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Notes -
Following up on this comment, I was recently working on an effort post that was loosely organized around "some people I have known." Specifically, I have been thinking about unenviable lives, people whose existence strikes me as excessively resistant to improvement of any kind, and how the way we structure society helps, hurts, or even creates such people. Some intended figures for inclusion were a man in his 50s who is a permanent American expatriate and recent convert to Islam; a woman in her 60s who lives in her car after burning through a six figure inheritance in the space of a single year; a man in his 40s whose whole life consists of playing video games and harvesting pineapples. All of their stories have culture war implications, I think, but one of them is culture war all the way down. This is Lana's story.
Requiem for a Friend(ship)
Once upon a time, before the world Awoke, I had a friend.
When I met Lana (name has been changed for all the usual reasons) she was a newly-minted attorney, freshly hired to the Office of General Counsel. A few weeks after being introduced at a university function, I ran into her at lunchtime. She was having a political discussion with another OGC employee and cheerfully invited my participation. This basic scenario played out again, intermittently, for several semesters, organically developing into a friendship that extended marginally beyond the workplace.
Over the years I learned that, when Lana first joined the OGC, she'd been married to another attorney--a family law practitioner of no particular reputation. They were religious Protestants but political Progressives. Lana's feminism was very 90s, in a way I find hard to describe today, but you can probably imagine it: makeup good, Barbie sus, "pro-child, pro-choice," but nary a mention of "patriarchy" or "rape culture" or "microaggressions." Critical theory was already a Thing, of course, but the battle of the sexes (as it was sometimes called) hadn't yet been racialized or radicalized in quite the way we see today. Anyway, Lana enjoyed--or seemed to enjoy!--that I was (approximately) an irreligious conservative. I think that, perhaps, by doubly violating her expectations (arguing against her politics without resort to Jesus, being unmoved by her appeals to Christian charity as a justification for bleeding-heart policies) I presented a novelty to her lawyerly (read: contrarian, adversarial) mindset. I appreciated her openness to discussion.
Eventually, Lana took a position elsewhere, but we occasionally caught up using whatever technology was in fashion. Email, Instant Messenger, social media. She proved to be an especially prolific Facebook poster after giving birth to a child and retiring from law practice to parent full-time (what she said then was that she never really enjoyed practicing law anyway--if memory serves, she was a literature undergraduate). Of course, social media is often a distorted lens, but what I saw was a pretty relatable mixture of joy and struggle, interspersed with the discussions of political interest that were the heart of many of Lana's friendships--including ours.
And then it was 2015.
It cannot possibly have been Donald Trump's fault that Lana divorced her husband. The problems she recounted in her Facebook overshares must have been simmering for some time: husband pressuring her for sex more than once a month, being a full-time mother had cost her her identity, raising a kid seemed like an impossibly difficult and objectionably thankless undertaking. But long-running disagreements with her Protestant friends over same-sex marriage came to an apogee in June of 2015, when Obergefell v. Hodges was decided--ten days, if I'm counting correctly, after Donald Trump announced his candidacy for President of the United States. That same month, Lana very publicly, very noisily separated from her husband--as well as her religious community, which she felt had taken "his side." The extended process of an acrimonious custody dispute began.
We sometimes speak of the "Great Awokening" and pin it to 2012 or 2014, but the first time I really noticed it influencing my personal life was during the 2016 election season (and aftermath). And what I noticed was not a vibe shift, but a shocking spate of relationship implosion. I had always thought of "blocking" people on social media as a tool created to weed out spammers, trolls, and perhaps the occasional stalker or abuser--not something anyone would ever do to friends, family, or even acquaintances, certainly not over something as trivial as political disagreement. But as 2016 progressed, Lana's Facebook posts grew increasingly vitriolic, and her tolerance for dissent all but vanished. "If you support Trump, just unfriend me now," she posted once. "Because if I see anyone post anything supporting him, I will block you."
Well, I wasn't a Trump supporter, so I didn't worry too much about it. At the time, I attributed this unbounded anger to Lana's personal circumstances, but by the time Trump won the election, Lana's divorce had been finalized for months. I suppose the official "end" of our friendship came in March of 2017. After months of watching Democrats scramble for any possible way to overturn the results of the election, from inducement to faithless electors to violent protests, I made a social media post highlighting several of the absurdities of the 2017 Women's March (in particular, its deliberate exclusion of pro-life women), and Lana put me on her block list.
I was sad about that, but by then our friendship had lacked an "in person" component for several years. I still had "in person" friendships with several mutual acquaintances, however, so I would occasionally get a second-hand update. At some point in 2018, Lana remarried--this time, to a woman. She had a couple of bad starts at getting back into law practice before finally settling back where she'd begun, doing lawyerly work for a (different) university. She gained two hundred pounds (ten of that in piercing jewelry), stopped shaving her legs (and started posting pictures of her unshaved legs to social media), shaved half her head instead, and colored blue what remained. Her Facebook posting, I was told, never slowed down, but became a stable mixture of "#NotMyPresident" and "I'm having another mental health crisis today" posts. (COVID-19 apparently heightened the amplitude in predictable ways, but in substance changed little.)
Then, not long ago, I got a message from a mutual friend asking if I knew of any way to contact Lana. They pointed me toward a post (now removed) on a subreddit I'd never heard of--a "suicide watch" subreddit. It is apparently a place for people to post their suicidal inclinations and get "non-judgemental peer support ONLY," whatever that means in the context of an anonymous internet forum. Under a pseudonym I recognized from our Instant Messenger days, Lana had posted that after a year of non-stop fighting (again, mostly over sex), her second marriage was coming to an end. All her friends had abandoned her and all she had left were online discussion groups with internet strangers, where she constantly faced accusations of being an awful spouse, awful mother, and all-around awful person. Our mutual friend was seriously concerned for Lana's well-being, but had been unable to get a response via social media, texts, phonecalls, or otherwise.
My first thought was that maybe I could find a way to get in touch with Lana--surely I owed her that much, for the years of friendship we'd enjoyed? Perhaps she was still active on one of her old accounts. But my second thought was that even if I could get in touch with her, there was a good chance I would only make her feel worse, in any number of ways. That put a damper on any inclination I might have felt to make any heroic effort on Lana's behalf, which in turn inspired some self-recrimination. I had to wonder: was my reluctance down to schadenfreude? Am I such a culture warrior that I would turn a blind eye to the suffering of a friend? After all, at minimum I could roll a fresh reddit alt and just... drop Lana an anonymous message of support. Would she see it? Would she care?
I won't tell you what I did, in the end. The point of this post is not to solicit advice, much less to inquire, with fluttering eyelashes, "AITA?" I will say that if my choice had any meaningful impact at all, I've never learned of it. I do have it on good authority that Lana is still alive, her second divorce final, and another same-sex romance underway. I can honestly say that I hope it works out for her.
Boo Outgroup
It leaves a bitter taste in my mouth, in a way that is difficult to discuss anywhere but the CW thread of the Motte. Lana is a person, but Lana also instantiates a personality. She is not the only friend I lost from 2015-2017, but the further we get from those days, the more closely their lives come to rhyme. I have a comfortable life, and often I think that's a g-loaded task (so to speak), but by and large these are not stupid people I see, setting fire to their lives in pursuit (or as a result) of ideological purity. I would say "status games" but they don't seem to be accruing any particular status! Swap out "lawyer" for "analyst" or "educator" or similar and much of Lana's story could be told of a dozen of the relationships I've enjoyed and lost. A cousin at a family function, a high school acquaintance on Facebook, a former student dropping by my office; all rolling in the deep, and every time a Bayesian reckoning lands me on "Leftism is both a cause and effect of acute mental illness" I roll to disbelieve, because I know it can't possibly be that simple--can it?
Of course it can't--conservatives top themselves, too, after all! And this is, like, prime culture war fodder, "boo outgroup" of the most aggressive sort. I don't know whether it's "mistake theory" or "conflict theory" to assert that people who believe differently have a disease of the mind, but--
Seven or eight years ago, I had a somewhat surprising interaction with a colleague at a conference. We were having dinner and discussing politics, and it gradually dawned on him that I was not just being entertainingly contrarian--that I was honestly defending some views, mostly libertarian but some downright conservative, which I actually held. His response was presciently forecast in Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality:
Well, okay, to be honest, he didn't actually accuse me of being insane. Rather, he refused to believe I am actually conservative. Weirdo contrarian libertarianism he could understand, but conservative? Never. In fairness, probably a lot of conservatives would refuse to believe it, too; my views on speech and sex and God and the like definitely put me on the outs with the diehards, but nevertheless I'm far too pro life, anti woke, pro federalism, anti public employee unions, etc. to ever fit in on the Left; it is a little difficult for me to even make a plausible bid for "centrist" without appending a caveat like "right-leaning." Even so--I simply was not believed.
That conversation got much less surprising by the fourth or fifth time it happened--most recently, just last week. I don't think I'm hiding the ball, here. I don't aggressively share my viewpoint in professional settings but neither do I bother to code switch for the benefit of others. And I have learned, over the years, that people really do just see what they expect to see. I'm a professor; once they know that, they make assumptions about my ideological commitments which even my own direct protestations are insufficient to counter. And this repeatedly inspires people to insist that I am putting on the affectation of conservatism; that I am clearly too smart, too educated, and too obviously sane to possibly see any value in right wing politics. Well, there's a lot I don't like about right wing politics! That's fair to say. Even so, I'm pretty conservative, especially as radical Leftism continues to push "classical liberalism" to the right of the recognized spectrum.
The obvious weak man here is just, you know, reddit commenters in default subs. These days it seems I can scarcely doomscroll for five minutes without encountering an entire thread of "no sane person can be a Republican" and "Republicans are all murderous sadists" and "I used to think tolerance was important, but there is no saving MAGA, we need to round these psychos up and put them out of our misery." Radical left wing violence is a thing! Presumably at least some of these posts are coming from Russian and Chinese botfarms, but most strike me as just the products of American public education.
Is there a forum for progressive cat ladies out there somewhere, where Lana is writing about her old friend, the professor? The one who used to be a mild-mannered contrarian scholar but who was radicalized by Harry Potter and My Little Pony fanfic and now moderates a forum for explicit wrongthink? I feel like, objectively, I've got the preferable outlook; I'm not suicidal, I haven't torched any marital or familial or professional relationships. I feel pretty sane, honestly. But I'm increasingly concerned that (1) I struggle to see sanity in my outgroup and (2) my outgroup struggles to see sanity in me.
In 1922, at the end of the Greco-Turkish War, about 1.2 million Christian Greeks relocated from (what is now) Turkey to (what is now) Greece, and about 400,000 predominantly Muslims relocated the other direction. There was a lot of force, and no small amount of death, involved in the process, but even so, the ethnic cleansing of the region (two regions?) has proven... surprisingly uncontroversial. Mostly forgotten, in fact. The "Cyprus Problem" is downstream from that conflict, of course, but even featuring as it does in the occasional Russian oligarch psychodrama, probably very few Americans have the first clue what a "Cyprus" is, never mind the finer details of the resolution of the Greco-Turkish War.
I do not think the United States is likely to be ideologically partitioned in my lifetime. But I am increasingly concerned about why that is the case. Greenland (population: 55,000) apparently warrants sovereignty and self-rule--but not California? Not Texas? (Not Taiwan? Not Israel? Not Palestine? Not Ukraine?) I think mostly that American citizens, fat on bread and satisfied with our circuses, are unwilling to sacrifice. Actually starting a war with the federal government of the United States would be suicidal, but I don't think the threat of military action is the primary deterrent to schism movements here--at least not yet. Rather, our prosperity is in part the result of our outsized global influence. While far behind China and India, we are nevertheless the third most populous nation in the world, an economic juggernaut despite the recent ascent of various others.
What will happen, if that changes?
What will happen, if it doesn't?
It's a problem for future generations, but at the same time I feel the desire to act, to do something about the rift that I see, to "reach out" and bridge the growing divide somehow--even though, if my actions have any meaningful impact at all, I am unlikely to ever know it. Talking about the problem (as we so often do here) doesn't seem to make it better. Not talking about the problem doesn't seem to make it better. Maybe if I were a billionaire, or a movie star, or a successful politician... but I'm not.
This is an oversimplification (inevitable, perhaps, when discussing Hegel) but Hegelian philosophy is sometimes explained through the metaphor of an acorn. An acorn is not an oak tree; a sprout is not an oak tree; a sapling is not an oak tree. And yet the oak tree is within those things, somehow. If we think of the bronze age as the sprouting of human civilization, and the renaissance as perhaps a sapling, then we begin to grasp the idea of our species progressing toward Hegel's "Absolute." The primary disagreement between Hegelians is whether we are each individually just along for the ride, or whether there is something we can do to accelerate the growth of our collective oak tree toward its final form. I am not much of a Hegel scholar--mostly I am aware of his work in connection with its influence on others, notably Karl Marx--but if I were a Hegelian, I think today I would side with those who suspect we're just along for the ride. Voltaire's Candide suggests we each tend to our own gardens, to not seek influence in the wider world. The older I get, the more I think that is probably good advice. But once Lana had a role to play in my particular garden, and now as a result of her own intolerance of diverse viewpoints, she does not. And, good or bad, inevitable or not--that makes me sad.
I saw this when my ex fiancée ended things abruptly and without explanation. We had been planning our family and kids and home and such. After the split she gained tons of weight, dyed her hair and got tons of tattoos, is stuck in a dead end job now, and apparently is constantly flooding social media with leftist shit. Her family doesn’t know what happened either because she cut them off at the same time.
I chalked it up to people being weird, but then I met a new friend in town and found out almost the exact same thing happened to him this year. Then I met a third dude whose wife left him and blew up her life and he has been watching her spiral. Then I learned a fourth guy who I have known for a while had a similar story and I had to throw my hands up. These are men I met through a diverse set of circumstances: mountain biking, remote worker meetups, church, etc.
I do think with this topic, there is a gendered problem underlying it all. I read a lot about the male loneliness crisis, or think pieces on why men are dropping out of the dating pool and I can’t help but draw nebulous connections with these experiences. I don’t know if it’s feminism’s fruits, being over medicated on ssris and birth control, or the neutering of men in society, but something is broken.
Women are going to connect with something. And, well, social media influencers are like that.
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I went through a version of that.
Not so much the politics, but she ducked out of the relationship, cut many existing ties, gained a bunch of weight, and now she binges anime (I found her myanimelist account last year) and plays around in Role-playing servers.
And I have three different acquaintances that had this happen too, one of whom I mentioned recently.
One wife was a really nice Mormon girl who now is presenting as full on LGBTQ, blue hair, and does roller derby.
I know of zero relationships that ended because the guy went too far right.
I know of one, the man now has a tiny twitter account retweeting BAP and Fuentes, NYU dropout, beautiful girlfriend, handsome and from a good family, started very loudly talking about how slavery was justified at parties, was literally part of the tiki torch march at Charlottesville, now lives in a small town inland in Florida off what most of his friends think is his grandfather’s inheritance. Went to private school in NYC (I didn’t know him then, but I have friends who did). Gained 50+ lbs.
If he's really fat right the 50lbs will be all muscle
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"Hard Rightie pundit living off of family wealth" seems like a notable archetype.
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I always found this weird, as mathematically for every lonely man there has to be one lonely woman and vice versa. There are some confounders, like that women can have one night stands or situationships. Or that men can pay for prostitutes as a substitute for one night stands. Or that there is more lonely women especially in higher age due to them living longer than men. In any case for each man that lays his head alone in his bedroom, there is a woman somewhere doing the same. It is intrinsically linked phenomenon and it does not make sense to talk about it separately.
Maybe one thing that is different is that in general men who are alone are more aware of it not being ideal situation and they talk more of despair. Even MGTOW community talks about loneliness as preferable to other types of suffering, not as something that is preferable to fulfilling relationship. While on the other side when people are talking about lonely women it is more linked with some sort of empowerment and other positive vibes.
I assume when people are talking about male loneliness they mean a lack of friends, not necessarily a lack of romantic engagement. Nobody thinks of the widowed church lady who spends all day drinking tea with her friends and looking after her grandchildren as lonely.
"Already old and has grandchildren" is quite the goalpost movement. When I think of the modal "lonely male" it's not someone who already has grandchildren, it's someone who never had children yet, or estranged from them in a divorce.
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Having friends - even close ones - is a different experience from having a girlfriend/fiancé/wife you come home to every evening.
There's also the other side of this equation, when some friends get married(and have children) and the rest don't. Even worse if they move away. You're still friends, you still talk alot, but circumstances change when you can only see each other face to face once or twice a year.
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Partly I think female friendship is closer, more emotional and less contingent than male friendship. Partly of course grandchildren are family and that makes a big difference compared to tfwngf incelish guys.
Male friendship can be as close, but my impression has always been that male friendship is abandoned for a romantic relationship in a way that female friendship isn’t always.
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Sure, but then this cuts both ways. In that sense MGTOw man who regularly goes to pub with his colleagues or who plays D&D with his friends or who organizes grill party for his nieces and nephews or who volunteers for summer camps for children is not lonely either.
Of course this can explain only part of the problem, loneliness is something deeper no matter how women or men try to rationalize it. And maybe in current culture lionizing single powerful women it may be easier for women to do that. The word "incel" has much more shame and negative connotation in it compared to femcel. A lonely childless widow may have more social status than lonely childless widower. Nevertheless in some fundamental way they are still lonely.
I think the biggest difference is male aggression toward women is usually physical while female aggression towards men is usually social, most notably attempted social ostracization. Women attack men's social bonds in ways that men don't attack women's, thus leading to this asymmetry.
True. In the years since I’ve discovered that when online dating, I get posted on private Facebook groups for women. My ex then shows up to talk mad shit including completely fabricating scenarios that didn’t happen. Social ostracization in action.
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There's also the fact that women are better about maintaining relationships, planning group outings, etc., so that she usually "gets" most of their mutual friends in the break up (Managing the social calendar is traditionally the woman's domain in a relationship). Most of them were probably her friends first anyway, since she was more likely to maintain a large group of friends after leaving school.
Because men tend to have fewer close friends and recieve less emotional support in general than women, break ups also tend to be more traumatic. It makes sense men associate being single with loneliness more than women. If you're a stereotypical man who has oursourced the work of maintaining his social life to his wife for a decade, single life is going to be a lot more lonely for you than for her.
Part of me thinks there should be such a thing as social/emotional alimony. Shared friendships are essentially a valuable and unrecognized marital asset, regardless of who "earned" them.
I love how we frame women controlling their partners' social lives as a burden while when men do it to their partners it is framed as abuse.
If a woman was happy with outsourcing the work of maintaining her social life to her husband, then most people wouldn't call that abuse.
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Sure, I don’t think this guy is necessarily lonely, unless he does really want a romantic relationship in which case he might be. But there are plenty of widowed older men who have similar large social circles, even if it’s less common than for widowed women.
Yes, that is why I was talking about general attitude. In general men may view loneliness as more problematic, for instance according to Pew research 57% of 18-34 men compared to 45% of women want a family. That is why I previously mentioned that men are more likely to see loneliness as a bad thing and approach it from despair, while women may view loneliness as an empowerment and something they want.
I think this goes hand in hand with general trend where men have more societal expectations put on them when it comes to traditional gender roles - strive for high status, provide for and protect your family and your community especially women and children. While for women the gender roles were targets of more attacks, to the extent where some traditional gender duties like motherhood were dropped completely. To even talk about having children as duty for women is viewed as misogyny.
This also informs how the topic is handled - incels are universally reviled as failures of their own character, while femcels are victims of society in general and men in particular at best. But this may also change in the future and men will be more comfortable also dropping the societal expectations - like 40 year old guys just working part time and playing video games completely reneging on social pressure on their behavior, similarly how it is with women now. However I would not see it as cure for loneliness, just more acceptance of shitty situation.
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After the trans mania dies down, I wonder if this will be the new context in which we're not allowed to use the phrase "social contagion".
The hypocrisy of the "theres no such thing as social contagion" brigade is, once again, amazing. Adolescence showed that problematic white boys are poisoned by Andrew Tate into killing girls with their misogynistic incel culture, which justifies broad castigation of the adolescent white male as the obvious target requiring remedial action. Meanwhile there is no such thing as transtok telling girls that being queer is simply self expression oh and binding makes the icky male gaze go away and if you think girls are prettier then maybe youre actually not a straight girl blablabla.
Social contagion is real, but its only a bad thing if boys can be blamed. There are no such thing as bad philosophies, only bad targets.
They would simply claim that this is a strawman, and that transtokkers exist but if you find their arguments compelling you must have really been trans else it would not have resonated with you and you would have left.
It's similar to the usual old dichotomy of "If you believe my arguments it's because of the power of the truth. If you believe the opponent, you have fallen for propaganda."
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Social media brainrot hits some women very hard and this is the result? People living in an online echo chamber amplifying their vague progressive leanings into extremism and cutting off all the evil conservatives, MAGAs, etc from their lives. People living the rhetoric of the lowest grade of Reddit political discourse.
I mean, far-right brain rot seems very big on self-improvement stuff even if some of their specific prescriptions are a bit dumb. I wonder how much of it is, specifically, that the hit the gym and cut out seed oils and start a business stuff protects men(there is a negligible number of actual women into this stuff) with rightward leanings from spiraling the way progressives do.
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It’s not just a problem of brain rot though. We’ve had a narcissistic culture for decades before brain rot hit the accelerator. Americans prize autonomy, their own needs and wants, and tend to see anyone or anything that requires them to give up their freedom and autonomy to care about others, do things they don’t want to do, or takes the focus off themselves as negative. It’s not that other people don’t want this, but Americans have long taken this to extreme levels. Brain rot simply weaponized this cultural trait and uses it to push political and social ends. Marinate an American raised in the culture of autonomy and narcissistic tendencies in content that tells them they are oppressed and abused by anyone who wants them to do something they don’t want to do. Then celebrate those who “throw off the shackles of oppression” by blowing up all their relationships, quitting their jobs (claims of burnout), dying their hair odd colors (rejection of the norms of society). People who read that stuff end up destroying themselves.
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I have to wonder if social media and smartphonification is making people give up on relationships.
They're simultaneously encouraged by toxic groups and subreddits to dump that gaslighting abuser already!! while also being programned to feel shitty about themselves. You shouldn't have to compromise so much when it comes to love!!, after all.
There's an endless doomscroll of ways to learn how your partner is a narcissist taking advantage of your empath nature while he weaponizes his incompetence to leave cleaning the bath tub to you.
Maybe the Great Awokening is not the cause of relationship collapse so much as another head on the social media-smartphone serpent frying people's brains.
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Perhaps the attention paid to the male loneliness crisis is due to the fact that it manifests as societal wide problems, whereas female loneliness just results in shut-ins posting on private tumblrs to a circle of cheerleaders waiting their turn at the podium.
To share my own experience, my own compatriots who fell into this insanity actually fell into such due to the harry potter fandom spaces, where they would go insane about how gay pederasty was morally pure compared to disgusting heterosexuality. Their real life end state manifestations is raging at the CCP for censoring their beloved boy love dramas and spamming chatgpt for increasingly explicit kpop slashfic, but the through line still exists. They have eschewed all heterosexual relationships, consigned themselves to a chaste nunnery dedicated to homosexual pedophilia, and find plenty of validation from adjacent groups cheerleading self-indulgence as liberation from the patriarchy.
The great awokening obviously broke many brains, and till my death I will point to elevatorgate as the crystallization of feminism+racism+mental issues in the social justice caucus, but it particularly affected unmoored young women who lacked real life reinforcement. Whether negative or positive reinforcement, the lack of real life consequences for life choices makes online communities easy to fall into and hard to escape once that becomes a 'community'. Men who crawl out of the porn and vidya pits could be threats, women just become the crazy cousin no one talks to anymore.
I would have never believed what you are describing if I didn’t see it happen to a friend in real time. Big gay pedo rape fanfic writer and all. This was a rather cute but just very shy and nerdy girl who explicitly flirted with me a couple times at the beginning of college but nothing ever happened and I think she went from kissless virgin with weird internet habits to full blown weirdo of exactly the type you are describing during the corona years after some sad family experiences and a lot of social isolation. Once in a while I get a sad “could I have cured her if I pursued her sexually” thought and suppress it.
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What is "elevatorgate"?
Elevatorgate was the Gamergate of the Atheist community. That either explains the whole thing perfectly or leaves you totally mystified, so I'll break it down a bit more.
You have a community. A woman in the community claims that the behavior of the men in the community is problematic, and what is needed is for the community to begin enforcing stringent new rules developed by social justice ideology. These rules contradict large portions of the community's existing norms, so people resist their imposition. The community rapidly polarizes into those who are on board with Social Justice ideology and those who are not, and social shunning and retaliation forces people to pick a side or have a side picked for them.
A short time later, the community that once existed is now a shell of its former self, if it exists at all.
I say "woman" above because the primary blast wave happened to coincide with a notable wave of Feminism, but this appears to be more or less an accident of history. It could be any identity group favored by social justice, and later often was, but in 2014-2015 it was mainly feminism driving the process. "Elevatorgate" was when the blastwave hit the Atheists. "Gamergate" was when it hit video game fans. "RequiresHate" was when it came for the fantasy/sci-fi authors community, "The Dickwolves Incident" for the Penny Arcade fandom; I don't know what they called it for the TTRPG designer forums. It came for most online communities sooner or later.
I dunno if there was a single crystalizing incident for TTRPG fandom as a whole, or even for individual forums.
RPGnet has a date that the moderators themselves advertise as turning from "the wild west" to intersectionality uber allies (usually mid-2004/2005ish), but there wasn't some big incident motivating that, just a more formalized ruleset that wasn't even especially biased, outside Darren McLennan, Curt, and a few other moderators having unofficial exceptions.
Same for conventions: things like banning people over pepes and ok symbols are pretty far downstream of everything else at GenCon, just like the White Male Terrorist writeups were downstream of far broader definitions of harassment becoming standardized or the nuTSR thing was very much a reaction to progressive politics becoming cost-of-entry. There's a lot of stuff that was the topic de jour in the early days: D&D's Oriental Adventures controversy in early D&D 4 days (probably 2007-2009ish?), various convention kerfluffles, CthulhuTech controversies...
That said, I'd largely left the fandom except to keep up with Morancy by the worst of it, so I may just have missed some.
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For a real life example, spend time browsing 4chan vs crystal cafe.
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Ah, you know Pausanias?
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Just as we're more concerned with female vulnerability due to men's physical aggression, I'd argue another big contributor to our concern about male loneliness is the fact that female aggression tends to manifest socially, particularly via ostracization of the target.
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Finished reading this and scrolled away before a little voice inside whispered "That all sounded so normal and obvious that it barely even registered."
Lord, have mercy.
Some of us are extremly online though. Try to imagine explaining every sentence to a normie.
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Happened to me.
After ten pretty happy years of marriage, my first wife found tumblr and flipped hard left circa 2015. Delivered our baby, abandoned our family for another state (I have total custody), cut most of her hair off, dyed the rest blue, now works a dead end job with not enough hours. A while later, I realized that I still had access to her private twitter (which I don't really use at all), checked in, and she's posting about how many days she can't even get out of bed due to depression. Did gain weight, but that's from slender to, by American standards, moderately chubby. Based on what I've seen, her life revolves entirely around various fandoms.
Doesn't seem to have money for anything but ugly tattoos.
Latest news via the grapevine is she's marrying a woman who lives as a man.
I've stopped trying to make sense of it. God has been good and now I'm with the woman of my dreams and a lot more children. Deleted my old twitter account so I don't have to worry about the temptation to voyeurism anymore. Sincerely wish her all the best. Far away from my kids.
Do your kids (hers especially) ever see her? Very sad.
Every now and then. A lot of people have urged me to cut off all contact due to the sheer potential radiative damage of her influence but I'm of the mind that on balance it's better for them to know their mom. I'm also making a scary, hopefully-not-prideful bet that they'll be able to look at how her life is going and compare it to our healthy family life and learn the right lesson there.
Don't mind admitting this is one of the most stressful needles I've ever had to thread. The stakes are enormous and there's no clear right answer.
ETA: Since you seem sincerely concerned, I'll note that she never, ever calls to talk to them except sometimes on birthdays. And even after everything that surprises me.
That is sad, I think it’s a great tragedy for a child to grow up without their biological mother but I’m sure your current wife is able to help as best she can. I do think it’s best for the children to know, the alternative is that they seek her out, meet her as impressionable teenagers and young adults and then are possibly ideologically indoctrinated; if they think she’s a loser from the beginning that is much less likely, and any lies she might tell about you are less likely to be believed. All the best.
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What is your new wifes opinion on her? Any female understanding/repudiation?
They've met twice and don't have a relationship.
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I think there might be a Berkson's paradox going on.
Very possibly, but I feel like just saying that employs Berkson's paradox as a thought-terminating cliche, rather than as a careful consideration of the observed clustered phenomena. Which correlation do you suspect might be spurious?
When I suggested that Lana is not just a person, but a personality, I meant it. Her post on the suicide forum made her a particularly extreme example of the type, but I know many women, including members of my family, who very much fit the type, though they haven't imploded their lives to quite the same spectacular degree. Some stay married (but often publicly declare their bisexuality), some get neopronouns, some keep their hair a natural color... but the commitment to wide-band political leftism combined with a willingness to excommunicate dissenters from their lives makes a pretty consistent through-line. Those things seem pretty obviously connected with the clustered phenomena--political leftism incentivizes sex and gender exploration, for example, and willingness to excommunicate others can extend to an unpersuaded spouse. Sociology is hard, but I'm not sure it's so hard that I should be willing to accept "nothing ever happens" as a refutation of the observations in this thread.
Assuming female hypergamy, in higher functioning circles you'd expect there to be more relatively lower functioning women. Lower functioning men can't make it to the circles and if they do are not tolerated for long. Low functioning men are detonating their relationships in the trailer park.
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