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Society vs Male Radicalisation II - Male Role Models/Surely This Time Our Plan Will Work
I was on the internet this week, and I found this:
Labour to help schools develop male influencers to combat Tate misogyny
It is interesting to note that there is an increasing shift towards talking about "role models" for young men and boys as a means of cooling the gender kerfuffle, rather than by repeating feminist talking points at males until they concede as was the case when I was a teenager. The Labour Party, the UK's apparent next government, has come up with policy to reduce the influence of Andrew Tate among schoolboys with the intended aim of safeguarding women and girls. It means to do this by creating counter role models to whom boys can look up to. This would not even the utterly embarrasing 30 year old boomers trying to guess what resonates with children, but would consist instead of older volunteer boys taken from within the same school. This if it is implemented, will have educators select the real life version of Will from Inbetweeners as its senior male role model and think themselves of sound mind for doing so. You are only ever going to get uncool loser types volunteering, and it is the fear of becoming an uncool loser (or worse) that motivates young men to go and consume manosphere content.
Feminism's defenders will counter that there are many existing role models available for men, often listing real or fictional people like Ryan Gosling, Marcus Rashford or Ted Lasso. These men are either fake or literal one percenters whose lifestyle an average young man has no hope of to attaining. This betrays a complete lack of understanding about why men choose the role models they do and how they attempt to emulate them. These role models are deliberately or implicitly chosen as role models for young men by people who aren't young men often because they display qualities that are useful, rather than valued, to society. This is because almost all policy dreamt up by institutions concerning Men and Boys is not to their benefit, but instead to neuter a perceived threat against Women, Girls and the wider society. For every Marcus Rashford, there are multiple Mason Greenwoods or Kurt Zoumas who continue to receive all the signifiers of male success and receive no punishment for any of their transgressions.
It is clear that what educational and social institutions want are meek, inoffensive and productive men who do not question the rules of society. This is in direct contrast to what young men want, which is to be outspoken, to be popular with women, to be socially and economically successful. No role model ever produced or selected by the state could manage this, particularly not when operating under the notion that it must maintain women's liberation, which itself requires the stifling of men. I question for how much longer this approach will be kept in place. There are hundreds of people like Andrew Tate across SM, each ready to teach boys what society is unable to teach them. Educators can more easily dispel Tate because of the sex trafficking offences and because Tate himself is a clown, but people like Hamza, whose lived experience is much closer to the boys he is trying to proselytize to than that of Tate's, they have no counterargument.
Selecting "role models" from within the system just continues the current system. The flavors change like all seasonal consumer goods.
I've written before about the cartoonish man-boy masculinity in current marketing. (I mean, Jesus, they literally have a boy with a beard in the first 20 seconds of the clip. This is what the marketers think of you). What is marketed and allowed is a no-consequence, no-potency masculinity that's safe and fun for all ages. There are uncountable YouTube clips that draw the obvious parallel between a boy at toy shop and a Dad at Home Depot / Fleet Farm. Adult manhood in the west is a cute "awww, look at them play!" trope.
Even within the current system, you hear complaint about prolonged boyhood and doughy soft man boys. SNL keeps almost pointing at it. For the greatest example; Seth Rogen's entire existence and career. In fact, this is also where clowns like Tate fall short. Tate was a kickboxer - not a soldier. His "manly" development was in a tightly controlled professional sport. I will always remember the time when I got into a scuffle with a fraternity brother who was a Division-1 Wrestler. He handily stomped my drunk ass but I was surprised to see him obviously shaken up after the fight. In our drunken bro-hug reconciliation, he let me know that "that was the first time I've been in a fight, man!"
I think the crux of it lies in the fact that a society wide ritual of real consequence to mark the transition from boy to man has been effectively eliminated.
Through the 20th century, the transition I'm talking about was when boys banded together for a hunt or tribal level military service. Consequences were real, people got hurt, women weren't only not "allowed" - it would've been actively detrimental to have them involved. Thus, you also had real and meaningful identification of a fundamentally male activity (hunting / war). While that no longer exists, women still absolutely have their sacred capability and activity; motherhood (or, at least, the ability to be a mother even if not chosen). (For a different post, but I also think that moterhood is under systemic attack as well.)
In another post (which I'm too lazy to link to) I pondered about how to get something like this back up and running today. It's hard for a few reasons; 1) Hunting isn't at all "necessary" the way it was in societies past, so the social honor / social proof reward would be absent for some sort of rec-league hunting team 2) War is a contest of human-techno-logistical systems now and you need committed professionals. As much as I love my Marines, the "warrior spirit" can't help you against guided munitions 3) I can't actually bring myself to be okay with something on the order of 1-2 in 10 young men being permanently maimed / killed for no other reason than to help generally promote good society wide models of masculinity. The closest approximation I came up with is a re-worked National Guard program (male only) that would start at the end of High School with something like quarterly musters until the age of 50. So many legal / logistic problems with that and I don't know if it would actually result in much more than a federally subsidized "guns and bowling" league.
In short - I just don't have any good ideas for this one, but I know it's a massive problem.
Until we figure out that idea, modern secular man will be one version or another of perma-boyhood --- the "giggling at my own farts" of Seth Rogen or the "pussy and punching" paper Tiger of Andrew Tate.
Quick side note: I believe there are viable traditional religious solutions to this (surprise!) but those simply aren't broadly implementable without sprinting towards a theocracy.
You left out 4) Men aren't allowed to have anything to themselves anymore, ever.
When I was a young man, I went to LAN parties with a bunch of other young men, and we formed intense bonds over deathmatches screaming every racially charged obscenity we could imagine. We tooled out our rigs, lots of us began learning to program or mod games, etc. This all happened in the safety of a basement, largely without internet except in the few houses that had big fancy broadband, and nobody was ever hurt.
Sure, it's not the most traditional of male bonding/rights of passage, but I think it worked, after a fashion, for us.
All this is now verboten. All games have some random fucking girlboss lecturing you about your privilege. There are no more offline servers. All behavior is closely monitored and you get suspended. Mods get you banned. It's the worst fucking dystopia I could have ever imagined being a 90's PC gamer.
I moved over to boardgames in the mid 00's, to continue to bond and compete as a slightly older adult male with my other adult male friends. Sometimes things got heated with our elevated testosterone and trying to find our place in the world. One time I almost came to blows with a guy after he got insanely drunk and made a bunch of outlandish accusations. A few years later I was best man at his wedding.
All this is now verboten. Less controllable, granted. But the last time I was in my old FLGS they almost kicked a guy out of the store for saying, in character, that he'd kill another player in a tabletop war game. Came down on him like a brick of shit, shouting "IF I EVER HEAR THAT LANGUAGE AGAIN YOU WILL BE PERMANENTLY BANNED FROM THE STORE!" Both players were absolutely shocked. They thought it was just banter.
Over the years, for some reason, that store went from staffing men approaching middle age who'd been gaming from before puberty, to a bunch of blue haired high school girls who routinely sneered at my purchases of GMT Games. I cannot comprehend the shift. I stopped going there.
And so it goes with literally every single thing too many men enjoy and bond over. It must be made terminally inclusive, so that women can participate and not have their feelings hurt. Which completely ruins it as a male bonding space. And so there will never be one again ever. At least not in the "free" world.
It's a pretty common occurrence nowadays in mixed-sex online spaces when discussing the "Women Are Wonderful" effect and female in-group preferences.
The women will often lean-in to merited impossibility, claiming something to the tune of "Female in-group preferences are not a thing and just a misogynistic myth. But if they are a real thing, it's only because women, with our greater empathy and propensity for emotional labor, are better at starting and maintaining support networks and social groups. If you don't like it, build your own support networks and social groups."
Yet, countless male support networks and social groups have been infiltrated and canceled. When men do build their own support networks and social groups, such women will recoil "wait... no! Not like that!" and be immediately screaming at the door to get in and/or trying to get such networks and groups canceled, claiming that such venues are but old-boys'-clubs and hotbeds of supposed misogyny and other types of crime-think.
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Yes to everything you wrote. I don't really play video games anymore, but I really miss lan parties with the bros back in the day. "barcades" are just not the same.
Yeah. And even when you do have a male bonding space, everyone is so used to being around women that they're still, I think, keeping themselves in check so that they won't say something bad that gets them reported. And some guys will report them, "calling out the misogyny" or whatever they're supposed to do. It's crazy! There's also a feeling, I think, that they've done something wrong if they throw a social event and only men show up. Like, clearly that complex tabletop war game "should" attract an equal number of women, so they must be doing something wrong if only guys show up, and they should be made to feel shame for that.
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None of this is a problem in actually competitive games like CS or Dota.
I disagree very strongly actually. CS2 and Dota2 are great examples of how exactly multiplayer went wrong. 20 years ago, there was no MMR system punishing you for getting better at the game, there was very little (if any) moderation and most people played with small groups of friends.
Whereas now? You go play dota, here are some random people who will flame you for not magically knowing the game. You will probably never see any of them ever again so you don't have any motivation to behave with kindness towards them either. You worked hard, learned the game and got better? Well now your MMR is higher, which means the people in your games are even sweatier tryhards, even angrier at the game. And you'll have to work even harder if you want to keep winning. This will continue until you burnout and stop playing or become the #1 top player on the planet (hope you don't mind playing for tens of thousands of hours because that's what it takes).
I agree with all of this. Maybe it's just age, but it's amazing how much nostalgia I have for old battle.net. Not so much the games themselves, but the whole system. (And yes I can technically still use it but it's nothing without the whole community)
One thing I'd add is that having such a finely tuned MMR system puts a weird stress on the game, by getting me an opponent of exactly my level (unless he's smurfing). If I want to try something new, play a new map for the first time, or just relax a little, I'll lose. To win, I have to be 100% pushing at max effort the entire time. And either way, it effects my "score."
Games used to be... well, games. Now they're just sports in a different package.
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What stops you from playing with your small group of friends now?
What's "punishing" about having to play with better players as you become a better player? Is it your desire to instead stomp lobbies 1v5 (or 1v9 if your teammates are bad enough)? Unfortunately, that would likely not be the desire of 5-9 people playing against you.
It's really, really hard! If you'll allow me to put on my tinfoil hat, I almost feel like publishers are intentionally making it hard. We went from "just download this torrent and install hamachi" to "you have to buy this game, install all 100GBs of it, make sure it's the correct version, you have to play it through steam or similar, the servers might brick at any point. And games are just not made for small groups of friends anymore. Compare Heroes of Might and Magic 3 or Age of Empires 2 or Diablo 2 or even Dota 1 to any of the million Call of Duty Clones, which are blatantly made so you'll click "soloqueue". A lot of the time there isn't even an option for party play. If there is, you might have to wait 30min or longer because the game forces groups of players to only play against other groups of players. Oh, and there's censorship, of course. Even innocent, casual-friendly games like Minecraft have to make sure you can't say any naughty words anymore.
Honestly? Yeah, I do want to stomp newbies. As long as it takes me dozens of hours to learn a game or map, I should be rewarded with a vastly increased win chance. Otherwise, what's the point? Why am I learning and trying to get better if the game will just become harder and harder up until I give up? This is just the Moloch problem again, btw.
There's nothing stopping them from playing for a few dozen hours, getting better at the game and stomping newbies too. This is how WC3 works and it's great. This is how the natural world and evolution work too.
Dota 2 and CS have party play, last time I checked.
Then find 5 more people to lobby with? Was it quicker than 30 minutes to go to your local LAN club back in the day so you could play within your own small community?
Presumably you have your own voice chat app so you don't have to speak ingame at all.
You have the choice to find a group of noob friends who don't mind getting stomped. That's how any even slightly organized competition works. You want to have fun? So does everyone else. Want to have easy fun? Play vs. bots. You don't want sweaty tryhards? Don't be sweaty and sink to the rating where people who don't try as hard are. Or, again, find likeminded people. Moloch is about sweatier systems outcompeting unsweatier ones, but I don't see how public queue is "outcompeting" premades, except in games that don't have premades in the first place (and CS/Dota 2 do).
"Game gets harder as I get better" is a selling point for many, many people in many, many games, it shouldn't be unfathomable to you.
It's not fun unless you're a complete masochist, and even you don't seem to be a masochist. Instead you seem to think that newbies don't deserve fun. While also thinking that the game shouldn't be sweaty.
Also, in nature and evolution you don't get better, you just eat shit and die if you're bad. You want to appeal to evolution? The MMR model of gaming flooded out your preferred model of gaming because it's more appealing. Therefore, it's better. That's evolution for you.
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I think that's a mixture of inertia, popularity among non-Western audiences (CS is probably second only to soccer among European and LatAm pastimes, and the Russian playerbase of Dota 2 is infamous), and the sort of "purity" of those games as contests of skill. Girls are probably more likely to play Overwatch, Valorant, or League.
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You can't police CS or Dota as well as a loxal game store.
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I am a white man who games fairly regularly and I have never had a lecture about my privilege, nor have I been banned.
I'm also sad about the death of LAN parties, but it feels very weird to complain that social norms (and their enforcement) on non-LAN servers are not the same as on LAN servers. On a LAN server the enforcement comes from your friends, but external enforcement is absolutely required for public servers. Rule enforcement means that League of Legends today is much more enjoyable today than it was in 2012 (because there is less flaming and intentional feeding), and definitely better than if there was no enforcement at all.
Yes, lament the death of LAN servers, but try to appreciate that a tyranny under social-defectors is not actually better than tyranny under a company preventing that defection. Ultimately public servers are common spaces, while your basement is private.
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As someone with zero knowledge on this entire subject, I'm asking: what happened? Were they banned, literally or practically?
Developers stopped supporting them with the rise of various matchmaking and digital delivery services. Requiring you to be online also ensures that everyone playing has purchased a license for the game.
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LAN parties became uneconomical once high speed internet meant that you didn't have to lug your PC around to frag with decent ping.
At the same time, game publishers started to remove the ability to host your own servers to crack down on piracy and the secondary market.
The infamously ineffective boycott of MW2 in 2009 was about this specific grievance. And we never really got this back in AAA games.
These days the fashion is to build games as "live services" which means every game is inherently tied to publisher servers (and moderation) the way only MMOs used to be back in the day.
It drives me crazy that people don't have enough backbone to actually follow through on stuff like that. I didn't purchase MW2 because of the lack of dedicated servers, and the price increase. I wanted to play it just like everyone else but I wasn't going to give them my money. It honestly wasn't that hard. And yet boycotts like this are always full of examples of people who don't have a modicum of self control to refrain from CONSOOMing for a short while.
I don't think it's a lack of backbone, I think it's a lack of knowledge. How many people read online forums, how many were even aware there was a boycott happening?
(I read quite a lot of gaming forums and this is the first I'm hearing of it)
In the MW2 case it was lack of backbone for sure. The reason that boycott is such a joke in particular is that the day the game came out, someone took a screenshot showing that most people in the "boycott MW2" steam group had bought the game and were playing it. So, despite joining a group trying to organize a boycott, they didn't actually refrain from purchasing.
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I was curious about how bad it is. I tried looking up games on steam to see if there was any sort of LAN functionality tag. Can't find one. There is "Massively Multiplayer", "Local Multiplayer" which I think is hotseat and mostly seems to be fighting games or coup co-op.
I found this curator which looks like a list of games with LAN support. It's... ok I guess. It's not completely empty. Apparently Baldur's Gate 3 supports LAN play, and Stardew Valley, Total War: Warhammer III. A bunch of remakes like Halo: The Master Chief Collection and Age of Empires Definitive Editions. Borderlands 3 apparently supports LAN play which surprises me.
But it's not nearly as robust as I would like. Virtually 100% of multiplayer games supported LAN play and private servers once upon a time.
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