Is it DEI to spend this much time and energy trying to get angry white boys laid? Can't we tell them to just stop being toxic?
— Cake or Death (@johngcole.bsky.social) May 5, 2025 at 1:01 PM
This particular brand of Iron John bullsh*t gets recycled every few years… and the prescription always seems to involve buying the latest Masculinity Guru’s books, lectures, tapes, or podcasts. I was a 98lb weakling…
people will just say any old bullshit on the internet
— not an art thief (@famousartthief.bsky.social) May 3, 2025 at 3:07 PM
Men are not constantly being told “you’re bad,” they are constantly being told “LEFT WING SJWS THINK YOU’RE BAD” by conservative propaganda. There’s a huge difference.
— Michael Hobbes (@michaelhobbes.bsky.social) May 5, 2025 at 12:06 PM
Interesting (supporting?) argument:
One of the messages boys get earliest and most often is that the way out of misery and weakness is the accumulation of wealth and power. “Real men” are able to do it through engaging in masculine-oriented behaviors. The message comes through music, SM, and older role models. 2/
The core message is that “making it” happens not through diligence, care, intelligence, grit, hard work, collaboration, and win-win negotiations, but through understanding that the world — romance, friendship, and business are zero-sum and subject to the law of the jungle. 3/
How you “make it” is through “Hustle” — vaguely defined entrepreneurship and self-seeking that can be anything from DJ’ing to influencing to drug dealing to real estate to multi-level-marketing to clothing brand design to nowadays most commonly, crypto and sports betting. 4/
Hustle is about snatching opportunities, beating competition, coming out on top, being the Alpha who dominates or the Sigma who disrupts — anything but the Beta who plays by the weak rules of the traditional system like a putz and never gets the girl. 5/
They spend money on Tate’s classes, they “invest” what little money they have in crypto or dj equipment or MLM scams or get rich quick schemes and in creatine and fitness programs and they “Hustle” 24/7/365 and 99.993% of them fail miserabley and end up broken and in debt. 6/
But enough people actually “make it” and enough other people know how to look like they’ve made it that the 99.993% of boys who haven’t made it feel like shit about themselves and they *need* to feel better, to “live up” to their maleness. 7/
This need to feel better and live up to their maleness, this feeling of failure and of being a loser Beta cuck not strong enough to survive the jungle? It’s *pervasive* in teenagers anyways and compounded by Hustle which leaves them filled with fear, feeling like absolute shit about themselves. 8/
And by the time they’re 23 or so, they’re “locked in” to the cycle. This *next* Hustle will be the one and when it isn’t, they know who to blame. They’ve learned it from the influencers they follow: women, Jews, gender-traitoring men, cucks, the system, whatever. 9/
And we’re left with a significant subset of our newest adult generation who are angry, indebted, resentful, uneducated, and deep into a sunk-cost relationship with the gurus who made them this way 10/
What can we do about it? I don’t know. What I do do about it is whenever one of my students starts spouting Tate stuff, I take the time to explain to them about the Hustle Trap and that it *is* a trap and that they *don’t* need to fall into it.
One at a time, I guess. One at a time. 11/
Additional thought:
Manosphere is a generational problem grown larger with our current info ecosystem. Many current victims were raised by victims who were in turn raised by victims. 12/
bbleh
Genuine question: is there any parallel here to the historical manipulation of girls’ and women’s self-esteem by a fixation on appearance — body image, dress, etc. — and if so, what might be a similarly parallel way out of it?
West of the Rockies
@bbleh:
Interesting question. Honestly, I think girls/women have had it far worse than man for hundreds of years longer.
But toxic masculinity is pure hell on boys/men: it deprives them of so much joy, so many experiences.
Christ, some humans are so heinous to each other.
trollhattan
Adolescence was a tough watch but worthwhile on its merits. Guessing it captures the zeitgeist very accurately.
In not unrelated news, Trump gets something right? Gotta find the fainting couch.
Gloria DryGarden
Thanks for bring up this subject.
for awhile I imagined getting community dialogues going, on:
is it safe to vulnerable, to have feelings, and needs, and talk about them… show them, ask for help? When and with whom?
We had this election, and it didn’t seem like a safe topic anymore.
Deep respect and gratitude to all who have raised children to be thinking caring humans with an idea of consent and mutual respect, and empathy for themselves and others.
JiveTurkin
I’m a 66-year-old white male. Teenage years can be pretty tough for anyone. No matter how confused I was I never thought “gee, maybe I should look up to a bunch of rapists for advice on how to live my life”. I guess easy answers means do whatever you feel like and then blame it on “I’m so confused”. I’d dismiss these dicks as a bunch of pathetic wusses, but unfortunately it is a real thing. If you are turning to the Tate brothers or Jordan Peterson then you probably consider Trump to be a man’s man.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@trollhattan: does not want to increase his already stunning unpopularity?
Omnes Omnibus
I remember Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche and The Manly Handbook from my college days. My football playing roommate (assigned no chosen) and his buddies left the latter on my bed as an “insult.” What’s funny is the only one of them who is still on my radar is an assistant football coach in his hometown. I ended up as a combat arms officer who jumped out of airplanes, climbed mountains and played rugby. Even on their measures, I win. But I also spoke French, had female friends, and knew stuff about art and music. Weird.
Josie
This is the sort of thing that happens when parents leave the raising of their children to someone else. It is no surprise to me that many boys who fall into these traps are in expensive schools that serve a parental role while parents spend their time in making large amounts of money and enjoying the social whirl. Sort of the way a certain well-known political figure raised his sons.
Betty
@bbleh: I am not sure girls are out of it. The latest story about Facebook is that they identified girls who deleted their selfies and started pushing beauty ads in their timelines. I also saw a story about a popular trend on Tik Tok that promotes skinniness for girls. None of the young males in my family seem to have fallen under these spell people are describing.
trollhattan
Shades of things to come?
National Weather Service current conditions have no temperature, humidity, dewpoint.
“N/A”
HopefullyNotcassandra
@bbleh: has anyone found a way out for girls?
Jeffg166
Does anyone have an easy childhood, teen or twenties years? Life is what you make it.
Auntie Mame said, “Life is a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death.”
It’s not other people’s fault if you wind up making lots of bad choices and screwing up your life.
Maybe it’s overpopulation but half the world seems to be seething with resentment about their life not being what they think it should be.
Wapiti
Manosphere is a generational problem grown larger with our current info ecosystem. Many current victims were raised by victims who were in turn raised by victims.
I need to say: bullshit.
Some 18-year old punk, er, victim, is that way because his dad was a victim (20 yeas ago in 2005) and his granddad was a victim (40 years ago in 1985, when I was graduating college) and it’s because of our info system. Bullshit.
Now, if you want to blame it on “Greed is good” and Ronald Reagan and decades upon decades of the law not being used on the connected (like Richard Fucking Nixon), I’ll listen.
West of the Rockies
@JiveTurkin:
I’m a few years younger than you. I wonder what the closest comparisons we had as young men to the Tates.
I can’t think of any.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@trollhattan: cutting NWS is just inexplicable. Destroying FEMA must be proof of no mental acuity. Where does this president think the majority of his voters live? Just completely whacko
Bolsa Chica may cease to exist as anything other than a hellhole, too, thanks to Muscovite Musk and his merry band of teenage wannabe Thanos-es.
How does one plural Thanos? Thanii?
Redshift
I agree that boys are victims, but the problem we need to address is “they’re victims of right-wing radicalization,” not “they’re victims of ‘society’ so we have to excuse their becoming right-wing assholes.”
And even if you don’t have sympathy for them, the reason we need to figure out how to counter that is the purely selfish reason of wanting to have fewer right-wing assholes in the world, and the people they vote for.
CHETAN MURTHY
@Betty: Yes, I remember when TV showed up at some South Sea island, and within a few years the incidence of eating disorders among adolescent females skyrocketed. Periodically we hear about some craziness spread thru social media — like the trend these days for women (even adolescents) to have -cosmetic- vaginal surgery. It’s all craziness and incredibly abusive.
Boys get nothing like that.
West of the Rockies
@Wapiti:
Generational trauma is real.
Gloria DryGarden
@trollhattan: hope they dismiss it then.
hope T sticks to it. Maybe he’s trying to slip under the radar with it. If it’s to our advantage, one good thing, we’ll thank FSM for that.
Urza
I can’t speak to the high school boys. But dating in your 40s and the disturbing amount scams and bots that try and get your attention and money and whatever they want is ridiculous. Its easy for someone who’s not a critical thinker trying to avoid scams to feel like women avoid them once they open their mouth or women are just trying to use them when its really just an AI bot running a scam. And don’t get me wrong, some of them are quite good and realistic and its only going to get worse.
Literally we need to go back to meeting people in person because the internet is clogged with scams, many of them run by the actual supposed dating site/app to get you spending money.
Also be nice if we taught people that almost any “one easy trick/get rich/find a bride” is a scam by default and the real answers are almost never easy.
cmorenc
I have three young grandsons, currently 7, 4, and 2 yo, who are all wonderful human beings now, but this thread terrifies me about the potential for one or more of them to get lured into making poor choices by as they hit adolescence and are confronted with the multitude of doors, especially the ones leading the “manosphere”. Fortunately they live in a town in the Western US in the Mountain west blessed with an abundance of healthy outdoor activities and sports activities, and their dad, my son-in-law, is a good role model who spends quality time with them.
lowtechcyclist
Growing up is hard for anyone of any gender if you don’t have a clear idea of what you want to do with your life, which most of us don’t. We have to try stuff, find out by trial and error what works for us and what doesn’t, and eventually get to a career path that we are more or less happy with.
I grew up in an upper middle class family where college was a given, but my younger sister and I have talked about the yawning chasm that awaited us after college that didn’t really give us much clue as to what to do next. And had that same conversation several years ago with my first cousin’s daughter.
But there’s no magical short cuts, no matter what your pronouns. You just have to figure it out for yourself, and become the person that you should be.
Urza
@West of the Rockies: Beavis and Butthead?
bbleh
@Betty: @HopefullyNotcassandra: I would hazard that, while definitely not “out of it,” girls and women, at least in most industrialized countries, are considerably less oppressed by it than was the case for (as WotR says) centuries if not millennia. And I can’t see it being completely over, at least for the foreseeable future, not least because there’s too many people who benefit from it. But I also think there’s no denying CONSIDERABLE progress has been made in the last couple of generations
(Also not saying, btw, that these things don’t matter at all; rather, that they should be matters of choice and self-determination rather than mechanisms of control and oppression.)
karen gail
Catching up on my TomDispatch; he reposts piece about and by Chalmers Johnson, the book he wrote “BLOWBACK.”
Evil Empire – TomDispatch.com
The book could have been written today, it is even more relevant now than when it was written. The book’s “star” was Bush and Iraq war but it speaks of the same horrors that we are seeing played out in real time.
Suzanne
@bbleh:
The beauty standard and the male gaze are alive and well.
In fact, I suspect that the body positivity movement, and women daring to not feel self-loathing because of their weight, is part of the manosphere cloud of resentments that keeps raining FFOTUS on us.
Steve LaBonne
When you are accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.
Suzanne
@Steve LaBonne: I will also note, as a corollary, that life under late capitalism is competitive and competition means that some people lose.
Steve LaBonne
@Suzanne: And the people who used to win by default, and now have to compete, are not happy about it.
Suzanne
@Steve LaBonne: Yes. And it also means that, now, women and girls win a lot of the time.
geg6
Sorry but men have it all over women in the game of life. Just because we’ve (not all but a LOT) shown ourselves to be tough and highly pain tolerant enough to scratch our way to 3/4 of a person status and are focused enough to play the long game without much complaint doesn’t mean we’re just fine and should now take on the job of “fixing” men. If men are fucked up, they need to pick themselves up by the bootstraps and fix themselves. They currently suck so bad that my beautiful and accomplished 22 yo niece is not interested in dating any of them. And she a much nicer person than I am.
bbleh
@Suzanne: indeed: some would say the “male gaze” is “hard-wired” to at least some extent, and likewise the drive among males to “succeed” and to dominate other males. This is one reason I think almost nobody will ever be completely “out of it.” The question for me is, how do we keep it from being such a powerful instrument of control?
Hoodie
Was talking about this with my 25 year old son and his girlfriend today. What’s weird is that this internet-based manosphere shit doesn’t look anything like the traditional masculinity of my father’s generation (Depression and WWII). Not that there weren’t a lot of bad things about it, but that strain of masculinity did at least have some positive aspects, such as generally favoring politeness and respect. None of this weird performative shit with guns, body sculpting, not wiping your ass, etc. In fact, guys like these influencers would likely be viewed as a bunch of weirdos to that generation of men.
CHETAN MURTHY
@karen gail: Wait, are you talking about the same book Blowback that I read? B/c I thought the book’s star was the history of American involvement with Japan, and all the ways in which we fucked things up over there? That is to say, he took what arguably should have been one of the shining examples of How Things Should Work In Our Empire and showed that there was all manner of blowback from it?
I remember a lot about Okinawa, also about the blowback to your domestic auto industry (IIRC, he claimed that the govt insisted that our auto makers not enforce their parents against infringing Japanese auto makers).
But I could be misremembering: it was a long time ago I read the book. Regardless, the book had important things to say about our “empire”: if a place like Japan (and our involvement there) engendered so much blowback, imagine what could happen in a place like Afghanistan, or Iraq, or Yemen.
Gloria DryGarden
@HopefullyNotcassandra: still dealing with it. Beauty is still our green card.
@West of the Rockies: I agree, toxic masculinity is hell on boys and men, and thus on society, on children and on women.
isn’t it boys, hazing each other, and men too, that enforce toxic masculinity. There’s so much peer pressure and role model/ advertising support for certain models of “man”.
And some have enough support to escape it, or never buy in.
I watched some guys at a mens workshop make it transparent: they discussed, who could take whom, but it was very simple. They went around the group, saying I can take you. I can’t take you, but I can sure take you. Addressing different men. I had no idea this sort of sizing each other up goes on.
of course women size up men, too, in terms of am I safe? I can take you, I can outrun you, I’m not going to be alone with you… But it’s not to win in a fight, or dominate, that I know of. Just, I can be safe here…or we measure how much respect or misogyny we’re getting.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Tate’s enteral struggle with his closet door continues.
Gloria DryGarden
@bbleh: if it were not the only station one had on the radio….
so, some of it may be hard wired, some people more than others, nature vs nurture… But what other skills do you have, what other songs can you play, musically? Do you have range and agility, or dies everything look like a nail because the only tool you have is a hammer?
HopefullyNotcassandra
@West of the Rockies: Andrew Dice Clay?
Matt
Hot take: any boy who looks at Tate etc and thinks “that’s a life I want to emulate” IS bad.
Treat other people like garbage to be exploited, expect to be treated the same way in kind.
Suzanne
@Hoodie: Eh. I was raised by my grandfather, who was a Depression/WWII/GI Bill guy. Deeply polite and chivalrous to women, faithful to his wife, upstanding. But still sexist as fuck. He thought there were only three acceptable jobs for women: Secretary, nurse, or teacher. He would yell at me if I didn’t bring home straight As, but still expected that I would get married and become a homemaker.
I cannot help that a lot of the rhetoric coming out of the “white working class” rhymes with all of this shit. The dream of the blue-collar job for men, dependent helpmeet/baby haver for the women.. Nope. It’s a trap.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Redshift: I absolutely agree with you
Gloria DryGarden
@geg6: indeed. And sometimes it’s important to say it fiercely, like you did. A lil tough love.
Glory b
Derek Guy is brilliant and I will not hear a contrary opinion.
Asked to write an article about why so many men dress like Joe Rogan, he begins at the industrial revolution.
A deeper dive into clothing style and manufacture and how it effects our lives (along with his yearning for affordable, walkable neighborhoods) cannot be found.
A retort from him (usually skewering someone questioning his manhood) resonates like none I’ve heard recently.
https://bsky.app/profile/dieworkwear.bsky.social/post/3lngcepx3s22z
JML
There is a lot of terrible toxic crap out there that makes it hard on young men, especially if/when they don’t have good role models and examples to help them screen out the bad and embrace the good. Hollywood has been sending out terrible messages to teen dudes for decades (“stalking is a great way to get a girl!”). Youth sports has a lot of toxic crap in it too, as some parents try to live out their dreams through their kids, and the pressure to choose one sport and specialize starts happening earlier and earlier. The idea of success only through wealth/power definitely hits guys hard.
But what we’re seeing in young men drifting into this kind of insular toxic “manosphere” is nothing all that new: it’s just people struggling to find comfort, friendship, and satisfaction in life looking for a place where they won’t be one getting bullied or mocked. Get into a crowd/clique and find safety in numbers. And with the internet, social media, and influencers it’s easier than ever for stuff like this to proliferate regardless of where you are.
I dunno what the solution is. Especially when so many adults have elected one of the worst possible role models in history and put the full force of the federal government behind the idea that it’s ok to hate people, mocking and attacking any group of people you fear/dislike is good and right, etc…
Still a lot of parents doing it right and raising good kids?
Hoodie
@Suzanne: No doubt sexist as hell, but not completely weird like this stuff.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@CHETAN MURTHY: just look at MAGA women. Only one man has to do orange face. The other MAGA men must wear red hats, and absurdly long red ties. Meanwhile, the MAGA women have to take their faces and twist them into something nearly human, blow up their lips like they were lip bee-stung and wear foundation several times too pale.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@JiveTurkin:
I’m guessing you were that way because you had parent(s) who taught you right from wrong.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@West of the Rockies: it is. 3 traumas in less than 7 years causes mental health issues in a majority of humans too.
Once I thought we would take this computing power and input all of our data to discover how to help and heal traumatized people before they could traumatize others.
Instead the gop decided to use this data to try and make us permanently anxious and afraid, incapable of rational thought, angry, vicious, mean spiteful human beings. The gop calls itself Christian while they do it, too.
They call themselves Christian while women bleed out from treatable miscarriages in hospital parking lots. They call themselves Christian while hooking another young man on gambling. They call themselves Christian while dismantling our scientific hopes for all of our futures and our weather forecasts.
Martin
Working with students at that age, a few things always stood out, and helped me to understand where I came from. I was mostly emancipated by the time I was 14. My parents divorced, my mom remarried a guy who was only 11 years older than me and early on his own career/adulting path. I had jobs more or less non-stop from 14, and probably had 3 dozen jobs before I got out of college. I’ve done a lot of random shit (not necessarily well, mind you).
One thing that stood out was that effectively none of the female students had expectations placed on them in the same way that many (not all) of the male students had. Many were expected to go to college, but being an arts major wasn’t some marker that they’d never be able to support themselves. There was always an expectation they’d marry (even if they were queer) and that would resolve the issue. But the male students – I’d say ⅓ at least – had some expectation that their academic program would result in a career good enough to support a family, buy a house, all that jazz. That’s why a lot of male students are pushed into engineering (and why many engineering programs excluded female students as late as the 1960s), medicine, law, STEM, etc. I had parents threaten to sue if we didn’t admit their kid into one of these programs. 100% of the time their kid was male. Never once had it happen with a female student. And it meant that while the struggles women had were not less serious than the struggles men had, their source was often pretty different.
There is this implied social contract with men – that men will be stoic in emergencies, produce work (at the micro care-for-your-family scale and macro mine-coal-and-produce-GDP scale, and all that which is expected to cut both ways. I’m of the camp that social contract shouldn’t exist in a gendered way, but it does, and once you internalize it, you expect that contract to work in both directions. In the old days it was career opportunities carved out for you, pay sufficient to achieve those goals (earning enough digging rocks to buy a house, etc.) and all that. And that social contract was broken by capitalists at the very least, but the expectations haven’t really changed that much.
One observation that has been made by a number of sociologists is that women are still locked into that same system themselves – where there is a whole social contract on them to be nurturing and have kids and all that. I’m not saying it’s any less of a burden, merely that it’s a different burden. So sociologists survey single women who are reporting they can’t find a partner and one of their requirements is often that their partner can out-earn them. Well, that’s not so realistic any longer. In many large US cities, women outearn men (noting that women are likely to be better educated statistically, that doesn’t mean a pay gap doesn’t still exist, just that a majority share of the professional jobs in these places are occupied by women – doctors, etc.) and that expectation needs to change (and it is), but it’s lagging.
This is a breaking of the social contract on both sides – men aren’t being handed the plum jobs that let them outearn women, and women still have some of the expectation that they aren’t the breadwinner – both of those expectations are pushed onto us by culture. Men haven’t learned to respond to this change, but so too have other parts of society. This is problem primarily affecting young men and women but culture is still predominately driven by older men and women, not recognizing that things have changed on the ground and pushing more cultural images that reflect that change. This is likely one of the reasons why young voters are so angry with older lawmakers because no matter how well intentioned they might be (and at least half of them aren’t, you know which half) they too are a product of that social contract to some degree. This is where generational conflict is often the greatest, when the projected expectation from an older generation who run the government, produce all the movies, write the books, run the companies runs up against a younger generation who look out at the opportunities and say – that’s bullshit. And this is far from the first time we’ve gone through this.
Andrew Tate is just like all the rest finding some scapegoat for why it’s so hard to put forth a reasonable amount of good faith effort to do your job and be properly compensated for it. He blames women instead of immigrants or trans people or Jews or whoever, but isn’t that really what all of those efforts are about – making excuses for why you can’t get ahead in the world?
lowtechcyclist
@Hoodie:
And NOT WHINING, fercryinoutloud. That generation expected men to suck it up. Which was probably too far over into ‘never show your feelings’ territory, but I miss the days when being a whiner was to be unmanly.
Because here we’ve got a person in the office of the Presidency who whines nonstop, practically, and people think he’s some sort of real man. I can’t tell you how much I despise that.
NutmegAgain
Teenage “men” ?? Isn’t that a total contradiction in terms?
karen gail
@bbleh: Notice every time archaeology dig turns up evidence of female warriors or leaders people are shocked, shocked that women would be anything but weak and subservient. For thousands of years men have written or written history so that if or when women were more it has failed to be part of history.
I took a number of women’s history courses and teacher struggled to find anything that showed women as strong, able leaders. Even the story of King David and Bathsheba leaves out that she was a Queen.
What is known is that women were powerful until religions that worshipped a male god made them lesser. Side note; what does one think of when being told story of Saint Patrick? snakes were a symbol of female and cycles of life.
cmorenc
@trollhattan: Let’s hope the Admin’s seeking dismissal of their abortion pill suit isn’t just a tactical move based on an assessment that their chances of success in obtaining a ruling limiting access are better if refiled in another district, another circuit.
Martin
I’ll add, there’s a really good observation by Ian Danskin (can’t find the video) where he notes that men often hit some point when they’re young and they start to analyze that social contract that they’ve been hit with – and some recognize that they were lied to and turn into feminists (like my dad did) and others analyze that social contract and realize they never got the pay off they were promised and adopt the viewpoint that it’s owed to them and they should just take it.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@bbleh: I do get your point. It is true in some ways:
Yet, women are not even entitled to necessary effective medical procedures to save their lives, these days.
The internet is brutal on pre-teen and teen girls, too. The suicide numbers of that age group show this. Selling girls absurd beauty standards practically from birth is new.
We used to get an interregnum to just be a child and play with our (how many is it now?) 35 dolls. Hanging from trees was more fun, though.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Steve LaBonne: a boy that is getting recruited by hate, inc. is not privileged. He is a pathetic kid living in a prison like environment trying desperately not to be the beta/prey. He is just a boy who needs help before he drowns in hate and becomes the frightened, violent adult man of whom you speak. This is just my humble opinion.
karen gail
@CHETAN MURTHY: I haven’t read the book, the section that Tom highlighted was about Iraqi war, Bush, the war on terror and black sites for torture. What I did get was how much of what saw during war in Iraq is still going on under “new management.”
I think it was mentioned in Tom’s piece that there are actually three books to the series.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Hoodie: yes. They would think this “trend” weird.
different-church-lady
“Okay, you’ve got the simple part. Now you’ve got a bit of work to go on the appealing part…”
Gloria DryGarden
@karen gail: I’m desperate for, hungry for this women’s history, our times of equality and power. Back before we got written out.
Doc Sardonic
A number of years ago State Farm put out an ad that addressed a lot of what we are seeing the longer term results of. Listen closely to the dialog.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DZbSlkFoSU
Martin
So, you can hold two ideas at the same time – that men do have it better, and that society is still fucking over men. The key is to not see it as some zero-sum battle between the genders but as a conflict between the powerful and the not-powerful. How do you get people to work in the mines where they are likely to die? Sell it as manly, convince the men to put their fears away and go down there because being willing to sacrifice yourself is what you are expected to do.
Note how that overlaps with the traits of fascism.
Those who hold power in society shape how we believe we should behave – both men and women – because it gives them their power. The government needs men to volunteer to go to war, men and women to be consumers, and so on. This is how we market trucks. Men can also be victims of this system.
hitchhiker
@Martin:
I was a bright girl, or so they said. I could sail through every standardized test without making an effort, for sure. But I wasn’t encouraged to do anything in particular, and when I finally understood at about age 23 that having intellectual chops could mean financial independence (lol, couldn’t have been that bright!), I signed up for engineering school.
“Cool,” said my dad. “You’ll marry an engineer if you go there.” He wasn’t being snarky, this was his actual opinion. Marrying an engineer was a real goal. Being one was … outside his range of possibilities for me.
This was in 1975. I had five brothers and two sisters; none of the boys went to college, but all the girls did.
The Audacity of Krope
“Answers which are appealingly simple”
The spurious seems to always win in the short term. I’m beginning to wonder if we don’t need periodic repeated crashes to knock sense into people.
khead
@West of the Rockies:
Well, yeah, but this is more like generational whining.
Also, I am mid-late 50s and left to wonder what has happened in the last 35 years that men don’t see the idiocy in points 2-5 of this “core message”. Because when I was 21, the term I woulda used for those “hustler folks” is “get-rich-quick losers”. AND I’m old enough to remember when it was ok to tell the kids “No, you won’t be a famous singer/actor/athlete” – but that was usually in the context of some white person saying that to a black kid about the NBA and/or rapping. So I’m not too surprised there’s a bunch of folks out there who don’t think it applies to them.
Jay
This started on Social Media/The Internet, with PUA scams. (Pick Up Artists). To condense the 100 page book they would sell you for $59.99 down to one sentence, make the woman you are hitting on feel back about herself and unworthy of her company. To condense it down to one word, “negging”.
A big driver of the Blowup, was GamerGate. Us olds never really noticed until Discord, that these guys, (mostly guys), playing MPG’s online, create their own gangs, units, etc and constantly talk to each other in amped adrenaline hazes. Then came the horror, turns out many of their favorite games were created by women, women were criticizing the technical and misogamy aspects of the games designs, IN THEIR FAVORITE GAME MAGAZINES AND WEBSITES. This could not stand, so a posse was rounded up to drive these Women from the Internet.
Anyhew, the Reichwing/Manosphere controls much of the Social Media young men consume, where “girlfriends” controls much of the social media young Women consume.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Gloria DryGarden: Athena ruled we were but vessels to free Orestes from the furies.
Doc Sardonic
@Hoodie: I wasn’t raised in the Depression/WWll generation, and these manosphere guys look to me like weirdo, skipping dipshits
HopefullyNotcassandra
@The Audacity of Krope: I so hope not!
VeniceRiley
WE HAVE BINGO!
karen gail
@Gloria DryGarden: After I took those courses to fulfill part of what need for degree I have done all I can to find out what still exists about women and history. It is a struggle; I was shocked to find out in the early Roman Empire there were still some traces of matriarchy.
One of my Celtic history books mentions that until the Roman Army came up against the tribes of the north they were winning battles. This was the time of the founding of the Holy Roman Catholic Chruch; one that was used as a weapon against a society that was family based with women “owning” the land and children. After all one could always question who the father was but hard to question who the woman was that gave birth to that child. My side trip into finding out some of these things was when was working on family tree and ended up in contact with woman in Ireland. She told me that until the British took over there was no marriage, children “belonged” to the mother and traced their family lines through the female line.
Martin
Well, the olds let the get-rich-quick losers blow up the economy in 2007 and walk away richer than they entered. They’re selling out even white collar professional jobs to AI now. The lesson learned was that working hard and doing right would get you punished, but fucking over your neighbor would get you rewarded.
Is anyone really surprised that we elected one of those get-rich-quick losers? No, you can still say to kids “No, you won’t be a famous singer/actor/athlete”. You can also now say to kids “No, you won’t be able to buy a house as an attorney or engineer or doctor.” They’re giving up on the normal career routes because we fucked them all up. No job security, no pensions, we’re going to rip out the safety net because we don’t want to pay, all of it. They didn’t do that – we did.
The Audacity of Krope
I recall a sports talk program where they were talking about a colleague who got in trouble for sexually abusing an only fans model he had made contact with.
They kept repeating the whole episode that men need discipline and stability. Over and over, “discipline and stability.”
Then the ad comes, brought to you DraftKings sports betting…🤦
H.E.Wolf
@CHETAN MURTHY: Is it possible the cosmetic surgery you’re referencing is labiaplasty? Because that’s vulvar, not vaginal.
Vulvas are on the outside. Vaginas are on the inside. There seems to be an odd cultural/social trend among younger folks to use the word for the inside-the-body part, for both… so your source may have mixed up the two.
And you’re right; there’s a whole PhD dissertation’s worth of analysis to be done – already done, or I miss my guess – on the whys and wherefores of cosmetic labiaplasty.
New Deal democrat
I think Adam Serwer has had the best take:
https://bsky.app/profile/adamserwer.bsky.social/post/3logfndpt5k26
“ This seems to be the correct answer. The dads idolize men like Trump and the sons follow their dads. We are looking for a “crisis” among young men but i think its actually middle aged men who have gone insane because many of us never really grew up ”
To which Max Kennelly agreed, and supplied a potent graph:
https://bsky.app/profile/maxkennerly.bsky.social/post/3locdiwao4s25
For those who don’t want to click through, while less than 25% of young women approve of T—-p, 45% of young men do.
And who are their dads? Gen X men, the only age/gender the majority of which – 56% – approve of Trump.
FWIW, I think T—-p’s disastrous performance will change young men’s minds about the GOP.
Martin
@Jay: Gamergate isn’t just about gender though. The same crew also oppose POC representation, queer representation, etc. Steve Bannon was notably at the center of GamerGate. He certainly doesn’t limit his attacks to women.
karen gail
@HopefullyNotcassandra: an elderly lady once told me that women screwed up when we rewarded men for killing with sharp pointed objects; sure they could kill something bigger but then women had to do all the work with dead animal to turn it into food. Then women didn’t kill the first man who used that weapon to take from another person.
prostratedragon
@trollhattan: I have seen that occasionally in the before times, and once in a while hourlies don’t come in. Is the weather turbulent where you are? Usually the case here (Chicago) when those things happen.
m.j.
Can someone please offer Trump a role (the best role) in a movie. It would be all he would think about.
Unfortunately, we need to film at a golf course in Scotland, you might say to him.
prostratedragon
@Jeffg166:
A rich man’s son
Martin
@New Deal democrat: I would note that GenX (I’m old GenX) are the first generation to hit the labor force after Reaganomics hit – when the unions were being busted, pensions eliminated, and all that. We never got to experience growing up in any other environment and rationalized it as normal, before we had a chance to see just how shitty the experiment would turn out. We were in our 20s and 30s when the internet hit and formed our cultural views in the era of Schwarzenegger and Rambo.
Gloria DryGarden
@HopefullyNotcassandra: Athena not my favorite, kind of loyal to men, in the archetype books, born out of Zeus’ forehead, good grief.
Isis, Astarte, diana, Hecate Demeter Kali, Inanna, Persephone, Gaia, Brigid… other Celtic goddesses, and all those nameless body- positive old fertility goddess figurines in Anatolia…
CHETAN MURTHY
@H.E.Wolf: Sorry, yes, I knew it was labiaplasty, but …. I was trying to get thru that part as quickly as possible, b/c ….. well, y’know, it’s pretty horrific to think about this sort of shit. I mean, the idea that a girl or woman would have herself mutilated to fit some pornographic standard of “beauty” …..
RaflW
™There are a lot of ways that, as a gay man who came of age 40+ years ago, and came out ~35 years ago, I just find this whole discourse™ to be both very boring and seriously alienating. The softest people on earth have spoiled young man children? wow.
Martin
@trollhattan: The billionaire who owns Accuweather has been pushing for this for decades. Santorum introduced a bill in 2005 to prevent NWS from making weather data available to the public so that he could profit off of that. He’s finally getting the payoff for his GOP donations.
CHETAN MURTHY
@RaflW: Yeah, gotta say, I agree with you on this. I grew up in a place -suffused- with toxic masculinity. And sure, I haven’t exactly made the most out of life, but for sure I’m not some raging misogynistic nutbag. And I know that the things that are wrong in my life aren’t the fault of women, or some foolish bullshit like that.
The Audacity of Krope
When you put it that way it sounds…almost obvious.
The Audacity of Krope
Why, after all, should the publicly funded collection of weather data be used to serve the public?
Splitting Image
@West of the Rockies:
Hugh Hefner.
Hef was probably never as bad as the Tates on a personal level, but he started out by objectifying women and became more reactionary as he got older. Playboy ran articles every few years about the increasing “womanization” of the country, which always meant that women were speaking out in public and disagreeing with men like him.
Gloria Steinem got her big break as a journalist by working undercover at a Playboy Club and writing an expose. She quickly realized that it was a terrible, exploitative place for women to work, but said later on that the real impact of feminism for her was the realization that all women were bunnies. No matter what your job was, you were still expected to be agreeable and decorative for the men you were working with in addition to the work that you were being paid to do.
Martin
@The Audacity of Krope: Why do you hate profits, comrade?
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Gloria DryGarden: that ruling by Athena is the reason given in times long gone for why women deserve nothing. We could not even rely on our sons not to murder us per Athena’s Orestes’ ruling because we were nothing to our sons, merely vessels.
I don’t dislike Athena although she was one mean girl to Medusa. I hate that verdict, though. She is the goddess of wisdom; yet, that ruling is foolish city.
Some historians think power in Mycenae and Sparta necessarily ran through Clytemnestra and Helen. This would be similar to the matrilineal notion of which the Irish lady spoke. So, Athena’s ruling rendering women “vessels” removes them from any claim to power or right to justice.
Gloria DryGarden
@RaflW: it matters to the women here. And to the men who raise children, have females in their lives,
or who worked to dodge that toxic masculinity inculcation.
I’m guessing coming out as gay men helps some guys have much better support for being true to your nature, and not buying into a pre made template… and perhaps you end up with enough like minded folks to have a built in support group for self determination and honoring feelings, etc. Does this fit?
HopefullyNotcassandra
@prostratedragon: a loved child, living in times of peace and prosperity, with well-adjusted parents has an easier one.
The Audacity of Krope
I don’t hate profits, per se. I hate that a class of owners are the sole judges of how those profits are allocated even though they aren’t truly the ones generating those profits.
The Audacity of Krope
Suddenly I realize that the Percy Jackson author wasn’t pulling the characterization of Athena’s daughter out of his ass.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@karen gail: my nana and grandpa both told me you clean what you kill. That rule was strictly enforced all around where they lived. Somehow I never managed to even catch a fish. Hmm
Gloria DryGarden
@HopefullyNotcassandra: so Athena, like eve, made a mistake, and we all pay…
I’ll have to look up this arpthena story you’re writing about. I didn’t learn tha5 one.
Harrison Wesley
@m.j.: Of course! The sequel to Braveheart – Blowhard!
Gloria DryGarden
@HopefullyNotcassandra: indeed.
and a wanted child….
West of the Rockies
@Urza:
We laughed at them mostly. They were occasionally funny in a modestly insightful way, but, boy, it would take a real idiot to find them aspirational.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@The Audacity of Krope: Nope. Those books are actually quite decent; although I admit to some embarrassment that I enjoyed books written for tweens.
West of the Rockies
@HopefullyNotcassandra:
Oh, ugh. Forgot about that imbecile.
The Audacity of Krope
@HopefullyNotcassandra: I’ll have to cop to not having read the books yet. I’m just left recalling the second movie where Athena’s daughter is characterized as the avatar of unbending prejudice (against cyclopes).
Martin
@West of the Rockies: there probably aren’t comparisons to the Tates, because what we’re witnessing is a class of people who have fallen off the top of the cultural hierarchy trying to get back on top. And we haven’t really had a serious reshuffling of culture in the way we’ve seen the last few decades. You had some in the 70s as advertisers started to reach out to black consumers, but the cis-het white christian male has been the cultural king for 400 years, and while we retain a lot of institutional power, we don’t have the kind of cultural veto power that we once had, as the Superbowl halftime show helped drive home, presumably with Trump in attendance. That’s really never happened before in US history apart from the loss of ‘slave-owning’ being part of that description in the mid 19th century.
So yeah, I don’t think we’ve ever experienced the kind of cultural lashing out that we are seeing today.
The Audacity of Krope
Why not Trump? He’s been around doing his schtick as long as I can remember.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Gloria DryGarden: look for Orestes and the furies. The ruling by Athena lets him off the hook (frees him from the furies) for murdering his mother, Clytemnestra, who murdered his father, Agamemnon, who murdered their daughter Iphigenia so he could get a good wind to sail across the sea to murder some Trojans. Oh, and Odysseus basically caused the whole thing simply because he wanted to go home, not be a murderer and instead be a good, non-toxic dad, husband and chieftain. He was too clever by half that Odysseus.
Fun times for all!
Martin
@The Audacity of Krope: Trump wasn’t an Internet personality. He relied on media gatekeepers to give him an audience, and in the cases where they granted him an audience they retained the ability to edit and censor him.
Tate doesn’t rely on media gatekeepers – anyone can open a YouTube account and game the algorithm all the same. Trump didn’t discover that until he ran for President.
Martin
Folks interested in checking in on where the Gamergate space is right now, Shaun has a nice video of where they are surrounding a game called Stellar Blade. Features their reactions to greek mythology as characterized in another game, and just overall where this part of society is. And it’s not that small a segment of society, and mostly but not exclusively young men.
Steve LaBonne
@HopefullyNotcassandra: That the white male privilege their fathers had, and they expected to have themselves, has eroded significantly is precisely the point.
geg6
@Martin:
I’m not an idiot. I understand all of that. I don’t give a shit. I used to, but I’m done with that. When men are reduced to 3/4 of a person, then maybe I’ll care. Until then, I don’t feel any need to sympathize with or listen to their whining about how tough they have it. Especially when all their solutions to their problems mean women (and many other groups) must be reduced even further from personhood. Until last September, I worked with young adults for over 30 years and never met more than a handful of young men with these attitudes. Most of them flunked out because they didn’t think they had to study or go to class, an attitude they brought with them from high school (almost always athletes) and family. The vast majority of young men I met over those years were just normal modern men and are now successful and happy in their personal lives. If this is such a widespread problem, why didn’t those thousands of young men (my caseload was about 500-700 a year, about half men) have that problem? It’s a minority of young men who have real issues that need addressed but no one is stripping them of their autonomy, no matter what their personal issues are. Instead, we get article after article fretting about the crisis among young men. This shit gets more attention than all the crap women have dealt with for centuries. I’m tired of hearing about it. And now I’ll leave this thread because I will surely offend someone soon, if I already haven’t.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Gloria DryGarden: a surprise child can be very pleasan surprise, though
geg6
@Martin:
I am a young Boomer and I disagree. I graduated college in 1982. Gen X was definitely NOT the first.
Martin
Well, there you go then.
karen gail
I read something that would love to rub in the face of every man who believes that space belongs to men and that women should get no credit for any contributions they have made.
The earliest evidence of a calendar exists from stone age markings; someone tracked the cycles of the moon and a cycle that averaged 28 days. There is only one group of humans that would need to do that tracking; women who were track their cycles. They would know what cycle of the moon they could expect to bleed and what cycle of the moon they were most likely to give birth.
frosty
My older son knew exactly what he wanted and held out until a job opened up, working for Lowe’s in the meantime. My younger also knows but getting through college has been a struggle.
Me? I knew what I wanted but I graduated into a recession so what I wanted was impossible. I bridged the chasm by getting the first professional job I could find: Cost/Scheduling Engineering for a multi-national corporation building refineries.
Omnes Omnibus
@geg6: I think you did hit on something important. The Tate fans and the crisis in masculinity people seem to me to be a small but noisy corner of the internet. I am pretty sure that it’s not that widespread, but because it strikes a chord in the brains of the same people who bitch about their blue haired niece at Oberlin it gets a shitload of coverage. The same people who got upset by MeToo and BLM.
Ivan X
Not for nothing, but I got a real healthy dolloping of “you are bad” as a “man” (as much as a 20-24 year old is) in college from 90-94.
While I did internalize this some of this message in ways I don’t think were helpful, I had enough self respect or ego or whatever to a) not follow some pied piper “masculinity” salesman (gross) and b) not think “women” are to blame for however I consider myself. I have my many flaws, but absolving myself of agency or responsibility is not one of them. I also have the capacity for empathy and listening, for better and worse, and that didn’t leave me without female interest in those years.
i do think that broad strokes are unhelpful. Different people, whether male, female, or between/other, are different, and most are complex and even contradictory.
I do think that figuring out how to be the “right kind” of man is a tricky needle to thread, and likely resented by some, then and now. But it’s a *good* thing figuring out how to thread a needle that avoids exercising power, present or historic, over others.
But the Tate brothers? Are you kidding? If that’s who’s speaking your truth, you’re the guy who makes the rest of us “bad.” You’re a follower, and you’re following a charlatan who reinforces and encourages your worst aspects.
RaflW
@Gloria DryGarden: What I didn’t say directly is this: Boys have been taught to be very ugly to other boys for generations. They had no qualms about being absolute shits to closeted gay boys like me.
I kept my head down, came out when safer to do so, and honestly I just have no patience or time for cis-het young men to moan, complain and seek participation trophies (in their language) for their ‘bruised’ manliness. Buck the fuck up. And yes, absolutely, do not take it out on women and girls any more than they should on us who are queer, trans, gender expansive and so on.
Matt McIrvin
@New Deal democrat: That’s the pattern I keep seeing: all these stories about young men going fascist, but when you look at the numbers, the youth crisis turns out to be that they’re ALMOST as fascist as 55-year-old fucks from my generation. Who may be their fathers.
HopefullyNotcassandra
@Steve LaBonne: A boy who is trying to hide in the corner and not be noticed is not thinking about anything (I don’t think) except how not to be prey. Boys used to get stuck in lockers. They only got let out if someone risked detention (for late to class) to try and help get them out. That is prison like behavior. I just want to stop the bullies and save the kids who are desperately trying to make themselves vanish.
Martin
@Omnes Omnibus: Of course Tate and his fans are a noisy corner of the internet. It’s absurd to think otherwise.
That said, one thing that the alt right does is invade communities and pull the normal discourse in a particular direction, and while not all the way to Tate’s position, they usually get some of the way there. So Tate’s crew is small (understand ‘small’ is 8.5 million followers on Twitter) but there’s a larger population that is only halfway there, and an even larger population a quarter of the way there.
lowtechcyclist
@Splitting Image:
Yabbut by the time Hef was going on like this, Playboy was losing its cachet, surpassed by Penthouse and others. The only time anyone I know paid attention to Playboy after about 1972 was the Jimmy Carter interview.
Gloria DryGarden
@HopefullyNotcassandra: ok, wow. A break from our modern news…Thanks tho.
Omnes Omnibus
@HopefullyNotcassandra: In my four years of high school (‘78-‘82), I only saw one kid put in a locker. It was a track freshman during indoor season when we had to share a locker room with the wrestling team. This freshman kept mouthing off to the senior wrestler whose locker was near his. The wrestler started to get annoyed and told the freshman that if he didn’t cut it out he was going to put him in his locker. The kid kept it up. He was placed firmly into the locker and shut in. The wrestler went and showered and let the kid out when he came back. FWIW according to high school guys’ code, the kid gained respect from the whole thing. He didn’t back down from a challenge and he accepted the consequences with as much dignity as one could inside a wrestler’s locker near the end of the wrestling season. Oddly, that is real locker room behavior, not the shot that Trinmp talked about as locker room talk.
n.b. I was not a participant in this. I was a witness with one foot in each camp. I was a senior, but I was on the track team.
Omnes Omnibus
@Martin: And even more who aren’t any of the way there.
Gloria DryGarden
@RaflW: good point. Boys, some boys, have a reputation for being bullies and being cruel to other boys. For dominance, because they can, attacking not just gay boys, but betas and nerds and guts who won’t buy into being oppressors. So I hear.
girls can be cruel, too. And siblings…
humans. “Can’t live with them, can’t live without them…”
prostratedragon
@HopefullyNotcassandra:
Just something to fix a reference, not an argument.
Bokonon
When you drive around in your car these days, and you encounter male drivers, you can tell instantly which ones of them subscribe to that zero sum game, winners/cucks mindset peddled by right-wing influencers like the Tates. You see it in their “no mercy” power games where they cut people off and refuse to allow anyone to merge, the tailgating, the red light running, the glares, the smirks, the simmering rage. It’s the obnoxious and toxic and dangerous way they handle their vehicles, and the way they treat other drivers as marks and victims, ready to be subordinated and abused.
There’s a LOT of them. The number seems to be growing.
Bonus for having a massive lifted pickup truck (painted gray or black) with Punisher and MAGA stickers, skulls, blacked-out American flags, gun decals. It’s just awesome sauce when you see one of those coming up fast behind you in your rear-view mirror …
Martin
@Omnes Omnibus: Right. but per the observation above that there don’t seem to be any more 14-29 year old fascists than there are 50-64 year old fascists – is that our standard now? That in 35 years we’ve made roughly zero social progress?
Every few days we have this debate about how we lost the election, and guess what – there are enough of these young men to lose us an election.
Omnes Omnibus
@Martin: Making no progress is better than regressing.
RevRick
@Redshift: I would say that neither boys nor girls are victims, unless we’re talking about accidents or violence. Looking back on my own teenage days, I would say I imprisoned myself in my own anxieties. For years, I convinced myself that I was unlovable (thanks mom for teaching me to think that way about myself), and that led me to isolate myself. I created an imaginary dialogue where I defeated myself before I even started.
Now, a lot of the dysfunction of our society stems from the belief that the opposite sex will have no interest in me unless I do X, where X is some performance that is supposed to hook a boyfriend/girlfriend. I am of course speaking solely of heterosexual relationships here. But what this does is ramp up the normal anxieties we have about getting to become friends with someone new, and dial them up to an eleven.
For girls/women, this often means things like enhancing their outward appearance or performing helplessness or some other such nonsense. For boys/men, it takes on the flavor of being strong/tough/in control, or some other such nonsense. The thing is they’re all performances, which is the opposite of reality. And performances are the death of healthy relationships.
So, how do we break the cycle? What can we, as elders say, that may help younger men and women navigate what can feel like treacherous waters?
Since I believe that every real community begins with confession, I guess I would start by talking about my own struggles and how I made things worse for myself with my own inner dialogue. Then I would talk about how, if I could take what I’ve learned back to my younger self, I would do things differently. Like not taking rejection personally. Like reminding myself that the other person is struggling with emotional shit, too. That saying things that may sound like weakness are actually reflections of true inner strength. That it’s okay to admit you’re scared or sad or feeling insecure.
I’m definitely not going to waste my time shaking my fist at the manosphere crowd. I would much rather model something different.
(Like all my opinions, this may be as useful as a stale fart).
Matt McIrvin
@Martin: Just trying to gauge what we’re dealing with here. I grew up in an absolute armpit of toxic masculinity–not from my family, I was lucky, but peers and pop culture. Bullying, Reaganism, date rape, steroid abuse, stalking and harassment as romantic ideal, weird religious patriarchy, competitive drunkenness, violent homophobia, frat hazing that killed people, it was all there. Is what we’re dealing with now something qualitatively different from that? Or is it the same damn thing? I suspect it’s mostly the same damn thing, with some of the messaging transferred to the Internet. Which gives some insight into dealing with it.
JML
@Matt McIrvin: substantively, I think you;re right: it’s still the same stuff, or the same types of stuff, modified for the current world. It does feel like it’s easier to amplify because of the internet and possibly spread around like a toxic virus. But it doesn’t seem all that new to me either.
karen gail
@RevRick: There are so many people who should never be parents; yes, some of them were damaged from what their parents did but not all of them. I firmly believe that some are just born missing something; my grandmother apologized for the hate mother had for me. She knew there was something wrong when she tried to kill her younger infant sister; so when dad married her grandma warned him that baby girls might not be safe around her.
Rather than making sure she could never give birth or making sure she was never around baby and young girls she “watched her carefully, then sent her to live with cousins that were all boys.”
Matt McIrvin
@JML: I do think that when I was a teenager, there were more girls who actually bought into this stuff and craved a 1980s macho man. Even then, it probably wasn’t a majority. But these days, so many girls are just done with it, and that’s one of the things driving these boys crazy.
Gvg
@Steve LaBonne: the people who are told they used to win are resentful about it. A lot of them were exploited cattle in the past too. That’s why unions got powerful, and there were pretty much class wars in the US. Coal mining used to be a way many white men died for instance. They have been manipulated back into powerlessness by their own foolishness. Racism is a trick to divide, among other things of course. Anyway, they are like the fools who imagine they are descended from kings, not commoners.
NobodySpecial
People put on their rose colored glasses when they talk about this, and it really gets in the way of identifying the problem and finding solutions.
The problem is that men are now in a expectations shift that women went through 40-50 years ago, and a lot of THAT involved groups of women screaming at each other about the evils of being a stay at home mom versus being a career woman versus the women who tried to juggle both and got screamed at by both camps and men at the same time.
Now if you actually go around on social media and look at the braindead takes young men are bombarded with, it’s no wonder a lot of them can’t figure out a good path and willingly look for a simple solution. On one hand you have a tsunami of pressure from the previous generations about Stoicism, Utility, and traditional male roles. On the other you have a bunch of people who demand that the changing expectations be instantly applied fully or else they’re just being Nazis. Then you have a bunch of people who expect young men to embrace all of that – they MUST be the breadwinner and the Stoic and the uber male while also being introspective and emotionally available when many women still deride them for being introspective and emotionally available or for not being the breadwinner and the Stoic and the uber male.
And, of course, if they complain, well, in many corners you’re not allowed to because of history that they didn’t cause and don’t have any way to alter. Madness. It’s like blaming the half of Gaza that wasn’t even old enough to carry a rifle in an army for thousands of years of Middle Eastern problems and claiming they “deserve” bad outcomes because of it. We expect young men born after the Clinton administration to atone for the sins of their fathers and then wonder why they get upset about it. The average 20 something guy doesn’t have institutional power because of the patriarchy, they just have institutional guilt in the minds of people angry at the patriarchy.
Andrew Tate sells snake oil, but at least he’s offering them something with what feels like a tangible reward, not just a scolding.
Martin
@Omnes Omnibus: We are regressing. Go back 15 years and we were making progress. That’s why people are alarmed by this.
Martin
@Matt McIrvin: I think it is qualitatively different.
In the 80s any dipshit with connections could get a job on Wall Street and make bank. Now, you gotta have a degree from a decent school and have good grades.
That means that the guys back then dealing with all of that stuff at least had a reasonable economic and social payoff. You could fuck off and still do okay. You could still find a partner because it’s not like women had many options for economic independence, so their bar was super low.
Note, I’m not saying that raising the bar for men is bad – far from it. I’m saying lowering the payoff is bad, and we’ve lowered the payoff. They look at their dad, who could be a total fuckup and still buy a house and raise a family, and look at their friends who are fucking busting their ass and still getting turned down from universities (because availability of college seats hasn’t kept up with demand, and the median performance of students has gone up as a result meaning you have to work MUCH harder to get the same opportunity), or landing a job and getting laid off for no apparent reason (witness the DOGE carnage on that front).
You shouldn’t fault young people too much for seeing the declining opportunities and getting sucked into Tates blame or Trumps blame, when there’s no countervailing narrative. I mean, there is, but it’s not really in politics, it’s in social media which is radicalizing a lot of young people away from capitalism. But plenty are hearing Tates message and saying ‘sure, that sounds good’. Note, we’re not talking 24 year olds here, we’re talking 13 year olds.
Remember this John Rogers quote:
It’s not Ayn Rand any more. It’s Andrew Tate. But it’s always sort of been there in some form.
CHETAN MURTHY
@Martin: Martin, you’re making excuses for moral idiots. The simple fact is, boys aren’t doing as well as girls, and that’s not because somehow the opportunities aren’t there: it’s because they’re not fucking trying.
I don’t know why, b /c hey, I’m an old. But the simple fact that girls are doing better than boys kinda says it all. Stop making excuses for them: it doesn’t wash.
Martin
@CHETAN MURTHY: I’m curious how this is a different argument from people who make the same accusation against, say, black people.
What is it about boys that makes them not try? Like biologically, since that’s where your argument must come from if you are rejecting cultural explanations.
Kayla Rudbek
@karen gail: and women would also have learned to track the tides so they could harvest oysters (I remember reading a short take on Oyster Gal – South Africa fossil maybe?)
Hildebrand
I think Terry Pratchett had the best take on all of this in his book Carpe Jugulum – ‘And sin, young man, is when you treat people like things.’
The only way to a better world is to start by treating people, all people, as people.
Rugosa
@bbleh: That is exactly what I thought. There’s money to be made on peoples’ insecurities – whether it’s women about appearance or men about masculinity. Does anyone else remember The Hidden Persuaders by Vance Packard? Published in the late 50s, it was an expose of advertising research and how advertisers manipulate people to sell products. It’s a useful guide to thinking critically about attempts to convince you of something, whether it’s which soap to buy or which guru to believe.
Rugosa
@Martin: That means that the guys back then dealing with all of that stuff at least had a reasonable economic and social payoff. You could fuck off and still do okay. You could still find a partner because it’s not like women had many options for economic independence, so their bar was super low.
Bingo. Men/boys have it harder than they used to and some of them resent it. They’d rather blame women than put in the work to better themselves. Oh, and women won’t put up with shit in relationships any more – that really gets them mad
Miss Bianca
@Omnes Omnibus: Sorry, but that sounds like a “man’s man” to me.
But maybe I’m prejudiced. My dad was that kind of guy.
Just Some Flyover
@HopefullyNotcassandra: Heh, yep he was considered the antichrist of his day. I remember Dennis Miller had a bit about it, how everyone was overreacting. “Come on people, he’s Fonzie with Tourette’s Syndrome, you gotta take it easy!”
apocalipstick
@Omnes Omnibus: Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche was quite funny and contained a passable recipe for beef bourguignon. I enjoyed it very much.
apocalipstick
@Wapiti: There is quite a bit of truth to the axiom that broken people raise broken people.
apocalipstick
@cmorenc: The dad is more important than the location. Lots of beautiful rural areas are seething pits of manosphere dysfunction.
Just Some Flyover
@m.j.: I recently rewatched the 1998 Woody Allen movie “Celebrity”. I’d forgotten the T….p had a cameo in it towards the end. Love him or hate him Woody did satire really well and T….p, to this day, I’m sure never realized he was effectively being made fun of for the buffoon he was even then. Famous for being famous, media whore, etc. All the themes the movie touches on with its other characters. Still worth a watch.
Paul in KY
@cmorenc: You know Southpark is close…
Paul in KY
@Steve LaBonne: Good point!
Paul in KY
@Gloria DryGarden: Kali?
Paul in KY
@Harrison Wesley: The Edward II story…
Paul in KY
@Bokonon: I think some of those clowns think that enhances their chance of wimmen action. For a type of woman, they may be right.