Jon Ronson on 'Unraveling' Men

**Kushan Avedar** (0:10)
It's The Brian Lehrer Show. I'm Kushan Avedar filling in for Brian today here on WNYC.
Journalist and filmmaker Jon Ronson has spent his career reporting on The Strange and The Extreme. You may remember his book, The Psychopath Test, which inspired an episode of This American Life of the same name, or his book titled Them, which was about extremists and conspiracy theories and featured a profile of a budding commentator named Alex Jones. Now Ronson has written a book about what he calls a world of unraveling men, men living through a moment when the jobs, roles and sense of purpose that used to define manhood disappeared out from under them. The story starts close to home. Ronson's own son wandered into the estate of a wealthy heir named Chris Mark, who had built himself an actual castle, including the moat, and was casting himself as the lord over a harem of young women he called princesses.
Ronson tracked Mark down and used his story as a way into something much bigger. A look at how men respond, sometimes in destructive ways when that ground disappears from under them. The book is The Castle, Adventures in a World of Unraveling Men, and I'm lucky to have Jon Ronson joining me just three feet away in the studio right now. Hi Jon.

**Jon Ronson** (1:31)
Hi. I'm very lucky to be here. Thank you for having me.

**Kushan Avedar** (1:34)
Absolutely. Listeners, we can take some phone calls for Jon Ronson on his new book, The Castle, Adventures in a World of Unraveling Men. What are you noticing about men and masculinity right now in your own family, your workplace, your friend group, or just in the culture around you? What's changing? How do you feel about it? Send us a call, send us a text. We're at 212-433-9692.
That's 212-433-WNYC. Okay. So Jon, take us into that Connecticut Castle. What did your son and his friends actually find themselves in the middle of?

**Jon Ronson** (2:08)
Sure. Well, this is a story that crushed unannounced into my life while I was asleep.
I wake up, and there's a series of texts of my son. I want to read them out. I want to leave verbatim because they included swear words made in panic. Because my son and three friends were invited to a party being held by a stranger that one of them had met earlier that week on Tinder. So a kind of inauspicious start.

**Kushan Avedar** (2:34)
Right.

**Jon Ronson** (2:35)
They drive into the forests of Connecticut and turn up at this man's house, and it is, as you say, a vast, newly built castle, which is ostentatious, even by Gothic castle standards.

**Kushan Avedar** (2:49)
You say by Connecticut standards, no shades of Connecticut.

**Jon Ronson** (2:51)
Forgot that. Even by Gothic. Count Dracula would think this was a bit blah. Yeah.
Way too many turrets. So they cross the drawbridge and enter the grand banqueting hall to discover that there's no party. They've been invited there for a different reason. So then the castle owner comes out and they say, sorry, where's the party? And he said, no, no, no, I've invited you here to take part in my reality show.
So they said, what's the name of your reality show? He said, it's called 101 Princesses. They said, what's the core concept? He said, I'm the Lord, I'm looking for my queen and I have 101 princesses to choose from. Then he said to the women in Joel's party, go downstairs to my basement costume room, choose a princess costume, and then come back upstairs for filming.

**Kushan Avedar** (3:40)
The trick here is that it's not a real reality show. No.

**Jon Ronson** (3:44)
Well, they first figured out that this wasn't a real reality show because they put on their princess costumes and a videographer appeared. But I think the first clue was that the videographer had several duties for the castle owner. One was filming, but the other was cutting up meat for the castle owner. He had a huge slab of meat. None of the meat was offered to anyone else. They thought, maybe this isn't a real reality show.
So they got kicked out after refusing to participate. But not a good idea to invite a journalist son to your forbidden castle of mysteries.

**Kushan Avedar** (4:21)
Because then you decided to dig deeper, right?

**Jon Ronson** (4:23)
I decided to go to the castle myself.

**Kushan Avedar** (4:25)
What was actually going on?

**Jon Ronson** (4:27)
Well, that was my question. So I went to the castle, and the castle owner showed me around, Chris Mark.
And then sort of told me some kind of unwise things about how he would get women to come to his castle. Then realized he was telling me some pretty indiscreet things, tried to get me to sign an NDA. I refused. I noticed he had a whole pile of NDAs in his kitchen. Who has a whole pile of NDAs in their kitchen? He had why? So I left, and then things got sketchier. He started sending me these very panicked and increasingly ominous messages. He said he had two murderers on his payroll called Carlos and Brandon. If I ever wrote negatively about the castle, it would make Carlos and Brandon very upset. They've just got out of prison for killing someone. Anyway, so things got weirder, and I thought I'm going to keep investigating the castle. I'm going to keep trying to find out what's going on. But also, I think the moment when I realized this was a book, was I realized that this was a man trying to be Hugh Hefner essentially. A playboy theme. Yes, of what is surely the worst moment in human history to be Hugh Hefner. You can't lord it over your princesses in your castle like it's the 1970s anymore. That made me smile because I thought, well, there's lots of things that men used to be able to do that they can't do anymore.