In a world where superyachts are cringe and firing a rocket ship turns you into a dick joke, what is a poor billionaire to do? According to Van Badham, a Guardian Australia columnist, spruiking billionaire-coded masculinity is now an invitation to feminine mockery. Real social power does not come from trinkets or trophies.
The Shift in Status Symbols
While Reuters has catalogued the toys in the luxury playbook being marketed to new squillionaires, social media suggests there is a new status symbol for the aspirational alpha male. It is 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, Badham proposes with pride that women are to blame.
Gendered Nature of Luxury
The market for luxury status symbols is whoever has the money and power to attain them. Historically, that is men, and 86% of the world's billionaires are men. The world's highest-paid athletes are men, the highest-paid film actors are also men, and heads of government are mostly men. The Global Media Monitoring Project reported that as recently as last year, an overwhelming number of news stories are sourced from men, quote from men, and are about men. The cachet of such achievement has traditionally been demonstrated through association with glamorous objects and lifestyles. When achievement is gendered, so are many of its rewards.
Cultural Devaluation of Luxury Goods
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 admit that on the newly diversified media platforms, lots of people are saying mean things about the things they own and the rarefied practices they have chosen to define them.
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. 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.
Gendered Social Judgment
If you are suspecting social judgment also has a gendered context, you are right. In a world that is still allowed to speak back to the powerful, spruiking your billionaire-coded masculine energy is an invitation to feminine mockery, not respect. Men who trophy hunt much younger women to signal their dominance are not messaging virility privilege or king among subjects; they are 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. A post illustrated with Hollywood star Mads Mikkelsen, 60, embracing his partner Hanne Jacobsen, 65, stated: "For me older men are hot only if they have wives their own age." 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 reflect their own. They are making the ultimate alpha male symbol a partner who is their equal.
Conclusion
This is not 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 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 does not come from trinkets or trophies. It comes from confidence among equals and the opportunity to show you are not fragile, frightened, or weak.
