There is a familiar pattern to stories of people with great wealth. It starts with the first generation becoming wealthy, usually by luck (they find oil on their property, say) or by developing some idea that they then ruthlessly exploit people and the earth’s resources to create their wealth. And then you have the subsequent generations that inherits that wealth. Some of them continue their ancestral business but others drift into hedonistic lifestyles where they do nothing productive at all but indulge their fantasies.

Jon Ronson writes about how, via his son, he stumbled onto the story of Chris Mark, whose great-grandfather Clayton had founded the steel company Clayton Mark & Company and made a fortune. Mark does not seem to have done anything on his own with his life but instead has nurtured the dream of using his inherited wealth to becoming a new Hugh Hefner, the founder of Playboy magazine, notorious for living in a mansion that was populated by scantily clad young women known as ‘bunnies’. (As far as we know, those women were not underage, which distinguishes Hefner from Jeffrey Epstein.)

Mark created his own mansion in the form of a massive medieval castle that he built in 2010 in rural Connecticut, complete with spires, towers, turrets, gargoyles, and a drawbridge. His dream seemed to be to entice attractive young women to come there and dress up and act like ‘princesses’, tiaras and all, who would curtsey before him and say things like “Yes, my lord”, and from among whom he would pick one to be his ‘queen’, while the others would have sex with one another. The lure for these women was that he told them he was producing a reality show for Netflix called 101 Princesses. Sadly, in these days of increasingly lurid and exploitative TV, this seemed plausible.

After initially accepting Ronson’s request to visit the castle and interview him, Mark seemed to have become concerned at how he might be portrayed and after the visit sent Ronson multiple text messages threatening him with legal action and even physical harm if he wrote anything negative. This is one:

“I’m going to be sending you some of my friends that were in prison for killing somebody… Maybe you could help them write something good so they can turn their lives around … One of my good friends who got out of prison is on his way to New York today … Do not ever mention anything negative about the castle because this guy will get really upset. He thinks I’m like a god, and you don’t want to see him angry. He just got out of jail like a week ago and has been in there for, like, 15 years … To be honest, I’m even a little bit afraid of some of these people … Carlos and Brandon are on their way to New York right now.”

Ronson felt that these threats were largely performative, sensing that Mark was really quite inept and a bumbler. Mark strikes me as being a little like the Peter Sellers character Chance in the film Being There, someone who has obtained his view of the world almost entirely from what he has seen on TV and acts accordingly, not realizing how ludicrous he looks.

Ronson tries to draw a larger message from this, the connection to the weird misogynistic world of the manosphere.

It struck me that Mark was trying to be Hugh Hefner during surely the worst period in human history to be Hugh Hefner. Unless you’re the creme de la creme of manosphere influencers, you can’t lord it over princesses in your castle like it’s the 1970s any more.

And so, despite there being nothing immediately relatable about his story, being a tale about the complexities of luring women to your castle in the post‑#MeToo age, I could see a resonance. It was a story about men out of time, men failing to adjust to a world that was moving away from them. The world had changed shape and all kinds of men were discovering there were things they’d once done that they couldn’t do any more.

Mark’s situation was, of course, bizarre and extreme. He had the resources to construct a fantasy bubble within which he could pretend his lifestyle wasn’t dated and weird and damaging, but aspirational. However, I was picturing less empowered and more sympathetic men than him – men who used to derive structure and meaning from, say, office or factory life, and were now struggling to adjust to a society that had reorganised itself without them in such a central position.

Some were instead scratching a living as YouTubers, “personal brands”, content creators with no job protections, while others were withdrawing, folding in on themselves. There’s data to prove it. By 2022, one in six US men aged between 25 and 54 wasn’t working. But within that statistic was a more startling one: two‑thirds of those men weren’t even looking for jobs. That’s 6.7 million US men, and countless more around the world, who’ve just … bowed out.

I was aghast. Why had those men opted out of society? What havoc was that purposelessness wreaking on their inner lives, and on the lives of their loved ones – partners, parents, children? And given that some of them would inevitably grow sick of a life in the shadows – of a life of male nothingness – what might happen next?
…

I think that, like many men, Mark was trying to create a fantasy life within which he didn’t have to live or interact with other people except on his own terms. It’s a growing phenomenon – men responding to the collapse of the old structures, and a shift in power, by becoming like separatists, succumbing to uninhibited behaviour, trying to create false utopias where they can behave however they want. But it feels like the experiment is failing. As Mark is presumably learning, sometimes when you push boundaries, reality bites back.

It should be no surprise that Mark is under investigation by a number of federal agencies for alleged sex-related crimes, though he has not yet been charged and his current whereabouts are unknown.