21 hours ago
3
How does the perfect morning begin? With gentle stretching, a coffee in bed? It could be a walk in the sun, a hot breakfast or simply managing to spend the first 20 minutes off your phone before spending the next 20 on Instagram. Lately, it may feel like the answer is being more productive.
The optimised morning routine has become a near-mythical ideal for young people, sold by fitness influencers posting obsessively about their 5.30am starts, claiming to finish their weight training, macronutrient-rich meals and emails before our first alarm – promising that everything in your life would be better if you, too, had the discipline to just get up early.
Our comparative feelings of inadequacy in response to this trend may have reached new heights last month, after the viral morning routine from the US fitness influencer Ashton Hall. The video features him getting up at 3.52am, plunging his face into multiple ice baths, following an idiosyncratic skincare routine (involving banana peel), meditating, journaling and completing several workouts to maintain his ripped physique. Female staff swarm around in the background, bringing towels and ice, preparing him breakfast and delivering branded Saratoga glass water bottles – these women often only seen as a pair of hands. In the caption on TikTok and Instagram, Hall says this routine “changed his life”; warning that “sin lives late at night” and to deal with “a weak mind, bad decisions or lack of productivity”, his followers should go to sleep early and spend the first four hours of the day practising this grimly rigid schedule. You have probably already seen this video: at the time of writing, it has been viewed more than 900m times across various platforms.
In the days since the routine was shared, it has drawn wide commentary, with many questioning if men are OK, if the video is even all that serious (Hall is a content creator for work and this could easily be pure rage-bait) and asking what it says about modern masculinity. The activist Matt Bernstein noted on X: “15 years ago this routine would get you called gay (or ‘metrosexual’) but is now considered peak alpha male behavior. Something weird has shifted.”
We’ve spent three years talking about the chilling rise of hyper-macho, Andrew Tate-style misogyny influencers, who promote an alpha brand that looks very different from Hall’s: one that glorifies domestic violence, explicitly says that women deserve limited rights and broadly champions a vision of gender dynamics that were common 80 years ago. Hall’s video also went viral in the middle of a public discussion around what to do about these ideas proliferating on social media, spurred on by the popularity of the Netflix series Adolescence, which makes the somewhat thin argument that all young men are susceptible to violent misogynistic thinking. As a result, this video might look like a departure from what we’ve come to know from alpha-influencers, revealing a perhaps absurd corner of the online male self-optimisation space, but one that’s completely harmless.
Hall’s video undoubtedly shows us a ridiculous side to hustle culture. But is that all it tells us about men today? Despite its risibility – and even Hall’s relative sweetness and politeness compared with those such as Tate, thanking the women in his videos – this content is evidence of a once-fringe manosphere squarely part of the mainstream. Now it has room to adapt and evolve to meet a growing audience of young guys attracted to a conservative gender philosophy, in which Hall pitches a less toxic version of a similar ethos.
While many men may be turned off by the overtness of Tate, this doesn’t mean they are turned off to a world defined by masculine dominance. Content like this plays into an egocentric male fantasy that glorifies the impossible image of a perfectly sculpted physique and encourages men to hustle and grind to meet an austere, success-obsessed brand of individualism.
Elsewhere, Hall promotes a Christian, puritanical living – not just through his content, but through his (paid) mentorship scheme, where he coaches men to avoid hook-up culture and to stop trying to impress women; to, instead, change their lives in service to themselves and God. As Beth McColl, the writer and co-host of the culture podcast Everything Is Content, said on a recent episode dedicated to Hall’s video: “You have to live this clean life in service to God – but you’re almost God yourself, because everything is actually in service of your own perfection.”
This content is less obviously misogynistic, but is still designed to promote regressive ideas about masculinity, which reinforce the new wave of conservatism we have begun to see among Gen-Z men. Men are placed at the centre of the universe, waited on and served by women who are obedient, submissive and secondary, if they are even considered. However, unlike content from those explicitly advocating for a patriarchal hierarchy, these videos masquerade as something mindlessly benign – giving them, at times, a greater power to disseminate via the implicit message that this is how good, happy, successful men and women act.
There are a concerning number of boys and men who align with the extreme views of figures such as Tate. But alone, Tate and men like him cannot shift wider culture. What can is the echoing reverb of something more palatable, that nudges us closer and closer to the same thing. Our reactionary shift is going to look much more like what Hall offers: a subtle lean towards patriarchy, which wears its motivations more lightly while feeding into our many new channels of misogyny.
Ashton Hall is not the cause of our current gender divide, but we shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking content like his isn’t part of the problem. We guarantee ourselves a worse future by letting these ideas fester in plain sight, unchecked – dismissing something sinister as nothing more than silly.
Sarah Manavis is a US writer and critic living in the UK
-
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at [email protected]
