Across Europe, debates about masculinity, gender equality, and democracy are becoming increasingly urgent. Online influencers, digital subcultures, and political discourse are shaping how young men understand power, identity, and belonging. At the same time, misogynistic and anti-democratic narratives are spreading widely across social media, where ideas of manhood are often framed through dominance, grievance, and rejection of feminism, empathy, and pluralism.

Synopsis

Echoes of Masculinity is a monologue performance about the voices that shape contemporary masculinity and the cost of listening to them for too long. Moving through instructions for manhood, social media rhetoric, inner pressure and emotional collapse, the performance traces how ideals of dominance, control, discipline and success become internalized in the body and mind.

In the first part, the audience is pulled into a relentless soundscape of motivational rhetoric, manosphere language, and social conditioning: win, dominate, suppress, never fail. These messages promise strength, certainty and belonging, while quietly producing fear, isolation and disconnection. What begins as empowerment slowly reveals itself as a system of pressure and erasure.

The second part shifts inward. Beneath the performance of invulnerability, another voice emerges: uncertain, tired, searching for connection. Here, masculinity is no longer presented as conquest, but as vulnerability, care, accountability, and the courage to be seen as incomplete.

The work opens a space to imagine a different kind of strength, one grounded not in dominance, but in openness and relation.

Combining text, repetition, voice distortion, and live sound cues, Echoes of Masculinity explores how cultural scripts around manhood are learned, performed and potentially unlearned. It is both a critique of the seductive logic of the manosphere and an invitation to rethink masculinity as something more humane, shared and democratic.

Credits

Dagmar Slagmolen writer and actress

Jeroen Janssen sound designer

Created for the Europe Horizon project Men4Dem