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Where do you see the Gender War going?
My Definition of the Gender War.
There are many fronts in the Culture War that can be more or less described as a 'Gender War'.
Front 1: Which pronouns to use? Does "gender even exist?
Front 2: Is Western society a "patriarchy"?
Front 3: Is Masculinity Toxic?
Front 4: "Incels".
This post is about Front 4. Growing male sexlessness. I am not going to make much of an empirical argument but more of a rhetorical one.
So what if men are having less sex?
A large enough contingency of young men not having sexual partners is almost always a precursor for political and social instability. All that excess energy needs to be directed somewhere (work to provide for the wife and kids), if it isn't it usually boils over towards the rest of society as men seek out more violent and high-risk avenues to gain social status let that be joining gangs or starting political revolutions.
Moreover, young men are the most productive demographic in society in just about every domain. If a large enough percentage of them don't see any reason/reward for working hard, they just won't.
It's getting worse.
A growing number of men not having sex is a canary in the coal mine. That whatever was holding the socioeconomic fabric together is deteriorating. Let that be worsening economic conditions (we got plenty of that), worsening economic inequality (plenty of that as well), or just worsening social institutions (Online dating is the plurality method of how heterosexual couples met., It's growing rapidly.).
The cultural wind is blowing
Not only that but the two sexes resenting each other is mainstream. As I was growing up in the early 2000s there were 'boys vs girls' conversations. But those conversations were light-hearted and there were no hard feelings.
Nowadays browsing through social media comment sections and talking to other young guys. The tensions are much higher. I see normies spouting black pill talking points all over Instagram and TikTok. And that seems to be the majority ideology. This is in stark contrast to the early 2000s and even the 2010s were the majority consensus amongst men could have been described as 'RedPill' or 'BluePill'.
If you want an example of the above, Read the comments of this video (Videos like this are an entire genre among zoomers). You can feel the tension in the comments. To me, it's obvious this girl is joking, even if the joke isn't all that funny or whatever. The comments don't suggest most people viewed it as such, the men are on edge. I'd wager they wouldn't have reacted like this a decade ago. Another interesting phenomenon is that unattractive girls produce content like this imitating the attractive ones who can actually get away with it and just end up sinking the sanity waterline further as young naive men peers who know her think "wait I can't even this this bitch?" and the women gas up their egos without being able to back it up.
I mean Andrew Tate is actually popular FFS! I have had so many of my normie friends and acquaintances ask me about what I think of Andrew Tate, and most of them say the same thing. "He's got a point, I agree with a large part of what he says". The man is a clown, he's a comedian in my eyes. The fact his rhetoric resonates with men despite all else is a testament to the times we are living in.
On the female side of the aisle, it seems like they are doubling down too. They will just make more TikTok videos like the one I linked above.
Where do I see all this going?
Increasing political and social tension. More fringe political parties are elected, and how that happens will be left as an exercise for the leader.
One can make the argument that countries like Japan and South Korea are already further along the line of atomization and sexlessness (their TFR is atrocious!).
I don't think East Asian countries with the rice farming optimized culture (and genetic predisposition against inhibition, extremely interesting but I can't find the link) are good proxies to model the rest of the world after.
India might be a candidate they have a Front 4 gender war as well, arranged marriage puts a damper but Hindu Nationalism is clearly on the rise.
It seems that we are in the perfect storm for worsening Gender relations. Economic struggles, increasing OLD (that comes with a massive amount of its own problems) app usage, increasing atomization, recommendation algorithms primarily suggesting media that lowers the sanity line (rage bait of the likes made by Ms Andrea Subotic), gender confusion, Males being vilified for???, Women specific AA, all of them compounding on each other...
The rise of the classical manosphere (Roosh, ChateauHeartiste, etc.), Neoreaction (Dreaded Jim, etc.), and even barstool F-boy-ery (Tucker Max) are all at least 10 years old, and in some cases closer to 20. None of this is new.
Scott wrote "Untitled" in what, 2014? The "women only go for jerks!" meme is not new. There was just a gap between when the millennials discovered it, and when the Zoomers finally hit puberty and started to discover it.
The point being made was that Andrew Tate is mainstream popular. Everyone in my workplace knows who Andrew Tate is. None of them have heard of the other things you listed. The fact he isn't saying anything 'new' to you isn't the point.
Who are your coworkers, and where do you work? None of my co-workers have heard of Andrew Tate, but a few have heard of Tucker Max.
Looking just at any metrics from TikTok, YouTube or any mainstream news outlet Tate is giant in comparison. I live in Scandinavia and there was, for example, a recent segment in the radio about Tate and how 'dangerous' he is. I don't understand where you are coming from here. Tate is obviously much bigger.
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IMO none of these people were even close to as popular as Tate was at his peak.
Part of that might be differences in media - e.g. Youtube wasn't as big in the early days of the "manosphere" - but some of those guys (e.g. Rollo Tomasi) are on Youtube today and don't have his viewership.
Tate is also imo different from the ones who did get as prominent as him, like Tucker Max and Neill Strauss in that he's much more directly "red pill" (or misogynist tbh). Tucker Max was mainly selling funny party stories that were called misogynist but he was a fratbro, not a combatant.
Strauss wrote a book about PUA that ended with him abandoning the space after he saw its problems. It basically perfectly followed the three act structure of most crime/"pitiful nerd changes his life" movies: life sucks, discover this cool thing -> enjoy it for a bit then see the downsides -> extricate yourself while hopefully keeping some of the benefits of your journey (usually a girl - Straus ended the book on a serious relationship). As a story it's flattering to both sides of the audience: the pitiful nerds who want to change or vicariously live through the hero, and the people who think the PUA stuff is bullshit or bad. It's like watching Tony Soprano: everyone enjoys it so long as we know he's going to get his comeuppance at the end.
These guys had a bit of cover.
Tate will just straight up say that women are property and belong to men, or high value men should be allowed to cheat and will just go after his ideological enemies in a way that Tucker Max - who was mainly a hedonist at first - just didn't seem to give a shit about. His model seems to be melding financial guru + Tucker Carlson's "populism" (including anti-vax stuff) + red pill culture warrior.
It's a much more confrontational stance that plays way more into the gender war (which fits the topic of it getting worse). Very different proposition and it explains why he got banned.
The interesting thing is that he rose at all tbh
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