‘It’s a strange time to be a man’: in The Castle, Jon Ronson investigates the plight of unanchored men

The ABC’s now-defunct current affairs show Q+A makes an early appearance in Jon Ronson’s The Castle: Adventures in a World of Unravelling Men.

A guest in 2024, he reflects on the show as “a delightful hour’s television with everyone being convivial to one another, no matter their politics”. That is, until there was a question about men, which he responded to with: “It’s a strange time to be a man.” He describes the response of host Patricia Karvelas (“Is it? Why?”) as the “sharpest exchange” of the program.

“I didn’t know what I meant by it at the time,” he writes. “It was a new thought for me.” He offered some quick remarks about the plight of everyday working men in deindustrialised towns and cities, everyone relaxed, and the moment passed. But he sensed there was something more to be said, “not least because so many people seemed nervous to broach it. For me, that uneasiness was a reason to head in.”

Review: The Castle: Adventures in a World of Unravelling Men by Jon Ronson (Viking Non Fiction)

This is familiar territory for Ronson. Throughout his career, most recently in his culture wars podcast Things Fell Apart (which will have a third season in 2027), he has made a speciality of probing difficult and challenging subjects, searching the social and political fault lines for the human complications that polarised public debate tends to airbrush away.

Monetising despair

The dilemma of modern masculinity may not have been an acceptable talking point in 2024, but it’s a hot one now, in 2026, when cultural phenomena such as looksmaxxing and noxious men’s rights figures like Andrew Tate regularly make headlines.

But Ronson, characteristically, takes the road less travelled. He describes his brand of journalism as “the constant quest to understand things I don’t understand”.

Here, that thing is the one in six American men aged between 25 and 54 not working, according to 2022 figures, with two thirds of them “not even looking for jobs” – and what this widespread “purposelessness” means for their lives and loved ones. “I’m a worker,” he writes, and his own anxiety about who he would be without his work to define him is key to the book.

While Ronson’s central story follows Chris Mark, the heir to a Gilded Age steel fortune, who lures women to a literal castle where he invites them to be part of a “princess reality show”, his book is less interested in manosphere-type behaviour than in the plight of unanchored men. This leads to nuanced character sketches of men whose lives have unravelled in surprising ways.

Ronson reveals the monetisation of despair: a sordid and tawdry space where sadness and grievance all too often become raw material and grist for the attention economy.

Each of the men Ronson encounters has, as he puts it,

a similarly dysfunctional relationship with purpose, hunting too desperately for it. And now there was a generation of men, unanchored from society and going it alone – as content creators, culture war influencers, amateur sleuths.

Ronson’s subjects include Greg Chism, a struggling single father and early YouTube celebrity whose life changed forever after he stumbled on the video diary of a misogynistic Australian going by “Durian Rider”.

Starting as a lawn care vlogger, Chism soon turned to family comedy. His channel, featuring him and his young daughters cosplaying “bad babies”, doing things like staging food fights, became increasingly over-the-top as he chased what the algorithm rewarded.

He eventually became the subject of a police investigation (which found nothing inappropriate) following viewer complaints, leading to his cancellation and ruin.

Another Ronson subject is Andrew Gold, an aspiring documentarian in the style of Louis Theroux, who discovered online success was contingent on an ever-worsening cycle of enmity and performative outrage.

A castle in Connecticut

The idea for The Castle was sparked by a series of unnerving text messages from Ronson’s twentysomething son Joel in the summer of 2023. He woke to read the final text first: “We left. Was completely fucked. All good now.”

The man at the centre of the story was Chris Mark, an eccentric millionaire with bipolar disorder in his early 60s, who had inherited a fortune. He lived in Woodstock, Connecticut, in a vast medieval-style castle he had built, “on a semi-suburban road that was otherwise filled with ordinary modest homes”. His stated reason for building it was so “his daughters might experience a fairytale childhood”.

Joel had arrived there with two friends after one received an invitation to a formal party from a man she’d met on Tinder. Yet when the gates opened and the group crossed the moat, they soon found themselves in a vast banquet hall with a handful of equally confused guests.

There was no party. Mark had brought them there to participate in a proposed reality show, 101 Princesses, in which he would play the lord of the castle searching for his queen. The young women were taken downstairs to Mark’s “costume room” to select medieval gowns and tiaras, while Joel and his male friend were given tuxedos. A videographer appeared out of nowhere and filming began.

Joel’s account was enough to draw Ronson there – 16 days after having part of his colon removed, in so much pain he was letting out occasional involuntary yelps and screams.

Mark, who met Ronson on the castle’s drawbridge, explained that he used dating apps to bring young women into his orbit, then tried to “adapt” them to his desired lifestyle. His ambition was to have six or eight women living with him at the castle. This arrangement required the women to become sexually involved with one another, a process Mark called “princessing”.

The castle is his version of the Playboy Mansion. “Chris was trying to be Hugh Hefner during surely the worst period in human history to be Hugh Hefner,” Ronson writes.

He asks Mark if his life would have been better if he’d been born 50 years earlier. “Probably, yeah,” Mark replies, before complaining that women’s rights have made everything more difficult. Women, he claims, are jealous, conniving and prepared to destroy men.

Sensing he has said too much, Mark retrieves a non-disclosure agreement from a kitchen drawer (yes, really) and asks Ronson to sign it. Ronson refuses.

Things only get weirder. Several weeks later, Mark began bombarding him with text messages: 42 in three hours. Mark threatened legal action. He also intimated two associates who had served prison sentences for murder were on their way to New York – and would be angry if Ronson wrote anything negative about him.

Ronson’s response captures the peculiar balance of menace and absurdity that runs through The Castle. On the one hand, he was genuinely alarmed. At the same time, he was relieved: threatening a journalist with a visit from “murder friends” would hardly help with future libel action.

Later, a pattern emerges. Mark moves from one harebrained scheme to the next, displaying little concern for any collateral damage. When a project collapses or someone close to him suffers, he simply redirects his attention and begins again.

Ronson comes to see Mark as a man whose impulses seem largely untouched by shame or self-scrutiny.

The disinhibited man

Mark’s long-time adviser suggests his behaviour escalated when his children left home – and Ronson starts to wonder if he represents a new masculine type. He calls this figure the “Disinhibited Man”.

Ronson wonders whether the Disinhibited Man emerged partly in reaction to the culture of public shaming that defined the 2010s – which he memorably chronicled in his 2015 book, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed.

There, he examined how social media mobs could destroy ordinary people for a single mistake or ill-judged remark. Such campaigns often achieved their immediate aims. Over time, however, they produced a backlash. People grew tired of living under the threat of denunciation.

The overuse of shame as a weapon made transgressors harden, Ronson concludes in The Castle. “They mutated like hospital superbugs, sanitized and sanitized until they became impervious to treatment.” While refusing shame was “healthy if the shaming had been inappropriate”, he writes, “people started brushing the shame off no matter the seriousness of their wrongdoing.”

Now, Ronson reflects, “we were seeing another mutation, from unashamedness to the next level, disinhibition – impulsive, unconstrained behaviour.”

Ronson sees this disinhibition extending beyond Mark, to figures such as businessman, podcaster and influencer Dan Bilzerian, the self-styled “King of Instagram”, whose online persona routinely turns masculine excess and cliché into public spectacle.

Since establishing himself through this cartoonish performance of male fantasy, Bilzerian has entered darker territory, using his platform to promote antisemitic conspiracy and Holocaust denial. His trajectory suggests how readily the abandonment of social restraint can carry someone beyond manosphere posturing into political extremism.

Primitive psyches run wild

Ronson wonders whether this is “a pendulum swing” from the “excesses of […] cancel culture” or evidence of something deeper. He has a “personal interest” in “the idea that people were suddenly eschewing all social filters to instead allow their ids, the most primitive, instinctive part of their psyches, to run wild”.

His interest has a name: his estranged friend Graham Linehan, the Irish comedy writer behind Father Ted and The IT Crowd, now consumed by his campaign against transgender rights. Over the years, Ronson had become a recurring online target.

Ronson, who orchestrates a meeting with Linehan to discuss it all, is less interested in adjudicating the gender debate than in trying to understand Linehan’s baffling, self-destructive intensity.

Believing himself engaged in a perpetual battle against evil, with compromise tantamount to surrender, he appeared unable to stop fighting even after he believed his side had won (and after his marriage collapsed).

For Ronson, this is disinhibition in its most painful form. Linehan, he writes, seemed to have decided to “basically rip off his own face” – doing away with all pretence of civility. The image captures both the violence of the change and Ronson’s sense of loss.

The story brings the book’s argument into sharper focus. The Disinhibited Man interprets every disagreement as proof of a wider struggle, then grants himself permission to behave in ways the struggle appears to justify. The same pattern is visible in Mark’s indifference to the consequences of his schemes and Bilzarian’s progression from manosphere posturing to the downplaying of genocidal atrocity.

Increasingly, across public life, grievance has become a badge of honour, a marker of identity, while restraint is increasingly recast as a marker of weakness. Ronson asks whether Linehan’s behaviour is an expression of masculinity. Perhaps, he had come to regard it as his duty “as a man” to preserve order while old structures seemingly collapsed around him?

This sense of threatened order haunts the pages of The Castle. Its men struggle with the loss of established sources of purpose and authority. Some build private fiefdoms where their desires remain sovereign. Others turn cultural conflict into an endless moral crusade. In each case, a changing world becomes something to resist rather than inhabit.

Ultimately, Ronson, typically sensitive to ambiguity and complexity, recognises there is no single – or simple – answer to the question of why it’s a strange time to be a man. Wisely, he sits with the complexity and contradiction he finds.

Instead of providing a definitive answer, The Castle shows how readily the search for masculine purpose can harden into a fortress against a fluctuating, uncertain world – with all the danger that entails.