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PaperclipPerfector  13d ago (text post)   25074 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 16, 2026

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Quillette did a series talking about, among other things, social contagion among boys. I agree that there's a lot of heavily sexualised, fetishised social contagion, but with younger boys there's also the anime-influenced variant, which, though sometimes about sex, is also sometimes a longing for a kind of 'soft' world full of coddling and gentleness.

Alex was adrift. He often misunderstood social cues, and his habit of talking like a college professor made him seem pedantic.

Young men such as Alex tend to prize autonomy, be it intellectual, creative, or physical: they react badly to being reined in.

Certainly, for jockish boys and the girls on the cheerleading squad, the purported gender/sex distinction isn’t of any particular interest. By contrast, many of the smart kids, gamers and hobbyists who spend a lot of time inside their own minds, may already be aware that they don’t quite fit in, and often being bored and underchallenged, have more time to spend on the abstract mental game of “What if?”

There’s a useful word in the German language, fachidiot, that describes a particular kind of cleverness. The first syllable, fach, translates to “subject” or “field of study,” as well as “drawer,” implying a distinct category of knowledge. The second part means—well, it means “idiot.” Fachidioten are specialists who can describe in mesmerizing detail the many reasons for the collapse of Byzantium, or the mechanics of pasteurization, or the influence of African rhythms on the various musicological substrata of modern jazz. Yet while they hold forth on such arcana, a petty thief walking past might ask the Fachidiot for his phone, just so he can “make a quick call,” and the Fachidiot will cheerfully oblige. When the parents I spoke with impress upon me how gifted their children are, they are not suggesting to me that they are intellectually overbearing or arrogant. Just the opposite: Many of them are keen to stress that their boys couldn’t successfully make a doctor’s appointment, or catch the right bus. As Rosalee puts it, “He couldn’t even tie his laces.”

As a toddler, he burst into tears in a diner because the ceiling fan wasn’t turned on. Ceiling fans are machines; machines should work; and the fact that it was just sitting there doing nothing indicated that the world had somehow fallen ever so slightly into disrepair.

I'm in this picture and I don't like it.

Never considered gender transition, though. I think my cohort was a bit too old for that. I'm also enough of a weirdo that I'm suspicious of putting myself in any category, even the weird ones, which I guess was protective.

I do increasingly notice it in these kinds of, for lack of a better term, autistic, socially inept, geek-intellectual kinds of spaces. That's a demographic that naturally tends to inhabit a kind of fantasy world of the imagination, and online it is easier and easier to disconnect from a sense of one's own physical body. Reinventing yourself as an imagined cute girl - pretending to be the thing you want - seems easy. I'd be lying if I said I didn't understand it, though it is a helpful reminder that, as FiveHourMarathon says and I've commented also, the grass always seems greener on the other side.

I think the answer is probably some combination of firstly male role models, affirmation of masculinity, or just implicitly communicating to these boys that a man is a good thing to be, and that manhood is possible, attractive, and in reach for them; and secondly, just getting out and touching grass. Getting off the computer and doing real, physical work in the world makes you more aware of your own body. Successfully doing things with your physical body feels great and is inherently affirming. Some level of fantasy is healthy, but the kind of obsessive, body-negating, self-fleeing fantasy that you get in these demographics is poison.

I think the answer is probably some combination of firstly male role models, affirmation of masculinity, or just implicitly communicating to these boys that a man is a good thing to be, and that manhood is possible, attractive, and in reach for them; and secondly, just getting out and touching grass.

I think this is the "draw the rest of the owl" kind of problem.

Another issue is that a lot of people who grow up with these sorts of traits have trouble making friends, especially in youth. I think the cause of the kind of fantasy we're talking about is a disconnect from the social world as much as from the physical one, and atypical traits make that more difficult. Motion/body disconnect is often part of a syndrome with social phobia; I myself often have experienced a kind of hyper-body awareness in certain social situations that are particularly anxiety-provoking, where you kind of move manually and are dissociated from the normal coherence of your body, like when you consciously start to control your breathing -- as you are now, that I've mentioned it. That's common among people with social phobia.

I think masculinity is fundamentally a good thing, but I think there is a real tension between the broad male phenome -- the sum of all the ways in which men are like -- and various models of masculinity. A common underlying set of traits is hierarchical competition, or resource provision, or physical strength... but the issue is that many, if not most, of the ways we describe the social role of men are in some sense zero sum, and in such an environment there will be social defeat. IMO, a great deal of the extremely online stuff we see is caused by people who have suffered (or perceive themselves to have suffered) social defeat trying in some sense to construct a social hierarchy where they can win. See, for instance, NEETs playing competitive online games.

I think the main issue with any model of masculinity is that it's typically enforced in one of two ways: the carrot of women's attention, and the stick of men's violence. You can see that, for instance, in the military, where boot camps, strict regimentation, and obsessive hierarchicalism force men into a mold. In World War I, the British government ran a program allied with prominent suffragettes in which women gave unenlisted men white feathers in a shame ritual calling them cowards. I hold that one of the major reasons the USA became unable to run a successful conscription campaign for the Vietnam War is that the military lost the support of young women, who began rewarding rebels against the system with adulation for their courage. The same I think is true of gang violence in minority neighborhoods; men enforce compliance with guns, and, often, the women from these communities reward status in organized crime with attention. You get from men what men enforce and women reward.

So any model of masculinity and positive male role models have to have women and girls on board. The issue is that, in the West, it's not clear what women and girls are on board with, and in fact the dominant social mode of discussions of masculinity are to discuss its abberations and possibility for harm, or occasionally to praise men for doing things according to what women desire of them (and not praising them for being masculine on its own terms). The people who do talk about masculinity on its own terms are often selling their own inane fantasy, like the bodybuilder RAW MEAT influencers. The social inflection behind "man" as a category is incredibly negative; it's no wonder to me that some young men are going, "well, that's not me! Teehee!"

I don't think it's just about wanting to be with women, but I also think the kinds of men we're talking about place a high premium on being seen as fundamentally good by women; the "creep" designation, in a sense the white feather of the day, carries so much stigma precisely because "being a threat to women" is considered deeply wrong by both men and women writ large, for good reasons. But I think young men feel like there's no stable and broadly-recognized way to do this. Sometimes religious subcultures do a better job at this than the secular world -- I often noted when I spent time with the young Catholics group at my college that the men and women got along much better than those outside, and generally considered each other trustworthy and worthy of respect -- but it's not guaranteed, and in a world where the Church is optional as a social institution and increasingly at odds with secular assumptions, "just leaving" is an option that many people are going to take. As, obviously, transitioners tend to do.

The grass, of course, is never greener on the other side. I never struggled with gender identity issues -- clearly I'm a man, the idea of being a woman seems nebulous and foreign to me, and has no appeal. I know enough from having female friends that women are entangled in their own thorny world of backstabbing and status competition about which I'm not jealous. Even if someone could transition perfectly, magically, I don't think that men would find women's social world astounding or grand in the way they imagine.

Certainly if I think about the way I've encountered some of this, there's, albeit usually in inchoate form, a desperate attraction to or craving for the feminine, and a sense that the masculine is ugly, violent, repulsive, brutish, or otherwise undesirable. The confused, sensitive young boy knows that he does not want to be his image of 'a man', which is probably a heavily jock- or pop-culture-inspired vision of a brute, and that he is attracted to things that are soft, gentle, and female-coded. But he cannot exist in a predominantly female space as a man, because he has come to see masculinity as, by its mere existence, a kind of violence or degradation upon that space. He wants the innocent and feminine, but sees himself as something that cannot coexist with that. He probably also has a Scott-like terror of engaging with women, of expressing male heterosexual desire, and so on. His picture of femininity and of women's lives is highly idealised - he's not actually hanging out with or spending much time with girls, and therefore does not know what they are really like. But he knows the glittering facade, and he wants it.

The result is a drive to purge himself of masculine traits, to expurgate the taint by any means possible, in the hope that through reinventing himself (possibly with chemical or surgical assistance, at the higher end), he can get himself out of this cursed category, and enter the idealised female one. This is how I interpret some of the drama you sometimes get around women's spaces, or businesses or services for women - there's a kind of trans woman who needs to constantly press into those spaces, for the sake of constant affirmation that, yes, he really has left masculinity behind entirely. The deeper you are into the process of transition or feminisation, the more important it is that every last sign of acceptance be validated, every last scrap of the male be rooted out and denied.

There's a lot of personal variation in this, but I do thus see, in my experience, a kind of performative misandry that you sometimes get in toxic trans spaces. (This is, it's fair to say, entirely AGP as a phenomenon.) It doesn't always present very strongly - sometimes just in the form of casual jokes about how male things are gross - but sometimes it does a lot more. I usually try to be charitable, on the basis that someone who has spent years and a great deal of effort trying to appear less male is not going to be a big fan of male-looking things, and it doesn't need to mean any actual malice towards men, but I've come to think there's a bit more to it than that. Masculinity is the problem, in this world.

To me one of the ways around this or out of this has to be via promoting a positive model of masculinity, but there are a few issues here. Firstly, it can't be just a dudebro model, so to speak. These boys already know they don't like that. There have to be ways to be strongly masculine and capable that are nonetheless in some way sensitive, courteous, intellectual, compassionate, and so on. Those are good traits and they need to take on appealingly masculine forms. Secondly, it has to be approved of by women. Female approval does matter. Now this probably isn't as hard as it actually sounds, because most real women do like men, but remember that the boys in this position don't have much contact with actual women; and also the media is a very unhelpful distorting factor here. But regardless, it must be something that women like.

Unfortunately, put like that it's obvious what the failure-state is - it's feminist messaging about 'good men', the kind that feels corporate and sanitised and frankly just wussy. It's that Gillette ad that everyone hated. So perhaps to this we should add a third requirement: it should be something that men themselves like. It has to appeal to men. If it feels like being lectured by an HR lady, it won't have any traction.

Recently I read an essay by Oliver Traldi about the portrayal of masculinity, and female sexual desire, in films, and in particular about the role of the 'monster'. It's fair to say that the monster, the compelling, sexually charismatic brute, is something that the sensitive boy flees from. I cannot blame him for that; I don't want to be the monster either. But there is nonetheless something in many women that thrills to imagine just a bit of the monster. Just a bit. Is reconciling those desires the problem? That the attractive, desirable man is supposed to combine two impossible things, firstly the polite, obliging, non-threateningly capable man who does everything a woman wants, and secondly, the powerful, dominating, or ravishing man, who makes the woman feel like the object of this compellingly rough desire? I'm a bit skeptical here because I think it might be rolling together the diverse desires of many women together into a single uber-woman, and then acting confused when they turn out to be contradictory, but even so, I am very struck by his conclusion:

A very different kind of film, Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze’s Adaptation, features the thought-provoking line: “You are what you love, not what loves you.” And why shouldn’t we think of men as characterized by the gentleness they seek, and women by the brutality they demand, rather than vice versa?

Maybe so. And if so, then I feel like what's going on with plenty of boys - certainly something that was going on with myself, though fortunately I never took the trans path (thank heavens I grew up before trans was a thing among teenagers!) - is that they struggle to find a way to unite their desire for the feminine with their identity as the masculine. Maybe they need a bit of what Eneasz Brodski talks about - liking and valuing the feminine, as the feminine, yet without seeking to become the feminine.

Maybe we need more honest-to-goodness complementarianism, that Robert-Jordan-esque understanding that the male and the female need each other, that they complete and enhance each other, and recognising and even loving that difference is the only way forward.

But maybe I'm just a cranky ageing Christian romantic. Who knows?

but the issue is that many, if not most, of the ways we describe the social role of men are in some sense zero sum, and in such an environment there will be social defeat.

I believe this to be true right now in our very fucked up social reality, but there's a ton of historical prescription for how to remedy this.

Male only small groups.

The last remnants of this today are found in the military. You can be totally average across the board and even below average in a few things and still be considered to be a "good marine" if you just get the basics right; show up on time, clean uniform, clean rifle, Yes Sir, No Sir, can exeucte orders. You may not ever progress up the hierarchical ladder, but you can still enjoy the esteem of your peers and superiors within the group because you're a net benefit, however small, to the overall group mission.

Hyperindividualism turns this "collective net benefit" into an adversarial ranking in which you are competing both with the defined "enemy" (who is preventing you from accomplishing your mission) and within the group itself for status.

People bemoans the lack of "loyalty" from companies to their employees, even long tenured ones. It's worth noting that this concept was its strongest when the workforce was still strongly majority male.

Male only small groups.

Illegal, thanks to women.

Remember, men are in societal surplus right now; and thus they are too weak as a class to check the inherent sociobiological/instinctual interest of women to destroy all other avenues that aren't "competing for woman's affection".
(Which, I will point out, is a common complaint from men about women who demand access to those spaces).

If you’re comparing being a heterosexual man to a heterosexual woman, sure. But if you’re a relatively effeminate male and primarily attracted to men, it’s very hard to feel like the grass isn’t greener on the other side. The “carrot” doesn’t look appetising and the idea of an escape from the “stick” of masculinity seems very appealing. The reality of transition is different from the ideal of course, but that only further increases the feelings of envy.

There’s also another aspect to this. Today there is broad consensus among most single men that dating as such is a big pain in the neck. In the old days, however, when the word ‘dating’ had a slightly different meaning and was generally understood not to entail sexual acts, it was specifically meant to be fun.

Did men who weren't Chad ever like dating?

Yes. By the end of it, when I'd managed to pull my head out of my ass and shake off the harmful memes from both the feminists and the redpillers. Before I started dating the girl who I'm hopefully going to marry, my final dates were "that was a good time, you're really interesting but you're not for me. I genuinely wish you the best."

This does track, rather frustratingly, with my experience. I like meeting people and talking to people, and I like women, obviously, but I do not like the experience that we have packaged together and called 'dating'.

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