Tlon: “” My wife “is a museum of dying masculinity (whose death could last forever)”

This article on the Facebook group “My wife” is published in number 36 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until September 2, 2025.

“A great man once said: in life everything revolves around sex. Apart from sex: Sex revolves around powerExplained the Mephistophelic Frank Underwood in the first season of House of Cards. And it is the same logic that held the Facebook group “My wife”closed after an online mobilization but already ready to be reborn elsewhere.

Inside, 32 thousand users They published photos of their companions, wives, friends, often photographed on the street or in daily moments: a woman in costume, in the kitchen, sitting by car. Trivial shots, which immediately became collective pornography in the comments. This reveals a precise trait: for these men there is no neutral context in which the woman is not a sexual object. There is no respite. But the real question is: Why share those images?

Not out of desire or for the need for pornography, which abounds everywhere. The answer is another: what they are looking for is mutual recognition. It is the “beautiful one” of a stranger who confirms that yes, you have “won” something in life. You have a woman that others would like. You are enviable, so it exists. And in turn You can access the “property” of others otherwise buried. It is pure social theater.

It is not (only) the need for sex to move them, but the desperate search for a place to reaffirm a male identity that in the real world no longer finds confirmation. “My wife” was, after all, a museum. A museum dedicated to a model of dying masculinity (whose death could last forever) in which the finds exposed are lively people, with real biographies and fragility, who have undergone real violence. Other groups will be born, more hidden and aggressive. Because the problem are not 32 thousand “rotten apples”: it is the tree itself that is built on subordination. And it is the social architecture that crashes, and that produces increasingly violent forms of resistance.

No Facebook moderation will be able to cure what has broken in the pact between the genres: the possibility of looking at each other as human beings instead of prey and hunters. The name of the group itself, “my wife”, is a programmatic declaration: the possessive preceding the relationshipthe property that defines identity. “Wife” as a status, as a acquisition, as a share capital to be exhibited. Compulsive sharing then becomes the last attempt to resume control. The more the real world makes female autonomy evident, the more these spaces become the refuge in which to reaffirm a lost authority. Each shared photo is an act of symbolic resetting: a desperate attempt to re -seal a power that escapes, of restore an order that no longer holds.

Until we continue to treat these episodes as aberrations instead of symptomsuntil we face the crisis of meaning that crosses the contemporary male, we will only continue to chase the emergencygroup after group, scandal after scandal, while violence reorganizes in the shadowsprotected by the homeere of those who prefer to look elsewhere.

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