People still yearn for that trace of meanness, that disregard for niceties.
Portnoy likes pizza with char on the bottom, pizza that doesn’t flop when you hold it by the crust. He seems to have an almost childish distaste for strong flavors like oregano and Parmesan. Vinyl signs, old photos on the wall, wood paneling — he’s a sucker for the dumpy vernacular forms of the Northeastern corner joint, and he visibly struggles when a mom-and-pop shop with a charmingly old-school interior has a mediocre product. He agonizes over his scores, always insisting on their decimal places, which give them the absurd specificity of that other famous user of the decimalized 10-point scale, Pitchfork.
This is just one of many details — his love of garish vintage clothing, his fetish for authenticity, the Yelp!-iness of this high-low foodie quest — that eventually made me realize: If Portnoy were doing this 15 years ago, you might reasonably have assumed he was some kind of hipster, not an avatar of a reactionary jock fringe. (In fact, there was something like this back then: a viral blog called Slice Harvester, by a New York punk rocker, that eventually became a memoir published by Simon & Schuster and deemed one of NPR’s best books of 2015.) Once you accept this, you can see Portnoy more clearly. The Portnoy in the pizza videos often has a preening, fussy, almost effete quality that complicates his butch self-image. He frets over his weight when he has been doing too many reviews; he shows off his tan when he’s in Florida. When someone walks by with a dog, he speaks to it in that baby voice people sometimes do and tries to guess its name. This can’t seriously be part of the fearsome “manosphere,” can it?
If it is — if Portnoy’s website and personal conduct put anything he touches in some marginal category outside the bounds of mainstream decency — then his many, many fans have not gotten the message. In the videos, Portnoy’s fame warps reality around him: People yell from passing cars, crowds form, smartphones deploy, mothers hand over babies. If the media business is about reaching people, then these people have been well and truly reached — and not by the mainstream. But also not by political propaganda or anything with any overt ideological content whatsoever. They have been reached by pizza-review videos. This is a common dynamic when the mainstream media considers the manosphere: Joe Rogan, arguably the biggest of its boogeymen, makes headlines when he transgresses some norm or another, but often he just talks about DMT, aliens and M.M.A. fighting, at excruciating length.
Over the past decade or so, the media has devoted a lot of energy to the purging of toxic elements — the presumption being that we would remain in control of what happened afterward. I suppose we imagined we were digging out someplace for all these unwanted energies to go, some cesspool far from our fort. But after some years, the cesspool got bigger, and our fort got smaller, and eventually the cesspool must have looked inviting. Because look at it now: People are swimming in it, tanning on its shores, doing doughnuts in it on their Sea-Doos, probably mystified by any claims that it’s a cesspool. In fact, looking over at our sad little fort, they probably enjoy whatever scum remains.
