredible people.
And here’s the link to the Catalysts for Change event that’s inspired this post today: https://webtv.un.org/en/asset/k1v/k1vw80z9i6
By the way, the majority (I think it’s around 70%) of the world’s media and advertising companies are led by men.
To understand the Manosphere, and what healthier connection can look like, I recommend taking a look at Equimundo’s resources What is the Manosphere? and The Manosphere Rewired.
I did fact-check these numbers, as my editing ears thought it sounded too neat that they were exactly half/double. They check out: 123.7 million people watched the 2024 Super Bowl (which took place on 11 February 2024). On 19 February 2024, an account on Twitter/X called 'MrBeast Statistics' posted that the YouTube channel had more than 240 million subscribers and 43 billion channel views.
