So-called ‘cancel culture’ is often conflated with the Left, as though mass online pile-ons are a moral failing of one worldview exclusively. But while it may be appealing to blame this phenomenon on The Other Guys (intersectional feminists, for example) the sad tale of ‘masculinity influencer’ Jack Murphy suggests something deeper is at work.
Murphy runs an online men-only membership group called The Liminal Order, whose remit is cultivating ‘positive masculinity’. He is (or was, until very recently) a prolific Twitter presence and regular guest on Right-wing and manosphere podcasts.
He incurred the wrath of the Online Right when he responded rudely to podcaster Sydney Watson asking him about ‘the cuck article’. The article in question was a 2018 piece Murphy wrote on ‘Cultivating Erotic Energy From A Surprising Source’, that source being sending his girlfriend to have sex with other men.
From the perspective of the ‘manosphere’, letting other men have sex with your girlfriend is a definite no-no, and will earn you the ultimate put-down: ‘cuck’, which is to say ‘cuckold’, an ultimately un-masculine man. Murphy’s defensiveness poured petrol on the flames: aggrieved fans combed the internet for other historic Murphy content, turning up pornographic videos depicting Murphy inserting objects into an orifice where, in the view of the majority of the manosphere, the sun of machismo should never be permitted to shine.
The ensuing memes have been brutal. It’s difficult to see how Murphy can persist as a beacon of masculinity among the online Right, a group for whom cuckoldry and anal penetration are perhaps the most potent symbols of emasculation possible. This, then, is a vintage instance of ‘cancellation’, a breach of in-group moral codes, outside the Left.
