Across eras and civilizations, the world has essentially reduced manhood to two archetypes–the defender and the conqueror.

It doesn’t matter whether you wander through Homeric epics or the algorithm-driven fantasies of contemporary cinema, these are the only two scripts men are handed.

This is not to suggest that men have no other purpose. Far from it. Two decades ago, long before Elon Musk turned him into a cult mascot for the internet age, I wrote a column in Jay Jay Din arguing that Nikola Tesla was the most influential figure of the 20th century because Tesla made alternating current usable, which in turn made the modern world possible.

Second on that list, I argued, should be Norman Borlaug, the father of the Green Revolution, who saved hundreds of millions of lives with wheat.

Yet these are not the roles society celebrates. The inventor, the philosopher, the scholar, the mind capable of wrenching civilization forward–these figures rarely make it onto the public’s emotional altar.

Their achievements lack the narrative voltage that drives our mythologies. There is no operatic arc to the fluorescent hum of an AC generator, or no cinematic showdown in hybrid seeds.

This is precisely why, if one were to commit the heresy of ranking the forces that liberated women, the results would scandalize polite company.

Line up every feminist from the dawn of time on one side and, on the other, four mundane technological interventions–the washing machine, the dishwasher, safe contraception, and IVF. Then admit, aloud, that these four have done more to transform the lives of real women than centuries of rhetoric ever managed.

Say this openly and you will be accused of “blasphemy” because it violates the narrative instinct. A washing machine tells no story. It does not march and it does not bleed. It only liberates.

Among ordinary people, the myth-making remains unchanged. We revere the man who protects and the man who triumphs. A young man probably only has to mimic these traits–like the swaggering posture of a Hindi film hero, the hollow bravado of a fictional fighter–for communities to shower him with admiration.

Even counterfeit courage inspires devotion as our appetite for these archetypes is that primal.

Basic instincts

At first glance, it might seem that the conqueror is merely an extension of the defender, that the boy who fights to protect his sister will inevitably grow into the man who defeats his enemies.

But this is a comforting misconception. “To defend” and “to vanquish” arise from entirely different psychological universes. One is rooted in responsibility, the other in ambition. One springs from fear of loss, while the other from hunger for dominance.

Every boy on earth, no matter where he is born, intuitively grasps what it means “to defend.” It is the most ancient moral choreography of manhood–fulfilling the responsibility that falls to you simply because there is no one else to do it.

Twenty thousand years ago, the father defended his family by hunting for food. Today, he defends them by earning a salary or by steering his wife safely through a crowded marketplace. Or by simply absorbing the mundane frictions of daily life so others don’t have to.

“To defend” is not glamorous. It is not meant to be. It is low-risk, high-responsibility. It demands preparedness, and an instinctive readiness to meet the social expectations placed squarely on your shoulders.

“To vanquish,” however, belongs to an entirely different emotional universe. It begins not with responsibility but with the shedding of it, a pursuit of domination for its own sake.

Historically, this was the role of empires at their apex–Rome reducing entire peoples to footnotes, Carthage erased so thoroughly that the Phoenicians survive only in textbooks and museum labels. Victors could kill the boys, enslave the girls, plunder the city, and move on without consequence.

It is a heady role, but one a man can occupy only briefly. It is intoxicating precisely because it is not sustainable.

 In the modern world, the pure victor is almost impossible. Nation-states, markets, institutions, and laws have engineered an equilibrium in which everyone can dominate everyone else in small, petty ways–micro-victories, nano-victories–without ever achieving the total triumph their instincts hunger for.

The old religious and philosophical frameworks recognized this tension and tried, in their own ways, to domesticate it. Moses may have been granted near-total domination in the Old Testament, but Islam took a different, unexpectedly nuanced approach.

Islam shares with other ideologies the idea of man as defender. But the early Muslim notion of the victor was radically conditional that victory was not self-made rather it was bestowed.

If you surrendered your will to God, He might make you the victor…and, as early Islamic history unfolded, believers felt justified in saying this promise had been fulfilled. But crucially, Islam denied men permanent access to the pure role of the conqueror.

The defeated, the Qur’an insisted, become your responsibility. You inherit not just their lands but their welfare, their humanity. For the most part, Muslims lived up to this constraint.

The spoils came with obligations.

The crisis of real ‘manhood’

Here is the crisis: our instincts were forged in a world where the stakes were primal, where domination and defense were matters of survival. Yet we live in realities that are hyper-modern and strangely weightless.

The hardware of the human mind is a hundred thousand years old, running on emotional software updated only yesterday.

Never in human history did the witless, mindless man from say a Bengal hinterland– know, in real time, what was happening in Gaza, or for that matter in other distant parts of the world.

Never did he compare himself, minute by minute, with billions of others. His world was four hundred people, perhaps five hundred at most. That was the universe to which his instincts were calibrated.

Now imagine that person reborn in Bangladesh today. The instinct “to vanquish” still pulses within him–it is older than civilization itself–but he has absolutely no arena in which a real victory is possible. No war to win and no legitimate conquest available to him.

Then what emerges is not victory, but a fixation with the idea of victory. A vanquish fetish. A hunger for domination with no territory to conquer except the small, fragile spaces of daily life–online arguments and street-level swagger.

The delusion of being a hero in a world that no longer creates heroes. It is not that the modern man has lost his story. It is that he cannot find a story large enough to hold the instincts he has inherited.

Let me give an example. There is a moment in a Ranbir Kapoor film–one of those glossy Bollywood fantasies–where he leans over a stunning actress whose face is pressed into the bed sheets in a posture that leaves nothing to the imagination.

It is an image staged for maximum effect–Kapoor at the apex of whim and desire, unburdened by consequence, performing total domination.

But that scene is not merely cinema in contemporary Bangladesh. It is aspiration and fantasy. For countless young men, the ultimate dream is probably not sex but control [of sexual act]—the idea that they [female sexual partner] will do whatever they want, and be addressed as “Sir” in the moments of their imagined conquest.

No fetish rivals this one in its popularity. It is the distilled essence of a vanquish fantasy in a society where real opportunities for victory have evaporated.

But this fantasy is also revealing a crisis at the core of modern Bangladeshi masculinity.

Fantasized and convoluted masculinity

The young man scrolling reels in Dhaka–who began life in that small village in the hinterland but now carries a smartphone more powerful than anything NASA used to reach the moon–has the world’s most beautiful women flashing across his screen all day long.

His beauty standards, shaped by algorithms rather than community, are rigid. Fair skin, exaggerated proportions, a glamour curated by studios, filters, and lighting rigs. There is no room for subjectivity here.

He cannot see this because biology blinds him with hope. Hormones promise possibilities that the social order never intended to fulfill. But the cold reality is this–he is not even the 277th-ranked contender in the hierarchy of the woman he fantasizes about.

 The modern mating market is ruthless, especially for young men without financial success or upward momentum. In Bangladesh, unless a man displays clear markers of achievement or unless he happens to be a tailor [pun intended], no beautiful woman will bother to look twice eye to eye.

And if she does, she will place him immediately and safely in the “Bhaiya” category.

In this brutal ecosystem, sexual frustration grows to Himalayan proportions. He is not satisfied with the attainable, yet the unattainable remains galaxies away. Every day, this dissonance spills across Facebook and TikTok in ways that would be darkly comic if they weren’t so desperate.

A young woman becomes, in his mind, a commodity–a lump of flesh, a machine onto which he projects centuries-old instincts with no outlet.

This young man, whose inner world is wilder and more primal than that of a hunter from 10,000 years ago, now carries ultra-modern devices capable of broadcasting his impulses in real time.

The collision is catastrophic. You can see it in the comments sections beneath the photographs of beautiful or prominent Bangladeshi women–cascades of vulgarity, innuendo.

And aggression.

These boys know they can never be Ranbir Kapoor–not even in their most fevered dreams–so they reclaim a counterfeit sense of domination through language.

For the ‘chhapri’–the uncultured striver at the edge of the digital bazaar, a sexually explicit comment is a triumph. An insult becomes a form of conquest. A crude fantasy becomes a substitute for agency. This, he believes, is victory.

And if you scroll far enough, you will find yourself wondering, with equal parts alarm and fascination–who are these people?

The filth and the fetish

Just scroll beneath almost any photograph of Rubaba Daula Matin and you will find the same thing. Teenage boys and young men leaving trails of vulgar innuendo, as if her body were public property.

Out of curiosity, I have occasionally clicked through to see who these boys are. Often, it is someone who would not qualify for a job as a helper in the village home of Rubaba Daula’s driver, yet he feels entitled to comment on the body of a woman old enough to be his mother.

Is there any escape from this spiral? The honest answer is no…not in the way we usually imagine. Our Facebook-driven public sphere, once a chaotic commons where everyone shouted into the same void, is already fragmenting.

Now technology has taken that primitive energy and amplified it, broadcast it, made it borderless. Now ‘Chhapri’ masculinity has climbed out of the neighborhoods where it once stayed, slipped under the digital doorframe, and now sits in the lap of the nation, tugging at the hem of our collective consciousness.

Fifty years ago this mentality existed, but it was contained, woven into local ecosystems where elders and communities could restrain it.

‘Chhapri masculinity’--raw, brittle, resentful, allergic to disagreement–has become the operating system of a generation of men in Bangladesh now.

If you doubt this, speak to any woman between 35 and 55 who must commute without a car or driver in Dhaka. Their testimonies possibly align with this consistency.

She cannot articulate this publicly because fear has become part of her daily routine. Her security on the streets feels paper-thin. Perhaps the danger has not statistically increased, but the perception of risk has, and perception–when it governs your body and your movements–is reality.

She may feel quietly relieved that Sheikh Hasina is gone initially, but her quality of life has probably worsened since that day. Ask her yourself. She will tell you–cautiously, discreetly–that she lives with a heightened sense of fear.

Consider August 5th–Bangladesh’s liberation day from the worst dictatorship of Sheikh Hasina’s. For a 25-year-old boy, it was a moment of exhilaration and possibility. For a city woman who is 35 or older, it was something else entirely, at least later on.

It bleeds into the streets.

This is what social collapse looks like in the algorithmic age. The near-total impossibility of dignified female participation in the public square. And it does not exist only on Facebook.

No woman escapes this inversion of power..not the woman in a saree, not the woman in a hijab, not even the young activist who, wearing a ninja-style niqab, received a Chhatra Dal nomination that briefly made the news. Under that post, a Jamaat supporter asked a question so crude it would be laughable if it weren’t so revealing: he wanted to know how much ‘khat-kapan’ (shaking the bed) she does.

He has no interest in her competence, career, achievements or influence. His gaze collapses her into flesh. The digital distance gives him the illusion of hierarchy.

As democratic participation grows more performative and political interest quietly erodes, people will retreat into narrower digital enclaves. The universal town square will splinter into a thousand small rooms.

Each person will find, or build, their own niche–curated and self-flattering.

And how we confront ‘chhapri’ masculinity–the brittle and digitally emboldened swagger that now roams freely between pixels and pavements–will determine far more than the tone of our comment sections.

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Faham Abdus Salam is an Australia based writer

(Translated from Bangla by Faisal Mahmud)