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A thing I don't think the 'manosphere' (loosely defined) has really grappled with, is men's role dismantling the 'patriarchy' (loosely defined).
" the patriarchy is [in a broad and very simplified sense] a system where men are responsible for women and women are accountable to men. (More accurately, it’s a system where women are accountable to their fathers/husbands and men are responsible for their daughters/wives.*) "
That works as a definition well enough.
For that system to hold, its a 2 way street.
A real question, culturally, do men want the responsibilities, or just the perks?
Its relevant that concurrent with Promise Keepers, we had elected Bill Clinton twice to the highest office in the land, JFK was considered the coolest possible politician, Joe Namath had been famous for going on 30 years at that point for being good with the ladies.
Culturally, men, held up that ideal as something to be aspired to.
If men are going to aspire to be cads, a feminism that decides that men aren't worth trusting the patriarchy to is a reasonable response.
My mental model of Promise Keepers, their main message was "hey men, be worthy of the patriarchy"
Promise Keepers as a phenomenon, it was always fighting massive cultural headwinds, it was founded with that express purpose.
Is it a failure that it's not still going strong 30 years later? idk, what's that half-life of these things? I mean Lilith Fair isn't still selling out shows, whatever Louis Farrakhan is up to, a million people aren't showing up in DC on the regular to hear him. These things peter out.
If some men took it to heart and actually lived better lives, I would say that counts as success, even if in 2025 the movement is a minor footnote in history.
I think it was Deiseach who once pointed out that second-wave feminism was actually a really sweet deal for men and a poison pill for women, with all the "free love" turning out to be just fucking around without any responsibility, and all later feminism waves are just an attempt at fixing this giant screw-up without admitting to it. I'd nitpick that it only was a sweet deal for a particular kind of men, but otherwise agree.
We’re already seeing modern examples of this. I remember saying the exact same thing whenever the topic would come up in my social round table years ago. It always felt like pissing in the wind. This stuff isn’t rocket science. I really don’t know how so many people missed it.
Had an interesting thought.
"Consequence-Free Sex" is a great sales pitch on its face.
But then you notice that some of the 'consequences' of sex are in fact good, desireable, and constructive, and throwing those out is really losing something important.
So women thought they were getting all the pleasure without the risk of pregnancy, STDs, emotional investment, or risk of abuse... and didn't notice that this was costing them a lot of the emotionally fulfilling aspects of it.
It was a talked about phenomenon even during Victorian Britain that some women were just completely “whorish” in their attitudes. So you’ve always had licentiousness and the overwhelming biological drive of people in their youth. The question in my mind has one to do with its proper place and context. The sexualization and commodification of everything is bad for both individuals and society.
Fully agree with you on the last paragraph. It also reminds me of the old, funny bash dot org quote:
“It used to be about sex, drugs and rock n roll. Now all we have is aids, crack and techno.”
In reading some accounts of the culture of the '60s and '70s, it seems like there were a LOT of true believers who genuinely thought that free love, LSD, and rock music was going to save the world and fix everything. And a lot of opportunists who saw how they could exploit this sentiment.
And as the quote implies, turns out there are some downsides to each of those things. The drugs in fact ended up killing a lot of the musicians.
To hear some tell it, the Altamont Free Concert was the day (four months after Woodstock, the apotheosis of the era) that dream died/the illusion popped.
"Wow, turns out getting people hopped up on drugs at a free concert with a Biker Gang (paid in beer) running security DOESN'T result in a peaceful, money-free utopia." And like a number of recent culture issues, the death of a black guy was the precipitating incident.
Richard Nixon was... more right than wrong about hippies.
For my part I think it was fully doomed when the Corporations Co-opted their sentiment to sell sugar water. Note this was the same year John Lennon released "Imagine."
Virtually the entire atmosphere of the postwar period was like that in the sense that the west came out triumphant. In particular with the US overwhelmingly being the biggest beneficiary. And with that you saw an attendant shift in the social values of the population with the abundant wealth that was following in.
Being the person that tried to restore sanity and imploring them to think of the long-term downstream consequences would’ve made you the party pooper or puritanical boomer of the previous generation. But the conclusion of all this wasn’t hard to see. A lot of what people complain about today and are writing I remember having the identical thoughts about in high school. And it’s not because I’m some sort of enlightened genius and everyone else is an idiot. I’m simply someone paying attention.
Well yeah I can actually sort of understand the logic there actually.
"Hey we've got this brand new drug that heightens sensory experiences but has seemingly zero side effects! Miraculous! And all these extremely talented musicians innovating genres with meaningful messages! And contraceptives so we can have the pleasure of sex without the risk! Truly this is an age of wonders, we can surely solve the world's problems if we just unite around something we all have in common!"
Then sprinkle some marxism in there. Can't forget to mention Jonestown where a bunch of self-professed Marxist-Communists got froggy and killed themselves along with a bunch of kids. That was later in the game, though.
Oh, and the Manson murders. 1969-1971 really killed any presumption of 'innocence' in this culture, didn't it?
The extra layer of weird spirituality that permeated much of the hippie era was a bit harder for me to understand. Lot of cults in that time period.
Whatever mindsets of the 60's has been repeated in the current era, it seems to be a firmly secular movement this time around, although most here can point out how "wokeism" is just a secular religion.
That era was a mistake in a number of ways and now the excesses of it are running hard up against the wall.
This isn’t a product of some Marxist bogeyman though, although many similar aspects of it you can also find at home in the Marxist tradition.
Even the Nazis of all people recognized this problem under their own paradigm. Hitler wrote about it himself when he talked about the contrast of values he experienced in Munich and when he went into Vienna. He noticed that the cities and program of urbanization led into the production of a new system of social values that was individualistic, against the national community and that he saw as “degenerate.” That’s why his appointed ideologues beneath him like Walter Darre and others came up with notions like “blood and soil.” They viewed the peasantry as the ideal model for German society because of its community and family orientation towards society, and they wanted that adapted to big city life.
It’s also why when they went into Scandinavia, they viewed Oslo as “too American” and “socially degenerate” because of its big city and urban lifestyle. The big cities led to a “liberalizing of social values.” It was yet another example to them as reminder of why they envied the countryside. The Nazis actually disliked many aspects of German rural life and called their immigration into the cities “convoys of death.” But one thing they noticed in the 40’s was that the urban cities were producing less than half of the soldiery and births needed to sustain the war effort. The countryside on the other hand had something like a 13%-16% surplus it provided.
So whether it’s this extreme or that extreme, these lunatics or those lunatics, both ideologies ran into different varieties of the same problem. And no paradigm to date that I’ve seen has good solutions to these.
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