In morning thread comments, we discussed a HuffPo article that exposes a racist, misogynist, right-wing creep who used to write pseudonymously for white supremacist sites and now dispenses a hastily varnished version of the same toxic garbage at elite institutions. It’s possible that particular creep’s academic career will be derailed by the revelation, though I wouldn’t bet the farm on it.
But he’s just one example of an enormous problem that arguably manifests in every aspect of our society. A disturbing number of mass shooters have a similar origin story — they’re disaffected because they don’t automatically receive the female attention and commercial success they feel entitled to, and they fall down rabbit holes online that reinforce their grievances and channel it into eruptions of apocalyptic rage.
Misogyny seems to be a gateway drug. In the morning thread, valued commenter Suzanne shared a theory about why that is:
I genuinely think misogyny is the very seed of the problems we are dealing with, because it is really part of the politics of the home, and that is where these terrible dudes are acculturated first. That is not to say that racism, homophobia, ableism, anti-Semitism, etc. are not equally toxic and harmful. Just that one of the very first things these terrible men come to believe is that women exist for their service and comfort. And they are taught that beginning the day they are born.
I agree. These angry, entitled young men don’t all become mass shooters — or disgraced academics. Many become white supremacists, fascists and/or religious fanatics. Maybe they storm the U.S. Capitol, make Nazi-adjacent memes for Repub presidential candidates or steal state secrets to make themselves look cool to other members on their Discord channels. I collectively think of them as “Trump Youth.”
In an Atlantic article published today, Hillary Clinton (aka America’s Cassandra) addresses the phenomenon:
There have always been angry young men alienated from mainstream society and susceptible to the appeal of demagogues and hate-mongers. But modern technology has taken the danger to another level. This was Steve Bannon’s key insight.
Long before Bannon ran Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, he was involved in the world of online gaming. He discovered an army of what he later described as “rootless white males,” disconnected from the real world but highly engaged online and often quick to resort to sexist and racist attacks. When Bannon took over the hard-right website Breitbart News, he was determined to turn these socially isolated gamers into the shock troops of the alt-right, pumping them full of conspiracy theories and hate speech. Bannon pursued the same project as a senior executive at Cambridge Analytica, the notorious data-mining and online-influence company largely owned by the right-wing billionaire Robert Mercer. According to a former Cambridge Analytica engineer turned whistleblower, Bannon targeted “incels,” or involuntarily celibate men, because they were easy to manipulate and prone to believing conspiracy theories. “You can activate that army,” Bannon told the Bloomberg journalist Joshua Green. “They come in through Gamergate or whatever and then get turned onto politics and Trump.”
We’ve seen the destructive role these dopes play at micro and macro levels, and thanks to deft exploitation by depraved right-wing oligarchs, here we are with a massive national problem that has metastasized beyond any single demographic.
In the Atlantic article, Clinton cites Surgeon General Vivek Murthy’s recent advisories on a “growing ‘epidemic of loneliness and isolation’ threatens Americans’ personal health and also the health of our democracy.” As usual, there are no easy fixes.
Clinton cites hopeful signs, including parents showing up at school board meetings to push back against right-wing book-bans, a revived union movement, people showing up to vote, etc. Her conclusion: “It still takes a village.” She’s usually right.
Open thread.
Van Buren
My mother, who lives largely in the FOX bubble, tells me that Biden is banning AC and it’s terrible and people are going to die.
Just not up for trying to set the record straight.
S Cerevisiae
Yeah, misogyny is at the heart of why these young white men are so angry, it’s even more American than racism and apple pie.
glory b
This is why we should destigmatize sex work.
Baud
That’s me, but somehow I ended up here.
Jerzy Russian
@Van Buren:
I did not know the direct current lobby was so strong in this country.
gwangung
@Baud: Amen, brethren.
RaflW
I do think the 100s and 100s of convictions for extremely online guys like the (eghad) “QAnon Shaman” — 41 months in prison followed by 36 months supervised release — has helped at least temporarily put a damper on these misguided and manipulated morons.
Definitely no easy answers for some of this, though I suspect legalized weed, including a buffet of edibles, sweeping the nation may provide some level of sedation. Not quite the Soma of Brave New World, but some similarities, maybe?
Baud
@Van Buren:
Just tell her you don’t believe her. Don’t take on the evidentiary burden.
RaflW
@Van Buren: “A heat pump? Why would anyone pump heat into their house!? It’s already 100 out there. Biden is just a monster.”
Baud
@Jerzy Russian:
Maybe Biden is banning AC/DC and she misheard.
Old School
@Van Buren:
A Google search tells me the Biden administration has created more stringent efficiency requirements for air conditioners. So they are “banning” people from buying the same A/C unit again.
trollhattan
@Van Buren: Just incandescent AC. Please reassure mum she can have an LED AC, with gas burners even.
prostratedragon
Good on Hilary for spelling out the 21st century problem, and noting that it doesn’t have to be thus.
Baud
@Old School:
It’s always something like that. Thanks for looking it up.
trollhattan
@Baud: Banning AC/DC would be a gift to us all. Now do Grand Funk and KISS.
Kay
There’s two problems. There’s the racist, misogynist youngish- middle aged men and then there’s the Right, Center and Left wing middle aged men who quietly admire, promote and mainstream them.
The second problem is bigger than the first.
They’re giving him awards. He wants to roll back civil rights for black people and women and they’re celebrating and promoting him.
A combination of covid, BLM and Me Too made these people lose their minds. They were weak people and the last 6 years broke them. Just them. Everyone else was resilient and recovered.
They shouldn’t be running anything. They lack character.
FelonyGovt
As a long-ago alumna of Columbia University, I’m appalled that that misogynistic creep is associated in any way with the university. What would be the most effective way of registering my displeasure? Write to the University President?
My daughter has a (former) male friend who has pretty much gone full Incel. He paid money for a “how to pick up girls” course and has graduated to nasty and derogatory posts about women. My kid has given up trying to change his behavior and has essentially ghosted him.
Old School
NancySmash interview in NY Mag:
Baud
@Kay:
Wait, so he’s the only one where they didn’t provide an explanatory summary?
Pavlovs Man
As always, a great piece from Jeet Heer, full of names and sources.
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/gop-popular-front-white-nationalism/
schrodingers_cat
@Kay: Emily Oster is also a pretty horrible person. She peddles right wing claptrap as “research”.
RepubAnon
@Jerzy Russian: EV fast chargers are all DC – none are AC. This just shows how intolerant Democrats are!
(/snark, just in case you’re wondering)
Mai Naem mobileI
@RaflW: QAnon Shaman still believes TFG is innocent and the greatest thing since sliced bread.
I’ve worked with a few of these guys and BTW it’s not just white guys. Women beating them on career achievement is not going down well with these men boys. And these women not giving them the time of day is just the shitty cherry on top. Seriously though there needs to be some kind of solution to this. Not sure what you do but having these angry people in your population is not going to end well.
Dan B
@RaflW: The ASA. Affordable Sex Act. Mellowing the Incels. That and some strong weed.
Kay
@Baud:
No there’s an explanation – follow linky – he has some kind of griftery “research” org. He brags about how the NYTimes and Washington Post have embraced him.
In his “apology” he says they plan on “reforming” civil rights. This is not just idiots conducting thought experiments. They plan on putting in US law. That’s what the idiots are mainstreaming- gutting civil rights protections.
BellyCat
Upvoted. Kills several birds with one stone. Legitimizes and regulates said service, and provides an (albeit paid) outlet for those unable/unwilling to find willing sexual partners to provide experience/sexual release.
Also too, more young women are needed in computer science.
Kay
@schrodingers_cat:
She is yet another economist who thinks they can run K-12 schools. That profession is fucking insufferable, I’m sorry. They need some kind of humility training. Stay in your lane!
Also – she writes gross parenting books where families are businesses and parents are like CEOs. Horrible. I feel bad for their children.
cain
@Van Buren: which is pretty funny considering all the electrical grid issues in Texas.
MisterForkbeard
@Kay: Iglesias is getting a lot of crap for this on twitter – even by the Blogfather, no less.
He has a history of saying that Hanania says really useful, interesting things that he doesn’t agree with. And also that he’s someone who should be listened to on the conservative side.
I guess the last part’s kind of true: Hanania is at the forefront of a lot of “conservative” thought, but that doesn’t mean you need to make him respectable.
cain
I remember back in the W. days – Islamic terrorists would join Islamic groups because of similar factors – but basically they have no jobs or economic opportunity and so they can’t get married – and since Islam is all like shit about women – it leads to these people joining terrorist groups.
It’s amazing how not being able to find a mate leads to these nearly world ending bullshit.
Alison Rose
This is part of why I loathe when parents talk about their baby/toddler/young sons as “little princes” or “kings” or how much the girls will love them and blah blah. Obviously, not all boys who hear stuff like that will grow up to be sexist sacks of shit, but if their brain chemistry is wired in a way that they are more likely to become so, calling them a little prince who will have all the girls falling all over him is adding fuel to the fire. (Also, like…your son might be gay.) They’re told over and over how much girls will like them, and then if a girl doesn’t, they can’t cope with it and can’t understand that a girl might just not be interested in them.
Of course, you can raise a son in a totally egalitarian mindset and he might still turn out to be a pig. It’s not all nature or all nurture. But I feel like you at least have a chance of heading that off at the pass if you don’t contribute to a narcissistic male-centric worldview from day one.
Kay
@Baud:
The knuckleheads, the ninnies, think the you tube commentor should be n charge of “reforming civil rights laws” :
The racist misogynist informs their views on “reforming” civil rights laws.
Bill Arnold
@Old School:
They are. Tightly written, too.
Yesterday I asked like 10 wingnuts on twitter whether they had read the latest indictment. 45 pages. Double spaced. A few replies, all “no” or some variant of “hell no”.
Baud
@MisterForkbeard:
I don’t why we libs always get scolded on not listening to other viewpoints. I don’t recall anyone ever telling other people they need to listen to us.
Alison Rose
@glory b: Ehh…it’s not that simple. I’m 100% in favor of decriminalizing sex work, but I don’t think foisting these jerks on sex workers is going to be a magical cure. They will still try to get away with abuse, especially if they see it as “well I paid for you so I can do this”. Sure, if it’s decriminalized, a sex worker can report assault, but we all know that reports of sexual assault are not always handled well by police, to put it mildly.
TriassicSands
Hey, what’s wrong with a little hateful, harmless white supremacy among friends? Richard Hanania now finds his former comments abhorrent because they’ve been tied to his real name and although they fit in nicely with the 2023 Republican Party, he also has to appear to mend his ways so as to appear to be no longer a racist POS, even though the GOP is a mob of sexist, racists thugs who spend their days trying to disenfranchise minority voters. It must be hard keeping public and private comments straight.
Maybe he can have dinner with Clarence and Ginni to show he’s no longer opposed to miscegenation. Harlan Crow could fly the three of them to Lima, Peru to have dinner at Central, the world’s supposed best restaurant.
Baud
@Kay:
They can start with the excessive protection religion gets under our civil rights laws.
MisterForkbeard
@Dan B: I can see the dumb jokes about the ASA already. “Affordable Sex Act? Now the government wants to regulate my marriage!”
Suzanne
More thoughts on misogyny and the home:
The family — in whatever form that is — is the first social structure anyone experiences. Certainly the oldest. In some ways, it’s the one that’s the most resistant to change in roles. And so much is learned through immersion and very little is written down. Everyone has reflected on that moment when they to to someone else’s house for the first time and learn that other families do things differently and that’s, like, mind-blowing to kids. In families with a strong patriarchal lean, I don’t think there’s ever a way to fully break free of that acculturation and the expectations for life that come out of it. I have tried, with my kids, to make them deeply aware of others’ lives, because I think that’s the beginning of empathy. But I don’t observe that, in many other families, that they consider that an important part of kids’ formation. I see a lot of families who want to make sure their kids are surrounded by “good influences”, which really means other families just like theirs.
trollhattan
@RaflW:
And for the love of god, never confuse heat pump with sump pump or breast pump.
Scout211
@Alison Rose:
I don’t disagree with this at all, but in my experience as a psychotherapist for 40+ years, the most powerful way that children are “parented,” is by example. That’s one of the reasons why this is so hard to change.
MisterForkbeard
@Baud: Because Republicans are always seen as operating in good faith (nope) and inherently reasonable or moderate (nope).
As much as the “online Left” irritates the shit out of me, they DO get it that a lot of center-right moderates and the media are just wired for the GOP. In a way that lets those same groups believe they’re acting as just arbiters.
smith
And just in time for today’s topic: Study: Young Americans who identify with gun culture are more likely to believe in male supremacy
And of course it’s not just gun culture and misogyny, but white supremacy as well. Not surprisingly these kids are high in anxiety and depression, and are vulnerable to online radicalization.
Unfortunately, the authors reach for the old “economic anxiety” as one explanation. It’s a lot more complicated than that — they’re having to compete with women and minorities and the anxiety comes from the possibility they will lose out to competitors they have been taught are inferior. So what does that make them?
Maxim
@Alison Rose: A lot of parents cannot separate their own egos from their kids, and treat said kids as extensions of themselves. Like when an author does a self-insertion character, only so much worse. It messes with the poor kids in all sorts of ways. The misogyny / patriarchy bullshit is obviously one of the worst, if not *the* worst, way this manifests, but also sometimes I just want to tell (some) parents to get some fucking therapy and stop working out their issues via their kids’ lives.
Baud
I sometimes wonder whether I would have ended up in a really dark place if I had the Internet when I was growing up. Or would have been less lonely because I would have found more like-minded cohorts than I had in real life.
Suzanne
@Alison Rose:
I cannot stand all the jokes I hear about nursing baby boys all being “boob men”. I have even heard NICU nurses and lactation consultants making these types of jokes. It’s fucking gross.
Alison Rose
@Scout211: Oh definitely. If there is sexist thinking modeled in the home, that will for sure influence a kid too.
trollhattan
@Alison Rose: They’re too busy working on banning slut pills to convince them them to legalize slutting for pay. Sounds too much like grooooooominggg.
For Republicans, sex is icky when practiced by anybody except their own special selves, and even then it’s suss.
They want the ’50 back. The 1850s.
RaflW
@Mai Naem mobileI: I feel like I mostly encounter these guys when they’re aggressively tailgating me in their 9 year old, mildly banged up massive Dodge Ram 2500s at 77mph in a 65 zone. A lot of not-even-suppressed road rage out there.
That aside, I do think a big source of conservative effort to re-make college away from “woke” (cough, cough) is the realization that women are now gaining college degrees at a 14% greater clip than men. What it says about men that they get pissed off about women doing better than them in open enrollment at the majority of colleges that aren’t selective could fill volumes.
It reminds me of a term paper I wrote about 40 years ago. It was for a sociology class, and I did a sophomoric (literally) overview of how white anger and violence in the TX Gulf Coast shrimping economy was really a reflection of the loss of white working class ethos. The SE Asian immigrant shrimpers were willing to get up earlier and work longer days, having come much more immediately from poverty. This was framed as “not fair” by the disgruntled, beer-swilling good ol’ boys sitting on the docks, griping to reporters.
It is of course laughable that waking up to a 4am alarm clock was being portrayed as ‘unfair’, but grievance need not be tied to reality. Our recently dethroned complainer-in-chief made that abundantly clear.
Alison Rose
@Suzanne: SO GROSS. It makes me hella uncomfortable when people say things like that. Also when you have boy and girl babies, maybe 3 or 4 months old, laying next to each other or looking at each other and people are like AWWW THEY’RE IN LOVE THEY’RE GONNA GET MARRIED!!! And these are often the same people who will insist a kid can’t know they’re gay or trans.
Scout211
Yes. Exactly my point in #41 The roles are learned by example and by family culture. It is very hard to change that and progress is very gradual and full of ups and downs.
MisterForkbeard
@Suzanne: These examples are both pretty gross, though little kids as “princes” or “princesses” is sorta understandable if still weird.
But making sex jokes about toddlers and their parents is gross. I could see making that joke in my early 20s. And then getting a lot of uncomfortable stares from people. Though I can definitely see nurses making those jokes and I wouldn’t fault them for it – everyone jokes about what they do. I have family that work with disabled folks, and they tell me that when it’s just nurses or just nurses and their patients, there’s a LOT of joking around that would raise the hair on the back of your neck – because that’s how they deal with the situation.
jimmiraybob
As a kid growing up in the 60s and 70s in a poor, white, semi-working* class, city neighborhood that was regularly terrorized by what would now be the kind of thoroughly shit-headed person that is being discussed, let me just say that there are some socio-psychopaths that just do it for sport and power. Make America Great Again!
*unless criming is considered working then you can scratch out the “semi”.
Maxim
@Suzanne:
Empathy is absolutely essential. And it can be taught, as pilot programs in some schools / districts have demonstrated. No wonder it’s one of the terms the right is demonizing.
Suzanne
@Scout211: And if a child observes their father and their mother having strict roles and interacting in a hierarchical fashion…. how do we ever convince someone who grew up with that as their baseline for normal that it isn’t okay? Especially when, for dudes…. patriarchy is a pretty sweet deal?
Scout211
Since going into every family and trying to change the family culture is well, not the best way to approach this . . .
I have questions. (Some are rhetorical).
Why are the right wing creeps getting so much media and social media attention right now?
Why are governments backing down from and even demonizing all forms of equality?
Why are educational institutions adding “voices” that are essentially hate speech?
What can we do to right now to stem this trend backward?
RaflW
@MisterForkbeard: The “view from nowhere” sure as heck is the perch of a straight white male with economic agency.
Chris
@Kay:
My unscientific guess is that most economists are probably fine, but the ones we get to hear about, the ones who actually get hired to important enough places that they’re helping make policy or shape the national discourse, are disproportionately assholes because they’re the ones who tell the rich and other powers-that-be what they want to hear.
BellyCat
@Alison Rose: The Netherlands seems to have figured out how to legalize sex work in beneficial fashion. And, you know, tax revenue!
Bill Arnold
@Maxim:
Have you heard the one about empathy being a sin? (Baptist News Council, Mark Wingfield, AUGUST 24, 2021)
Chosen because it has plenty of links, and is not particularly religious in tone. Follow the third one for the root of the arguments.
ETA there is considerable research literature on the various states of mind that have been called empathy, that is worth exploring. (The “predator stare” of a cat could be considered an example.)
prostratedragon
@Suzanne: Oh dear, that’s horrifying. And what do they suppose baby girls are up to? Better to keep things simple and in their place.
bjacques
@MisterForkbeard: and don’t get me started on Little Death Panels, deciding who gets to have an orgasm and who gets that horrible noise, ruining their orgasm, on the Playboy Channel.
artem1s
@BellyCat:
I’m am sick to death of this hot take being a solution to Incels.
They don’t want to pay for sex or have to negotiate with a woman who has agency over her own body. They want every woman available to lay down and service them on their demand at any time they demand it. This is not solvable by “legitimizing” or “legalizing” sex work. And doing those things will not in any way shape or form solve human trafficking. Stop assuming there is an easy solution to misogyny, sexual or domestic violence. Just like rape, it’s not about sex – it’s about violent dominance.
schrodingers_cat
@Chris: You are right about this. Most mainstream economists are perfectly middle-of-the road boring people. These contrarians get the most exposure in the media. Its true about most academic disciplines.
Suzanne
I also want to note that the longing for white patriarchy is obvs a white dude thing…. but misogyny is certainly not confined to white dudes.
trollhattan
Occurs to me “vast right-wing creep” could be Rudy himself.
West of the Rockies
@Old School:
“Exquisite indictments”, the best! And so many of them as well…
Trump is the Indictment King!
Kay
@Chris:
It was just so clear that she was integrating her brands with the sudden interest in public school administration. Bashing public schools is fashionable, and Covid/schools was a good hook to sell more “run your family like a corporation” books – her other business.
Redshift
One of Chris Hayes recent podcast interviews was with a researcher who has done longitudinal studies most with boys and teenagers, who writes about the “epidemic of loneliness.” One of her big findings of a cause is the new idea of masculinity being that you should be strong and self-sufficient (y’know, Josh Hawley crap.) This leads to boys not having any close male friends (defined as people they can tell their secrets to without being laughed at) as they get older. And the boys she studies would like to have close friends.
The basic conclusion is that, aside from all the other flavors of masculinity that are labeled toxic, this one is actually harmful to people’s health, because humans don’t work that way. We’re naturally social creatures, and trying to stand on your own is actively bad for you.
(It’s possible this is even a precursor to the misogyny, rather than the misogyny coming first, I dunno. Her research didn’t deal with that.)
Kay
@Chris:
None of the public school critics would ever acknowledge that AA and Latino parents supported school closures more than white parents did.
AA and Latino districts were as much responding to the people they serve as white schools were. AA and Latino people were harmed more by Covid in the first year than white people.
It makes sense that they would be more cautious about their children contracting it.
schrodingers_cat
Epidemic of loneliness is the new economic anxiety. The white male demographic is never wrong and cannot fail if they fail it is because others have wronged them (women, immigrants and so on)
BellyCat
@artem1s: Woah, woah, woah…. I never suggested legalizing sex work was THE solution. We can disagree whether or not it may be a helpful step towards improving the stated problem—which it appears we do.
BTW: legalized sex work would include all genders and sexual identities.
President Johnny Gentle (famous crooner)
I don’t think it’s loneliness and isolation at all. It’s the opposite. Whereas those kind of people previously had to stifle all the horrible, shitty, racist, misogynist, antisemitic things they thought, now they have a vast online community to share it with. Once they realize how many other people freely and openly say these things they’ve been thinking, they become emboldened. It’s a feedback loop that keeps growing because of shared community, not the lack of it.
gwangung
@Kay: This has its parallel with all the lackwits yammering about movie and “Go woke, go broke”….stupid statement with more than half the tickets for movies are bought by non-white folks…
Redshift
@Suzanne:
Yeah, but if this problem has gotten worse recently, then clearly something has changed. Whether it’s in the family or not, that means change is possible and we shouldn’t give up on pushing it to change in a better direction.
AM in NC
@Suzanne: Yep. And it’s why so many “good, liberal” men on so many other issues just take a pass when it comes to issues around recognizing women’s full humanity. Equality for women will upend the most personal, private aspects of their lives, from physical intimacy, to child-rearing, to division of labor, to their very self-definition as “head of household”. Even in my friend group, where we are all liberal Democrats, both partners work, and half the women out-earn the men, the women do so much more work for the family than the men do. And the women are so much more involved politically and in their communities as well.
Because we women were taught from birth (and it’s what almost all of us saw at home) to prioritize the needs of others (particularly the needs of men). Men were taught from birth (and what most of us saw at home) to prioritize their needs – Daddy gets the best piece of meat; Mommy gets the egg with the broken yoke. It’s just how things naturally are, right?
These scripts are very deeply ingrained, for both men and women, and it is going to take an incredible effort to undo them.
Scout211
Agree.
scav
Poor Widdle Lonely Men. So needy! Clinging! Emotionally driven! Who will step up and take Care of them!
Chris
@schrodingers_cat:
Yeah, like I said, I don’t know much about economists, but based on my experience getting a bachelor’s and then a Master’s in the field, this is how International Relations works. Most of the fellow students I met studying that were either Democrats or HW-style Republicans who by now have probably voted Democrat at least a couple times in this century. If “the Blob” was reflective of the average IR student’s leanings, we’d be largely fine. But that’s not who the people at the top (or a large portion of the general population) wants to listen to, so instead, our foreign policy Great Statemen end up being Colin Powells at “best” and Dick Cheneys at worst.
I think this is increasingly everything, even outside of academia. No matter what the field is, objective observation and experience tends to generate results that the right-wingers don’t want, which makes them upset, makes them dismiss the entire field, and makes them hire their own “experts” who tell them what they do want to hear.
Jackie
@Old School: Great article!
I’m sure TIFG will be weighing in…
Betty Cracker
Regarding the “loneliness and isolation” thing — check out the linked Atlantic article if you can access it. In my post, I focused on the incel creeps because we had just been hashing that out when I stumbled across Clinton’s article that touched on the issue. But the piece addresses loneliness and isolation as a much broader topic that manifests across many demographic groups in different ways — my excerpt doesn’t do that aspect of it justice.
HumboldtBlue
@S Cerevisiae:
BellyCat
My seven year old is beginning to ask a lot of gender related questions, colored somewhat by a few unhelpful stereotypical preconceptions propagated by friends at school and observed YouTube behaviors (even in the “kid-friendly” channels).
I recently told him something that seems important for all boys to be taught at an early age – – something I was not aware of until very recently – – that upon conception ALL embryos are female. The Y chromosome (male) does not present until later, successfully establishing only if there is enough testosterone and the receptors are fully accepting. (This is why hermaphrodites and other gender-nondeterminative states, including for women, exist). I told him that both he and me (his father) as well as EVERY other male began life as FEMALE before we developed into MALE.
This pretty much blew his mind, as it did mine when I recently found out. And definitely changed the nature of his questions and his thinking about gender in a seemingly more positive way.
Disclaimer: I am neither a doctor, nor a geneticist, but the above is my understanding based on a discussion with my doctor partner. More informed insights are likely needed!
Suzanne
@Redshift:
I don’t know if the underlying problem of misogyny has gotten worse. I think women are increasingly out-competing men on traditional spheres of influence and control for men, like career, university, intellect, content creation, etc…. and thus there’s a backlash. That’s the change. The underlying misogyny has always been there.
Soprano2
Ding ding ding ding ding! It’s why they’ve suddenly decided having a college education isn’t worth anything anymore.
Kelly
Here in Oregon A few brawling proud boys are finally getting several years of jail time after Portland pd treated them with sympathetic tolerance since the early Trump years.
Elizabelle
@Kay:
When do we get to lay them off? Or sell them at a fire sale?
Suzanne
@Soprano2: Oh 100% yes. As soon as women outdo men at something, we decide that thing isn’t worth doing. I will also note that the cost of college paid by the student has increased dramatically simultaneous with women out-achieving men at college. I am sure those two things are totally unrelated.
Betty Cracker
@Suzanne: Yep — more women can choose to live independently, so they are marrying later if they decide to marry at all. The schmucks they used to settle for to avoid the social shame of being an impoverished “old maid” aren’t happy about that.
JCJ
@Baud: Biden was afraid she was on the Highway to Hell
Roger Moore
@Dan B:
Just getting these guys laid isn’t going to solve anything. Their underlying problem is lack of meaningful social connections. Occasional sex with a sex worker isn’t going to fix that. They will still be angry about being rejected by the women they think should be flocking to them.
Suzanne
@Betty Cracker: Jordan Peterson wants to return to “enforced monogamy”.
I want to return to “before I ever heard of Jordan Peterson”. But we can’t always get what we want.
Everyone who ever boosted Hanania’s career should be ashamed of their damn selves.
Chris
@Suzanne:
And the thing is, to the extent that it exists, the “women outcompeting men” “problem” is at least in large part self-inflicted.
The “proper” way to do masculinity in recent decades has been ever-more-increasingly tied to anti-intellectualism, with education and the “knowledge economy” devalued as the province of women and weak unmanly men, whereas REAL men are supposed to be be doing manly work that requires muscles and outdoor activities and all that good all-American stuff. End result: lots of men don’t value university, intellect, etc, even those who do don’t necessarily take it seriously, and, yes, that means they get outcompeted by women. And men who aren’t properly performing masculinity.
Meanwhile, that muscle work that’s considered Real Man Work is increasingly offering fewer and fewer jobs for less and less pay; do I even need to point out that, while there’s more than one reason for this, one of the big ones is that those exact men who are obsessed with masculinity have mostly spend the last forty years voting for people who would ensure that these jobs weren’t properly valued and compensated anymore?
So now we’re at a place where Real Men, in order to Do Masculinity Right, are required to ignore a whole host of possible job fields, concentrating only on those exact fields that they themselves have just ensured would not be a path to a financially stable future. And somehow, by the miracle of American meritocracy, they think this is supposed to result in them somehow end up leading them to Tony Stark level success. And when it doesn’t, that’s the fault of the wimminz and the Girly Men.
Barry
@Kay: “A combination of covid, BLM and Me Too made these people lose their minds. They were weak people and the last 6 years broke them. Just them. Everyone else was resilient and recovered.”
IMHO, they were always nasty, and received more license to be evil, and publicly so.
Dan B
@Bill Arnold: Empathy is toxic to narcissistic straight white men. Who knew? Feeling others feelings makes you a sissy (girlie). Also the racism, etc.
CliosFanBoy
@Alison Rose: Maybe free subscriptions to Pornhub and a bottle of Astroglide delivered every month to their dorm room?
Then again, having their knowledge of what sexual intercourse is like come from p*** is probably a very, very bad idea.
CliosFanBoy
@Baud: Me too! Thank God I had a lot of good friends who were women when I was a teen. Hanging out with nobody but other frustrated, horny, socially immature guys is a real recipe for disaster!
Dan B
@Roger Moore: They don’t know how to feel if they are not the victim. They need to complain in order to feel validated.
Suzanne
@Chris:
I know I keep bringing up Joan Williams’ book White Working Class a lot, but she makes a few great observations in it. She notes that many men are deeply insulted by any suggestion that they go into career fields like nursing, because that’s “women’s work”. She also notes how much resentment there is of teachers, because they’re mostly college-educated women and men without a college degree find that threatening. When you hear more crapping on public schools, remember that it’s really just wanting to take women down a peg.
geg6
@Suzanne:
Totally agree on this. Women are kicking their asses academically and professionally and even socially and personally. They see that and fall back on the misogyny that every American male is exposed to at a very young age. Most men get beyond the incel/wingnut gender resentments and can function very well even in a changing society. But a large segment of the U.S. male population seems immune to any sort of mature reflection or analysis of their place in the world. And if they’re very, very lucky, they find a woman who also has been brought up immersed in the same garbage. And thus, my explanation for why so many of my fellow white women voted for Trump. The men don’t need any explanation. They ARE him and vice versa.
Chris
@Barry:
This.
All these things came after the fact. At best, if you have to pick a modern event that broke their brains, it was Obama’s election. I was still reading wingnut websites in the first couple years of the Obama administration, before BLM, before MeToo, long before Covid. They were every bit as bad as they are now. In fact, the rise of the teabaggers and later Trumpists, from my point of view, was largely a matter of watching Republican politicians and “intellectuals” start to say out loud on the national stage the things that I’d already been reading on PJMedia or my relatives’ Facebook pages. (And truthfully most of that stuff predated Obama as well).
Cliosfanboy
@Suzanne:
there’s a good story in the latest New Yorker by a young woman who grew up in a very strict Rasta household in Jamaca. VERY male-dominated.
Cliosfanboy
@Soprano2:
when I wS 18 there being more young women in college than young men would gave been a sell8ng point!
Chris
@Suzanne:
Yeah, but I’m not sure which came first, the chicken or the egg. To quite an extent this “I won’t do women’s work” thing is self-inflicted – they keep taking careers that were once considered miscellaneous or even male-coded (school teaching used to be “a man’s job”) and deciding that these things are now girly and unserious.
Suzanne
@Chris: Elementary school teaching was never a man’s job. High school and college, yes. Elementary teaching was historically done at home (by mom, usually), or by the one single woman in town in the one-room schoolhouse, before she got married.
Chris
@Cliosfanboy:
Yeah, I think one of the reasons Suzanne’s right about sexism being the basic building bloc of modern fascism is that it’s so universal. Not every society has black people to crap on, or Jews, or whatever, at least not a numerically and/or culturally significant enough number to worry about. Every society has LGBTQ, but there are a lot less of them so a lot of societies have been successful in forcing them “in the closet” where people don’t have to think about them.
… By contrast, every society has women. And they make up about half the population. And they’re in every family. And since the women are universal, so is the sexism.
Chris
@Suzanne:
Elementary, no. But as you say, the others were… and now they’re all considered “women’s work.”
Suzanne
@Chris:
Absolutely.
There’s been a lot of shifting in family structures since the women’s lib movement. As women have gotten more educated and made more money, there’s been an increase in assortative mating w/r/t educational attainment. In short, more and more, college grads marry one another, and they make two college-grad salaries, and they use that money on their own kids. And the divorce rate for these families is much less than for lower earners. So men who can’t get over this are directly hitting themselves in the wallet.
As Ali Wong said, a man who doesn’t like if his wife makes more than him is “a man who doesn’t like free money”.
Sister Golden Bear
@glory b: Problem is the incels assert its their right to have sex with any women they want, anytime they want, for free.
Paying to have sex with a sex worker wouldn’t be satisfying for them because it lacks the element of dominance and coercion.
Suzanne
LAWL I am sooooo enjoying watching Matt Yglesias flailing around on Xhitter as he gets called out for past boosting of Hanania.
DOOD. There are ways to read and engage with awful content. Step One is acknowledging that it’s awful.
AM in NC
@Cliosfanboy: Just read that piece yesterday, and all I could think was: every organized religion is predicated on female subservience to male authority. From Rasta to Judaism to Christianity, to Islam, to Buddhism, and on, and, on, and on. I fled religion as soon as I was old enough to tell my parents nope.no more. not what I believe.
So sick of this bullshit.
glory b
@BellyCat: Yes, this is the type of system I was thinking of. Nothings perfect, of course, but I think it might relieve some of the thinking going on with some of these young (and not so young) men.
louc
@BellyCat: I highly recommend a RadioLab series called Gonads, which explains how that happens and how there are women with XY chromosomes.
glory b
@CliosFanBoy: I remember hearing Howard Stern talking about his mother, who was fairly liberal for her time, admonishing him that the real women he would have intimate relationships with would NOT look like the ones in the magazines.
Then he proceeded to marry a very beautiful woman who looked like the ones on the magazines, and who his mother loves more than him, or so he says.
She does a lot of work with animal rescue. She has devoted a wing of their house to her rescues, paying for vet care, surgery, etc., and as an incentive, will deliver to those in the NYC area who adopt them from her care.
And she’s from Pittsburgh, has done some local modeling.
Elizabelle
@Suzanne: I think of him as Matt Ick-Lesias. Not gonna take him seriously. He is a mirror image of David Brooks.
Re the feminization of schoolteaching: there were male teachers until around the 1820s-1830s? And then: they needed more teachers for the common (public) schools, and they could pay women 1/3 of the males’ salary. Win!
Interesting PBS site. Only a Teacher. Timeline.
cmorenc
To be fair, the left has a handful creeps of our own, though nowhere remotely in the numbers among the right. But the handful among us have been far more costly to our side, and the many among the RW far less than would be the case in a just world.
For example, but-for the chain of events precipitated by the investigation rep Anthony Weiner’s dick pics leading to the discovery of Clinton emails on his laptop that opened the door to James Comey’s false public claims a week from election day 2016 that another giant trove of hiterto unknown Clinton server emails might exist, Clinton would likely have defeated Trump, albeit much more narrowly than we all supposed two or three weeks out from election day.
AWOL
@Sister Golden Bear:
When bored, I used to lurk on their repulsive sites – with many others – before they became aware of this and went underground.
They’re fairly open about themselves and their sexuality and suicidal/homicidal feelings. They find themselves repulsive “non-Chads” who will never get the “Stacies.” They envy “whiteness.” (Believe me, being an incel is not just a white phenomenon.) Many claim to be autistic. They masturbate endlessly or brag that they never masturbate. Some do frequent sex workers but find it unsatisfying. Their fetishes tend to reflect an attraction to body smells. Their sites are attractive recruiting points for nazis and other psychotic movements.
Sex work should be legalized and destigmatized – no one suffers through it as a source of income unless they have no choice or ae mentally ill – but as you and many others say, it won’t cure our incel problem.
glory b
@Sister Golden Bear: Yeah, it’s not going to be an answer for all of them, but I’d hope there would be other residual beneficial effects as well
Or, what AWOL said.
Eolirin
@AM in NC: This is not actually true.
Some are, some aren’t. Even of your list. And depending on sect. Or whatever the right word for it is.
Subsole
@Baud: Sure looks that way.
Remember folks: the calm, polite country-club folks with the Ivy League vocabs and the right connections and the proper breeding? The ones Kay’s talking about? The people who run the WaPo and the NYT?
They ain’t falling for anything. They are actively running cover for the dregs of this earth with malice aforethought.
You gotta understand that all those hundreds of half-assed diner safaris to go speak with Trumpists out in Bent Pecker, Iowa were never meant to foster debate or encourage civility or remind us of our common humanity or any of that.
They were intended to gaslight us into thinking we were outnumbered, alone, unreasonable, and wrong.
Just like they did back during Iraq, cone to think of it…
cmorenc
@AM in NC:
That’s because until very recently in world history (as in as few decades as people have fingers on one hand) – most societies across the world were heavily male-dominated, female-subservient, especially among the most dominant, numerous ones. Respective religions reflect the societies they evolved within. That said, their respective religious institutions and theologies unsurprisingly tend to reinforce those social norms, in a mutual feedback cycle.
Subsole
@cain:
Oh yeah. It’s hilarious here in the Metroplex. Day five of 107 degree weather.
You can probably hear me laughing all the way over there…
Subsole
@MisterForkbeard: Didn’t Iggles also put his name on some big Free Speech Panic letter about the evil Transes a while back?? Or am I thinking of soneone else.
Subsole
@cain:
Huh. All those times I got shot down in high school, I was stacking up mass-shooting licenses.
Never knew…
Suzanne
@AWOL:
I saw a brilliant discussion somewhere on the internet, now lost to whatever, in which the writer pointed out that depictions of beautiful women with average-looking men…. were created and shown on sitcoms, movies, etc. in order to make that pairing more likely to occur in real life. It’s because all these media help craft our view of what is normal.
Which is why they hate when women, POC, disabled people, etc etc etc get to tell stories. It’s because telling those stories is not just reflective but determinative.
Subsole
@trollhattan: Yeah.
The 1850s B.C.
Eyeroller
@BellyCat: I am not sure what you are talking about here. At conception most embryos get either an X from Mom and an X from Dad, or an X from Mom and a Y from Dad. Errors actually happen pretty frequently because the X chromosome is one of the larger ones and the Y is considered “degenerate,” and they have some difficulty pairing at meiosis. But most of the time it works. The Y chromosome carries relatively few genes. A few are necessary for male fertility but for the most part, the purpose of the Y is to signal its presence. Once that happens, which is very early, then development of the male kicks in, and the embryonic tissues that start out androgynous take the path to male structures. You may be thinking of the old belief that female is the “default” developmental path, i.e. if the correct signaling doesn’t occur for one reason or another, the embryo will become female, but I’ve read that that’s been disproven recently; there is some active signaling involved in that process as well.
So as we can see, there are a lot of opportunities for errors (not to mention the possibility of defects on other genes, such as those that result in androgen resistance) and that’s why intersex is a lot more common than most people realize.
Ruckus
@Kay:
To them money is the Holly Grail, rather than a means of purchase, a payment for work accomplished and reward.
Money of itself is the total end. Not a reward for work accomplished a reward for theft of many kinds rewarded. The concept of society repackaged to who’s got it and nothing else. Not a means of exchange for work or work output. A golden cow – literally. This is Scrooge McDuck becoming the good guy.
Suzanne
In a funnier version of this same topic, I saw “Barbie” last week, and now I have “Push” in my head on repeat. Ryan Gosling had me laughing so hard I could not breathe.
HOLY SHIT that song is so fucked up. LAWLLLLL.
Ruckus
@Suzanne:
I had to learn to never tell my mother anything. Because anything I’d say could be and was used against me. ANYTHING. My sisters had it worse because they didn’t learn this well and given our ages, societal changes were starting but not as considered as they are today, and we still have a ways to go. The concepts of independent thought and body autonomy are still not thought of reasonably in many households. They weren’t considered at all in mine.
The Pale Scot
I’ve said this before here, It’s not women, it’s beautiful women that they mutely lust after. I use to to lurk on the incel reddit after that “supreme gentleman” in Cal. went on a killing spree. They don’t want a girlfriend, they want arm candy they can flaunt, it’s about social domination. I got the impression it’s not even about them having sex, good or otherwise. Which goes to
“This is why we should destigmatize sex work.”
@glory b:
They won’t go to sex workers, it’s below them. Elliot Rodger was decent looking, rich, drove a BMW, wore expensive clothes, but was such prig he obsessed over women that were out of his league.
The Pale Scot
I’ll go to war over that
bluefoot
A couple of years ago I read a book that was co-authored by a former white supremacist. One of the things he said was that supremacist orgs are highly organized, well funded and have nationwide reach. They actively recruit boys in online games, at concerts, etc, really anyplace in meatspace or online where kids are, and relatively unsupervised. not just kids that are prone to loneliness, but like a cult, they try to condition kids to feel anger, disaffection, etc, basically fostering isolation and anger. And then they give rewards and validation to the kids that recruit more kids into it or commit acts of violence against out groups.
I asked my nephew about it (he’s been a big online gamer since his early teens; he’s in his early 20s now). He says he has seen that since he started gaming. And has lost friends to the rabbit hole.
smedley the uncertain
@Jerzy Russian: Edison Lives…
The Pale Scot
All those guys are such clowns. There one named Rosh or something. He’s an Iranian immigrant that also has/had a following of white supremacists. I so wanted to show up at one of his shows and scream that sand n***** is hitting on decent white women, string him up!
AWOL
@Suzanne: I can see that. So, the greatest irony is that our semi-democracy is threatened by “The Sit-Com Wife.”
At least in Japan, these dudes just lock themselves up in their own apartments, work online programming jobs, and hide in disgrace from a world they’re not prepared for. They’re more sympathetic, from what I can tell via YouTube interviews.
The Pale Scot
China’s gender imbalance is going to be interesting to watch
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@The Pale Scot: Gender imbalances are not interesting they are dangerous. Women and girls are trafficked and kidnapped
Subsole
@bluefoot:
So, groomers, essentially.
Go figure.
BellyCat
@Eyeroller: We do not disagree.
Aj
@RaflW: I have read that colleges admit males with lower grades/scores than females to even up the freshmen classes. I do not doubt that females are graduating at a higher percentage.
Aj
@BellyCat: yes female is the default. It is a shame that legislators dont know this.