Asherkine’s latest video opens with him in Enugu State, specifically at the University of Nigeria. He’s wearing a white tee, baggy jorts, and sneakers. As the video shows, not too long after arriving on the campus, he spots a damsel: Becky, a 300-level mass communications student, seated with her friends, taking cover under a sprawling tree. She’s dressed modestly: a white tee, a skirt, and flip-flops. Holding out his right hand, he invites her to a private conversation. During the conversation, he’s every bit the gentleman, and she in turn, is palpably receptive to his charm. “Do you have a boyfriend?” He asks after making a bit of small talk. “No.” “When was your last relationship?” He follows. She hesitates for a moment and then replies with “I’ve never been in one.” Becky’s exams finish by 7:30 pm the next day, and the conversation culminates with Asherkine extending to her the offer to take her back with him to Lagos. But even before then, he takes her grocery shopping: a dress rehearsal for tomorrow’s largesse.
The ensuing part of the video unspools with every bit the spectacle the video’s overture seemed to suggest. On the first morning, he picks her up from her hotel room in a black limousine. What happens next, I will argue, is tremendously important to our parsing of the story. Before our eyes, she begins to metamorphose. What, on the surface, appears to be a random cascade of activities brings about a sweeping transformation: he—Asherkine—takes her to a spa where she gets her nails done, he buys her diamond jewelry, an assortment of wigs, flowers, a new dress, and shoes. By the time we get to the video’s coda, its concluding chapter, her transformation is complete: she has gone from being the ingenue she was at the start of the video to an absolute stunner. It’s night, and they’re having dinner on a yacht, bathed in a soft purple glow. The perfect end to a wholesome video, one would think. But the show is hardly over. Just when you think the show has arrived at its crescendo, he ups the ante, offering her wads of cash, a box of perfumes, and brand-new AirPods.
The video, which has now been viewed on X some 29 million times, is the latest in a series of videos he produces, which I will call “Cinderella-esque.” They invariably follow a simple format: he goes to a university, randomly picks a girl to be the recipient of his generosity, and then subjects her to a glamorous “glow up,” all the while basting the whole experience with romantic overtones. This genre of videos, which portrays him as a wellspring of generosity, is sponsored by brands and constitutes a small fraction of his canon. His other video formats include gladiator style food competitions in which participants race to finish mountain-sized food portions to win a prize; videos set in shopping malls in which he typically offers to pay for whatever the participant can fit in the cart in a couple of minutes; videos in which he gratuitously disperses money to struggling families. To put it simply, Asherkine is perhaps the modern reincarnation of Mansa Musa, or at least that’s how he styles himself, and his videos typically capture him performing acts of generosity.
His videos, like many other videos that capture grand acts of generosity (for example, Mr Beast’s content), tend to perform well on social media, garnering millions of views and engendering hotly contested opinions. But his Cinderella-esque videos are, by some distance, his most volatile. They generate tens of millions of views and tend to temporarily monopolize the attention economy on social media, especially on X, which thrives on polarizing discourse. In the days since his most recent video, a flurry of debates and incidents, and reality-television-type dramas have erupted. There has been the routine mudslinging and inane rhetoric: mostly men accusing him of unfairly exposing her to “a lifestyle she can’t maintain,” and berating her as broke and opportunistic. But this time, something ominously different happened.
In response to her claim of being single and never having dated, screenshots from a guy named Kenny, who claimed to be her boyfriend, began to surface. In one, his face is covered with an emoji as he plants a kiss on her cheek. Following these claims a rabid horde turned on her, raining vitriolic invectives on as though they had a personal vendetta to settle. It turns out that the guy, Kenny, had stolen the pictures from her TikTok page and doctored them using AI to mislead the public. Given the ubiquity of AI-generated images and a general rise of fake news, why was the public, especially seemingly disgruntled men, so easily fooled? X users love to troll users of platforms like Facebook as impressionable and posit themselves as more critical, and, by effect, more impervious to fake news. How then were they so easily fooled?
To that question, I’ll offer a neat answer: they wanted to. Even before those disingenuous screenshots surfaced on social media, people—mostly men—had expressed doubts about her claims of being single. “Always single,” one sardonic tweet reads. And so when evidence to the contrary surfaced, notwithstanding the anonymity of the claimant and the weakness of the evidence, they seized upon it and began their vitriolic crusade. When the question of what animates the hateful behavior that almost always trails Asherkine’s Cinderella-esque videos arises, a simple culprit is typically served up: misogyny. And while that assessment is not wrong, it presents an overly simplistic answer to a multi-layered problem.
Wanton acts of misogyny are often animated by underlying psychological pathologies and cultural drivers. To put it differently, these acts of misogyny are typically the results of much deeper issues. In Gary Taylor’s essay, Death of an English Major, he unpacks “the grief, despair, and rage caused by the murder of one of our students.” The student in question, Maura Binkley, was the victim of “premeditated political violence,” killed by a raging misogynist. In his essay, he contends that this sort of violence is the inevitable consequence of a culture that measures men based on their “capacity for violence.” In Lilly Loofbourow’s essay Men Are More Afraid Than Ever, she draws a straight line between the preponderance of sexual assault amongst young men and what she describes as the “Boys will be boys nostrum” which blithely ascribes male malfeasance to “ innocent high spirits.”
By the same token, we can further probe the whirlpool of contempt that often accompanies Asherkine’s Cinderella-esque videos. What are its cultural drivers, and what might they reveal about our society? To answer this question, it’s important to notice the parallels between these videos and the classic Cinderella plot. There is, in these videos, invariably a prince in the person of Asherkine, a damsel in distress—or at least one who’s more than eager to play the part, romantic overtones and the potential for a happily-ever-after-situation (Fans of this type of videos, while aware that it’s essentially make-believe, often hold out hope for a happy ending). Crucially, this genre of videos, just like the Cinderella fairy tale, luxuriates in the narrative trope of a glamorous transformation. Just as Cinderella transforms when she steps into her magical shoes, those dates with Asherkine usually occasion a glamorous transformation. The excitement of watching Cinderella arrive at the ball is heightened by our knowledge that the shoes’ transformative effects are temporary; similarly, Asherkine’s videos are especially compelling because we know it’s an act.
What’s interesting is how both genders interpret these videos differently. Observing the comments sections of these videos reveals that women, especially young ones, experience the videos vicariously through Asherkine’s date. For a generation of women who grew up watching Cinderella, and similar Disney animations, and were later subjected to a deluge of pop culture offerings that celebrated glow up culture—Glee, Gossip Girls, Keeping Up With The Kardashians, as well as the interminable list of Nollywood films that lean into this trope—it’s hard not to see why these videos have a singular appeal to them.
Many men, on the other hand, tend to see it differently. Scrolling through the comments section of a typical Asherkine Cinderella-esque video, it’s not unusual to see plaintive comments like “As a man just have money.” One especially worrisome tweet, under Asherkine’s latest post, reads “As a man if you later make am for this life and u no useless this gender, omo e no go better for ur mama.” Beneath this maelstrom of misogyny, from these men, is a disgruntlement at not being able to perform the role of provider, or to put it differently, the role of ”knight in shining armor.” For some time now, the increasingly transactional nature of modern relationships has taken on increased prominence on social media, pointing to the urgency of this trend. The irony about this phenomenon is that it’s happening against the backdrop of a historically precarious economic climate.
Even as inflation and other economic headwinds chip away at the standard of living, many men feel the pressure to live up to the role of provider and feel emasculated when they fall short. One might argue that this is simply cultural conditioning and that these men simply need to pick themselves up by the bootstraps and redefine masculinity on their terms. But this simple prescription ignores several realities. The chief of which is that dating in this typically begins with a first date, or a cascade of dates, which does not come cheap. Earlier this year, following a didactic tweet in which an X user cautioned against reckless spending on dates, the platform erupted with wails from young men who bemoaned the costs of dates. The subtext of that tweet, which has now been viewed on X about a million times, and the resulting conversation, is that modern relationships are highly transactional, and despite the putative progressive slant of this generation, men for the most part are saddled with the responsibility of covering the costs.
Making the connection between the transactional nature of contemporary relationships and the vitriol in Asherkine’s posts might seem to minimize the role of misogyny, the reality however is that while misogyny is often gratuitous, it can be influenced or exacerbated by certain underlying factors. It’s easier to be hateful and bitter when your life isn’t going to plan, when you feel adrift or indignant. And so, it’s impossible to separate the socio-cultural trends—men increasingly feeling hopeless and adrift in a world where economic and technological headwinds are creating more uncertainty—from the rise of this especially quarrelsome variety of misogyny.
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