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Consider yourself forewarned, lads; while Reuters has catalogued the toys in the “luxury playbook” being marketed to new squillionaires, social media suggests there’s a new status symbol for the aspirational “alpha male”. And it’s not a Birkin-for-boys – even if Erling Haaland is wearing one.
We are in a moment where traditional status symbols have been upended by a reluctance to imbue objects – or relationships – with their heritage prestige. As a feminist, I propose, with pride, that women are to blame.
The market for luxury status symbols is whoever has the money and power to attain them. Historically, that’s men – and 86% of the world’s billionaires are men. The world’s highest-paid athletes? Men. The world’s highest-paid film actors? Also, men. Heads of government? Mostly men. The Global Media Monitoring Project reported that, yes, as recently as last year, an overwhelming number of news stories are sourced from men, quote from men and are – would you believe it? – about men.
The cachet of such splendiferous achievement has traditionally been demonstrated through association with glamorous objects and lifestyles that only privileged status affords. When achievement is gendered, so are many of its rewards. Relationships are not extrinsic to this dynamic – sometimes, they are its instrument.
What’s considered a status enhancement is then copied and fetishised by those who aspire to it with powerful yearning. The Australian newspaper ran a story last year about a half-a-million-dollar watch entering the local market; internationally, as per Reuters this week, the dark princes of tech have been flashing such things about like a bat signal to alert who else in their rooms may also be very rich, and a wanker.
In a world with an increasing number of billionaires, are the intermittent contractions in the luxury goods market really just about money? Or could status objects themselves be subject to cultural devaluation, enforced by the bank of public opinion?
Social media is mostly awful, but its one redeeming quality is the heft it provides to genuine expressions of mass moral judgment and popular taste. This has proved devastating to the feelings of some incredibly privileged, mostly male individuals who wear fancy watches. A lot of them – hilariously – admit that on the newly diversified media platforms “lots of people are saying mean things”. And not just about them and people like them, but about the things they own and the rarefied practices they have chosen to define them.
You can’t even insist you’re a tops-best gamer online any more without some self-appointed worldwide committee calculating your in-game hours and counterclaiming it just isn’t so. Firing a single rocket turns you into a dick joke for the rest of your life. Superyachts are cringe, and not just because of the implication.
And nothing says “brand damage” more than a Bugatti now spreadeagled forever in the mind with a hairless accused rapist in ankle pants smoking on it … aside from, perhaps, the words “private island”.
If you’re suspecting social judgment also has a gendered context, you are right. In a world that’s still, at present, allowed to speak back to the powerful, spruiking your billionaire-coded “masculine energy” is an invitation to feminine mockery, not respect.
And men who trophy hunt much younger women to signal their dominance aren’t messaging “virility privilege” or “king among subjects”. They’re inspiring disgust.
Those otherwise-acolytes who find themselves hesitant to ape wealthy, famous men who believed dating teenagers was a brag … or manipulated teenage girls into becoming sex objects in a surveillance harem and sold TV rights to it … or casually sexualised the girls … have @quarter_12340 on Mark Zuckerberg’s Threads to thank for a heaps more alpha lifestyle instruction: “For me older men are hot only if they have wives their own age” went a post illustrated with Hollywood star Mads Mikkelsen, 60, embracing his partner, the dancer and actor Hanne Jacobsen, 65. In its viral wake flowed similar photos, of Ryan Gosling (45) with Eva Mendes (52), Tom Hiddleston (45) with Zawe Ashton (41), Billy Crudup (58) and Naomi Watts (57), and Stephen Colbert and his wife, Evelyn McGee Colbert (both 62) – among a much longer list of powerful men adding to their power through partnership with women whose age, experience and personal success and achievement reflect their own. They are making the ultimate “alpha male” symbol a partner who’s their equal.
This isn’t to say there are no relationships of significant age difference in which equalities are fundamental and acknowledged, and which persist with dynamics of mutual respect. Such partnerships are hardly the subjects of the popular scorn.
But what all aspirational watch-wearers may want to heed as they peruse the latest luxury catalogue and dream, is to ask what their dream is about.
Social status may have a wealth and visibility calculus, but real social power doesn’t come from trinkets or trophies. It comes from confidence among equals, and the opportunity to show you’re not fragile. Or frightened. Or weak.
