Gift Guides, Consumerism and Climate Change

Hi, welcome to A Manly Podcast. I’m your host Dr. Matthew Manly.

On A Manly Podcast, I talk about issues related to men and masculinity in American culture, and society. In the 2024 presidential election, Trump won the overwhelming support of men across the country. Traditional, manly forms of masculinity are represented far more in American media and culture than more positive forms of masculinity. This is a space to dive into understanding more traditional forms of masculinity and sharing alternative, more inclusive forms of masculinity.

Let’s dive in!

I like looking at gift guides. Without digital gift guides and online reviews , I would be a castaway in the ocean of online shopping.

This Christmas, I found a gift for my dad with a gift guide and also find the right pair of slippers to ask for. Wirecutter on The New York Times is constantly throwing up new articles, and they’ve become an encyclopedia for almost any type of product or gadget you can think of.

There are thousands of these gift guide lists on the internet for almost any type of holiday. And the bigger the holiday, the more segmented and niche the lists become.

Gift guides tend to perpetuate rigid gender stereotypes around women as domestic homemakers and men as burly handymen that love cars, whiskey, sports and beer. This is especially true when considering holidays like Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, and Valentine’s Day. The lens of most gift guides thinks of gender roles in traditional, outdated ways. This is a tiny, tiny element of American culture, but is representative of how narrow definitions of gender are normalized and reinforced in our society.

People love them though. They’re useful and profitable. Almost every major media company like The New York Times uses gift guides, and relies on revenue from affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is where publishers earn commission by sharing or promoting a product or service from someone else. The affiliates in this case are the media companies publishing gift guides. They receive a commission from the company or retailer’s sales for visits to sites, sign-ups, purchases, or all of the above.

Gift guides are prolific, and they’ve only become more so in the last decade with the accumulation of stuff from online shopping. They are a valuable source of revenue in a changing, fragmented media landscape driven by distraction. Almost all retailers now offer super-fast, low-cost shipping to compete with Amazon prime’s free two-day shipping. The American consumer has become conditioned towards this almost instant gratification where we buy something online with just a few clicks, and it shows up at our doorstep.

We love to be entertained, and one form of entertainment is lists. Gift guides lists of things we can actually attain, or get for someone else, or dream about getting. It gives us good feelings. What we don’t think about is where the product was sourced from, the environmental cost of getting it to our doorstep, the packaging, and what we’re going to do it once we’ve finished using it.

I’ve found myself on a range of these media sites over the last few years looking for gifts for family, friends, or maybe even colleagues. The ones I remember being on: Esquire, GQ, Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan. Like Wirecutter, there are other sites solely dedicated to gift guides like The Strategist from New York Magazine and CNN Underscored from CNN. If I’ve fallen down a rabbit hole looking through my third or fourth gift list, I’m distracted, I’m distracted from intention, but curious, enjoying myself, wondering “Who would buy this?” Ogling with my eyes kind of popping out saying, “Oo, I could find this useful.” Sometimes I’ve bought those things.

Our attention these days is always going somewhere different. We live in a world of endless choice for entertainment and information, with tech and media companies vying for our attention and time through mobile games, apps, streaming apps, social platforms. They want us to spend as much time engaging with their game, app or platform because the more time we spend there, the more money they’re going to make from advertisers and our attention. Many people believe that our technology has made our attention spans shorter and that our world is full of endless distraction without the ability to pay attention to what’s important. That may be true to an extent, but people still enjoy longform content. I don’t believe our attention spans have gotten shorter, they’ve just been diverted to worry about things that are more relevant and relatable to our nuanced and complex lives than big, big issues like the environment.

Masculinity is personal and nuanced for anyone who identifies as a man. One of the things I believe is important to a positive, inclusive masculinity is being pro-environment, caring about the environment in some way. I will admit, I’m a casual environmentalist. I compost, I’m a member of the San Diego Zoo and our local Audobon, now Bird Alliance chapter. I’ve read Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, and am all for policies to help solve climate change. We need renewable energies, learning from Indigenous land practices and environmental justice initiatives to help solve this existential issue.

I’m sure there are many highly masculine men in America who care about the environment and want to see their planet healthy for the next generation. 29% of men who are democrats identify as highly masculine, and I can’t imagine they don’t want to see climate change addressed in a real and substantive way. There is broad support (and unanimous consent among democrats) across the country for climate change policies that are being rescinded or will be rescinded by the new Trump administration. Also, 8 in 10 Americans are frustrated by Washington’s inability to address the issue of climate change.

The flip side of this though is men who do identify as highly masculine that see the Earth and nature as something to be exploited and dominated. They want to burn more fossil fuels. They want to repeal the Endangered Species Act so they can drill and pollute where they want. They deny climate change, choosing profit and short term gains over the planet’s health. This is toxic masculinity at its finest because it’s all about power, men trying to dominate the most powerful force on Earth, nature, for short term gains leaving future generations to suffer, and believing there’s some plan B on the moon or Mars, I guess.

Post-pandemic America went all in on the convenience of online shopping, and a choose your own adventure digital media landscape that further cemented the dominance of powerful global tech companies based here in the US.

It’s not difficult to find nuanced thoughts or longform content in the attention economy, but it can be difficult to have nuanced and substantive conversations around important issues and problems that the world is facing.

Advertisers of course discourage us from thinking critically, presenting the world in simple, black and white ways. They want us to live life on a plastic surface of simplicity. Most people can see through this though. Gift guides are essentially advertisements of products, but they give us agency for finding what intrigues or interests us. It’s like a simple game, reacting to the different products, reading the pithy descriptions, going, “Uh?” or “Ooh!”

As a consumer in their sales funnel, we’re not asking questions about how gender stereotypes are being presented to us. We’re less likely to think critically about how their ad or message is possibly normalizing toxic masculinity. And even if it reinforcing gender stereotypes or toxic masculinity, what can we do about it? Our world of consumerism constantly reinforces the status quo of gender norms in our society and the idea that traditional, manly masculinity is the dominant expression of masculinity in America, which it isn’t. Asking and answering questions like these can be difficult when our attention is constantly being redirected elsewhere. It’s hard to keep our focus on understanding more nuanced issues that require deeper thought over time.

At the end of 2024, I was reading an article by a writer in which they talked about how convenient their life felt, but how chaotic the world felt. There are the Wars in Gaza and Ukraine, Trump’s campaign and winning the presidency, environmental and wildlife decline. I think they were picking up on how our attention is constantly being redirected. Tech companies feed us a complex, nuanced world through convenience and entertainment. They don’t leave a lot of space for substance though about public policy issues (and I hate to say it) that are really boring but consequential. Daniel Immerwahr in The New Yorker wrote an article in which he said that attention trolls captivate our consciousness much more than say issues like climate change. For instance, last week Elon Musk was talked about a lot more than say Trump backing out of the Paris Climate Agreement (again), signing an executive order to block new renewable energy projects, and withhold funds from electric car manufacturers.

Consumerism in the age of “attention capitalism” under our new tech overlords has two versions of the same story, and both of these are parallel truth that exist in our reality.

Take the microcosm of the gift guide industry.

So, let’s go with Version 1: Version 1 is the success story about how gift guides help drive small business for innovative niche products and services. Gift guides help people choose the right thing without the headache of whatever could go wrong as an internet shopper castaway. They help drive consumerism and the economy. Media companies saw an opportunity, ran with it, and replaced more traditional form of advertising with affiliate marketing opportunities. The American way is to be adaptable and resourceful, and companies found a lucrative revenue source to help support and keep their journalism profitable.

Version 2 is that this new form of consumerism encourages and gets us to buy too much stuff. The average American produces just under 5 pounds of waste a day. In 1960, it was 2.68 pounds.

In 2018, the US created 292.4 million tons of waste. In 1960, it was 88.1 million tons. Over the last half century, we’ve increased the amount of things we use and throw away exponentially.

Recently, a researcher at John Hopkins, Dr. Menard in collaboration with a graphic designer, Nikita Shtarkman, created a powerful online visualization of all the stuff humans have created, technomass, in relation to the stuff of the natural world has created, biomass. This was based on research published in 2018 by a geophysicist at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Dr. Yinon M. Bar-On.

Today, technomass comprises 1.3 gigatons compared to biomass, which is 1.1 gigatons. Humans are only .12 gigatons.

Almost all of the world’s technomass was created after 1900, and it’s astounding to see how much was created after 1990. Manmade technomass was nowhere even close to surpassing the world’s biomass in 1990. Plastic waste seems to start around the ‘80s and in less than 50 years, its mass has already proliferated to 13 gigatons, over twice the mass of all animals. It took four billion years to create all the biomass on Earth and in just over a century, people have drastically altered and shaped the world to their ways of life.

Our household consumption of products and services accounts for 60% of global emissions. The world last year went over the 1.5 degree celsius threshold from the Paris Climate Agreement, which means we are perilously close to dangerous tipping points that could cause drastic changes in the atmosphere and weather leading to widespread environmental collapse and biodiversity loss.

Many Americans want to see real, substantive change on this issue. They don’t want to continue burning fossil fuels at higher rates than before till we destroy our environment. The world as a whole wants to see substantive change on this issue.

What’s stopping the world from making change though is leadership. Patriarchal and traditional, manly masculinities right now do not see the environment as a priority, and they dominate positions of power in politics and the business world. 86% of UN member states are run by men. About 90% of Fortune 500 companies are run by white men. 37 of the top 50 Fortune 500 Companies are run by white men.

The status quo right now, and what we saw at the Inauguration last week, is men (and in the US a very powerful group of cisgendered, heteronormative, white men) who choose power and profit over the greater good of the people and the environment.

The world leaders who can help the world address issues like plastic waste and climate change that are byproducts of consumerism won’t. The corporate leaders who can help create it promise to make change, but it comes too slow.

How does a world that runs on consumerism and fossil fuels stop running on consumerism and fossil fuels?

It’s hard not to collectively shrug at all the doom and gloom, and go back to watching something on our phones, find something else to worry about, or escape into. It’s not good for our mental health to constantly worry about these big issues. It’s too depressing!

A lot of Americans want to buy more sustainable products. There’s just not a lot of information or awareness about the right products to buy or why to buy them. Businesses don’t want to talk about a crisis of overconsumption because it hinders growth. Governments don’t want to talk about it because it hinders economies. And talking about climate change in the wrong way can put the burden of addressing the issue on consumers when it should be on big polluters who are generally large corporations.

Gift guides are just another tool in the toolbox for businesses and corporations to get us to buy more stuff. And if you love gift guides, if you love buying stuff, you do you. I believe and value people expressing themselves however they want. If gift guides, I don’t know, have helped you level up in your job or got that perfect gift for an impossible relative, then I’ve probably been missing out.

What I am here for is in a world run by men, I want Americans to be aware of what’s going on in the larger world. Most CEOs and world leaders look to keep people in the dark about this stuff, and for good reason. It’s not good for profit. It’s not a good reflection of leadership at a time when action is needed.

I believe men, especially white men can be conscious of valuing, believing, and at some point advocating for a healthier planet in some way.

I appreciate you being generous with your time and listening to this episode of A Manly Podcast. Please subscribe here on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

I’ll be sharing about a topic related to men and masculinity each week. On my next episode, I’ll be talking about the masculinity of Spider-Man. Till next time!