What kills you will make your memecoin stronger: injured masculinity and financialized media

As the second quarter of the 21st century unfolds, the music industry has become one where the majority of artists basically work for little to no money, performing labor that socially reproduces musical culture while Spotify and Live Nation make money from VC, monetizing user data, and layers upon layers of service fees. At the same time, headlines from NPR to GRAMMY.com to countless college newspapers declared 2024 the year of the “femininominon” where women came to dominate the music industry. Like teaching, music king seems to have become a feminized profession, one that is perceived to be dominated by women and for that reason is poorly compensated. Rock star is now a pink-collar job.

I’ve written about how rock’s defining aesthetic, cool, has been flipped from an inherently macho status game to, well, brat. For much of the late 19th and 20th centuries, Western popular music’s libidinal economy was organized around white masculine appropriations of stereotypical Black masculinity in an attempt to recover the physicality and sexuality that brains-in-vats style Enlightenment white masculinity renounces. Think Adam Levine’s “moves like Jagger” or Justin Timberlake “taking sexy back” or the whole phenomenon of so-called “cock rock.” There’s a reason why musicologist Susan McClary found that the tension-release structures common to much Western classical and popular music mirror stereotypical cisheteromasculine orgasm: these musical traditions model aesthetic pleasure on cisheteromasculine sexual pleasure.

With manosphere influencers like the infamous Andrew Tate declaring it’s “gay” to have sex with women just for pleasure (and not perpetuating one’s “genetic legacy”), it’s safe to say that pop culture’s dominant constructions of masculinity have moved on from the libidnal economy of “sexyback” and on to something else. As Tate’s singling out of the intergenerational transfer of genetic property suggests, pleasure is out and property accumulation is in. Masculinity’s new libidinal economy is transparently a political economy, one where aesthetic or sexual desire is manipulated not as built or released tension, but quite directly as wealth.

The spectacle of the suicide of crypto investor and X user MistaFuccYou (MFU) makes starkly clear, pop culture increasingly frames masculinity as a performance of aggrieved injury which is then flipped into exponentially scalable returns. Streaming live on X/Twitter, MFU claimed that he lost everything in a bad crypto deal and pointed a gun at himself. Before pulling the trigger, he plead “If I die, make me a meme coin.” Viewers watched him bleed out for half an hour while other users “reacted in real-time as meme coins using his name flooded the market within minutes.” The spectacle of MFU’s financial and mortal injury drove a market bubble by creating overinflated interest in the value of brands oriented around that spectacle. MFU killed himself to make the value of his brand stronger.

Flipping the spectacle of white masculine injury into viral content, MFU’s X/Twitter stream adopts the same market strategy Netflix used in its Woodstock 99 documentary “Trainwreck.” As the series shows in graphic detail, Woodstock 99 was a music festival that ended in what I’ve called “not the white riot Joe Strummer was looking for” as the largely white male audience, primed by some misogynist banter by Fred Durst, responds to deteriorating infrastructural conditions like the absence of potable water with riots, arson, and sexual assault. Though the festival itself was, to put it extremely lightly, a flop, Netflix used the violent spectacle of white cisheteromasculine injury to transform that flop into content that drove a flurry of likes, clicks, and posts. In the case of both MFU and “Trainwreck,” the extreme performance of masculine injury (or masculinity as wounded entitlement) generates the exponentially scalable growth 21st century financialized capitalism expects from good investments.

I wrote a whole book about how women and other feminized phenomena can meet that expectation through the performance of gendered resilience: they make a spectacle out of the performance of both the damage patriarchy has done to them and their resilient overcoming of that damage in popular feminist triumph. Gender studies scholar Michelle Murphy has noted a similar phenomena in representations of what she calls “The Girl” figure. “Join[ing] Western liberal feminist imaginaries of empowerment to speculative finance” (120), The Girl “is calculated as a risk pool that draws together a bloom of possibility, a bouquet of potential, a cluster of affect, applicable to any dispossessed condition anywhere, as long as it is ‘girled’” (120). Like my femme subject of resilience discourse, The Girl represents the exponential growth achieved when somebody doesn’t let the crisis of patriarchal oppression go to waste and transforms feminized dispossession into a spectacle of returns on investment. In Murphy’s formulation, adjectives like “bloom” and “bouquet” evoke a feminized form of multiplication, like the sped-up footage of a flower unfolding from a single bud to a vast plurality of petals. This “avalanche” (117) of compounding positive returns on investment represents the ideal of 21st century finance capitalism – think about how crypto and meme stocks suddenly and exponentially spike in value, etc. Similar to Tiqqun’s claim that the “young girl” is neoliberalism’s ideal subject, Murphy emphasizes that this figure of the ideal investment is “girled” because feminized phenomena are presumed to start from a position of low value; The Girl personifies the distressed asset that gets flipped.

If the dominant figure personifying high-performing human capital is femme, this puts masculinity at a disadvantage. As Murphy puts it, the flip side of The Girl is the stereotype that “boys…offer lower rates of return” (123). Her study focuses on the 1990s through the 2010s, and in this era The Girl’s masculine counterpart was framed as “non-compliant brown boys” such as “the figure of the racialized young, possibly Muslim, male” (123). With the post-9/11 West caught in a moral panic about so-called “terrorists,” such as the figure of the suicide bomber, it makes sense that the figure for an exponentially-destructive radicalization is a brown boy or man.

Of course as we are now well aware the real wave of radicalization that happened in the late 2000s and across the 2010s was the rise of the manosphere and what Sara Banet-Weiser calls “popular misogyny.” These movements use personal injury and wounded entitlement as devices for the performance of a masculine analog of The Girl’s femme resilience. The claim of injury or wound gives mascs the appearance of setback that they need to plausibly claim the same degree of scalability The Girl is assumed to have. This is quite literally what happened with MFU-branded memecoins: his actual, physiological injury created a state of dispossession or scarcity that (at least temporarily) made his brand an exceptionally hot investment for his colleagues to pump and dump. “Trainwreck” demonstrates how this translates to a more cultural or discursive level, as the spectacle of mens’ wounded entitlement creates a sense of exponentialized growth that’s less flowery and more traditionally masculine: hard, angry, aggressive, etc. Though many of the well-known figures for this form of masculinity-as-personal-injury are associated with far-right subcultures (incels, techbros, fans of the current US president, etc.), MFU’s case shows this same figure in a more explicitly economic context lacking, at least on the surface, explicit references to neoreactionary ideologies.

I don’t have a snappy name for this figure of masculinity-as-personal-injury, but it seems like the main or one of the main figures for cisheteromasculinity that pop culture offers today. From the rebel without a cause to hippies, ravers, slackers, and the hipster, Boomers, Gen X, and millennials all grew up in contexts where cool was king when it came to the form of masculinity pop culture idealized. But just as the political economy of music and media industries has changed from one of commodities and broadcasts to one of licensing and streaming, the gendered, racialized libidinal economies of media have also shifted. Performing personal injury/wounded entitlement lets masculine subjects access the “gains” of a high-performing investment in terms aligned with traditional patriarchal masculinity (i.e. and not as a girlie blossom).

One thing this suggests is that the neoreactionary politics everywhere from the White House to NBC are not a break from neoliberalism but continuous with it. The kind of aggrieved masculinity performed by the US’s most famous techbro, personal memoir author, and reality show host is fostered by the political economy of neoliberal financial capitalism.