The Masculine Urge to Rawdog Life Male Paranoia and the Gendering of Digital Detox

This article engages with the online trend of ‘rawdogging’ flights—where men endure long flights without any distractions, entertainment or amenities—to analyse the gendered logic behind digital detox cultures. We investigate this trend, a typical instance of digital detox, as a hegemonically masculine practice of resistance to what are experienced as the feminizing forces of digital technologies. Our contention is that this experience of emasculating stimulation is shaped by the tendency of networked devices to structure subjectivity in ways predominantly defined by vibes, flows and the capture of affect and attention. The immersive volatility of digital environments challenges perceptual control and corrodes the autonomous agency of the male self, thus triggering a defensive push-back. We conceptualise this response as a form of paranoid masculinity, which relentlessly polices the boundaries of the self and obsessively shores up fantasies of autonomy, rationality and (self-)control to ward off the supposedly emasculating forces of alterity, emotion and stimulation.