Abstract
This article engages with the online trend of ‘rawdogging’ flights—where men endure long flights without any distractions, entertainment or amenities—to analyse the gendered logic behind digital detox cultures. We investigate this trend, a typical instance of digital detox, as a hegemonically masculine practice of resistance to what are experienced as the feminizing forces of digital technologies. Our contention is that this experience of emasculating stimulation is shaped by the tendency of networked devices to structure subjectivity in ways predominantly defined by vibes, flows and the capture of affect and attention. The immersive volatility of digital environments challenges perceptual control and corrodes the autonomous agency of the male self, thus triggering a defensive push-back. We conceptualise this response as a form of paranoid masculinity, which relentlessly polices the boundaries of the self and obsessively shores up fantasies of autonomy, rationality and (self-)control to ward off the supposedly emasculating forces of alterity, emotion and stimulation.
Keywords
rawdogging, media stimulation, paranoid masculinities, feminizing technologies, digital detox
JERNEJ MARKELJ
University of Amsterdam, THE NETHERLANDS
JAKKO KEMPER
University of Amsterdam, THE NETHERLANDS
For the official version of record, see here:
Markelj, J., & Kemper, J. (2026). The Masculine Urge to Rawdog Life: Male Paranoia and the Gendering of Digital Detox. Media Theory, 10(1), 75–100. https://doi.org/10.70064/mt.v10i1.1368
Introduction
‘Just rawdogged a 7hr flight (new personal best), no headphones, no movie, no water, nothing. Incredible. The power of my mind knows no bounds’, reads the caption of a viral TikTok video posted by user @oiwudini, an aspiring music producer. ‘POV: you have successfully completed another 7 hour flight watching only the maps’ states the caption of another viral video, superimposed over footage of the flight map on the seat-back screen. These videos are part of a wider TikTok trend of ‘rawdogging’ flights—a trend that is predominantly adopted by men (Pelley, 2024) and that reached peak virality in the summer of 2024, with celebrities like the Norwegian footballer Erling Haaland participating.[i] The rawdogging trend gets its name from a slang term for unprotected sex: to rawdog is to have sex without the mediation of the condom. In other words, rawdogged sex strips away the mitigating artifice of the condom. Similarly, a rawdogged flight is a flight without any external (media) stimulation that would alleviate its uncomfortable tedium: no smartphones or tablets, no films, music or books, no snacks or food, and, in extreme cases, no water, sleep, movement or toilet breaks. The only allowed prop is the inbuilt animated map, which tracks the flight from the departure point to its destination. In the absence of all other forms of media stimulation, a rawdogger allegedly exhibits a pure presence of mind and exercises their power over the body and their environment.
Journalistic and scholarly accounts have interpreted the trend of rawdogging flights in different ways. Some see it as nothing more than a silly meme (Wichter, 2024) or a harmless way of practicing mindfulness (Anas, 2024), some emphasize the health risks linked to extreme forms of rawdogging (Steinberg, 2024), while others draw attention to the fact that the participants in this trend are almost exclusively male and associate the practice with a particular image of masculinity (Bogost, 2024; Pelley, 2024; Lindsay, 2024; Hooker, 2024; Galip and Paisley, 2024). Following such accounts, rawdoggers essentially view the foregoing of media stimulation—in a cramped environment where media entertainment conventionally offers a welcome source of distraction—as an exercise in strengthening masculine proclivities. Hooker (2024), for instance, speculates that the trend appeals to young men as it gives them ‘the opportunity to prove their resilience and self-control’. ‘The longer you do it’, she adds (ibid.), ‘the tougher you have apparently proven yourself to be’. In other words, this perspective sees rawdogging flights as a performance of masculinity, a practice through which traditionally masculine traits, such as autonomy, mastery, and mental toughness, are displayed and reinforced.
In this paper, we pick up on this distinctly masculine character of rawdogging and read it as a symptom of broader socio-technological developments. We suggest that the rawdogging trend is not an isolated phenomenon, but rather emblematic of a more general way in which cultures of masculinity exist at odds with contemporary dynamics of digital culture. Our contention is that the masculine resistance to media stimulation that rawdogging exemplifies can be seen as a defensive push-back against the disruptive rhythms and invasive tendencies exhibited by digital technologies.[ii] In particular, we claim that hegemonic forms of masculinity (Connell and Messerschmidt, 2005) resist the influence of networked media because these media are experienced as vectors of feminization.[iii] Our argument is developed in two stages. First, we contend that the trend of rawdogging speaks to a form of paranoid masculinity (Markelj, 2024) that relentlessly polices the boundaries of the self and that obsessively shores up fantasies of autonomy, rationality and (self-)control to ward off the purportedly emasculating forces of alterity, emotion and (addictive) stimulation. The perspective of paranoid masculinities provides us with a lens for theorizing, on the one hand, the affective attachments to ideas, objects and technologies that enable the performance of these masculine identities, and, on the other, the repulsions directed towards whatever undermines such performances.
Second, we suggest that this mode of masculinity increasingly frames these debilitating forces to issue from digital technologies, as digital media structure perception and aesthetic experience in ways predominantly defined by vibes, flows and the capture of affect and attention. The specific form that media stimulation today takes is, in other words, one that challenges perceptual control and purportedly corrodes the autonomous agency of the male self; to engage digital media is to be ecologically and aesthetically immersed in unpredictable currents that always carry the risk of alterity. Since digital technologies in this way tend to erode and destabilise masculine-coded forms of behavior, they are experienced as a threat. If one response to the volatile powers of media stimulation has been the construction of masculine cultures of technological mastery (think, for instance, of influencers offering arcane insights into cryptocurrencies’ unruly tides), we suggest that another response is to be found in practices that fetishize the masculine capacity to disconnect and disengage. We conclude that such practices, of which the ephemeral TikTok trend of rawdogging serves as a prime example, risk restructuring the cultural phenomenon of digital detox[iv] along a problematic divide between a male, autonomous self and a feminized technological environment.
While scholarship within media studies has explored the practices of technological detox, disconnection and refusal from different perspectives, their gendered dimensions remain largely unaddressed. Karppi (2018), for instance, examines the measures that social platforms take to make disconnecting from them as difficult as possible; Odell (2020) explores, among other things, the link between digital detox and productivity culture; Hu (2022) finds emancipatory potentials in digital lethargy, the exhaustion experienced under data capitalism; Syvertsen and Enli (2020) investigate how digital detox tourism constructs disconnection as recovery of one’s authentic self; Natale and Treré (2020) observe that disconnective practices are easily co-opted by Big Tech and argue for Disconnection-through-Engagement, a critical commitment to, instead of wholesale rejection of, networked media; Bucher (2020) problematizes the idea that we are able to effectively disconnect from the digital as our subjectivities are always already co-constituted by these technologies; and Kuntsman and Miyage (2022) critically read digital detox in relation to the environmental impact of digital technologies. Our analysis of rawdogging as a practice that condenses the logic of digital detox seeks to address the blind spot of gender by focusing on the tensions that emerge between the dynamics encouraged by digital technologies and hegemonic masculinities.[v]
Paranoid masculinities
Understanding the defensive pushback against the emasculating dynamics of digital technologies requires us to situate it within a broader historical context. This context concerns a changing set of destabilising forces, at work since the late 18th century, resulting in what has been framed as the crisis of masculinity (Kimmel, 2015). Duerringer (2015: 138) characterises this ongoing crisis as the idea ‘that men are now in danger of becoming feminized, neutered, weak, ineffectual, or disenfranchised’ and ascribes its emergence to changes in the nature of labour that rendered male-coded roles increasingly obsolete and to the increasing visibility of women and homosexuality in the public sphere.[i] Building on Deleuze and Guattari (1983), we claim that this destabilisation of masculinity, which induces and spreads the fear of emasculation, is connected to the disruptive functioning of capitalist social formation. It is only under the pressure of its uprooting forces that all ‘fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, [and all] that is solid turns into air’ (Marx and Engels, 1848). Unlike previous social formations, which maintained themselves by warding off uncontrolled transformation, change is intrinsic to the way capitalism organises its production and consumption. Under capitalism, any position and identity can be turned into a source of profit, which upsets the hierarchies of power that traditionally underlie social order. The process of production and consumption constantly extracts people, know-how, machines, money, and resources from their environments, and thus puts pressure on the structures in which they were embedded.
Yet, in order to ensure extraction and realisation of profit, capitalism needs to maintain a degree of social order that safeguards it against undermining its own foundations. Deleuze and Guattari refer to the forces that seek to protect, police or (re)enforce the boundaries that organise our social world as the forces of paranoia (1983: 273-83). They see paranoid forces as mobilising institutions like nuclear family, legal system, and its repressive apparatus, but also what they refer to as folkloric archaisms (1983: 34, 245), such as nationalism, traditionalism, masculinist movements, and other antiquated ideologies that serve as artificial add-ons to the impersonal mechanism of the market. The function of these paranoid folklorisms is to channel and contain desires and affects unleashed by the market, compensating for the fact that the latter’s operations are entirely based on the meaningless calculus of surplus value.
Paranoid masculinities (Markelj, 2024) take shape within this socio-economic dynamic of capitalism. On the one hand, hegemonic forms of masculinity are constantly undermined, destabilised and threatened by the disruptive forces of the market. On the other hand, paranoid tendencies seek to find ways, by resorting to different practices, ideas and institutions, to push back against what they perceive as the forces of emasculation. In this way, paranoid masculinities are defined in terms of two affective tendencies, those of attraction and repulsion. While the first invest and attach themselves to ideas, objects and tools that empower and enhance the masculine capacity to act, the latter fervently resist everything that threatens and inhibits the performance of masculinity. The affective forces of repulsion invested in maintaining the masculine identity also include an operation of self-repression that instinctively inhibits and suspends affective connections that would render one effeminate (e.g. interests in manicures, knitting, or ballet dancing). Since the rigid forces of repulsion block off potentially enhancing relations, Deleuze and Guattari (1983: 105) see paranoid tendencies as invested in desiring their own repression.[ii]
While masculine paranoia has already been problematised throughout the 20th century (Hocquenghem, 1993; Theweleit, 1987; Paradis, 2008), Beckman (2022: 33) suggests that today ‘paranoid masculinity has reached new heights’ within the context of the Manosphere (Ging, 2019; Johanssen, 2021)—the heterogeneous assemblage of forums, blogs, and communities hosting a wide range of masculinist and misogynist cultures. Broadly speaking, the shared aim of the Manosphere is to protect hegemonic masculinities from the perceived threat of feminist ideas and practices, and, in this way, ‘to liberate men from a life of feminist delusion’ (Ging, 2019: 638). Paranoid pushback here manifests itself in the misogynistic ‘Red Pill philosophy’, which seeks to ‘awaken men to feminism’s misandry and brainwashing’ (ibid.). While in the case of the Manosphere digital networks are mobilised to circulate content that incites and amplifies masculine paranoia against feminism, we will argue that rawdogging suggests that these very same digital networks can also become the object of masculine repulsion.
Yet, since technological mastery is traditionally an important outlet for hegemonic masculinity (Mellström, 2004: 369), approaching masculine digital technophobia requires establishing a distinction between two different kinds of technologies; those that attract and those that repulse. Constituting this boundary is a recurrent theme within male attitudes to technological objects that can be aptly illustrated by the perceived difference between human-operated and self-driving cars. The human-operated car has historically been seen as one of the main symbols of masculinity. Its gendered affordances (Schwartz and Neff, 2019) facilitate the sense of mastery, control and risk, which are the central components to the performance of hegemonic masculinity. Balkmar claims that ‘dangerous driving can be perceived as a quest for masculine prowess, status, and power’ (2020: 354) and adds that ‘the pleasure found in handling, controlling and being with machines is central to the reproduction of gender orders, including hegemonic forms of masculinity’ (2020: 355). In contrast, driverless cars are perceived by hegemonic masculinities as a threat as they undermine the performance of mastery. A driverless car, Bratton suggests, ‘decenters the agency and authority of the human pilot from the cockpit and disperses it into ambient networks operating at multiple scales’ (2015: 344). For this reason, he anticipates that the automated vehicle ‘will prove an unacceptable emasculation or even dehumanization and will be met with violent resistance, and various forms of human-centric identity politics’ (ibid.).
The distinction between human-operated and driverless cars aptly demonstrates how paranoid masculinity operates on a distinction between technologies that are seen as embodying and amplifying ‘the essence of human mastery’ (Bratton, 2015: 344)—which is, historically speaking, perceived as male mastery—and those that ‘contaminate it by mediation and hybridization’ (ibid.). Many forms of digital detox are driven precisely by such paranoid differentiation of technology. For example, the commercial man-only retreat The Bali Time Chamber is guided by the mission ‘to facilitate transformation for all of the hard-working and ambitious men who know they are meant for more in this life’ and promises ‘100% focus and zero distractions’.[iii] This secluded facility in the mountains aims to achieve this by paranoidly policing a distinction between different kinds of tools and practices, distinguishing the virile pull of its fully-equipped gym and meat-heavy diets from the contaminating influence of digital devices and pornography. Meanwhile, rawdogging flights, in its extreme form, narrows down the elements compatible with hegemonic masculinities to one single thing: the flight map on the back of the seat, which, not unlike candle wick, functions as a facilitator of meditation. ‘No phone, no sleep, no water, no food’, reports Haaland on TikTok. ‘Only map’. The map here functions as an amplifying technology: ‘great way to train attention span’, an ‘attention span reset💀🙏🏾’, as the comments on TikTok suggest. Every other digital medium is seen as a debilitating technology that is to be paranoidly resisted.
The paranoid-masculine resistance to tools and practices experienced as emasculating essentially comprises a symptom of agency panic (Melley, 2000). Agency panic concerns a set of anxieties that issue from a paranoid attachment to an enduring understanding of the human subject, particularly the liberal humanist idea of the self. Melley (2000: 162-163) characterises this concept of the self in the following terms:
First, one must believe individuals ought to be rational, motivated agents in full control of themselves. This assumption, in turn, entails a strict metaphysics of inside and outside; that is, the self must be a clearly bounded entity, with an interior core of unique beliefs, memories, desires easily distinguished from the external influences and controls […]. Finally, one must view control as an individual property, something that is possessed either by the individual or by external influences.
Significantly, the liberal concept of self at stake here has a fundamentally masculine bent. Beckman (2022: 31) suggests that it is ‘premised on a Western, male subject position’. Unlike women and racialised subjects, who are constantly reminded of their bodies by patriarchal and racist social structures, the illusion of an unrestrained and autonomous mind is much easier to uphold for white heterosexual men. In its essence, masculine agency panic can therefore be seen as the ‘reluctant admittance of spacetime and embodiment in the first place’ (Beckman, 2022: 31-32). Male embodiment and the socio-technical systems that shape these bodies comprise a carnal sin: the contamination of masculine purity of thought and will. Melley (2000) observes that the association of masculinity with autonomy, freedom and control leads to aligning the experience of their loss with feminization. For him, the reason that social or technological control is frequently framed in terms of feminization ‘is that feminization is a pervasive and tangible form of disempowerment’ (2000: 33). These feminizing forces act as ‘domesticating powers that violate the borders of the autonomous [male] self, penetrating, inhabiting and controlling it from within’ (2000: 32).
Rawdogging, following its uptake within masculine cultures, operates on a similar metaphysical distinction, pitting a male self against a feminizing, technological environment. The rawdogger is positioned as a subject perpetually at risk of falling under the sway of digital technologies, compromising the fantasy of autonomy and self-control: he experiences agency panic (Markelj & De Zeeuw, 2023). In reinforcing a strict distinction between the inside and outside, rawdogging conceals the affective relationality of socio-technical assemblages that enable and shape agency in the first place (Paasonen, 2015: 771). Instead, it strives toward an illusion of purity by entirely rejecting technological stimuli. In this way, a rawdogger seeks to approach what Sedgwick understands as pure voluntarity (1993: 134), the state in which one’s will power exercises absolute control over bodily compulsions or external influences. Rawdogging is indeed, as Bogost (2024) suggests, ‘an aspiration, not an act. It is a fantasy of returning to a supposedly pure prior circumstance’ of self-contained autonomy. However, what remains unclear is what the specific elements of digital technology are that are experienced as most repulsive or threatening in this context. In our next section, we focus particularly on how our machines—so ‘disturbingly lively’ as Haraway famously claimed (1991: 52)—consistently undermine the paranoid masculine sense of autonomy, self-containment and technological mastery.
Digital vectors of feminization
What is it about the digital that gives contemporary cultures of masculinity cause for paranoia and repulsion? We suggest that a prominent threat relates to how digital technologies structure perception, attention and aesthetic subjectivity in ways that erode the clear boundaries of the self and throw the previously recounted fantasy of a rational, autonomous subject in charge of its inclinations into disarray. This is essentially an argument that relies on a postphenomenological interpretation of technology. Postphenomenology holds that technologies are not mere objects in the world but, rather, that they are ‘mediators of human experiences and practices’ (Rosenberger and Verbeek, 2015: 9). Human perception and aesthetic subjectivity are, in other words, by default informed by the technological environment in which they are embedded, meaning that identity and one’s sense of self are always technologically modulated. To inhabit a digitalized world, then, is also to risk having one’s perceptual, aesthetic and self-reflexive registers rewritten by the digital’s animating logic (Lindberg, 2023: 21). However, what postphenomenological theorisations often lack is a consideration of the role that gender can play within phenomenological processes. If it is indeed true that technology constantly shifts one’s grasp on the world (whether in the form of steering perception, diverting attention or inviting new aesthetic categories), then it may also be the case that it does so in a way that privileges one gender-inflected set of norms and values over another. More concretely, we argue that digital technologies shape a form of perception and aesthetic subjectivity—flow-based, fragmented, ecologically entangled, never fully autonomous—directly at odds with the preferred perceptual regimes of paranoid masculinity—self-contained, sovereign, oriented in relation to clear boundaries.
Arguably, paranoid readings of digital media’s effects on perception find a precursor in what Fredric Jameson (1991) theorised as a form of postmodernist sublimity. Under postmodernism, cultural objects and technological processes increasingly challenge ‘the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world’ (Jameson, 1991: 44). What is notable here is not only how Jameson proves himself keenly aware of the way technology modulates aesthetic capacities (even if, for him, in the end technology merely stands in for the global networks of transnational capitalism), but also that so many of the postmodern confusions he identifies eat away at the masculine fantasy of a self-contained, autonomous self. The dissolution of established ‘systems of perception’ (14); the decentering and ultimate fragmentation of the subject (15); the reign of a relentless presentism that prevents the convergence of past, present and future into a stable and coherent ‘I’ (26-27); and the effacement of critical distance at the hands of pure immersion (48)—these are all aesthetic effects that are heightened through technology and that challenge perceptual modes based on self-determination, reason and control. Postmodernity thus inaugurated a crisis of perception and its technological modulation that precipitated many of today’s crises of masculinity.
Anna Kornbluh (2024) has recently suggested that the style of immediacy has largely supplanted the logic of postmodernism, and that much of this shift stems from the circulationary capacities of digital media. With immediacy—which she presents as ‘a master category for making sense of twenty-first-century production’ (6)—we see some of postmodernism’s core features pushed to their extreme, while others are transformed by the volume and velocity of the contemporary mediascape. Under technological conditions of immediacy, media primarily ‘effect flow and indistinction’ (13) and douse the mind in a perpetual display of stimulation, strengthening certain modes of perception, attention and sense-making at the expense of others; ‘the speed and flow of information and the velocity of discretization are making our internal processors run on different stimuli’ (44). Today’s digital media mold an ‘algorithmized consciousness’ whose ‘perceptual faculties’ tend toward ‘racing, skimming, browsing, and other quick integrations’ rather than ‘slow, long reading or interpretation’ (45). In contrast to postmodernism, immediacy is not just about the ability to orient oneself in relation to the operations of global capitalism (although the lack of this capacity still provides plenty of food for paranoia) but also about the incapacity of staying afloat within the flows of the digital itself, where perception is constantly expected to adjust to a vortex of sensations and stimulations. From the viewpoint of paranoid masculinity, there are two elements of contemporary media stimulation that prove especially repulsive.
First, the digital is felt to shape an attention-based logic that is at odds with masculine fantasies of attentional control. N. Katherine Hayles’s (2007) conception of deep and hyper attention as distinct cognitive styles is informative here:
Deep attention […] is characterized by concentrating on a single object for long periods […], ignoring outside stimuli while so engaged, preferring a single information stream, and having a high tolerance for long focus times. Hyper attention is characterized by switching focus rapidly among different tasks, preferring multiple information streams, seeking a high level of stimulation, and having a low tolerance for boredom (187).
While almost two decades old, Hayles’s text still counts as a model for academic theories and popular accounts that lament how the digital affects our cognitive capacities, privileging the hyper over the deep. Of course, Hayles is very much aware that digital technologies can foster both deep and hyper attention, and that each medium possesses its own temporality and rhythm (see Paasonen, 2021: 67). Nonetheless, the shift toward digitization is often understood in terms of a certain cognitive decline where a multitude of stimuli hollows out the capacity for engaged, reflective contemplation. Bernard Stiegler, for instance, takes this narrative to its extreme; he suggests that the retentional effects of the digital have led to a veritable depletion of libido, as digital technologies are designed to divert attention away from long-term libidinal investments and toward a short-term logic of addictive consumption (2014: 86-87). Whether or not Stiegler’s claims are overblown is not the point here; rather, what is salient is that Stiegler’s account discloses a perceived loss of attentional control and autonomy that maps closely onto the perceptual capacities that paranoid masculinity seeks to safeguard. Paranoid masculinity, in other words, largely seems to follow a similar interpretation of the digital and its perceptual affordances. Indeed, deep attention is what paranoid masculinity sees as the distinct perceptual and aesthetic mode of the idealized man—a subject immune to distraction, able to assume distance from and perceptual control over the elected object of its attention, and capable of focused and prolonged reflection. In a paranoid masculine register, rawdogging becomes a strategy for reclaiming attentional autonomy from the digital’s emasculating and repulsive effects.
A second and closely related threat that the digital harbors for paranoid masculinity is the possibility of algorithmic capture that pervades most of its environments. To traverse digital spaces is to cede control to the machinic as most online encounters are algorithmically staged (Seaver, 2022: 69). Crucially, algorithms are designed through what Nick Seaver (2022) calls ‘captological thinking;’ within Silicon Valley, algorithmic systems have increasingly ‘come to be understood as a kind of trap, fine-tuned to capture the attention of users, who [are] their prey’ (51). As such, the technical systems that serve us content are ‘devices for anticipating, attracting, and retaining users that embody theories about how their prey behave and that provide knowledge about behavior to the people who set them’ (52). It is, in other words, not just the case that digital technology is felt to train its users to experience the world in a hyper-attentive register, but also that the digital’s glimmering tides conceal an environment laden with snares. Consider, for example, TikTok, which employs a whole range of what Roffarrello et al. (2023) call ‘attention capture damaging patterns’ that keep users from leaving the platform, sometimes to their own detriment. In this regard, TikTok is emblematic of many digital platforms that privilege the immersion in algorithmic streams and flows over isolated, conscious consumption, embedding the user in an ‘affective scroll’ (Anikina, 2021) that is less about representation (and its contemplation and interpretation) and more about the tethering of cognition to endless tides of stimulation. Again, a paranoid masculine embrace of rawdogging functions as a counterweight, performing a male self that can entirely withstand digital capture.
Paranoid masculinity and the impulse to rawdog it may inspire thus envision the digital user not as an autonomous subject assuredly carving their own technological path but a figure whose desires and impulses are given over to external technological influences. Seen from this view, digital technology tries to align its users with what Sianne Ngai (2012) theorises as the culturally pervasive aesthetic category of zaniness (albeit with few of the category’s comic undertones and with a focus on cognitive rather than physical overstimulation). The zany is an aesthetic category that documents relentless, often precarious activity and a constant flitting from one stimulus to the next. For Ngai, zaniness is intimately tied up with labor and post-Fordist capitalism, but also with questions of gender, making it especially relevant in this context. The aesthetic subjectivity of zaniness assumes the shape of ‘an absolutely elastic subject—one who is nothing but a series of adjustments and adaptations to one situation after another’ (174). Ngai argues that zaniness is essentially ‘an aesthetic about work—and about a precariousness created specifically by the capitalist organization of work’ (188), in which flexibility, precarity and activity have become central elements. If the zany worker is defined by how she is forced to relentlessly adapt to the labor market, she finds a digital double in the user as she is bombarded by a constant stream of stimulations that do not cohere into a unified experience—not to mention that the types of ‘affective’, ‘aesthetic’ and ‘visibility’ labor (Elias, Gill and Scharff, 2017; Abidin, 2020) that retaining some control over digital spaces now entails closely track the emotional labor defining Post-Fordist work. Indeed, zaniness is precisely about the generalization of labor as it ‘speaks to a politically ambiguous erosion of the distinction between playing and working’ that is ‘marked by an increasing extraction of surplus value from affect and subjectivity’ (Ngai, 2012: 188). In this sense, the navigation of digital space essentially comprises another form of precarious work; similar to how the zany is trapped by post-industrial capitalism, the digital subject feared by paranoid masculinity is trapped within algorithmic capitalism.
This in itself already goes some way toward explaining the masculine appeal of digital refusal, but the category of zaniness becomes all the more pressing when one considers how its gendered dynamics mirror the aesthetic experience of digital subjectivity. As Ngai observes, ‘there is something impotent and “reactive” about the zany’s incessant activity’ (187) and this impotence discloses a gendered logic: the ‘confusion about the gender of the kind of affective work zaniness indexes as it increasingly gets done across gender and class divides is producing mixed but strong emotions in both men and women’ (210). More specifically, zaniness is closely related to a ‘femininization’ of work, in which the uncertainty, flexibility and emotionality that have been traditionally associated with feminine types of work (if they were acknowledged as work at all) are ‘becoming radically generalized across all spheres of work’ (208; see also Baym, 2015). In the context of the digital, this means that media shape an aesthetic subjectivity in which emotional flexibility is stimulated if not outright required. If this focus on emotional labor already poses an affront to the masculine, something similar goes for the way in which digital subjects are dissuaded from retaining a stable and autonomous sense of self—just like the post-Fordist laborer, the role of the digital subject, for all its strenuous activity, is ‘in fact not self-created but rather scripted for [it] in advance’ (227). This script, consisting of an endless barrage of stimuli to which attention must surrender, threatens to dissolve personhood and self-stability; zaniness as a ‘style evokes a kind of person/character who implodes the concept of character from within, contesting the stability of any formal representation of personhood by defining personhood itself as an unremitting succession of activities’ (193). In this relentless stream, media stimulations and algorithms are seen to fragment rather than reinforce the self. Paranoid masculinity thus refuses to adopt the role of the zany precisely for its perceived feminine features (pronounced affectivity, a dissolved or weakened personality, tireless activity that is nonetheless passive rather than agential); if zaniness often leads to ‘overzealously defending masculinity’ (213), rawdogging bestows a distinctly digital sheen on this defense.
Of course, accounts that focus on digital media as instruments of capture and hyper-stimulation tell only one possible story about the digital—different, more affirmative readings exist. Many of such readings, nonetheless, similarly highlight experiential and aesthetic affordances of digital technology that challenge masculine fantasies of self-containment. Valentina Tanni, glossing the online world as a realm where ‘alternatives are endless’ and ‘identities unstable’ (15), suggests that ‘physical sensations, emotional states and “vibes” are the most visible common thread in the online cultures that emerged from the 2010s onwards,’ bespeaking ‘a culture obsessed with sensations’ (63). The aesthetic objects users encounter online increasingly call for distinctly affect- and emotion-based ways of sense-making; in digital content, representational qualities and formal dimensions are regularly de-emphasized as ‘[t]he only thing that matters is how the image makes us feel’ (125, emphasis original). Perhaps the clearest example of this aesthetic logic is found in the prevalence of vibes online. If vibe refers to ‘a collectively experienced affective tone’ (Garcia, 2021: 27) that has often been associated with the ‘affective dimensions of dancefloor experience’ (26), it now also pervades online culture, as digital stimuli frequently function as modulators of emotion and sensation that open the body up to alterity. In this way, the notion of vibes and its connotations of resonance and reciprocity disclose the online circulation of ‘visual and auditory stimuli’ that above all enable the sharing of ‘emotional frequencies’ (Tanni, 2024: 75). As Mitch Therieau (2022) contends, the famous internet phrase ‘no thoughts, just vibes’ essentially serves as a ‘mantra for depersonalization’, as ‘techniques of vibing are methods for getting momentary relief from the burdens of personhood’ and ‘for relaxing the boundaries of the self’. Vibe culture is redoubled by the digital’s underlying biopolitics of algorithmic and AI-driven modeling, which position users not in terms of discrete identities but in relation to emergent and constantly shifting vectors (Törnberg et al., 2025: 10). Even though Robin James (2025) convincingly demonstrates that ‘vernacular vibes discourse’ and its computational foundation ultimately still serve to reinforce ‘patriarchal personhood’, it is vibe culture’s ostensible loosening of norms and categories that provides cause for masculine paranoia. To partake in the digital’s vibe-based culture is to give oneself over (or, in paranoid masculinity’s viewpoint, become intolerably susceptible) to alterity, depersonalization and entanglement.
Even accounts that do point to the possibility of maintaining a digital self offer no safe haven for the masculine paranoid. Giolo and Berghman (2023), for example, argue that internet aesthetics (or the new types of aesthetic expressions and categories that are created through online practices of collection, synthesis and categorization) offer new means for constructing a self in the rubble of postmodernism. At face value, this focus on the self might seem to align with paranoid masculinity as it reveals a desire for self-coherence in the wake of the erosion of established perceptual registers. However, the self that is construed through engaging Internet aesthetics is a self attained by aesthetic and emotional means: ‘Internet aesthetics’ function as ‘formulae through which to reach certain psychological states by the meaningful consumption of cultural objects’ (2023). In consuming and circulating internet aesthetics, the respondents Giolo and Berghman interview ‘brought coherence to different life events through aesthetic lenses’ which, ‘in turn, afforded them a coherent self-image’ (2023). Indeed, as with the predominance of vibe culture, internet aesthetics ‘display little consistency in their composition and avoid drawing clear-cut defining lines;’ ‘[r]ather, they are characterized by presenting an experience of sorts, a subjectively defined atmosphere’ (2023). Internet aesthetics, in other words, promote a form of reflexive sense-making in which emotion, affectivity and subjectivity trump reason; here, the self is not the autonomous, pre-given monad of the liberal tradition, but a flexible construct shaped by (rather than prefiguring) aesthetic and emotional subjectivity.[i] As Tanni explains, under digital conditions our perception and memory become ‘not so much the ability to recall specific events, people, and situations, but rather an archive of sensations, moods, atmospheres’ (257). In these more affirmative takes, digital stimulation thus fosters affect-, sensation- and emotion-based modes of perception and aesthetics. Paranoid masculinity, however, clings to the fantasy of a reason-based and clearly delineated self and thus cannot reconcile itself with the perceptual registers that digital culture encourages.
Regardless of whether one views digital technologies as behavioral traps or emancipatory tools, for paranoid masculinity they harbor the repulsive danger of emasculation. One may define the aesthetic subjectivity the digital molds in terms of addictive stimulation and perennial distraction or affective entanglement and resonant vibes—the point is that both these influential interpretations stress that the digital can loosen the boundaries of the self, unclasp the authoritative hold of reason-based judgment and negate the sovereignty of the individual. In the face of the digital’s power to destabilize and reorient perception, agency and aesthetic subjectivity, we have been tracking a mode of male paranoia that finds its masculinity in the capacity to disconnect. Instead of mastering the billowing tides of media stimulation, it prefers to stay out of the water. If media stimulation now always carries the perceived threat of emasculation, rawdogging and similar practices of digital detox offer paranoid masculinity a way to reclaim agency.
Conclusion
‘Entering the matrix is no assertion of masculinity, but a loss of humanity’, declares Sadie Plant (1995a: 60) in mid-90s; ‘to jack into cyberspace is not to penetrate, but to be invaded’. Writing in the era of peak optimism about the internet’s emancipatory potentials, Plant develops a peculiar version of cyberfeminism that resonates with the gendered dynamics we have been charting here. Its uniqueness lies in the fact that the main agent of its feminist politics are not women or even humans, but emerging digital and biotechnologies. In Plant’s view, the agential powers of these complex and self-governing technologies, which have been further gaining momentum in the last decades, are gradually undermining the patriarchal structures by means of which men have been dominating women, nature, and machines. According to her (1995a: 58), the control, exploitation and utilization of the latter by men for their own ends is what defines the history of humanity: the story of human history is centered around the development of masculine reason, mastery, and self-identity at the expense of the feminine, the machinic, and the natural, which are the disavowed preconditions and materials of this alleged manly self-determination. As Plant points out, ‘it always has been man, the male, who has circumscribed humanity’, and this domineering figure ‘has defined itself against a feminine considered too fluid, flexible, and lacking in concentration to merit anything more than associate membership of the species’ (1995b: 28). Plant, however, notes that at the end of the 20th century man is no longer able to control his tools as the rise of digital networks undermines ‘both the world-view and the material reality of two thousand years of patriarchal control’ (2000: 325). As they erode these patriarchal structures, networked technologies become the agents of feminist empowerment.
While Plant’s cyberfeminist perspective has often been criticized,[i] her invocation of a male subject pervaded by fluid and feminizing media resonates with the influential discourse of paranoid masculinity that we have been tracing. Just as in Plant’s work, for paranoid masculinity digital media function as vectors of fluidity, affectivity and distraction, which invade and emasculate the male user when he logs in. Our analysis of rawdogging suggests that, in line with Plant, connecting with the digital is often experienced not as an act of asserting masculinity, but as its potential invasion and undermining. The capacity to disconnect, conversely, is envisioned as a path toward regaining male autonomy. Even if the existence of the Manosphere has disrupted the cyberfeminist trajectory in ways Plant did not imagine, there seems to be a general aesthetic and affective logic to the digital that proceeds to subvert fantasies of masculine autonomy and self-containment.
Throughout the paper, we have noted how rawdogging is often coded as distinctly masculine and have sought to theorize what exactly the supposedly feminizing influences are that the digital carries. Digital technologies erode the borders of the (male, autonomous, insular) self through the way they steer attention, stimulate engagement, portend algorithmic capture, privilege emotion- and affect-based modes of sense-making and construct more distributed forms of identity. They thereby yield a form of aesthetic subjectivity whose core traits embody precisely the loss of control and agency that causes paranoid masculinity so much panic. The masculine endorsement of rawdogging as a way of reclaiming self-control captures this drama in miniature. There is, of course, a glaring tension in the fact that rawdogging emerged as a trend on TikTok, one of the very same platforms whose stimulations it is designed to escape, but this just goes to show that digital subjectivities are always multivalent and contradictory; paranoid masculinity can co-exist with conflicting digital dispositions and even the most avid rawdogger may be a prolific digital user in other contexts (either by will or by cultural necessity). Nonetheless, as online trends are currently extending the idea of rawdogging from flights to meetings, workouts and social interactions, with each of these settings becoming a potential scene in which media stimulation can be rejected, we believe it is crucial to study how hegemonic masculinities might obliquely extend themselves through digital detox cultures more broadly.
While we do not want to claim that digital detox in general—or rawdogging flights in particular—necessarily contain traces of misogyny, the underlying tenet of the Manosphere, we are tempted to suggest that these phenomena stem from a similar paranoid impulse. Like paranoid masculinity, rawdogging and detoxing are ultimately about purity, both as metaphors and in practice. Rawdogging implies a state of purity untainted by technological artifice: it is, as suggested above via Bogost, ‘a fantasy of returning to a supposedly pure prior circumstance’. Similarly, Syvertsen (2020: 4) suggests that throughout ‘history, media have been linked to infections, trash and poison and digital detox is a metaphorical way to clean up’, to purify. If practices of detox and rawdogging are adopted in a paranoid-masculine mode, it is all too easy for a feminine shape to be projected onto these suggested toxicities. In paranoid masculinity, warding off mediatic contamination is seen as a distinctly masculine gesture that protects the alleged autonomy of the male subject and his purity of thought and will against emasculation. The mediatic environment is only one of many things that the masculine paranoid can rally against—and the Manosphere shows that men can imagine many external threats indeed—but Beckman (2021: 245) suggests that the paranoid impulse remains the same as it is always ‘grounded in the paranoid fear of losing a historically authoritative subject position’. It is, then, not so much the case that digital detox is inherently problematic, but that its logic of a beset subject that must inoculate itself against external forces maps closely onto the affective composition of paranoid masculinity. No matter how innocent a particular detox trend may appear, it is thus crucial to study the supplementary ideas and values that are attached to the subject and its technological environment respectively. Although digital detox cultures are in no way directly connected to the xenophobia of the Manosphere, they share a similar affective structure—and the masculine embrace of rawdogging shows that (ironically, often with the right algorithmic push) it is not unlikely that the mediatic anxiety of the former slides into the reactionary paranoia of the latter.
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Notes
[1] There even exists an online rawdogging simulator (https://www.rawdogsimulator.com/), which further underlines the trend’s cultural spread.
[2] The types of discourse on digital refusal that we see exemplified in ‘rawdogging’ flights include not only digital detox (Syvertsen and Enli, 2020), which often functions as an umbrella term, but also popular trends such as dopamine fasting (Lembke, 2021; Parsons, 2019), going ‘monk mode’ (Beddington, 2023), and even the NoFap movement (Hartmann, 2021). Although NoFap primarily promotes abstinence from online pornography and masturbation, its underlying logic aligns with the forms of refusal we outline in this paper.
Here it is also worth noting that rawdogging, as a sexual term, is synonymous with ‘barebacking’—a practice with a long history in gay sexual culture, where it similarly relates to performances of masculinity. Although queer conceptualizations of barebacking are wide-ranging and complex, they point to a recurring theme: that condoms can ‘make a man and his masculinity vulnerable to doubt or derision. Latex compromises […] not only sensation and intimacy but also masculine identity’ (Dean, cited in Garcia, 2013: 1034). Therefore, gay bareback sex can be seen as a practice that seeks to safeguard masculinity against perceived corrupting forces, a dynamic we also identify with rawdogging flights.
[3] Other influential forms of masculinity, such as geek or nerd masculinities, are much more compatible with digital technologies. For an insightful investigation of the relation between nerd/geek masculinities, digital computation, and hegemonic masculinities, see Lockhart, 2015.
[4] Digital detox concerns the ‘periodic disconnection from social or online media, or strategies to reduce social media involvement’ (Syvertsen and Enli, 2020: 1269).
[5] Our focus in this paper is on illuminating the gendered digital paranoia behind the practice of rawdogging rather than its subsequent mediation and circulation. The trend of rawdogging essentially comprises a performance of non-performance: while the trend is characterised by an attitude of digital refusal, it equally consists in the subsequent mediation and dissemination of this refusal in the form of social media content. It is therefore driven by internal contradictions, as its practitioners often share content on the very same platforms rawdogging encourages them to tune out. These are important points that are worthy of study in their own right, but our interest here lies more in theorising how rawdogging, and digital detox more generally, may exhibit a gendered logic in their invocation of a masculine subject threatened by a feminizing digital environment.
[6] Moreover, industrialization, mass production and automation have long decreased demand for jobs requiring physical strength, further limiting outlets for traditional masculinity. These issues have recently resurfaced in relation to the trade tariffs introduced by Donald Trump, which are promised to bring manufacturing back to the US and were described by Fox News as ‘manly’ and able ‘to reverse the crisis of masculinity’. ‘When you sit behind the screen all day’, one of the pundits further remarks, ‘it makes you a woman’ (source: https://youtu.be/k_zGMCkbor4).
[7] It should be noted that paranoia, as an organising tendency that erects borders, is not inherently inhibiting; a degree of structure and self-consistency is a prerequisite for any kind of sustained political or ethical activity, and enforcing borders can be a way of shielding the self against forms of oppression. In contrast, the paranoia at stake with hegemonic masculinity is rigid and seeks to protect a dominant position.
[8] See https://balitimechamber.com/.
[9] In this light, it is salient that Giolo and Berghman indicate they were only able to find women respondents interested in internet aesthetics; they write this might ‘be considered a sign that different gender identities relate differently to the use of cultural toolkits when making sense of their life experiences’ (2023).
[10] Plant’s declaration of the arrival of posthumanist machinic feminism did not go down well with her feminist contemporaries. Her ‘feminism without women’ (Lê, 2022) was heavily critiqued even before the disenchantment that came with the emergence of the GAFAM digital ecology. Mixing theoretical speculation with sci-fi, Plant was dismissed as being ‘uncritical’ (Hawthorne and Klein, cited in Paasonen, 2010: 69), ‘not a technologist’ (Hovenden, 2000: 256), and out of touch with actual gendered dynamics of digital technologies. Similarly, Lê (2022) observes how most discussions of cyberfeminism reject or overlook Plant’s work; ‘Often times the mere mention of her name is enough to incite a wave of rather unscholarly invectives in place of sustained arguments and reasoned objections’. Given Plant’s theoretical sophistication and rigor such categorical and patronizing rejection of her work is clearly unwarranted, although given that digital technologies went on to become the site of surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2019), reactionary misinformation and manospherian misogyny, it would also be fair to say that her feminist techno-optimism has not aged well.
Jernej Markelj is a Lecturer in New Media and Digital Culture at the Department of Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam, and a researcher at the University of Ljubljana. His research, which has been published in various journals and collected volumes, focuses on networked affect, agentic imaginaries, and online gender.
Email: j.markelj@uva.nl
Jakko Kemper is Assistant Professor in Digital Aesthetics and Platform Vernaculars at the Department of Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam. He is the author of the book Frictionlessness (2024), co-editor of the volume Imperfections (2021), and has published work in Theory, Culture, and Society; Media Theory; Critical AI; and Information, Communication, and Society, among other journals.
Email: J.Kemper@uva.nl
Conflicts of interest
None declared
Funding
None declared
Article history
Article submitted: 12/05/25
Date of original decision: 5/09/25
Revised article submitted: 17/09/25
Article accepted: 17/09/25
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