Jake and Logan Paul Hit the Limits of the Manosphere
In the opening minutes of the new reality show Paul American, Jake Paul torches a fat wad of $100 bills. The jacked and tatted YouTuber turned boxer flirts with the camera as he shoots promos for, in a meta twist, the show you’re already watching. (The money is fake.) Jake and his older brother, Logan, a YouTuber turned pro wrestler, are the stars and executive producers of the cocksure Max series chronicling their family’s exploits. “Like if the Kardashians were combat fighters—that’s really what we have here,” is how Jake puts it during a pitch meeting. Against a backdrop of podcasts, private jets, McMansions, and shameless shilling (body spray and energy drinks), the brothers steamroll their way through daily life.
The series is a slick attempt by two giants of the so-called manosphere—the loose network of podcasts and YouTube channels by, for, and about testosterone-laced males—to conquer the cultural mainstream. And yet, in setting out to build their macho fantasy, the Pauls may have also revealed the manosphere’s intellectual limits. Paul American shows Jake, 28, and Logan, 29, discovering that a crucial part of a hetero male’s existence is learning to live with his female equal.
Logan’s fiancée is the Danish supermodel Nina Agdal, and Jake recently proposed to Jutta Leerdam, a Dutch Olympic speed skater. In capturing their relationship dynamics on camera, the show demonstrates that not even the most successful “alpha male” self-promoters can live in a world entirely of their own making. So much of today’s manosphere revolves around the repellent misogyny of influencers such as Andrew Tate, but the first four episodes of Paul American may unwittingly leave viewers with the idea that having a strong, freethinking woman in your life is the best thing that can happen to you.
The Pauls, who have 150 million online followers across all their platforms, have spent the bulk of their lives on a never-ending quest for virality. Last year, Donald Trump was a guest on Logan’s podcast, Impaulsive—months before Trump went on Joe Rogan’s and Theo Von’s shows—and both brothers attended the president’s inauguration. The internet-culture writer Taylor Lorenz, who has chronicled the Pauls’ rise to fame, told me that a decade ago, they seemed like “silly, young frat-bro-type guys” but that they have since been “radicalized to the right” and embraced by “the Trump movement.” The first episode of the Max show contains a clip from last year in which the president hands Logan an autographed red TRUMP hat.
Most of the time, though, the politics are merely implicit: The Pauls come off as content creators first, athletes second, ideologues a distant third. Jake is a new boxer who last fall fought Mike Tyson, a former champ now in his late 50s; Logan is beholden to the scripted outcomes of World Wrestling Entertainment. But those gigs feel more like side hustles, even if their reality show would like you to believe otherwise. The Pauls are the heirs to MTV’s Jackass, and they built their influence empire by filming their antics for their YouTube channels. One such stunt was Logan setting a mattress ablaze and chucking it into a swimming pool; more disturbing was his infamous journey into Japan’s “suicide forest,” in which he filmed a dead body and received widespread condemnation.
Like Trump, though, the Pauls have muscled through every controversy—bravado they seem to have inherited from their father, Greg. “Cancel culture can suck my ass,” Greg tells the camera, while flashing the middle finger with both hands.
As children of divorce, the brothers sometimes tiptoe around their short-fused father. Jake occasionally speaks of unspecified traumas. Logan is more direct: “Yeah, man, my dad was physical with us.” (“I think I was a great dad,” Greg responds in the next clip.) In one episode, during a family meeting, Logan refers to his dad as a liability for the show; Greg, incensed, tells his son to “shut the fuck up” and “jokes” about punching him in the face. Some of these moments are uncomfortable, while others feel like pro-wrestling kayfabe. (“We’re gonna have to manufacture some drama for sure,” Logan tells Jake after their show is green-lit.)
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Their mother, Pam, is generally portrayed in a more sympathetic light but can seem overwhelmed by her sons’ celebrity. “Why would they listen to me?” Pam asks at one point. “They’re making lots more money than I ever made. What am I gonna do?” Still, she never doubted that her boys’ natural athleticism would lead them to lives of distinction; she once believed that Jake, for example, would go into the NFL or become a Navy SEAL. Greg, in contrast, scoffed that if his sons couldn’t become mainstream entertainers, they’d end up doing porn. The sons still act as if they crave his approval.
In this absence of model parenting, Jake and Logan’s significant others, Jutta and Nina, come to resemble surrogate moms. Each woman keeps her respective Paul in check, even challenges him. In one memorable scene, aboard a private jet, Jutta implores Jake to be his “real” self. “Remember how that was?” she asks pointedly. She’s the most blunt family member at the aforementioned meeting. She won’t uproot her life—she lives and trains in the Netherlands, while he does so in Puerto Rico—and steadfastly refuses to act as Jake’s arm candy. And Jake is visibly his best self around her.
Even the distinctly conservative world of the Pauls has to make room for women’s agency. “The trad wife is not the only model of right-wing femininity,” the feminist writer Jill Filipovic told me. Each brother’s partner telegraphs that she’d be just fine if she had never ventured into the Paul mediaverse.
Nina, a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model, had previously made cameos in fast-food commercials and on HBO’s bro-fantasy comedy Entourage, but, it seems, she had no plan to become a reality-TV star. In a poignant scene, Nina talks about the cyberbullying and online sexual harassment she’s received from one of Logan’s rivals, an experience that seems to have both shaken and awakened her. The season turns on Nina’s becoming pregnant with her and Logan’s first child—and her ambivalence over turning their baby into content, after her experience of online abuse. He wanted a boy, but Nina’s carrying a girl. In a moment of reflection, Logan admits, “It almost felt maybe like life karma for the way I’ve treated women.”
At times, Paul American reminds me of The Osbournes—the classic MTV reality series about how fame and fortune unbalance a family—except with blond 20-somethings at the center, instead of an aging British heavy-metal god. That show, from the early 2000s, was fundamentally wholesome; the members of the Osbourne family all appeared to love one another despite profanity flying around the house all day. If there’s any comparably wholesome side to Paul American, it’s that even two man-children can stumble into understanding how their own self-aggrandizement affects the women around them.