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By Yad Abdulqader
In recent months, a meme has been circulating widely on Kurdish social media. It shows two men arranged vertically: at the bottom, a man with a thick moustache and beard, curly black hair, traditional Kurdish clothes, and an expression typically associated with older, rural, or working-class masculinity; and above him, a filtered, polished young man with shaped eyebrows, bleached teeth, Western clothes, and the kind of digital sheen that comes straight out of Instagram filters. Beside them, short captions or small graphics contrast how each supposedly behaves – how they speak, what they eat, how they argue, have fun, or even how they knock on doors. Both figures are recognisably from the region: the bottom image represents a traditional form of masculinity, while the top conveys a new, alternative, or emerging modern masculinity. The meme’s humour comes from exaggerating their differences. A few examples illustrate the contrast: the polished ‘new man’ drinks coffee, while the ‘old’ traditional man drinks tea. The ‘new’ man tells a lover, “Maybe we are not meant to be together, and that’s okay,” while the traditional one threatens, “If you don’t pick up the phone, I will publish your photos.” One says, “I will study to build a future,” while the other says, “I will leave school and join the commando forces through wasta (connections).” One responds to a cheating spouse with violence, the other says “I’m filing for divorce.” Their cultural references diverge too: one listens to Michael Jackson, the other to the Kurdish folk singer Awati Ama Qaraj. One praises a friend with, “You gave a very meaningful speech,” while the other uses the blunt idiom, “Bless the breast that fed you.” Even their everyday gestures split: the ‘new’ man knocks softly on a door because “they might be sleeping,” while the traditional one knocks loudly on the door for the same reason. One eats burgers and fast food; the other proudly eats lamb-penis tikka and kebab. One uses a polite, softened phrase like “he passed away,” while the other opts for the vulgar “he got fucked.”
The meme undeniably exaggerates the differences between these two figures. But what is most striking, however, is that the ‘new’ figure, until recently, was barely recognisable in Kurdistan. While the “traditional” man remains socially clear, rooted in masculinities that prioritize dominance, physical strength, and authority, and that define themselves through anti-feminist positions, the regulation of women, and the normalization of violence and power, the ‘new’ man, appears almost imported: polished, soft, hyper-groomed, and shaped by a set of aesthetics and sensibilities that feel foreign. His appearance, tastes, and even the language through which he expresses himself seem less the product of Kurdish cultural or political histories and more the result of a cosmopolitan mindset learned through screens. In other words, while the meme may seem to simply document lifestyle differences, it is actually giving a vocabulary to an emerging masculinity in Kurdistan, one that is not easily described as modern or traditional, but rather as a digital-age masculinity.
How Disorientation, Migration, English-Language Education, and Digital Life Produced a New Masculinity
To understand why this masculinity is taking shape now, we need to place it within the broader social transformations that have shaped the Kurdistan region over the past two and half decades. Mariwan Kanie’s concept of normative disorientation is particularly useful here. Kanie argues that Kurdistan is going through a moment in which the old moral values have lost their authority without being replaced by a coherent new value system. Urbanization, consumerism, economic struggles, migration, party patronage, and the decline of liberation-era narratives have produced a society suspended between multiple and often contradictory moral frameworks. The result is not simply moral change, but a condition of disorientation, in which no single set of norms is able to organize social life in a dominant way, producing what Kanie describes as a hegemonic vacuum.
It is within this condition of normative disorientation that new masculine forms appear. As older masculine ideals lose their normative coherence and authority, masculinity itself becomes a site where competing norms are tested, reworked, and asserted. Out of this vacuum, Kanie identifies three masculinities: the heroic peshmarga masculinity rooted in collective sacrifice; the business masculinity emerging from wealth and political access; and the protest masculinity formed by marginalized men who feel excluded from economic and social rewards. These masculinities, according to Kanie, coexist, collide, and compete with one another, but collectively they illustrate a society where identity no longer has a stable anchor. It is within this landscape of disorientation that a fourth masculinity, which is cosmopolitan, global, and platform-driven, is beginning to take shape.
The first thread of this masculinity can be traced to the reverse migration of segments of the Kurdish diaspora back to the Kurdistan Region in mid 2000s. Following the post-2003 political settlement and the economic boom of the late 2000s, thousands of Kurds who had grown up in Europe, North America, and Australia returned, bringing with them different aesthetic sensibilities, social norms, and modes of self-presentation. Their presence introduced new styles of masculinity, which was less overtly nationalist and less bound to traditional honor codes.
What later transformed these dispersed styles into a recognizable masculinity was the scale and timing of digital life in the region. Social media entered the Kurdistan Region in the late 2000s and early 2010s alongside post-war urbanization, smartphone access, and relative political stability. Within a short period, it became a part of everyday social life. According to one research, individuals in the Kurdistan Region now spend an average of 4 hours and 42 minutes per day on social media. Families now spend as much time on screens as they do with each other. Iraq’s internet penetration rate stands above 81%, and TikTok alone has over 34 million users in the country. What these numbers show is that profound influence on identity, taste, and norms come from digital connectivity. Social media does not merely expose Kurdish youth to the West; it puts them in an algorithmic global culture whose values are often inconsistent with local ones. And this inconsistency appears clearly in the attitudes of young Kurds: for example, according to the same research mentioned earlier, 83.9% of youth in Kurdistan strongly believe in individual liberty, but at the same time 85.5% believe that women should not travel alone. Beleiving in individual liberty and rejectivng it at the same time should not be read as hypocrisy in the simple sense; it is the lived expression of normative disorientation where imported ideals of personal freedom coexist with deeply inherited patriarchal norms, the effect of which is a masculinity that is liberal in theory but conservative when encountering boundaries.
But this new masculinity is not emerging across all social classes; it is largely concentrated among youth with access to English-medium education and the global digital culture that English unlocks. Beginning in the mid-2000s, private foreign-language and international schools began to proliferate in Kurdistan. Several studies show that these English-language private and international schools increasingly replace Kurdish with English as the primary language of instruction, creating what scholars describe as a “constant threat of marginalization and declination” of Kurdish in everyday life. In these schools, Kurdish is often sidelined or treated as secondary, and students gradually lose competence in their mother tongue, a phenomenon documented both in formal research and in the growing parental complaint, heard on a daily basis that “my child does not speak Kurdish well.” Other research on such schools in the region finds that these institutions actively cultivate a “global identity” and aim to produce “global citizens,” encouraging students to internalize international norms, values, and cultural references.
This creates a clear social distinction. English-speaking Kurdish youth may live physically in the region, but socially and imaginatively they inhabit global spaces. Their language skills makes them consumers of a digital worlds shaped by English-speaking influencers, global aesthetics, and transnational lifestyle and sensibilities. They watch the same creators, adopt the same emotional vocabulary, and absorb the same aspirational scripts as their peers in London, Berlin, Melbourne, or Los Angeles. Youth outside these systems also use social media, of course, but without English they remain excluded from the globalized digital spaces where new identities, and this new masculinity, are being formed.
A Global Masculinity Detached from Local Histories
In this context, the ‘new man’ in the meme becomes more understandable. He is not an updated version of Kurdish masculinity, nor a reaction to it. He is not actively redefining honor, nor responding to patriarchy, nor engaging politically with the structures that shaped earlier male identities. Instead, he is following a script that originates nowhere in Kurdistan, but in the digital worlds of Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat. He operates with a sense of self that is platform-native rather than culturally rooted. His masculinity is shaped less by family, tribe, or intellegentsia, and more by influencers, viral reels, and global lifestyle trends. This is also why he appears almost placeless in the meme; he could be from anywhere, because his reference points are no longer Erbil, Sulaymaniyah, or Zakho, but the globalized world of digital cosmopolitanism.
What makes this masculinity distinct is not only its global aesthetic but also its particular mode of detachment. It is apolitical in a very specific sense: earlier Kurdish masculinities were inseparable from political life: peshmarga masculinity drew its legitimacy from nationalism and collective struggle; business masculinity emerged through party patronage, corruption networks, and the economic opportunities tied to political affiliation; and protest masculinity was a reaction to the failures, inequalities, and humiliations produced by the political elite. But the new cosmopolitan masculinity, by contrast, is barely connected to politics, at least in the traditional sense. And this detachment is not politically neutral. It is, in fact, deeply convenient for the political elite. A masculinity oriented toward lifestyle, consumption, and self-curation rather than critique, organization, or collective grievance poses no threat to existing power structures, and makes up a masculinity that is most governable.
To llustrate this point: the new cosmopolitan masculinity neither seeks to challenge authority nor to reproduce traditional hierarchies; it does not engage in political participation or collective projects. Instead, it privileges lifestyle over ideology, personal expression over communal duty, and curated selfhood over moral or political frameworks. In this new cosmopolitan masculinity, identity becomes an aesthetic project, crafted through fashion, emotional vocabulary, and digital self-presentation, rather than a social or political one. And although its practices may look political, or be read as political precisely because they refuse conventional political engagement, its apolitical character lies in the fact that it is emerging within a landscape where every other form of masculinity in the region is intensely politicized. In this sense, the new masculinity does not oppose political norms so much as it ignores them entirely. It embodies a politically passive selfhood optimized for visibility and autonomy rather than for belonging, struggle, or social change. It is individualism par excellence.
Why the Meme Matters Now
The meme has become widespread precisely because it makes visible the emergence of a masculinity that is foreign yet familiar; global yet localized through Kurdish faces and local complexities; imported yet lived as everyday practice. Its humor works because everyone instantly recognizes the contrast: the traditional man evokes a century of cultural memory while the modern man evokes hours spent scrolling. And in circulating widely, the meme does more than provoke laughter: it solidifies this masculinity as a category, giving people a language to describe something that has been forming quietly in Kurdistan’s urban life. In this sense, the meme is not just a joke. It is a cultural artifact marking the arrival of a new, global, and largely apolitical masculinity; one born in the space between normative disorientation and hyper-connected digital life, and one that is reshaping what it means to be a man in Kurdistan today.
Image: By Sabat Ebbas