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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25823 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 16, 2026

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I saw a thread about Louis Theroux's manosphere documentary. OP relates his teen daughter's alleged words and experiences to make a point about healthy values and teen male behaviours. The current verdict is that boys should have their screen times monitored or limited so they don't get corrupted by the manosphere, and raise them with feminist values. Okay. I agree with some of this. There are certainly incel adjacent online spaces that spiral into nihilism and hate. There are teenage boys with zero offline male role models to mainline this stuff and end up emerging more bitter than buff. Parental gatekeeping of violent porn, gambling apps, or extremist political content seems like basic risk management. If your heuristic is “anything that makes my daughter feel existentially unsafe is bad for my son too,” the monitoring prescription follows naturally. And yes, the generational digital literacy gap is real. Parents are often shocked their kids know the lore. I'd go further, I'm in favour of a blanket social media ban until they (both boys and girls) turn 16.

That being said. This comes just one day after Clavicular's recent clip with Leela Saraswat went viral. FWIW the "boyfriend" commented on Instagram that it was an old prom pic and they weren't dating. But are we allowed to question what message women's questionable dating choices (made of their free will with no external pressure) send to young boys and girls? We have a clip of an (allegedly) attached woman melting for a high value male on camera, yet the discourse pivots to “protect boys from the manosphere”. Here's the truth nuke: Clavicular is not an incel. He is living proof of the sexual marketplace the manosphere describes, which is heavily determined by looks, money, height, race, social status, etc. He pulls taken women with minimal effort. Young men are not “corrupted” into noticing these patterns. They notice them first (through lived failure) and then find the subculture that names the pattern instead of shaming them for noticing. So what is the problem with the manosphere? That it spreads dangerous lies and radicalises young men into subjugating and even killing women? Or that the rhetoric makes women look bad?

If it's the former, I need to see some evidence. Netflix's "Adolescence" made waves last year for catching the so called andrew tate problem that's apparently radicalising 13 year old boys into stabbing their classmates. Never mind the fact that homicide rates in the UK have been trending DOWN over the years, particularly against females. Are we allowed to discuss the harm caused by manufactured hysteria? If it's the latter, then you’re not protecting boys. You’re just delaying the day they notice the discrepancy between official feminist sermons and observed reality. And when they finally do notice, they’ll be angrier for the wasted years. And manosphere critics would tell us they've been "corrupted".

Lastly, since #notallmen was mentioned as a gotcha, can I point out how this "collective guilt" only flows one way? If every man should feel ashamed about the manosphere because we share genitals with them, what about the (overwhelmingly male) miners, linemen, firemen, welders, construction workers, road workers, steel workers, etc etc who commit to physically intensive and dangerous labour everyday to keep your lights on? Do we all get a collective male labour paycheck for that too, simply because we share genitals with the workers in these vocations? You don't need to hold yourself to consistent principles if you have sufficient social capital, like feminism does.

Feminism is a deeply entrenched mind virus. A social contagion that rode the waves of 20th century progressivism and the creeping post-WW2-ban on pushing back against leftism. It exists to propagate itself. To shut down those who disagree with it by painting them as villains, to promote those who promote it by lionizing them. That's all there is to it. It's come a long way and it remains in a fairly strong position.

That it's objectively bullshit is besides the point. Ask instead how it made it this far. Why it survive the moral outrages against it and has now, for multiple generations, been in a position to weild such outrage itself. To poison the water half population of the world swims in. Socially it's maladaptive and will die out eventually. That it's been originally adopted and later exported only by the obscenely wealthy Western societies that could afford it and the downsides it brings speaks to this. Demographic decline comes from numerous sources, but it seems plainly evident that feminism is one of them.

Social media, information bubbles, positive reinforcment cycles. Feminism is a good thing to have there. Elevate the ingroup, denigrate the outgroup, that never gets old. And what else does feminism do? Man bad, woman good, ad infinitum. It's blown past all its mottes of legal or political equality and now frolics in the baileys of patriarchy, systemic sexism and unconditional women-are-always-oppressed-yet-wonderful, with several sides of welfare designed for the benefit of women. But we could ignore all the legal, political and financial aspects. Those are barely even secondary. What matters is the narrative - a narrative that accords unearned merit to women, and undeserved scorn to men, which thanks to its wide reach and influence drives both to ever more stupid behavior. And thanks to the current media environment, this narrative is easily capable of self-reinforcing and acquiring new believers the moment they learn to talk.

As you can tell, I have little left for it except near-infinite disdain, limited only by the apparently finite shelf-life of humanity as a whole, with the expiration date approaching slowly but surely.

End social media. Destroy the internet with a flood of deliberately destructive AI agents designed to make it unusable. Shut down the universities, the public broadcasters. End public welfare. Flatten the playing field! Nuke it from orbit! Then see how much of feminism survives. One can dream.

When people write screeds like this about feminism, in my mind I always wonder "Which kind of feminism"? Because nowadays, "feminism" means pretty much whatever the person using the word wants it to mean, whether that is "Women should be able to vote" or "Evil civilization-hating penis-removing witches."

It's not just that there have been many different waves and schools of feminist thought, it's that it literally has become such a generic term that essentially anything other than a neolithic model of gender relations can be called "feminist." That's not even an exaggeration when we have people here on the Motte who literally believe that women should be property and it's those fucking bitch feminists who are the reason they aren't.

This is my personal opinion, not a mod note, but "feminism is a mind virus," "feminism is objectively false," "feminism is cancer," etc. reads as very boo-outgroup to me when you don't even specify what you mean by it. Generally I assume you more or less mean modern progressive feminism, 3rd wave or whatever, sex positivity and equal rights etc. etc. And before you think I'm white knighting or some shit, I think I have made it clear enough in the past that I largely agree with the criticisms of modern feminism. But I don't think someone who believes "Women should be allowed to vote" or "It should be illegal to beat your wife" is the same as someone who's pushing whatever specific progressive feminist thing is enraging you.

When people write screeds like this about feminism, in my mind I always wonder "Which kind of feminism"? Because nowadays, "feminism" means pretty much whatever the person using the word wants it to mean, whether that is "Women should be able to vote" or "Evil civilization-hating penis-removing witches."

And yet there is one thing that it never means, which is applying the same standards to men and women. For example, is there any subset of feminism that (also) studies toxic femininity?

Which kind of feminism

All the ones that self-identify as such. It is that simple, at present - the label of deminism is in a strong social position, so anyone willing to promote it can only gain by associating with it. This isn't like "fascism" or "cultural marxism", where you have to forcibly pin the label on people so you can attempt to lump them in together. The feminists will proudly tell you they're part of the same movement or ideological group. It's public. And I'm deliberately not going off of some hard defitnion, since the memeplex contains everything from mild suffragettes to the evil witches, which are indeed not the same, but they voluntarily adopt the same label. Put on the same uniform and mark themselves as belligerents in the gender/culture wars, so to speak.

I can't speak for where the usual TheMotte user stands on these things, this place attracts and tolerates people with well outside the overton window takes without being brigaded by downvotes and redditor insults, as long as they can do so with some sort of rigour and charity.

That said, when I rail against "feminism" as a mind virus, I'm targeting the existing, mainstream, culturally dominant version: the 3rd wave plus progressive bundle that dominates media, academia, HR, policy advocacy, and campus and corporate norms. The version that rarely, if ever, distances itself from female favouring asymmetries (family courts, affirmative action, distortionist history, #BelieveAllWomen defaults, benevolent sexism as privilege, etc.) and almost never features prominent mainstream voices aggressively holding women accountable for exploiting them or calling out female hypergamy, entitlement, invasion of male spaces or bad behaviour as systemic problems rather than individual flaws.

Also, earlier waves of feminism heavily baked in original sin dialectics (men as inherent oppressors, patriarchy as omnipresent original sin women are born into resisting), while lounging off of the comforts of the modern world (which allows for systemic equality between the sexes and offers vocations that women can fill without being bogged down by physical disadvantages), which itself was built upon and continues to be sustained by (mostly) male physical labour. And radfem roots (still influential in TERF corners and academia) strategically seek to halt the progression wheel short of full gender abolition so biological females retain sex based privileges indefinitely. At least the 3rd wave goes the whole 9 yards, with a little more nuanced understanding of systems and not blaming individual men.

But no feminist school consistently critiques female privilege, enforces symmetric accountability, or disavows the bundle of progressive stances that tilt the field toward women in culture war flashpoints. There is no feminist aligned with the mainstream calling out the harmful propaganda pushed by multimillion dollar shows (I'm speculating) like Netflix's "Adolescence", nor the blatant falsehoods associated with its messaging (implied or blatant) that run against actual hard data. I don't take issue with women earning or owning property, but it does not function as a buffet where you only pick what you like. It's a package deal, it comes with all the policy and CW outcomes that disadvantage men. That is why I'll never side with feminists, even when I agree with them.

I'm on my bus home so apologies if this comes across as a brain dump, but I hope my point was sufficiently cohesive.

the 3rd wave plus progressive bundle that dominates media, academia, HR, policy advocacy, and campus and corporate norms.

You might as well just call this bundle "fourth-wave feminism" like Wikipedia does.

End social media. Destroy the internet with a flood of deliberately destructive AI agents designed to make it unusable. Shut down the universities, the public broadcasters. End public welfare. Flatten the playing field! Nuke it from orbit! Then see how much of feminism survives. One can dream.

So Butlerian Jihad + Dissolution of the Monasteries + Destroy the Welfare State? I can dig it. Granted, the elimination of feminism would just be a bonus to all that.

I'd heard the name Clavicular mentioned before, but this comment prompted me to read his Wikipedia article. Obviously Wikipedia is a profoundly biased source with every incentive to make him sound as bad as possible, but if half of the content of this article is true, good Lord is this one dysfunctional individual. He started shooting himself up with testosterone at the age of 14, which he has so thoroughly abused as to render himself infertile at the age of 20? He takes crystal meth to suppress his appetite so as not to gain weight? Jesus Christ. Further evidence for the theory that people who devote their lives to streaming every waking minute are fundamentally unhealthy people. No healthy person would choose to live their life in such a way. I genuinely regret reading that article, it legitimately made me feel depressed. What would possess someone to do this to themselves?

I also notice a weird cultural symmetry in his apparent endorsement of taking testosterone to the point of infertility. Is this really the choice facing Gen Z boys?

this comment prompted me to read his Wikipedia article

See also his Kiwi Farms thread.

Thanks for the link, this was morbidly fascinating. All that looksmaxxing wasn't for naught: he is a fairly handsome dude. I would've thought being that handsome was incompatible with being a lolcow, but apparently not.

Freddie deBoer advanced the theory that Clavicular might be a profoundly closeted gay man, and nothing in that thread contradicts that theory. It's almost like he's so in denial about his sexuality that he's decided to perform an exaggerated parody of what he thinks a macho man behaves like (casually racist, drives a big stupid truck for no reason, says appalling things to and about women, drinks too much, reacts violently to perceived slights etc.). It's sad. I hope he gets out of the streaming game and finds something more fulfilling to do with his time.

Freddie deBoer advanced the theory that Clavicular might be a profoundly closeted gay man, and nothing in that thread contradicts that theory.

I seem to recall a recent comment around here (that I now can't find) passing along wisdom from a plastic surgeon that there are two types of men who get surgery like jawline improvement: gay men... and men who haven't yet realized they're gay.

Thanks, I'll check this out this evening. KiwiFarms is blocked on my work's WiFi, lol.

Perhaps because it's an explicitly 18+ site (while NSFW content is allowed, all of it must be spoilered). I always browse with a VPN so I never have any issues with my WiFi network blocking the site.

Yeah, I'm not surprised it's blocked. What's surprising is some of the sites which aren't blocked.

I remember middle school - young boys were disgusting pieces of shit. Young boys now 30 years later are probably better (I have two teen boys) in ways.

Seriously - does no one recall 1990’s middle aged boys?

The manosphere might be an improvement.

Feminism, as an ideology for advancing women's interests, cannot survive in an open marketplace of ideas. It's Motte is 'Feminism is about equality between men and women' which is indefensible when presented with the flood of examples of Bailey exploitation where 'feminists' pick or discard gender roles according to whatever is most in their interests in the circumstance, equality be damned.

Boys and men can now drink from the firehose of the internet which facilitates easy noticing. Like many other ideologies crumbling in the face of evidence, Feminism's supporters have started pushing for suppression of information to allow the gaslighting to continue.

It's this broader desire for suppression to allow narrative control that worries me about the West right now. Its happening along other fronts such as Multiculturalism which also seems to now require suppression of speech to get incompatible cultures to coexist.

Except- as I've pointed out before- feminism is not a movement for women's interests writ large. It is a movement for a narrow subset of women's interests- those of urban, educated, professional-class working women. Not for all working women- feminism doesn't generally care much about the interests of, say, women in the military, or juanita the hotel room cleaner, or whatever. Not non-working women, no matter how educated, wealthy, and empowered they are- feminists lose their minds over any proposal to help SAHMs.

The rape feminists get conspicuously upset about illustrates this principle well- did you know women in the military experience sexual assault at very high rates? I bet not, feminists were too busy telling you about women in college being raped at something approaching, but not equaling, the rate of their non-college peers. The feminist redefinition of 'abuse' into petty BS is another good example; this is not a movement for the women who might actually get knocked around by their alcoholic husbands, as tragic as such cases may be, feminists have other women to care about.

It's this broader desire for suppression to allow narrative control that worries me about the West right now. Its happening along other fronts such as Multiculturalism which also seems to now require suppression of speech to get incompatible cultures to coexist.

That politician from Australia notwithstanding, I don't actually think that Multiculturalism requires suppression of speech to function, it just requires some amount of cultural assimilation and little-L liberalization. It's really easy to go back and read something like H.P. Lovecraft's He, where he wrote:

So instead of the poems I had hoped for, there came only a shuddering blankness and ineffable loneliness; and I saw at last a fearful truth which no one had ever dared to breathe before—the unwhisperable secret of secrets—the fact that this city [New York] of stone and stridor is not a sentient perpetuation of Old New York as London is of Old London and Paris of Old Paris, but that it is in fact quite dead, its sprawling body imperfectly embalmed and infested with queer animate things which have nothing to do with it as it was in life. Upon making this discovery I ceased to sleep comfortably; though something of resigned tranquillity came back as I gradually formed the habit of keeping off the streets by day and venturing abroad only at night, when darkness calls forth what little of the past still hovers wraith-like about, and old white doorways remember the stalwart forms that once passed through them. With this mode of relief I even wrote a few poems, and still refrained from going home to my people lest I seem to crawl back ignobly in defeat.

And see it as a bit silly and overblown. New York city isn't dead just because it isn't Dutch or Anglo American. (Also, surely London has had some shift in ethnicity from its Roman founding to the time of Lovecraft? Like, what about the anglo-saxons and the vikings?) And it just seems obvious that many of the ethnic groups that H.P. Lovecraft was worried about, like Southern and Eastern Europeans, the Irish, and Asians just aren't that scary in the modern day. Surely, even critics of multiculturalism would find a passage about the scary Asians like this one:

And swarming loathsomely on aërial galleries I saw the yellow, squint-eyed people of that city, robed horribly in orange and red, and dancing insanely to the pounding of fevered kettle-drums, the clatter of obscene crotala, and the maniacal moaning of muted horns whose ceaseless dirges rose and fell undulantly like the waves of an unhallowed ocean of bitumen.

To be utterly laughable. Seriously, I've been to Chinese New Year celebrations within my city, and it is a fun time. They do have drum performances, and dress in strange clothes, but I don't feel like a group celebrating their heritage once or twice a year is some death knell for Western civilization and culture.

The good, still mostly functional Western countries that matter like the United States, still remember what it means to be an empire (even if they don't call it that), and we've successfully anglified basically every white ethnic group that has come here, we anglified the Native Americans, and sufficiently assimilated Asians and Hispanics so that they're no great threat to our society. People look at the statistics of Europe's failed immigration policies, and assume that they also apply to the US, but they just don't. Regardless of whatever foolish policies Europe and the wider anglosphere adopt, the United States is doing fine and will continue to be a torchbearer for Western values even after those cultures have become just like the New York of Lovecraft's imagination.

I kind of don't understand people who look at the facts of succesful past assimilation, and who just assume that there is no soft or hard pressure to assimilate anymore in spite of political correctness and what the progressive left say. People who come here learn English. People who come here, learn a baseline of American culture and values. Just as the Chinese Empire of old hanified many of the disparate ethnic groups within its borders and failed to hanify others, so too America has and will succesfully anglify (or if you prefer, americanize) many ethnic groups and will fail to anglify others. But as long as we have the state capacity to stop the non-anglified groups from being too much of a problem (and we definitely do), it is a total non-issue for our civilization and way of life.

To be utterly laughable. Seriously, I've been to Chinese New Year celebrations within my city, and it is a fun time. They do have drum performances, and dress in strange clothes, but I don't feel like a group celebrating their heritage once or twice a year is some death knell for Western civilization and culture.

The Chinese are famous for self-seggregating into a ghetto, and having a ghetto is one of the traditional solutions to prevent a non-integrating ethnic group from being a threat to the ethnic cohesion of the majority of society. Secondly, the Chinese are one of the least aggressive groups when it comes to demanding accommodations. They are also one of the least criminal groups around. As a result, frictions with other ethnic groups in various places tends to revolve around their economic success, not so much a negative impact on other civilizations and cultures, but you can't just assume that different groups have the same traits.

In fact, the very essence of ethnicity/culture is that peoples with a different ethnicity have different behaviors, so pointing to one group and claiming that these experiences generalize, suggest that you don't actually understand what ethnicity/culture is.

and we've successfully anglified basically every white ethnic group that has come here, we anglified the Native Americans, and sufficiently assimilated Asians and Hispanics so that they're no great threat to our society.

That 'basically' is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, with there being quite a large population of 'white trash' in extreme poverty, high crime and otherwise poorly assimilated people. Native Americans have the highest poverty rate of any group, many of them live in ghetto's, and the only real success of that community is by being given an unfair advantage (being allowed to run casino's in places where other ethnic groups are not allowed to do that).

And you completely ignore black people in your comment, for seemingly obvious reasons.

People look at the statistics of Europe's failed immigration policies, and assume that they also apply to the US, but they just don't.

Perhaps that is because progressives have now gained a huge amount of informal power in the US and are using that to push the exact same failed immigration policies.

I mean there are Western cultures that are common to our shared cultural heritage. Things like the Enlightenment ideals of thought (rationalism and empiricism) liberal democracy as ideal ways of making decisions. If you don’t agree, just imagine someone choosing to do things the opposite way. Perhaps they are a monarchist like Curtis Yarvin, or they decide to make major decisions by use of a set of Norse Runes, or they think liberalism and civil liberties and human rights are suspect. Would such a person be able to do those things openly in polite society without triggering a huge backlash against themselves. You wouldn’t want to see the CEO of your company using Tarot cards to decide on major strategic planning. Yarvin is mostly an object of derision in those same polite society.

At some point, I think you reach critical mass where the groups who reject Western consensus end up being strong enough to make the assumptions of our culture no longer the consensus that you can assume most people around are on board with. One Yarvin is a curiosity, 3 million Yarvinites in a state can affect the zeitgeist.

Doesn’t Zuck pine for imperial Pax Romana era Rome ( specifically Augustus)?

torchbearer for Western values

Like what? White supremacy or multiculturalism? Fascism or Marxism-Leninism? Scientific racism and social darwinism? Monarchism and the divine right of kings? Catholic integralism? These are all Western ideas.

I guess you mean liberal democracy. But how liberal should democracy be? Should voters be allowed to get what they want, or is that populism? What should be censored? Communists? Nazis? Porn? Anti-feminists? Islam? What should be taught in state education, what is the correct kind of history? Who should be debanked and suppressed? Who controls who is let into the country and in what numbers? Are there such controls? Or are they racist? Who can be murdered with impunity? Who can say certain words? Who runs the administration?

'Western values' as we mean them are a recent idea. They aren't even Anglo. The Anglos of old did not really believe all the things we believe today. The Americans of old believed in white supremacy, homophobia, all kinds of things that are unfashionable today.

There is indeed a Western culture, language group, philosophy, worldview to a certain extent. But it's such a vast tree with so many branches. It's like how 'America' in a certain sense includes Peruvians, Alaskan natives, Montreal latte-sippers, Texas cowboys, Venezuelan lowlifes. But that meaning of America is so broad as to be all but useless. It's ever changing and whole groups disappear in time, changing beyond recognition. The cowboys are mostly gone. The Aztecs are all gone. The Puritans are gone.

The issue is not just in 'not anglifying' others but in others changing what it means to be 'anglified.' The danger is deeper and more insidious than just seeing the Somali Learing Centre and thinking 'oh it's not so hard to get rid of these jokers' - it has to actually be done and not just talked about. Values have to actually be preserved, not just defended. Culture wars must be won rather than merely fought.

When talking about large groups of people over time, the only constant is change.

Dante might have been a Christian, but he also saw himself as an inheritor of Roman culture, and so his Divine Comedy ends up with a strange mix of references to Classical Mythology and the Aeneid, in a book about the Christian Afterlife. And before Rome "Hellenized" and adopted Greek philosophy and Homeric myth as its own, it saw the Greeks as foreign and other. We know that Cato the Elder considered Greek philosophy "un-Roman" and he probably would have hated to learn that his great grandson, Cato the Younger would be remembered as a sort of Stoic martyr and sage. It only took four generations for a resistant Rome to Hellenize in this way.

Just as there is no "truer" Rome, there is no "truer" West. All of those version of Rome are the real Rome, whether pro-Hellenistic or anti-Hellenistic, whether Pagan or Christian, all of them were Roman. So too, the West has been a lot of different things. The West is Greece and Rome, and Geneva, and London and Paris. It encompasses secular enlightenment ideals from the Encyclopedists of France, to the Marxists of Russia, and the Christians of the Crusades, and the Pagan Romans.

CertainlyWorse was expressing concern for the fate of "the West", and I was addressing him in those terms. But the simple fact is that the only thing we can say for sure is that "the West" is going to change in ways we can hardly predict, and would have no matter what happened. That's the weird thing about concerning yourself about a civilization instead of a nation or an ethnos or a tribe. Civilizations contain multitudes and are ever-changing. At least if you zoom in to the tribe level, you can say that there is a continuity of genetics, even if there is cultural drift and change over time.

All of those version of Rome are the real Rome, whether pro-Hellenistic or anti-Hellenistic, whether Pagan or Christian, all of them were Roman.

This is completely incoherent, unless what you mean by the 'real Rome' is merely that these different cultures all existed in the same place. But then the 'real' is not doing any work. You can't just adopt a phrase while rejecting the premise behind it, which is that true forms exist in contrast to non-true forms.

So too, the West has been a lot of different things.

Yes, but this is not really relevant. If people interpret 'Western culture' as one involving things like individualism, democracy, capitalism, etc; then pointing out that parts of the history of Western Europe didn't have those things is at most a criticism of a sloppy choice of words, but it doesn't invalidate that people can have a preference for a certain culture and put a label on it. That the label is sloppy, does not mean that the things the label refers to is not something real, or that it is invalid to have a subjective preference for things that the label covers.

Note that by adopting the 'real' adjective, people are in fact making it clear that they reject your belief that just because things happen in a place, things all fall under that label of 'real X'.

We know that Cato the Elder considered Greek philosophy "un-Roman" and he probably would have hated to learn that his great grandson, Cato the Younger would be remembered as a sort of Stoic martyr and sage.

And historians recognize the distinction between the early 'Romanitas' and the later Greco-Roman culture, so a change happened, that destroyed the thing that Cato the Elder loved and considered to be true Roman. His belief was based on a true fact (a cultural distinction), plus a subjective preference. You seem to agree with the fact, but only disagree with the subjective element, but there is no right or wrong when it comes to subjective preference. There is a wrong when it comes to denying others their subjective preference, by claiming that this preference is objectively wrong.

That's the weird thing about concerning yourself about a civilization instead of a nation or an ethnos or a tribe. Civilizations contain multitudes and are ever-changing.

Your own argument can also be used to argue that it is weird to have a concern for a nation or an ethnos or a tribe, which are of course all ever-changing. Even the human race is changing or if you abstract away even further, the animal population of earth (with mankind being just one of the animals). So does your reasoning not require total apathy, even to the survival of humankind, or the quality of humankind (see Idiocracy)?

New York city isn't dead just because it isn't Dutch or Anglo American.

It’s only dangerous!

What level of intellect is required to see the violence and murder difference between races?

It’s not dead - but it COULD have been the capital of the free world.

Thank god we got Biggie Smalls and tacos instead.

It’s not dead - but it COULD have been the capital of the free world.

Do you hate humanity so much that NYC should've had more influence?

What level of intellect is required to see the violence and murder difference between races?

Irish Americans had high rates of criminality until the around the 20th century. And the Irish in Ireland had low IQ's until their country became a banking hub. Lovecraft wasn't wrong to hate and fear the Irish in one sense, but after they were anglicized, the Irish Americans are just another "spicy white" ethnic group.

Certainly, I don't assume unkind things about someone when I hear they have some Irish heritage today.

I think the basic intuition is, sure, there might be genuine cultural or genetic differences that are leading some races to have higher rates of criminality in the United States today, but we don't actually know whether those groups are more like the Irish (where under the right set of societal conditions they might be made to assimilate) or whether it would literally take gene therapy to fix it. Also, the genetic factors for say, criminality, might not be precisely what we think. Just as the Native Americans seem to genuinely have higher genetic risk for alcoholism, I could easily imagine that ADOS black people might be more susceptible to certain kinds of drug addiction and that might end up explaining a large part of the difference in criminality between them and other ethnic groups.

It’s not dead - but it COULD have been the capital of the free world.

Sure, instead it got the consolation prize of being the wealthiest city in the world, and one of two megacities that makes a major imprint on all of American culture and entertainment.

whether it would literally take gene therapy to fix it.

Specifically targeting the MAOA 2-repeat allele.

Irish Americans had high rates of criminality until the around the 20th century. And the Irish in Ireland had low IQ's until their country became a banking hub.

It's debatable whether or not this is an honest presentation of facts, but just assuming it as true for the sake of argument: liberals have been promising to do the same for other populations since time immemorial. American blacks are still not integrated, and Africa is still a basket case. How much longer until you accept you were wrong, ans who will be held accountable for it?

Sure, instead it got the consolation prize of being the wealthiest city in the world, and one of two megacities that makes a major imprint on all of American culture and entertainment.

American culture and entertainment are on life support.

American blacks are still not integrated, and Africa is still a basket case. How much longer until you accept you were wrong, ans who will be held accountable for it?

In a certain sense, I don't think we can be 100 percent sure until we have computers that can simulate the physics of our biological processes to a high degree of accuracy, because until that point all we will be able to do is genome-wide association studies and find genetic correlations with life outcomes but not explanations for why those correlations exist or whether they are causal. (Though I grant that we could in principle get a physical explanation earlier than that, the same way we figured out that the genetic disorder Phenylketonuria leads to low IQ if one eats a high protein diet due to their body not producing phenylalanine hydroxylase, and thus discovering that with a strict diet people with PKU can have normal IQ's. Genetics is weird sometimes, and interacts with the environment in odd ways.)

I'm perfectly open to the idea that black people might genetically be predisposed to low IQ and personality traits that lead to higher criminality, but I think this is far from proven. It would actually be great news if it was all genetic, because that means we could probably do voluntary eugenics or gene therapies with the right framing and marketing, and be rid of the problem without much issue. If it's cultural, that's much harder to deal with.

American culture and entertainment are on life support.

I think we're highly biased by our novelty-focused culture, but I would wager that America is producing excellent cultural and entertainment products at least as consistently as Ancient Greece or Rome did.

How often did the ancient world produce a Virgil or a Homer? How often did they coast for a few centuries on the insights of a Galen or an Aristotle?

If you want to enjoy human artistic excellence in the United States, you can find it in virtually every large American city. You like opera? We've got opera. Ballet? Classical music? You could disengage from American pop culture, and probably fly to a different city every week and enjoy great Western art and performances that are probably at least as good as the average of what you could have experienced 500 years ago, or 1000 years ago, or 2000 years ago. Maybe we can't compare to the Gaussian tail artists of those eras, the virtuosos like Beethoven or Chopin, but you probably wouldn't have to look hard to find artists and performers in the top 20% of all of human history all over the United States today, which I think is nothing to sneeze at.

And if you're not rich, there's always the wealth of recordings we have, which give even the common man access to the great performances of the past. For a mere pittance, you could buy the Harvard Classics and immerse yourself in the greatest thoughts of Western thinkers of the last 2500 years.

Maybe it is true that many Americans choose to engage with the new and the now, and ignore the mountain of gold they're born into. But I'm grateful that I've had access to the public domain books on Project Gutenburg since I was in middle school, and got to enjoy works from 1001 Arabian Nights to Plato's Republic for free. I think it is possible, even with brain rot and the nightmare of the algorithm that more people today are engaging with the thought stream of Western civilization than ever before. And let's be honest, most of the servants of Ancient Greece and Rome probably weren't deeply immersing themselves in the art and literature of the era (even if there are notable exceptions like Epictetus and Cleanthes.)

I think we're highly biased by our novelty-focused culture, but I would wager that America is producing excellent cultural and entertainment products at least as consistently as Ancient Greece or Rome did.

To be fair, Rome was also known for entertaining the masses with blood sports and the like, but Hollywood went from intelligent, well-written movies to Superhero-slop. Now that the audience has grown tired of it, they have apparently become incapable of producing new epics, and are mostly recycling old movies or existing IPs, usually poorly.

If you want to enjoy human artistic excellence in the United States, you can find it in virtually every large American city. You like opera? We've got opera. Ballet? Classical music?

All stagnating, mostly simply replaying the same old classics to dwindling audiences.

and performances that are probably at least as good as the average of what you could have experienced 500 years ago, or 1000 years ago, or 2000 years ago.

Yes, the US is very technically proficient. But that is not culture.

And let's be honest, most of the servants of Ancient Greece and Rome probably weren't deeply immersing themselves in the art and literature of the era (even if there are notable exceptions like Epictetus and Cleanthes.)

Traditional cultures are known for roaming troupes of artists, entertaining the masses, so I actually would expect people of that time (including farmers, not sure why you chose servants, unless you see the past through the lens of the rich, and have a blindness to the lives of commoners), to have access to art as well, but obviously more in line with the wealth levels and population density of the time.

I'm perfectly open to the idea that black people might genetically be predisposed to low IQ and personality traits that lead to higher criminality, but I think this is far from proven

The evidence is so overwhelming that a scientific study is not even necessary. It's like observing that men are genetically predisposed to being taller than women.

I don't think we can be 100 percent sure until we have computers that can simulate the physics of our biological processes to a high degree of accuracy

This strikes me as an isolated demand for rigor. Would you apply the same standards to the claim that smoking cigarettes causes lung cancer?

Would you apply the same standards to the claim that smoking cigarettes causes lung cancer?

No, because the consequences of getting it wrong are very different.

If a society believes that smoking causes cancer, and they are wrong, some people don't get to enjoy setting fire to foul-smelling leaves and covering their walls and furniture with discusting gunk.

If a society believes that Black people are less intelligent and more criminal, and they are wrong, millions of innocent people go through their lives with a boot stamping on their faces.

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Or would you apply the same rigor to the other question? That is, neither position is proven but which has more evidence. Why are privileging the blank slate hypothesis when it has for less evidence.

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In a certain sense, I don't think we can be 100 percent sure until we have computers that can simulate the physics of our biological processes to a high degree of accuracy

If the only thing that could convince you is literal sci-fi technology, why are you doing the "it worked for the Irish" bit, then? That argument certainly doesn't meet the standard that you put upon people who disagree with you, so it should be rejected on similar grounds.

It would actually be great news if it was all genetic, because that means we could probably do voluntary eugenics or gene therapies

The bad news would have been that we've spent an inordinate amount of time and resources victim-blaming, and excluding people out of public life, for not enthusiastically hopping on the current race-equality bandwagon. This is why I asked who will be held accountable for it, it's not something we can gloss over with "teehee, I guess it doesn't matter now".

I think we're highly biased by our novelty-focused culture, but I would wager that America is producing excellent cultural and entertainment products at least as consistently as Ancient Greece or Rome did.

By that metric, there's nothing special about New York. I'm not buying a ticket to watch any of the stuff they make there, there's more than enough local artists I can enjoy. Even in the US a trip to the city scarcely seems worth the bother, and the city's impact on the rest of the culture is dwindling.

If the only thing that could convince you is literal sci-fi technology, why are you doing the "it worked for the Irish" bit, then? That argument certainly doesn't meet the standard that you put upon people who disagree with you, so it should be rejected on similar grounds.

The metric of IQ was invented in 1905. Around the 1970's we measured Irish IQ, and it seemed low. In the late 1980's Ireland became a banking hub and in the decades that followed we measured their IQ's and they weren't low. Those are the facts as I roughly understand them, without causal links added.

I do agree that the banking hub explanation is only one possible explanation for the observed changes in IQ. It's not as certain as the conservation of momentum, to be sure. It is just a balance of probabilities.

We have seen Irish IQ go up to around the White European average. We have also seen black IQ go up, but it does not match White IQ (today it averages around 85 in the US.) I don't think we have definitive evidence that this is as high as it will ever go. I guess my question would be, would it surprise you if in 100 years, people with similar genetics to today's African Americans ended up having average IQ's that were equivalent to a 90 or a 95 today and no medical interventions were responsible for the measured rise in IQ? Would it surprise you if in 100 years the black murder rate fell 10%-20%? What about if the rise in IQ was larger, or the fall in the murder rate even greater? What do you consider unrealistic for us to observe in the future?

By that metric, there's nothing special about New York. I'm not buying a ticket to watch any of the stuff they make there, there's more than enough local artists I can enjoy. Even in the US a trip to the city scarcely seems worth the bother, and the city's impact on the rest of the culture is dwindling.

Sure. I was just defending American culture as a whole there. You were the one who said it was on life support.

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I’m not convinced that multiculturalism doesn’t need some speech suppression, it can sort of coast in periods of prosperity without it, but when you create a situation where it’s obvious that there’s not enough goodies to give the majority of people the good life, it falls apart quickly, and even with speech controls in place it’s hard to keep tribalism at bay.

when you create a situation where it’s obvious that there’s not enough goodies to give the majority of people the good life

Maybe don't do that then? (This is why I find the leftist embrace of Gaianist degrowtherism to be less than logically coherent with their stated commitments to "Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité", and lean more toward Leigh Phillips Thought as a more effective route to the realisation of those principles.)

EDIT: I have realised that there is a grammatical ambiguity in my response. The 'that' which you ought not to do refers to 'create a situation where...', not to 'give the majority of people...'.

We apologise for the inconvenience.

So you deliberately destroy the economy so that nobody gets anything above bare survival? The issue is that competition for resources in a situation where the people involved have enough differences to matter means that they become much more tribal than they would otherwise. And as such it’s inevitable unless you find a way to always either have absolutely nothing available to fight over, or so many resources that everyone can have everything they want and still have enough left. If you’re not in either of those conditions, you’re going to have tribalism.

Integration sort of worked in the 1960s because it was part of the American golden age in which everyone could reasonably expect that a modicum of effort would allow them to own a house and a car and their kids could go to an affordable college and land a white collar job. In 2026, that’s no longer the case, homes are out of reach for most people, secure jobs are hard to get even as college becomes virtually unaffordable for most people. In that Situation, it’s easy to fall into tribalism and work to make sure that whatever resources available go to people like you, rather than some other tribe.

So you deliberately destroy the economy so that nobody gets anything above bare survival?

No. I said that I am against degrowth.

either have absolutely nothing available to fight over, or so many resources that everyone can have everything they want and still have enough left

I am aiming for the latter. I apologise if that wasn't clear.

Integration sort of worked in the 1960s because it was part of the American golden age in which everyone could reasonably expect that a modicum of effort would allow them to own a house and a car and their kids could go to an affordable college and land a white collar job. In 2026, that’s no longer the case, homes are out of reach for most people, secure jobs are hard to get even as college becomes virtually unaffordable for most people.

That's the problem we need to solve.

The thesis of the linked monograph is, roughly paraphrased, is "Don't smash the machine, take it over!"; the machine being large-scale industrial production, which Mr Phillips desires be managed via the ballot box.

You can aim for it, but the planet is finite, so im not convinced you can just make large amounts of everything available. Take housing. If you’re going to ensure everyone has access to a nice home of 3-4 bedrooms and maybe 1/8 an acre of land you are limited to the inhabitable land in the USA and even then you need to be near places with jobs. You basically cannot do this. You can maybe give everyone a car, or maybe cheap consumer goods.

but the planet is finite

Planet?

But as long as we have the state capacity to stop the non-anglified groups from being too much of a problem (and we definitely do), it is a total non-issue for our civilization and way of life.

American exceptionalism aside, in the non-American Western nations there is definitely a lack of will and state capacity to assimilate foreign cultures. It is cheaper in terms of political capital to double down on indoctrinating the host heritage populations to accept the 'eccentricities' of immigrant groups over mandating assimilation. There's also perverse incentives where host politicians (and parties more broadly) can benefit themselves by championing immigrant groups over heritage citizens. The US isn't immune to this in pockets, but broader American culture may be more resilient against cultural infringement.

Noticing the 'two tier' celebration of immigrant cultures over the denigration of the host cultures is building resentment. The UK seems to be the first of the Anglo nations to reach a crisis about this with free speech infringements used to keep a lid on things.

The fertility decline/rapid aging of the citizen population doesn't help either imo. The younger cohorts are much more diverse.

It also means that you can't ever stop and assimilate people. People always bring up the Ellis Islanders or whoever but that stopped and the intake slowed for a generation after. Nobody who cites that as a success story even pretends that's going to happen because they want workers and to show population/economic growth.

Nobody can ever make the argument to ease off for a decade or two, even for specific groups.

There's some pretense that they're gonna fix the plane when it's in flight but no one actually knows how to do it.

It is cheaper in terms of political capital to double down on indoctrinating the host heritage populations to accept the 'eccentricities' of immigrant groups over mandating assimilation

It's the only group with revolutionary potential so it's very dangerous to embolden their critiques of multiculturalism or show it may be worse than they think. I think, in the eyes of the leaders, it runs the risk of becoming a runaway train where they take it too far.

Of course, this is partly what helped the very offenses that make it even harder to fess up and further discredit the system.

The fertility decline/rapid aging of the citizen population doesn't help either imo.

I might sound like a broken record, but I think TFR is the root cause of all this. Western governments see population decline (and consequent tax base erosion) as a sovereign risk and will do whatever they can to forestall it. Immigration is the only tool they think is feasible to 'fix' this, so we continue to see uniparty policies of mass immigration despite it being grossly unpopular.

Everything else is downstream of this. I've heard speculation that AI based productivity gains might obviate the need for immigration, but I'm not holding my breath.

I might sound like a broken record, but I think TFR is the root cause of all this. Western governments see population decline (and consequent tax base erosion) as a sovereign risk and will do whatever they can to forestall it.

We know this is not the reason, because the governments have data that show immigrants are a massive money sink. Some of them even decided to share it with the public!

This didn't actually prevent some government orgs from assuming otherwise, e.g. in the British OBR projections that assumed migrants would be as productive as locals.

That and lobbying from business (and fears of a dying healthcare system) explains the massive post-COVID migration spike.

Incredibly short sighted (basically low wages for business that didn't like how COVID shifted the labour market + pretty projections of growth so you can borrow at the expense of taxpayers for decades) but governments can be shortsighted. It also doesn't help when discussions on human capital are basically taboo so it's hard to coordinate criticism without being called racist.

Of course, that's another structural problem caused by aging: there aren't really many high IQ populations to squeeze since most of their countries are both wealthy now and aging (and, in the case of Britain, they left the EU). If you think migration is your solution it's gonna be Third World migration and we've seen how even selective immigration systems that try to get the cream of the crop from places like India got corrupted by the incentive to import cheap labour.

Refugees are definitely a money sink. Young educated tradespeople or professionals going through a strict points based system are normally positive in lifetime contribution.

Its difficult to do direct comparisons on net lifetime contributions across the anglo countries because a lot of the studies seem to be gamed to create the strongest arguments for immigration.

Regardless, as soon as you look at non-economic impacts, multiculturalism has so many downsides over homogeneity.

I was waiting for theMotte(TM) to discuss this. I had listened to the podcast Louis did with Chris Williamson (of Modern Wisdom) fame (https://youtube.com/watch?v=cBt7KbaBzu8). Not all the podcasts are hits, IMO.

While I was listening, I was rolling my eyes at what Louis was complaining about. The constant focus of "streamers", the banal descriptions of what the manosphere means, the "tax" that Chris Williamson paid (by saying he was not part of the manosphere), and so on. I stopped before I got half way.

I was trying to listen to see if Louis had any insights as I mostly do with Chris's guests but I was sorely disappointed. Anyways, I am appreciative of the comments from @faceh and @cjet79 (sorry if I summoned you) (https://www.themotte.org/post/3618/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/422386?context=8#context).

That comment really crystallizes a thought that I have been wrestling for a while what makes me manly over my lifetime. It distills some of the readings from /r/marriedredpill, parts of the Redpill from 2015-2017 (when I was really reading it) and some male-focused Substacks.

I wish Chris got someone on that had a more positive/nuanced take. But those people are not attention-seeking so it is probably a pipe dream.

I am appreciative of the comments from @faceh and @cjet79 (sorry if I summoned you)

Well its hard to complain when you give me a complement.

what makes me manly over my lifetime

In one of the original formations of my comment I was explicitly trying to wrestle with this idea.

I feel manly right now. It has been a journey. What would I tell to a young boy trying to embark on this journey?

This is not an entirely idle question for me. I have male cousins that are in the 16-23 range. I have two nephews that are young now but they'll grow. I have friends that are in their early 20's. I would like to be able to give them good advice if slightly prompted since unprompted advice is not worth the energy it takes to speak it. I've also found that just being a knowledgeable advice source and acting as you are gets some of the smarter guys to seek you out themselves. As I said above, being a man is recognizable. It is kind of one of the main benefits. Humans are social. They recognize social success, and being a man is ultimate social success for the male gender.

But those people are not attention-seeking so it is probably a pipe dream.

Has this always been the way of things? Those most worthy of the crown attention are often the least desirous of it.

I think in the case of RedPill, most people that both hold nuanced opinions and are also influential enough to help steer the tone of conversation have just gotten old. Much of red pill theory seems based on how the dating market shifted through the late 90's and early 2000's. People who were in their late twenties in 2008 are almost 50 now. It seems plausible to me that those who originally wrote the theory no longer care about swaying public opinion and the drama that comes with that.

This comes just one day after Clavicular's recent clip with Leela Saraswat went viral.

As an aside: wow, she is gorgeous.

official feminist sermons

Honest question, how widespread is feminist messaging regarding dating towards men these days? Women don't actually claim to want nice guys (but date jerks) anymore, they just date jerks (the most-panty-melting man in their Hinge inbox, who has no reason to treat them well) and complain about it. Part of this is that there's a lot more median and trashy women visible on the internet these days, and they don't seem to maintain the previous kayfaybe as tightly as the FeministTM bloggers of yesteryear did; the shallowness is very on-display. What "official" messaging that does exist consists of shitting on men for being a gestalt of the Patriarchy, rapists and abusers, and that hot guy who won't text them back after fucking them. They don't even call them NiceGuys anymore. I suppose there's ideological demands on men to be rabid protesting leftists (these demands coming from women who are themselves rabid protesting leftists), but its all abstract stuff to do with abortion, transphobia, Orange Man Bad, and anti-racism.

(Edit: the TL;DR is that the feminist orthodoxy of the time was that male romantic success was contingent on personal virtue, with personal virtue being defined as being politically Feminist, and later anti-racist and pro-LGBTQXYZ, with any lack of romantic success being proof of lack of personal virtue. Now the orthodoxy seems to just be that men=bad)

I'm old and don't really hear young guys talking about women at all, cut myself off from as much mainstream dating discourse as possible online, and I'm in a horrible bubble IRL where every woman compulsively says "Men are all such trash, amirite?" as a greeting, so I'm very aware my perspective is distorted.

Even the man-o-sphere stuff these days is plainly targeted at median/normie men, with an emphasis on those who actually do seem to have toxic masculinity (ex: the huge Muslim fanbase), whereas in the past, when the internet was just nerds, it very clearly was coming from/to nerdy experiences and frustrations.

Sometimes I hear women complaining about being on dates with man-o-sphere guys, and I'm a little bit skeptical. What fucking guy is the unlikely combination of hot enough to get a woman to go on a date with him, romantically frustrated enough to engage in Man-o-Sphere content, AND clueless enough to talk judgy redpill lingo about bodycount and hypergamy to the woman he's on a date with?

My last point of contact for the Apex Predator of contemporary playa appeal-maxxing is five years out of date, and it was to be hot while also being a black gay communist and say cringey soy things about Believing Women and Pronouns. And I don't know of any Man-o-Sphere influencers or dating coaches who give guys the advice that apparently works; self-identify as "queer" and use leftist buzzwords while treating women like shit.

What fucking guy is the unlikely combination of hot enough to get a woman to go on a date with him, romantically frustrated enough to engage in Man-o-Sphere content, AND clueless enough to talk judgy redpill lingo about bodycount and hypergamy to the woman he's on a date with?

You rang?

I jest: I've never watched any manosphere or Andrew Tate content, much less paid for it. But back when I was single, I believe I went on dates with girls in which I would bring up adjacent concepts like hypergamy or sexual market value. I think for some of them it scanned as so outrageous as to make me seem daring and iconoclastic, and hence more attractive.

What fucking guy is the unlikely combination of hot enough to get a woman to go on a date with him, romantically frustrated enough to engage in Man-o-Sphere content, AND clueless enough to talk judgy redpill lingo about bodycount and hypergamy to the woman he's on a date with?

Assuming that the manosphere content works in getting women attractive, this combo actually makes sense. The man in question failed to attract women due to being clueless in the past, and thus became sexually frustrated. He eventually stumbled on to red pill content, and implementing it improved his game to the point where women now find him attractive. Once he is a few dates in, he starts to relax and use redpill lingo. Since he follows redpill content, he is not interested in long relationships, and eventually moves onto a new woman. At this point, his former lover becomes angry and starts talking about how she should have seen the warning signs.

Besides, the guy doesn't have to mention something as extreme as hypergamy to be perceived as red pill. Certain behaviors are red-pill coded enough, and would be enough evidence for an angry ex feeling like the guy was at fault. Stuff like negging, or not taking her emotions seriously.

Sometimes I hear women complaining about being on dates with man-o-sphere guys, and I'm a little bit skeptical.

They might be jumping at shadows and imagined dogwhistles? I remember being 13 in the early 2010s and being very confused to have a girl confidently accuse me of being PUA, a scene I barely had any awareness of at the time, based on my making some relatively innocuous comment I barely remember along the lines of calling dating a "game".

An example of politics being interested in you. You can avoid alt right or whatever stuff, but the women you associate with will infer it from your statements nonetheless.

This is how you get Havel's Greengrocer. 'Are you a Soviet Spy? I think you're a Soviet Spy!'

Funnily enough this never happened to me despite long ago spending time in the PUA sphere. Never punished.

It also, reminds me of recent forced polarisation of neutral parties in the influencer sphere into stating their (non-existent) party membership.

What fucking guy is the unlikely combination of hot enough to get a woman to go on a date with him, romantically frustrated enough to engage in Man-o-Sphere content, AND clueless enough to talk judgy redpill lingo about bodycount and hypergamy to the woman he's on a date with?

Are these really such an unlikely combination? I'm sure these streamers are largely scams like any overpriced self-help program, but equally, the ideology would hardly have persisted for decades if it literally never landed any of its believers a first date, so the first two items in conjunction don't seem especially hard to believe. That leaves the third, which is handily rephrased as "what percentage of guys who only got a date at all from studying dodgy PUA-type techniques will proceed to flounder once they have the real flesh and blood woman in front of them and need to engage her in conversation?", to which I would be very surprised if the answer was in the single digits.

That leaves the third, which is handily rephrased as "what percentage of guys who only got a date at all from studying dodgy PUA-type techniques will proceed to flounder once they have the real flesh and blood woman in front of them and need to engage her in conversation?", to which I would be very surprised if the answer was in the single digits.

There were a lot of socially awkward men that mistook the map for the territory and took the Red Pill ideology quite literally. There seemed to be a correlation between those likely to make the mistake of 'talking about Fight Club' on dates and their place on the autism spectrum.

The older theory was designed to bootstrap dateless guys enough to get them on 'dates' and provide some encouragement as they discovered 'landmarks', or correlations between the theory and what they encountered in reality. They were then meant to build experience through repetition to bring themselves dating success (whatever 'success' meant to them). Unfortunately a lot of guys fell into a pattern of talking about the theory endlessly online over actually developing themselves into better (which is to say more attractive) men.

In the worst case you had weirdos autistically trying to 'force the territory to match the map', by using jargon in the field or even trying to 'correct' women's behaviour to match their own understanding of the theory rather than accepting reality as it is. This was one of the many contributing factors to the 'brand' of PUA/Red Pill cratering once it gained more mainstream awareness.

I mean we're also leaving out the denominator- there's a lot of people(citation needed). It doesn't seem difficult to believe that this might happen occasionally even if all of those things are rare.

The manosphere stuff appeals to two kinds of men -- men who can't get laid, and men who can get laid more than they think is reasonable. You see that in the distribution of complaints about dating on the motte: on the one hand you have the Hock guy, and on the other you have Sloot. One side talks up to women, even if they're complaining; they see women as having more power and options than them, and are annoyed/frustrated/alienated by the gap. The other side talks down to women, seeing them as weak souls with no emotional resilience or backbone who, in the words of Sloot, defend their wonderfulness even as they violate it.

The point of the manosphere, and perhaps why the outrage is so high, is that it consists of men who are in the latter group trying to recruit men in the former group to join them. Feminists get upset at this because its goal is to convert men with less power than women into men with more power than women, who look down on women and see them as manipulable, and it's not hard to see how feminism would find that alarming. Conservatives/normies/romantics get upset at this because it asserts that any kind of complementarianism/egalitarianism/mutuality is false consciousness, and that's their whole orientation towards intimacy. Traditionalists get upset at this because it argues that women are weak souls with no emotional resilience or backbone, and men should exploit this for their own benefit. Traditionalists instead make the very different argument that women are weak souls with no emotional resilience or backbone, and men should be beneficent to them because of it. That tension is pretty explicit; some of our trad posters will say essentially just this, and then in the next breath call Sloot a sexist.

That said, I have no clue what feminism is actually saying to men nowadays. I actually think they're saying nothing. Like you said, normies/trashy women are spilling their tea all over the internet now, and so exposure to women's concerns about dating is unregulated and not filtered through feminist beliefs except insofar as young women reach for feminist concepts they've heard of to ground whatever feelings they have in something concrete. For that reason, a lot of the dating and marriage complaints just come across as petty and boring, not meaningfully different from the complaints that you could hear about boyfriends and husbands in 1980 or 1999.

That tension is pretty explicit; some of our trad posters will say essentially just this, and then in the next breath call Sloot a sexist.

Excuse me, I call Sloot a misogynist. There is a difference.

Men are beneficent to women because of civilization; we don't live in a might makes right world where the weak suffer what they must. I mean we could, but we would be unable to maintain running water and colour TVs and microwaves and all those nice benefits of civilization. Resenting this beneficence specifically towards women(yes, many women are trashy, self absorbed etc) is misogynistic. Noting that they need it is I guess technically sexism, but it's a justified sexism. Sort of like how I guess you could term it paedophobia or something equally ridiculous to argue that 5 year olds shouldn't have driving licenses, but the retort to that isn't playing definitional games or getting mad at some poor kindergartners for not being able to drive. It's what we were already doing.

Maybe I'm just built different, but all that collective guilt shit always reads as either a confesion, a projection, or moral weakness to me.

Yeah, I'm a feminist. I'm also a flawless adonis placed on earth as an example to be followed. I don't feel guilty for shit, if I've fucked up in the past I simply don't do that thing again, and if anyone tries to make me feel bad about it I simply don't, because I'm not so bitchmade that people tut tutting me keeps me up at night.

Secondly: Also, all that "Girls like jerks" talk is a self report. Girls don't like jerks! Everyone alive likes confidence, and one way to have confidence is to enjoy being cruel to people!

Some statistically congruent portion of women are stupid and fail to see the blatant signs, just like some men are stupid and let themselves get DA'd and SA'd because they're manly men, and manly men don't get raped or abused; bitches do, so whatever is happening must not be rape or abuse because then they would be a bitch and they aren't, as they go to the bar for the sixth day in a row instead of coming home to feel sad about having a FUCKING GIRLFRIEND, not even a wife! A girlfriend! Silence knowledge workers, Someone is telling you they were in construction without telling you they were in construction.

That is the main problem with the manosphere IMO: It presents a set of values and structures that cause men who truly buy in to justify being taken advantage of both by other men and women instead of simply Hitting Da Bricks.

Apparently, the zeitgeist has turned away from "bad boys." It's not the 90s anymore. Not going to college and having served time isn't hot anymore. This is what I'm picking up at least from black YouTube. (My ex - Boalt Law school-bound at the time - once said I was slightly hotter to her after explaining I'd gone to continuation school, didn't graduate on time. I don't see a woman saying that nowadays.) To what degree does this suggest that women don't in fact want jerks?

Is the current Zeitgeist turned towards "himbos," then?

There are some dumbasses out there that want someone that will fuck their whole life up; it isn't gender segregated. I come from a poor background so I seen more of it than most people who were born upper middle; the poor whites especially love to date the exact drunk/high piece of shit who was their mother/father. Shit is tragic.

But, outside of the people who are going to find some way to self destruct, even in the past the bad boy thing was the media hallucination of the time to make middle aged men shake their heads slowly and middle aged women tut tut and give all them oldies the opportunity to feel superior to the youth. The avocado toast of their day, as it were.

I've seen clips of the documentary. Not going to watch it.

Just seems like your standard scare piece, like they moved on from climate change, declining bee populations, or unhealthy fast food meals, and now its the big, scary red pill men who are corrupting the youth and we should be having a satanic panic about it RIGHT NOW.

What just viscerally puts me off is how there is, apparently, no sympathetic examination of what exactly appeals about these guys. Sure you can kind of handwave it "guys want to feel powerful, superior, and important, and these are effectively con men who prey upon those urges." Fine. Whatever. What conditions in the material world are such that young men are looking to these men as role models, what is missing in their lives that they seek to fill it with this?

And I make this point semi-often... they always fail to offer up a competing vision of true 'healthy' masculinity that men should aspire to instead. Or to point out a non-toxic male role model that actually engenders the values they suggest men ought to seek to represent.

This creates an inherently muddled message to men. "DON'T listen to the siren song of red pill grifters, DON'T give in to misogyny, DON'T become a parody of masculinity. That's VERY BAD."

"Okay okay, but what should I do instead?"

"Fuck you, figure it out yourself or die alone."

It is a critical problem if you ask me. There are very VERY few well-known, popular male figures who espouse and represent a form of masculinity that demonstrates an appealing and attainable path an otherwise average guy can follow to get a meaningful, fulfilling life. Mike Rowe tries but I also just recently learned that Mike Rowe and his long term romantic partner ARE NOT MARRIED and DO NOT HAVE KIDS. Dude.

And I'll hit on it one more time: Charlie Kirk fulfilled that function pretty well and got murdered, in cold blood, in broad daylight, on camera and there has been no real replacement forthcoming. Yes I'm mad.

And young men by and large don't seem to want to outsource this stuff to social media or celebrities. They'd rather have a father figure (ideally an actual father) in their life to personally guide them on the path and demonstrate a healthy, successful approach to romance, business, family, life. And its the fact that society fails to provide that for millions of men that we find ourselves where we are.

You can dip into the stats and studies, its beyond obvious that whatever impact social media influencers have on guys, you can assume there's double that impact occuring on the female of the species. Its not even really controversial to say that science confirms that women are more susceptible to groupthink, peer pressure, social shaming, and use conformity to maintain social status. Whatever you want to refer to the social mechanisms for consensus formation as, its women who are being guided by it.

Sabrina Carpenter gets thousands of women to sing a lyric about men being 'useless' and we don't get thinkpieces delving into what impact this has on impressionable young women.

And of course, if you're so worried about the takeaway men get from redpill culture, please, feel free to tell me how you think men should react to THAT. What exactly is the 'healthy' male response there?

Its like we have a culturally-enforced Women are Wonderful Effect. It doesn't matter if they're performing objectively anti-social, destructive behavior for all to see. Women can do no wrong therefore if women are doing it, it isn't wrong. If you say its wrong and level a critique, YOU are in fact the bad person.

So Louis Theroux tossing ANOTHER parcel of cultural baggage onto young men's backs is simply not going to help the situation much. And I daresay its emblematic of cowardice, to a certain extent. If he wanted to court controversy and invite discussion, do the approximate equivalent of this documentary on the female side, look into what they're pulling from tiktok, from the media they consume, and how THEY are being taken in by bad actors for personal profit at the expense of their mental health and relationship with the opposite gender.

Fine. Whatever. What conditions in the material world are such that young men are looking to these men as role models, what is missing in their lives that they seek to fill it with this?

This incuriosity also applies in other fields. Why didn't everyone line up to vote for Hilary? Why did Trump win so bigly after Biden? The institutional response was to call dissenters everything from "deplorables" to "dangerous racists" to "fascist" to "almost literally the Führer reincarnate". The feedback mechanisms no longer exist (if they ever did), so there's no self-correction.

Yep.

Cue my Skin in the Game rant.

We are TEN FUCKING YEARS into Trump's political career and they STILL DO NOT GET why he is genuinely popular, and why he keeps 'winning' even as they characterize him as a buffoon.

People that are THIS wrong for THIS long ought to be filtered out of the court of public opinion, should not have positions of political authority. But no, they persist on the power of mass delusion (which, ironically, is what enables Trump to be successful too).

This is why one of the most genuinely useful rationalist skills to learn is "notice when you are confused" and "make beliefs pay rent."

If I'm constantly surprised by certain outcomes, clearly there's a knowledge or logic gap I need to address, rather than just stepping on the same rake over and over again.

This creates an inherently muddled message to men. "DON'T listen to the siren song of red pill grifters, DON'T give in to misogyny, DON'T become a parody of masculinity. That's VERY BAD."

"Okay okay, but what should I do instead?"

"Fuck you, figure it out yourself or die alone."

The issue here is that the muddling of the message is the point, and encoded in that above interaction is the clear message: "figure it out yourself [the first step of which is to ignore everything my peers and I tell you to do and learn to think for yourself]." Women want men who can figure things out for themselves, and the only way to discriminate between men who do and don't is to give them a hard, confusing, self-contradictory problem and then see which ones figure out the answer.

Yeah, but the feedback mechanisms are all screwed up.

Mistakes men make are probably overcorrected, i.e. punished too quickly and harshly for them to learn the proper lesson. Related to my point that women aren't good at gracefully rejecting guys (or accepting rejection) who approach them.

Attempts by men to coordinate into groups designed to advance their mutual interests and provide mutual support and advice tend to get disrupted and infiltrated if they gain any success.

Taking the correct action usually doesn't offer immediate rewards, and progress can be hard to perceive. Hell, you can even be PUNISHED for taking the 'correct' path, and the rewards only manifest if you push through that and have faith it will pay off.

A guy is going to take a LOT of lumps before he happens on the 'working' strategy, and he can't even be completely sure if the working strategy will be enough to win until he's followed it past the point of probable no return.

So its "figure it out on your own" but you dropped men into the wilderness with a mislabeled map, barely any supplies, and not even a walkie talkie, much less an expert guide to keep them from stepping off a cliff. So they can set off walking in a given direction and hope it works out, but without the actual resources to tell if they're walking to their doom or not.

And when the comparison point is VIDEO GAMES, which have very tight feedback loops, visible rewards and progression, and satisfying 'gameplay,' the real world seems intolerable by comparison.

That's only a problem if you believe that men in general or on average deserve a fair chance at accomplishing things like romantic partnership, sex, children, family, general life satisfaction. But my observation is that women aren't concerned with that, and I doubt it's physically possible to make them concerned with that, in general. They're concerned with finding the highest quality partner for themselves, and the highest quality partner is heavily determined by the partner's genes, and so the point of the test is purely to discriminate, not to be a system that men can learn from in order to pass it. The entire point is that they should be able to pass it without any help, despite the, again, bizarre, contradictory, nonsensical nature of the test, which also has a horrendous feedback mechanism. If the tests fixed any of these things, then the tests would work less well.

That's only a problem if you believe that men in general or on average deserve a fair chance at accomplishing things like romantic partnership, sex, children, family, general life satisfaction.

What can I say?

I'm a man, I would like a 'fair shot' at every one of those things. I think the world that is ordered to enable the majority of men to achieve this outcome if they can follow a few relatively simple guidelines, and become 'worthy' of raising kids, will produce a LOT more human happiness and long term thriving on net than the trajectory we're on now.

If women themselves are less happy by any reasonable measure then clearly this whole experiment has failed to produce good results!

The world was never fair. But it is likely that it has become substantially less fair in this regard than most men were ever taught to expect.

So as a very basic level of fairness, if the actual 'rules' are thus:

They're concerned with finding the highest quality partner for themselves, and the highest quality partner is heavily determined by the partner's genes, and so the point of the test is purely to discriminate, not to be a system that men can learn from in order to pass it. The entire point is that they should be able to pass it without any help, despite the, again, bizarre, contradictory, nonsensical nature of the test, which also has a horrendous feedback mechanism.

THEN WE SHOULD BE HONEST AND ACTUALLY TEACH THIS AS TRUTH.

I will grant it as true for purposes of discussion.

If the entire social system does not teach men that this is how things work, and inculcates them with rules like "be yourself," "treat her with respect," "believe women," and "you have male privilege"... and these men find that adhering to these rules is not effective for achieving their goals...

This is what creates the opportunity for Red Pill Influencers to step in. The whole reason it is called "red pill" is the metaphor for 'waking up from the program' and breaking the conditioning of how men are socially expected to act... and accept the biological reality of what actually produces romantic, sexual, and genetic success!

The only reason they can claim to be providing special/secret knowledge is that society and culture have in fact been hiding this information. Hence why I said:

Its like we have a culturally-enforced Women are Wonderful Effect. It doesn't matter if they're performing objectively anti-social, destructive behavior for all to see. Women can do no wrong therefore if women are doing it, it isn't wrong. If you say its wrong and level a critique, YOU are in fact the bad person.

So in short, even if the world can't be made more fair in outcomes, we could at least teach men the reality of how the game is played.

And what we appear to be observing with Clavicular Et al. a huge generational cohort of men who have been exposed to and accept that reality, and they are trying to optimize as best they can, and (unsurprisingly) the social institutions that want to maintain the status quo revile this. But they can't refute them.

I see a bunch of essentially "we should" statements, which I interpret as "the world would be better if this were so:" and for your statements, I do agree. I also think the world would be better if we all got unicorns and rainbows and eternal life without illness beyond what's exactly needed to provide just the right amount of suffering and challenge for a good life. If only we could just "we should" into that world!

Now, perhaps such a world you describe, unlike one with unicorns (until we figure out genetic engineering to a sufficient extent), is possible to get to from here. I don't think it's obviously impossible. Figuring out if and how to change this world to that better world are the real challenges, not just "what would a better world look like." And you cannot expect women as a group or on average, to do anything other than be maximally sabotaging to such a project. Because giving men information and feedback on how to be attractive is something that directly harms women's ability to judge them as potential mates. So any project of getting to that better future from here must take into account their sabotage and route around it or through it. Their sabotage is as much a fact of life as death and taxes, so best to just accept it as it is instead of considering it bad or good.

Women have sons and brothers though. Shouldn’t they be invested into increasing the fitness of their male children?

Sometimes, at the direct one-to-one cost to the male children of other women who aren't related to them, of course.

Sure, but who's going to hold them accountable if they don't do it?

(The current answer is "nobody, and if men themselves try it, they'll just get oppressed and blood-libelled even harder for it", and it shows.)

They're not trying to correct men. They're trying to filter them. And the criteria are not legible, not to men and not to them. Any stated criteria will work out to be a brick wall; those aren't real.

In terms of the larger genetic fitness level, many many women are successfully filtering themselves out too.

But this would lead us to the aside of how young ladies being on hormonal birth control probably screws up their actual desires and has them filtering for factors that aren't great for long term reproductive success.

is to give them a hard, confusing, self-contradictory problem and then see which ones figure out the answer.

Sure, but instinct doesn't self-moderate in the presence of better alternatives, which is why a good chunk of [modern] men can now go "you're not worth it, go fuck yourself" to women (and society as a whole, for that matter). It's not necessarily a positive thing, but it is a necessary part of the process.

Just as fathers failed their daughters in the '50s and '60s by giving them outdated self-sabotaging advice (the "never make anything of yourself, just marry well" one that feminists complain about), mothers fail their sons now in the same way (the "respect women and make yourself as unattractive as possible" stuff).

Its not surprising some young men feel resentment at being set up to fail, and instead choose ruthless self interest (whether that looks like checking out of the dating market or sexual exploitation of women). You can't break the social contract and expect young men to unilaterally honour their side.

You can't break the social contract and expect young men to unilaterally honour their side.

Much of society breaking the social contract and expecting men (especially white men) to unilaterally uphold their side has been working pretty well for the last 40 years, so why would the defecting part of society bother to change course?

They think that it is working, but they are not actually achieving their goals.

This creates an inherently muddled message to men. "DON'T listen to the siren song of red pill grifters, DON'T give in to misogyny, DON'T become a parody of masculinity. That's VERY BAD."

"Okay okay, but what should I do instead?"

"Fuck you, figure it out yourself or die alone."

The more common case is deliberately bad advice as a form of sabotage.

The effect is the same, but I doubt the bad advice is usually deliberately so.

This creates an inherently muddled message to men. "DON'T listen to the siren song of red pill grifters, DON'T give in to misogyny, DON'T become a parody of masculinity. That's VERY BAD."

"Okay okay, but what should I do instead?"

"Fuck you, figure it out yourself or die alone."

It is a critical problem if you ask me. There are very VERY few well-known, popular male figures who espouse and represent a form of masculinity that demonstrates an appealing and attainable path an otherwise average guy can follow to get a meaningful, fulfilling life.

I will now answer how to become a Man

At its root "healthy masculinity" is an existential crisis that every individual man sort of has to navigate on their own. You can take advice from others, and the path you follow will be similar to many others, but it will still be your own.

The question young men need to ask themselves and repeatedly try to answer is "What makes me feel like a man?" They need to find answers that they can believe in. Then they need to pursue those things and believe themselves a man by achieving them. Humans are social creatures and they pick up on the behavior and beliefs of others. Women will love the genuine "I'm a man" energy, almost regardless of where it comes from. Other men will pick up on it and respect you more. Young boys will listen to your commands.

It can be almost anything, but you'll certainly notice lots of trends and similarities. A man is a provider. A man is skilled at hard things. A man has a beautiful woman. A man is knowledgeable and intelligent. A man has a family. A man is powerful. A man is wealthy. A man has convictions. A man fights for a cause. A man appears effortlessly cool or funny. A man has a strong healthy body. A man is a good father.

The path to becoming a man can be given. Someone like Andrew Tate can get young men to believe that having beautiful women is what makes you a man, and he will teach you how to get those women. But its a weak path, for two reasons:

  1. The belief is partly tied up with someone else. Its not internal. Thus you are relying on that person to maintain the belief for you. They have to maintain their mystique of manliness.
  2. You have not learned how to build the path yourself. A single path to manliness will not last you a lifetime. You need to learn the masculinity pathfinding skill to survive long term.

If you see being a man as having a beautiful woman, then you marry a beautiful woman and feel like the ultimate man. But slowly that woman ages, or her body is stressed and shredded by child birth. If she is no longer beautiful, are you still a man? No, you lose your man belief, and she notices and loses interest in you too. Both of you feel that the other has failed in the marriage, but you will both lack the words and ideas to describe it.

Instead you learn how to find many ways to be a man. A man is a provider, but what if you lose your job? A man has a healthy and strong body, but what if you get in a car accident and are maimed? This is why you must learn to forge a belief in yourself as a man for the things you achieve. A single path might become closed to you, so you need to know how to open new ones.

No it is not easy. Yes it takes a while. Yes the rewards are totally worth it.

Sure, that and a pair of testicles

Maybe I've read too much Nietzsche, but the whole " A man is a provider. A man is skilled at hard things. A man ..." always comes off as external validation seeking weakness.

What sort of man needs the world to tell them they are a man? What sort of man is concerned at all about their manliness? By even wondering how/if you are man enough, you become not.

In summation: The Cis Het Neurotypical etc etc so on so forth are not alright, I think I dodged a bullet when god was rolling up my traits and I didn't get "Really concerned with performing gender".

"Man" is a useful Schelling point for mentally organizing virtuous traits linked to systematizing and testosterone. Plenty of them would still be useful (critical even!) on a desert island.

That is true, but in a weird way caring about them makes you less likely to have them. I think of the "Manliest" men I have known in my life, and I think of Don Miguel, who ran his hillside finca his entire life, caused no trouble for anybody, resolved any trouble brought to him by others one way or another to his own satisfaction, and was carrying fenceposts a couple miles up a hill well into his 80's. When it was his turn to help the neighbor put up a roof he did it without complaint, when it was his turn to get a roof put up the neighbors were happy to help.

At no point in his entire life did he for a second thing about " A man is a provider. A man is skilled at hard things. A man ...", or testosterone, or the dating marketplace. Similarly for my picks in the US; my neighbour Lloyd, old man Swede, etc etc.

None of these men would be considered particularly manly by the degenerates in the manosphere, but each of them would psychically and emotionally and in some cases (Swede was BIG big, like absentmindedly lift a stack of tires all at once well into his 70s big).

I guess this clarifies what I think of as the basis of virtue, which is being tough. Would you be as you were if life was a bit harder? This is also why I don't respect gender I suppose; because to in the end it's the same for all humans; regardless of your chromosomal or phycological arrangements.

At no point in his entire life did he for a second thing about " A man is a provider. A man is skilled at hard things. A man ...",

I would suspect that to the extent this is true, it's because it was so utterly self-evident that talking about it would seem silly. Those old guys absolutely had strong beliefs about what makes a man a good man, or a woman a good woman, and they definitely knew and believed that those were separate categories. What they didn't have was a bunch of autistic or naval-gazing Discourse about it.

None of these men would be considered particularly manly by the degenerates in the manosphere,

This is because the manosphere types are operating outside the paradigm of a community, so they have to hyperfocus on visually obvious elements. I've raised the topic before, and it seems relatively rare for the posters here to have opportunities to be helpful in their communities. Many are atomized, isolated.

Bluntly, if the girls never get to see you carrying 8 chairs at a time back to storage after church, then you might need to signal strength extra super hard by shallower metrics.

Bluntly, if the girls never get to see you carrying 8 chairs at a time back to storage after church, then you might need to signal strength extra super hard by shallower metrics.

So this is just a universal experience I guess.

I do think external validation is a "weakness", but that the line between external and internal is always blurry and nothing is fully internal. There is a spectrum and I think internal motivations are more lasting. That is why I have a problem with some of the Andrew Tate manosphere types. They are providing an external validation.

But truly internal validation seems a bit ... psychopathic to me. Humans are social creatures. Adam Smith is quoted as saying "Humans want to love and be loved." Optimum tradeoff from my perspective is probably 80-90% internal and the rest external.

What I really think matters on a social level is your personal belief in manliness. For many people that means external validation. I think it is healthy for most teens to have that external validation. To look to other male role models and see what works for them. But by your thirties as a male you should be charting your own path. I think midlife crisis is often men figuring out how to be manly on their own.

Fair enough. I grew up in a much more trad society, which weirdly cared way less about masculinity because everybody knew that at the end of the day the cows needed to be brought in and milked and the roof needed to be patched and dinner needed to be cooked, and getting it done was more important than being seen getting it done.

It helps one be a natural feminist when your formative experience of womanhood was Upon Dona Vicky (Capital D Dona) getting SO mad at a cow for stepping in the milk bucket on purpose then trying to step on her when she went to right it; then punched the cow in the head SO hard it (the cow) fell over and mended it's bitchy ways and acted rightly from then on (with her. Still a devil to everyone else until eventually it was eaten).

It makes all the peacocking western Manly Men do feel kinda hollow, because I can always refer to this subsistence and a bit extra farm wife I knew and think "I know a woman that could actually factually kill you in one punch, who was about 16" taller and 60 lbs heavier than her husband, and that shit was fine, so what's this dudes problem"

A man is a provider. A man is skilled at hard things. A man has a beautiful woman. A man is knowledgeable and intelligent. A man has a family. A man is powerful. A man is wealthy. A man has convictions. A man fights for a cause. A man appears effortlessly cool or funny. A man has a strong healthy body. A man is a good father.

Lets just take a quick audit, though.

Which of those things does western society actively deter and hobble young men from achieving these days? I'd argue almost all of them except the strong-healthy-body part, which is why so many men are now gym-maxxing, its the only unrestricted avenue left.

How much of the advice we do provide young men is actually outdated/useless under modern constraints? i.e. actively unhelpful and arguably setting them up for failure?

What if a prospective man surveys his potential paths to manhood, and concludes that the current structure of society is his primary obstacle to achieving it? What if he's correct?

What course of action does that man likely arrive at, assuming he doesn't give up and become a NEET on the spot.

And the whole problem with "the rewards are totally worth it" is that the big reward: wife, family, kids... those are objectively becoming less likely outcomes. Everywhere. So how do you convince these guys to get up and keep plugging away when they can observe with their own two eyes that it is increasingly unlikely that they'll get their preferred outcome unless something drastic changes?

Again, it is not easy. If it is easy, then it less likely to contribute to the feeling of manliness. Because manliness is somewhat a sense of achievement. It doesn't have to be that. But it is and it has been. If you are upset about that, then the blame does not lie with feminists it lies with ancient human culture and norms.

Artificial and natural constraints are interchangeable in my view. If people believe that only the top 10% of height is attractive that is fine. They might also believe that only the top 10% of funnyness is attractiveness. Add an endless number of competitive "best of" categories. With enough categories most men can be best at something. Its important for males to realize where and when they can be competitive with others. The smart guys will create their own categories.

I will emphasize again that this cannot be easy. To be easy defeats the purpose of it all. Working hard at being good at something is the point of it all. Its what women want. If it is too easy you won't be proving anything.

I think its somewhat less about being easy and more about being legible.

Redpill guys make the art of attracting a woman legible.

Looksmaxxers make the status game being played legible.

Bodybuilders make the process of slapping on absurd amounts of muscle very, VERY legible.

Science as a whole makes the basic biological/evolutionary/psychological underpinnings of our otherwise inscrutable traditions and social rules more legible.

If there's no legible rules, if the game being played changes on a dime or on the whim of some fickle women, or because political parties change, it becomes completely impossible to play this game in a 'rational' way.

And then people's fates are decided entirely by luck and a few factors they may or may not be able to control.

A man is skilled at hard things. A man is knowledgeable and intelligent.

Neither of these require any external input, western society does not deter or hobble you from doing them. It doesn't promote them, but that's the key underlying point. You need to do them on your own, because "figuring it out" is part of that skill. Competence is sexy.

Not going to weigh in on your other stuff because it's not necessarily wrong, but these two were glossed over and you are wrong about them.

Neither of these require any external input, western society does not deter or hobble you from doing them.

Well that's two, then.

Of course, what's the incentive for doing them if the reward isn't there.

Men ARE in fact deterred from traditional paths that would lead to knowledge. A properly motivated guy can learn all he wants through self-driven research and reading and discussion... like we have here. He just won't get the official 'certificate' that signifies he is intelligent and knowledgeable.

But he will not earn much respect merely for his intelligence and knowledge unless he can convert that into money, which is also made very difficult these days.

And becoming skilled at 'hard things' ultimately depends on what barriers exist to acquiring the skills. And what, precisely, do we consider 'hard things' in terms of skill?

Of course, what's the incentive for doing them if the reward isn't there.

Existential self-satisfaction and discovery. Needing to be rewarded for doing/knowing/being good at things is the behavior of a child or a dog. Part of being a man is cutting your own path in the world for yourself, not because other told you to, rewarded you for doing so, told you: "you were are a good little boy", etc.

Yes, collectively society can be at tension with the individual in conferring certification of competence, and even that certification can degrade in actually being a clear signal of competence. Doesn't make that competence any less masculine.

But he will not earn much respect merely for his intelligence and knowledge unless he can convert that into money, which is also made very difficult these days.

For some things sure, but I disagree its difficult. Yes somethings like being handy around the house will not get you money, but being able to do them on your own displays competence, saves you money. People absolutely will respect you for it.

And becoming skilled at 'hard things' ultimately depends on what barriers exist to acquiring the skills. And what, precisely, do we consider 'hard things' in terms of skill?

Idk, figure it out, its a personal journey towards being competent. For some its being handy, woodsy, crafty. For others its great partner dance skills. I don't know of anyone who has ever thought that being a Renaissance man was a negative. Giving people a template to follow destroys the credibility of the signal. You need to figure out what "being skilled or being competent" means to you on your own.

Needing to be rewarded for doing/knowing/being good at things is the behavior of a child or a dog. Part of being a man is cutting your own path in the world for yourself, not because other told you to, rewarded you for doing so, told you: "you were are a good little boy", etc.

Cutting a path TOWARDS what?

There are some things that have to be terminal values or objective, or close to it, for people to keep charging on. Call if 'purpose,' or call it will to power, call it whatever, but there's some world-state, some emotional state, some actual place on the map that one is striving towards. What is the long-term payoff in this life?

Existential self-satisfaction and discovery

I have engaged in a lot of 'discovery' over the past 10 years. Introspection, outrospection, research, experimentation, trying things, failing, and sometimes succeeding.

And it turns out that the factors that gives me the highest amount of existential contentment and self-satisfaction are having an attractive partner that loves me and having a genetic legacy in the world that I can expect will outlast me.

Bar none. I've had the experience, and I can say with zero doubt the happiest days of my life were having a woman that I expected to marry at my side. I am not guessing, I've been there, I know how it feels, I know how motivating it was, I can remember how happy it made me.

Likewise, turns out one of the most important things in my life is my little 18 month old niece. I can only imagine how important a child who is my direct genetic lineage would feel.

Amazingly, I also noticed that these are the exact things that the modern world has made much, much harder to achieve, for completely structural/economic/political reasons that are beyond any individual man's control.

I suspect I'm not the only one who has come to this sort or realization. Far from it.

Idk, figure it out,

Yeah sure. 10 years training Krav Maga 5 of those years teaching it. I can probably physically dominate on the order of 95% of the male population. If mating rights with local females came down to a contest of physical violence, I'm likely winning a whole harem for myself. But no, society is not (currently) arranged that way. How is it arranged?

Acquiring that skill was a hard thing. Maybe someday I'll have to us that skill. I'd love to never have to physically harm someone, but the capacity to do so is good.

But... why spend time building such skills. I point towards my earlier self-discovery. If I can't find a loving partner, if I can't pass on my genes and raise and protect children of my own, what in all that is good and holy do I do with these skills? If I'm destined to be alone for my whole life then I'm missing something that I am PAINFULLY AWARE would make me happier and more content.

And if developing further skills isn't appreciably increase my chances of getting this, then the motivation to put in the effort is simply not there.

Incentives exist, incentives drive behavior no matter your philosophy on the matter. If there's some reward for a behavior, you get more of it. Full stop.

And the current incentives are lacking for going out and doing 'great things' for a world that isn't going to let you achieve the favorable outcome that most people are biologically wired to desire.

Like, dude I don't, and most guys don't need someone holding their hand every step of the way. But support, positive reinforcement, and constructive criticism are sort of necessary. Rome wasn't built by a bunch of individual dudes self-maxxing. It was cooperation, coordination, building through team efforts (and some slavery), working TOGETHER rather than just saying "I dunno, you go figure out what you want to do." In short, men helping men figure out a unified purpose, and driving in unison towards that purpose for decades on end.

And when they didn't have enough women to go around, they banded together and guess what they did. And presumably your philosophy would approve of such path-carving. It shows gumption.

But it'd really help to make the whole process easier if we can at least agree that the social baseline is in fact slanted against men, and the factors that enabled and encouraged men to succeed not even 50 years ago have been knocked out from under them. AT LEAST BE HONEST ABOUT THE MAGNITUDE OF THE TASK, and then we can maybe acknowledge that solving it/overcoming it will require some serious cooperation between men, not just a bunch of individual guys wandering around 'figuring things out' ad hoc, with most of them failing, individually.

So, how can you cooperate/coordinate with other men to improve things?

You've written a lot, and tied much of it to your personal experience, I'm not sure I can match you in length but I will try in depth. I'm not really motivated to litigate point for point with you though.

Cutting a path through life, towards death, dissolution, non-existence, remembrance, the next life, pick your metaphysical ending. Not every journey is about the destination. I exist therefore I am. There is no purpose other than the one you give your own life. You need to forge your own meaning. That meaning is going to be deeply personal and deeply individual. No one can give it to you, or tell you what it is. The biggest crime our society has inflicted on men, is that by trying to control them, force them to fit in the square hole of society, we have created a class of men who need to be told what to do, how to think, how to feel, how to be. Lo for it to be me to fall to the common trap of now prescribing what manhood means, all I can say is that manhood is forge by the individual. You cannot forge something without resistance, without struggle.

It sounds like to you, meaning was found through family, you see your existence as the perpetuation of your familial line. That's an old meaning, common through history. But it has its risks. As stated elsewhere in this thread, it depends on others to engage with you. You have tied your own happiness to others, and are thus at the mercy of the fates, or the health of our society. You can rage against the darkness but accept it is the darkness of your own choosing.

I have never been one to find meaning in my genetic line. Oh I've had the thoughts about my biological purpose, but I'm not a animal. I am not chained to my biology. I find meaning, manhood, masculinity in the depth and breath of my knowledge and skills, my ability to overcome challenges. To me nothing gives me greater satisfaction than thinking about where I came from: an outcast, autistic child, to a pillar of my local community. I'm not going to humble brag about all the skills I've developed or knowledge I have acquired. But I look back on my struggle, and I find meaning in it.

I'm sure there are broad strokes around what meaning a man can find. What it means to "be a man" but its varied, and subscribing to a one-size fits all; these are the boxes you need to check to be "a man" is exactly the opposite of what manhood means.

Our major viewpoint differences is that you have tied yourself to others, to society, to reward you for "being a man". You have an external locus of reward. All your efforts, gaining skills, knowledge, capability, are all in service of peacocking your way into to having other's recognize you and reward you for those skills/knowledge/capabilities. Incentives do exist, they do drive behavior, but the mistake is that thinking life is some sort of video game where the rewards are deterministic: insert resources, tech, behavior, -> get predefined rewards for doing so. It's not and has never been. Yeah the previous generations paired up more, but those weren't all marriages of love, but economic necessity, social necessity, cultural necessity. Times change and people don't want to be shackled to someone who "was there and available and I could stand", they want a fantasy of love and marriage.

Your entire mentality seems to be as though you can engineer society like its some video game, provide the incentives -> get behavior. And then you get mad because society is not encouraging the incentives you think it should, failing to conceive that maybe society is not a video game. It's this weird technocratic thinking that is divorced from reality.

Different time period, Rome existed in a brutal world where most people died often, and to survive it required you to band together, build a community, struggle together, and win at all costs. Modern life is not that world. If you want to go back to subsistence farming and raiding your neighbors for sheep, then move to Afghanistan or Somalia and Iron-Age Max with the bros. You can forge this men-helping-men tribe the same way everyone has already figured out to: Shared Struggle. Modern life is currently too wealthy, safe, secure, comfortable to really give you that struggle. You find that sort of camaraderie in places where those comforts are stripped, or the struggle is emphasized. It probably doesn't scale well.

And lets be clear, your fantasy of Rome being this Men-For-Men paradise was far from the truth. The society was not propelled by the unified purpose, but by individual agents each seeking what was best for themselves with a society that had converged to channeling that towards its own continued existence. It was not engineered. Nobody sat in the game design room and was like "here add a pinch of republicanism, a dash of social approval from public works, and a splash of citizen armies" For every society that has converged to pro-social norms there are hundreds of societies that have converged on anti-social ones and failed. History doesn't remember them.

And when they didn't have enough women to go around, they banded together and guess what they did. And presumably your philosophy would approve of such path-carving. It shows gumption.

I have a fairly Nietzschean disposition, the ancient world was cruel and brutal. I do not judge the men of yesteryear by what was required to exist in such a time.

More comments

It can be almost anything, but you'll certainly notice lots of trends and similarities. A man is a provider. A man is skilled at hard things. A man has a beautiful woman. A man is knowledgeable and intelligent. A man has a family. A man is powerful. A man is wealthy. A man has convictions. A man fights for a cause. A man appears effortlessly cool or funny. A man has a strong healthy body. A man is a good father.

Your comment reminded me of a quote-

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”

― Robert A. Heinlein

Just seems like your standard scare piece, like they moved on from climate change, declining bee populations, or unhealthy fast food meals, and now its the big, scary red pill men who are corrupting the youth and we should be having a satanic panic about it RIGHT NOW.

I mean that might be its role for some and the reason it's been made, but it's Louis Theroux, he is just meeting influencers and asking them questions and then leaving long silences for them to hang themselves, just as he has done for many other interview subjects. There's not really any editorialising. You can say it's selectively edited to make them look bad but if you watch it, it's hard to say it does anything than show conversations with them play out in real time and leave it to the viewer to make their own judgements (which will surely be negative, because the interview subjects are objectively absolute bell-ends).

And I make this point semi-often... they always fail to offer up a competing vision of true 'healthy' masculinity that men should aspire to instead. Or to point out a non-toxic male role model that actually engenders the values they suggest men ought to seek to represent.

I think that's a hole in the culture generally, but this particular documentary is hard to watch without seeing a clear contrast between Louis Theroux himself and the influencers. He is weedy, softly spoken and awkward, but much more comfortable in his psoriasis-striken skin than they are in their suntanned muscle suits. He actually comes across as much more masculine and secure than they do. Albeit adorkable fearless modern day Socrates may not be an ideal your average teenage boy is going to gravitate towards (although I actually did as a teen).

Two criticisms: This documentary is biased and trying to pile on young men, and, Where are the female equivalents?

Focusing on the latter maintains your good points here about just Theroux just letting these people speak.

The most direct counterpart to this that springs to mind is another UK documentary that came in the midst of a similar moral panic (and also leaves the audience to make up their own mind): '1000 Men and Me, The Bonnie Blue story' by Victoria Silver. This had similar profile to the manosphere one in the UK but would not have benefitted from the Netflix effect globally.

You can say it's selectively edited to make them look bad but if you watch it, it's hard to say it does anything than show conversations with them play out in real time and leave it to the viewer to make their own judgements (which will surely be negative, because the interview subjects are objectively absolute bell-ends).

I'm not throwing any particular accusation out.

But Documentaries are always going to be 'tainted' by the choice of interviewees, the topics they actually ask about, and selective, if not deceptive editing.

I think the types who agreed to interview are also somewhat more likely to be bad examples since they are the attention-seeking types, rather than the more grounded, intelligent ones who could in theory steelman their own positions.

But hey, if Louis' sole intent is to expose a grift and undermine the status of the grifters, I can overall approve. But again, its not examining why this grift is successful.

Albeit adorkable fearless modern day Socrates may not be an ideal your average teenage boy is going to gravitate towards (although I actually did as a teen).

Dorks need role models too.

And I guess he can at least attest to being married with kids.

I have seen the claim that anyone in the sphere with a shred of sense or self-respect refused the offer to interview.

Not entirely sure who such people might be, tbh.

Warren Farrell would be a good example, but he is about a thousand miles away from the contemporary manosphere.

Back in my day, the big three of the Manosphere were Roissy, Roosh, and Rollo (Dalrock was a distant fourth). But those were bloggers, and it seems like the new meta is streaming? Yet, when I think of big manosphere streamers I think of Andrew Tate, Kevin Samuels, or Richard Cooper. I've never heard of the guys in this documentary.

There are some RedPill guys who were around since the early days who have maintained a sheen of respectability, and they aren't spotlight-seeking anymore, so they might interpret an interview invite as an unnecessary risk.

This whole thing is pretty weird to me. Many of the men in the documentary are avowed misogynists, but guys like that were common 20 years ago, 50 years ago, and so on. Are they more common today? No, not really.

What confuses me - on both the ‘incel’ and ‘mainstream liberal’ (not that those are the only two views, but they’re the two most commonly represented in this debate) is that both sides are taking something out of these stories and interactions that isn’t true.

Let me illustrate:

The handsome, outgoing and tall 19 year old ‘Clavicular’ flirts with and hits on the young women outside Miami bars and clubs on camera. He says some outrageous things and also happens to have been an incel / looksmaxxing forum dweller. According to the incels this somehow vindicates a particular strand of contempt for women. But this young man’s misogyny and performative meanness to women isn’t why he gets laid! He gets laid because, presumably, he is tall, handsome and outgoing. A very handsome and charming 6’4 man could just as well be a consummate feminist and do just as well. If the accusation is that women looking to hook up with guys outside clubs in Miami prioritize looks over the politics and social views of the men they hook up with, OK? As the joke about white nationalist men with non-white wives goes, this is not a gender-specific concept.

And does this really mean women in general are particularly shallow? Leaving aside the fact that may of these streamers primarily hookup with OnlyFans content creators (ie sex workers), even the “girl in a tight dress outside a nightclub in Miami at 1am willing to talk on camera to a guy with an entourage of posturing young men” isn’t the ‘average’ woman or even young woman, it’s a very much filtered group. It’s like dating only people you meet at Burning Man and complaining they all smell bad, are polyamorous, and have STDs.

The second issue, the banality of the progressive or mainstream critique of these guys, is just as obvious - the primary victims of these men aren’t young women, who mostly don’t care or have nothing to do with them (unless they have an OnlyFans to advertise) - they’re the young men who donate their hard earned money to them on stream, or who spend thousands of dollars on scam courses or fake ‘trading’ apps where nobody but the house (and the influencer taking a cut of every rube he directs its way) ever makes any money. It’s that short Mexican guy from the documentary who thinks that if he’s only a bit more masculine, more misogynist, more alpha, he can have the life of the tall rich white guy.

But this young man’s misogyny and performative meanness to women isn’t why he gets laid!

This kind of person is similar to the women with duck-lips and basketball-sized breast implants. They take something that is actually attractive to the other sex like bigger lips and bigger breasts, but then take it too far, but this makes them successful as social media personalities, because people who are inadequate in a way, tend to look for people who exaggerate in that area, not people who are normal.

I do think that for a guy who always does what a woman wants, is afraid of being negatively judged by women and thus does not approach them, is afraid to take up space, is afraid of saying things that women may disagree with, etc; can benefit from a higher level of misogyny where he starts believing that women are regularly full of it, stops caring as much about their opinions, their lack of comfort when an approach doesn't work out, isn't very afraid to speak his real thoughts and preferences, etc.

the primary victims of these men aren’t [...] It’s that short Mexican guy from the documentary who thinks that if he’s only a bit more masculine, more misogynist, more alpha, he can have the life of the tall rich white guy.

Or is that exactly the kind of person that can benefit from them, by applying 1/10th of what the streamer shows to his own life? I haven't seen the documentary, but did he really expect to have that exact same life, or just to get a result that is closer to that?

baseball-sized breast implants

One would struggle to call baseball-sized implants going too far, except perhaps going too far in the other direction.

Ah yes, modified to be the right sport, sport.

If the accusation is that women looking to hook up with guys outside clubs in Miami prioritize looks over the politics and social views of the men they hook up with, OK?

Miami. You don't say! It's sad that young men really just want a decent-looking Jesse Buckley-style female friend with similar interests that grows into a LOVE interest. But they're so adrift they're pining for the longstanding trope of superficial club chicks? Chicks who existed in the 80s too - when things weren't so bad - and so a constant.

guys like that were common 20 years ago, 50 years ago, and so on. Are they more common today? No, not really.

The misogynist basement dwelling rapist incel and the cock carousel riding woman are both myths. Not in the sense that there don't exist individuals who might qualify as those categories--sure, it's possible to find both. But their primary purpose isn't as labels meant to describe people you're likely to meet in physical reality, but to be symbolic avatars for people to project their deepest neuroses and fears onto.

The algorithm detects that people engage strongly with their neuroses and fears and so presents them more and more of the same. And so these virtual types end up displacing conceptions of the typical man and woman informed by interactions with real men and women.

The "Clavicular Thesis" would be closer to "Looks are the most important thing, more important than everything else." You could say, yeah, everyone knows looks are important, but since you're not currently a looksmaxxer, clearly your preference for looks is weaker than Clav's. And he'd say your preference was wrong.

In a way it's almost saintly, of course everyone knows virtue is good but are you actively cultivating your virtue? So you become a hero by embodying virtue at a higher level than everyone else. I guess in some sense that's just what it means to be an idol.

As for scam courses and money, the modal donation to a streamer is in the $5-$10 range. The scam courses are almost a separate category of behavior. (I think the problem is actually somewhat class-coded, participating in that world is low-status, it's like Alex Jones advertiser supplements, Trump University, influencer bodybuilding routines, etc. There's nothing wrong in principle with paying for any of these things but we think of it as low-status.)

The "Clavicular Thesis" would be closer to "Looks are the most important thing, more important than everything else."

Most important for what? For getting casual sex, sure. For developing a soul-deep bond with someone you'd enjoy talking to every day for the rest of your life… jury's still out. Or, rather, Manosphere types don't even try to make such an argument, because they don't believe in romance. I think that's the underlying assumption that makes them repellent and anti-human, the real Clavicular Thesis: "there's no such thing as true love, so don't even worry about anything more sophisticated than hacking the female monkey brain's sex drive (for which looks are trivially the most important thing)".

Most important for what? For getting casual sex, sure. For developing a soul-deep bond with someone you'd enjoy talking to every day for the rest of your life… jury's still out. Or, rather, Manosphere types don't even try to make such an argument, because they don't believe in romance.

Well, I think the steelman of the argument is that to have the soul-deep bond with a woman as a romantic/sexual partner, there needs to be primal attraction on her part. So that if she has short term flings with attractive men who won't commit to her; and then settles for a less attractive man who is otherwise a good relationship partner, but doesn't excite her in the same way, the relationship will be poisoned from the start and she will always resent him for not living up to her past partners.

I do think there is some degree of validity of this argument. If society is willing to agree that men can be spoiled by frequent use of pornography and frequent viewing of women who meet "unrealistic beauty standards," why is it so difficult to accept that women can be spoiled by casual sex with extremely desirable men?

I would caution you against overly conflating "attractive men" and "physically attractive men" but otherwise this seems true to me.

Most important for what?

Income, status, happiness, grades, romantic success, job hunting, everything. It's a pretty consistent finding in social research that people treat you better when you're more attractive. People treat you differently when you're good-looking. They give you things. They take your ideas more seriously. They're nicer.

For developing a soul-deep bond with someone you'd enjoy talking to every day for the rest of your life…

Being physically attracted to someone is an extreme prerequisite for wanting to spend the rest of your life with them.

Being physically attracted to someone is an extreme prerequisite for wanting to spend the rest of your life with them.

It doesn't seem to be for women. I've seen too many instances of "woman falls in love for another reason, finds guy physically attractive now that she's in love with him" to chalk it up to coincidence. I don't know why, but it certainly seems to be common from what I've seen.

Yeah, it's a prerequisite but it's not independent of other factors, nor does it have to be there from the start.

Being physically attracted to someone is an extreme prerequisite for wanting to spend the rest of your life with them.

Sure; but it is not the only prerequisite, and past a certain level of time and energy spent looksmaxxing, you're going to be neglecting other, very necessary things that aren't confined to the merely carnal. Also, I'm not convinced that being the most attractive gives you anywhere near as big an edge in the fall-in-reciprocated-love game as it does in the getting-lots-of-one-night-stands game. A relatively high baseline of attractiveness is important to both, but comparative attractiveness seems much more important to the latter.

In any case, I think you're making an argument that these guys don't actually make. I might be mistaken - I'm not exactly an aficionado - so if you want to prove me wrong, by all means show me prominent Manosphere types evangelizing about the two-sided intellectually, emotionally, spiritually fulfilling romantic relationships that looksmaxxing has netted them. But my understanding is that the very notion embodied by the "Red Pill" meme involves denying that such things are possible.

As for scam courses and money, the modal donation to a streamer is in the $5-$10 range.

Many of these streamers stream 7 days a week all day, that $10 a stream adds up fast, there’s a reason these guys are buying Lamborghinis.

"Looks are the most important thing, more important than everything else." You could say, yeah, everyone knows looks are important, but since you're not currently a looksmaxxer, clearly your preference for looks is weaker than Clav's. And he'd say your preference was wrong.

Most important thing for what? I think a reasonable framing is that looks are very important, especially when seeking a partner (but also generally, the halo effect, etc). That’s just biology. But that doesn’t justify looksmaxxing to the extreme lengths some of these people go to. You can agree that looks are important without devoting thousands of hours to going from an 8 to an 8.5, for example. That is not a simple way to make bone smashing or leg lengthening necessarily rational.

there’s a reason these guys are buying Lamborghinis.

A lot of them are leased and if they get used in video's, they can also be deducted as a business expense.

Many of these streamers stream 7 days a week all day, that $10 a stream adds up fast, there’s a reason these guys are buying Lamborghinis.

Right, but what I mean is that it's not necessarily dysfunctional on the part of the viewer. You made the remark that "they’re the young men who donate their hard earned money to them on stream" -- but for most people the occasional $5 tip doesn't amount to a very high-stakes donation. (I donated $5 once to someone through that "Buy Me a Coffee" page because a supplement he had been advertising actually solved something I was dealing with.

You can agree that looks are important without devoting thousands of hours to going from an 8 to an 8.5, for example.

I agree with you but I imagine your intuition on what's reasonable from Clavicular's is very different. Observably there are a lot of "looksmaxxing interventions" that don't cost much in terms of time or money but are enormously effective.

For example: I got turned onto Vitamin A by a friend's girlfriend I incorrectly pegged as ten years younger than she actually was. You can get adapalene over the counter or you can get a simple script from your doctor for tretinoin. I ran out of mine a few weeks ago and when I resumed my friends immediately complimented me on how good I looked, have I lost weight? It's not an extreme intervention and has basically no significant side-effects. (Tretinoin can dry out the skin so you use a little lotion or you can go with a lower dose Vit A supplement, it's really not a big deal.) And this is talked about on looksmaxxing forums. Maybe you haven't heard about it before, in which case, the looksmaxxers would feel satisfied that they are offering something above and beyond something "everybody knows". Or maybe you still don't feel like doing any of this (above and beyond the immediate excuses that you're at your desk, you're busy right now, you're intrigued but will look into it etc.). In which case, the looksmaxxers would feel satisfied that they are cultivating a virtue that materially improves their good looks that most people are not pursuing.

Imagine there were $10 bills on the sidewalk, so you tried to encourage your friends to start picking them up. And they said: "Everybody knows already about the $10 bills," "$10 really isn't that much," "Money isn't all that important". I'm certainly not going to say you need to spend all day picking up bills to the exclusion of everything else, but...

But that doesn’t justify looksmaxxing to the extreme lengths some of these people go to. You can agree that looks are important without devoting thousands of hours to going from an 8 to an 8.5, for example. That is not a simple way to make bone smashing or leg lengthening necessarily rational.

I'm reminded of a line in some Op Ed (NYTimes or Boston Globe, IIRC) I read in early 2000s, where some Republican pundit was justifying his push back against president Bush, in part by saying something like, "When the car you're in has veered sharply to the right towards a cliff, the proper thing to do isn't to turn the wheel back to neutral; it's to turn it sharply back to the left." Looksmaxxing to the point of self-surgery like in Gattaca seems extreme to a demented extent, but it's a response to what I perceive as an environment in which the idea that looks don't matter at all has become the only allowable opinion to be expressed, to the extent that a significant portion of the population of those environments have decided to believe it, as expressed by their behaviors in terms of looks with respect to romance.

The "Clavicular Thesis" would be closer to "Looks are the most important thing, more important than everything else." You could say, yeah, everyone knows looks are important, but since you're not currently a looksmaxxer, clearly your preference for looks is weaker than Clav's. And he'd say your preference was wrong.

Yeah but... so? What does it exactly even mean for a preference to be "wrong" or "right" in this context? Near as I can tall, it's a debate on what is effective (for attracting women), and my observations on what the type of a guy who attracts a lot of women and has a highly successful dating life indicates that yes, looks are important, but they're not as important as being fun, charismatic and confident, and the manosphere types are frequently not a reliable type on what sort of looks are actually the most attractive to women (partly due to ignorance, partly due to their predilection for maing money by advertising get-swole-quick solutions etc.)

looks are important, but they're not as important as being fun, charismatic and confident

Looking hot is the number one determinant of whether people interpret you as fun charismatic and confident.

and the manosphere types are frequently not a reliable type on what sort of looks are actually the most attractive to women

Although there is always an arbitrary component attractiveness has many objective parts. Bone structure, body fat percentage, frame, jawline, hairline, fashion, clear skin, red lips, etc. etc. There are some guys who take it too far into ridiculous caricatures but generally when we talk about looking more attractive we all know what's being talked about. There aren't a lot of competing schools of thought here, there isn't one group claiming you should shrink your hairline, another claiming you should restore your hairline, one claiming you should gain 100 pounds, one claiming you should develop acne, etc. etc.

Clav would say, essentially, that you're coping. That some like blondes and some like brunettes doesn't change the basic beauty ideal. And maybe, sure, too much goes too far but women who profess to look down on looksmaxxing in theory swoon for the looksmaxxers in practice.

As I said, I'm comparing what is being said here with my own observations for 40+ years of life and counting. Who am I going to believe, my own lying eyes or some guy online?

There aren't a lot of competing schools of thought here, there isn't one group claiming you should shrink your hairline, another claiming you should restore your hairline, one claiming you should gain 100 pounds, one claiming you should develop acne, etc. etc.

Well, sure, obvious stuff is obvious, but there are in fact differing opinions on how muscular you should get and where, whether you should aim for the hollow-cheeks look etc.

Looking hot is the number one determinant of whether people interpret you as fun charismatic and confident.

Oh come on. I had a friend who was quite handsome but mumbled and had the presence of wallpaper. Ended up drinking himself to death, creeping women out on the way.

This is like if I said that men are taller than woman and you said, no way, the tallest person I know is a woman, she's 6'5.

Do you think that's literally the only example I've ever seen, not simply the most salient?

I’m just wondering why anyone decides to release a documentary about the Manosphere in 2026. As far as I can tell, the period when the Manosphere had any relevance was sometime between 2008-14. Since 2014 the defining fault line in the Culture War has been race, not sex, and most of the political attention the Manosphere might have otherwise been able to capture was swept up by Trump, who apparently has relatively little or no interest in gender politics. The PUA scene was already declining before the COVID lockdowns for various reasons and seems to have completely died off since then. Andrew Tate, as far as I know, is simply rehashing a dumbed-down version of arguments you could find on any of the dozens of Red Pill sites that existed back in 2013 or so.

Since 2014 the defining fault line in the Culture War has been race, not sex

And even then, any oxygen in the room for issues about sex has been sucked up by the trans issue.

the trans issue

Which, in Britain, where Theroux is from and where the panic about the manosphere is most prominent, is a feminist issue. British feminists are a strikingly powerful and organized bloc and feminism continues to be a major culture war issue in the UK.

TERF opposition to trans stuff is directly connected to feminist opposition of the manosphere. They see both as manifestations of men attempting to wield power over women or harm them.

As a side note, I think it's worth pointing out that manosphere types can only exist to the extent feminism also exists. So for example, one can imagine a traditional society where (1) women are not free to have sex outside of marriage; and (2) any proposed marriage must be approved by a woman's father or other male guardian. In such a society, a pick-up artist type is not going to get anywhere. No amount of cold approaching, negging, etc. is going to get a man into a woman's pants.

On the other hand, in a society where women are free to have sex on a whim with whomever they want, then it's kind of inevitable that (1) some men will experiment with different techniques for seducing women; (2) men will exchange ideas on these issues; and (3) those men will discover things about female sexuality which are unflattering (because women are human and in general the truth about human nature is unflattering at times). i.e. some kind of manosphere will develop.

So really, as usual, this is about women wanting to have their cake and eat it too.

I mean traditional societies had men leaving Ophelia as a recurring motif- it happened occasionally.

For sure, the misogyny is largely amplified by the streisand effect. Even those who unironically push #notallmen are falling into the rhetorical trap of auditioning for women's social approval by "speaking up and calling out their bros". I don't disagree with the sentiment, it's basic human decency after all and both men and women should do it. But I do object to posturing for social capital via feminism.

So what is the problem with the manosphere? That it spreads dangerous lies and radicalises young men into subjugating and even killing women? Or that the rhetoric makes women look bad?

Neither of those things. The manosphere Is Problematic because it convinces young men to get off the path of contributing to society in the way that society wants men to contribute to it, when it is easiest to get started on that path of filling the male role in society. Yes, feminism does the same thing for women and the double standard exists, but two wrongs don't make a right. Yes, there are legitimate issues the manosphere points to- just like feminism, which really did call out some bad stuff- but most of it is whining and secession from public contribution. Society needs young men to study for career skills, work hard, join the army, etc. Young male activities which seem pointless but which society is largely pro(such as team sports) largely do push towards these goals at least somewhat.

The manosphere Is Problematic because it convinces young men to get off the path of contributing to society in the way that society wants men to contribute to it

Yes, but what "society" wants is unreasonable. Not because what it wants in terms of contributions, but because of what it's willing to provide in return -- which is that they can keep some of the money they earn, and that's it.

Well, there's a very good reason other than physical fitness for why societies tend to try to get men into the military at young ages like 18.

It's signing up to kill people on government orders and potentially die yourself, to protect a society that on an institutional level barely knows that you exist and will do relatively little for you, compared to what it asks of you, if you ever fall on hard times.

It is an easier sell to young naive reckless men than it is to men who have more life experience.

The government by and large does follow through on it's promises to soldiers.

Fair enough but I was posing that query to the anti-manosphere folk, not a TheMotte user. I agree with what you say, but that is not what the usual critics regularly write screeds about. Nor are they the champions of healthy male bonding activities like team sports. Au contraire, it's the same folk who believe (or flock with people who believe) that the Boy Scouts was exclusionary for only allowing boys. The subject of their concerns is always women and being palatable to women.

They wanted access to the boy scouts because the girl scouts suck, and they're seemingly pretty happy with the gender-segregated compromise. They may not be championing team sports but they're more than happy to point to them as good when the situation calls for it, and they aren't complaining vocally about it either.

The manosphere complaints are taken seriously by the powers that be for the reasons I just outlined, and not for 'protecting women and girls' reasons. That's BS, tPtb don't care about that- see also, Weinstein. 'Protecting women and girls' is, however, a potent meme for getting nice, middle class moms onboard, and you cannot run a campaign of adolescent-targeted censorship without parents, China is failing at it let alone the west.

While yes, feminism is running a very similar campaign with very similar effects towards girls and young women, that's completely true. I'm not claiming there's not a double standard here, but the powers that be are also very concerned about lower class defections from feminism resulting in shit they have to eat the bill for(like teen pregnancy). That's why the FLDS got raided despite not really having child welfare concerns(Texas CPS basically said they couldn't find a reason, and nobody likes the FLDS)- because they're all doing welfare fraud without engaging in the appropriate political machinery. Like it or not, lower class defections from feminism tend not to wind up as happy 50's larping stepford due to the reactionary impulse not itself providing any alternative to feminism. Organized groups with some alternative lifestyle who either support themselves or form political machines to cover their welfare fraud? Anglosphere governments don't really care all that much.

I haven’t watched the documentary yet, but IMO if you wish to increase the sum total happiness in society, it’s better to lean into “women should be ashamed of their gender” than “men should be ashamed of their gender”. This is because women are more sensitive to shame, threats of social ostracization, and other kinds of social stressors, while being more socially conformist, and while also being more “vain” in their choice of mate (hypergamy, which is just nature naturing), and more likely to instigate divorce when the status differential is changed in their favor [1, 2, 3]. Men, contrarily, are more likely to take risks and break social norms in order to secure a mate, and so any attempt at shaming them into not getting laid will be less effective. So there is a qualitative difference in the effect size of any behavior-policing social intervention: with the same amount of shame, you can modify more of the behaviors and values of more women than if you tried the same for men. We know from a study on the Lancaster Amish that women who are controlled according to traditional values have less stress, fewer symptoms of depression, higher aggregate scores of mental health, lower levels of intimate partner violence, higher levels of social support, and even report lower levels of unfair treatment owing to gender (lol, lmao even) compared to the general population. We can only imagine how happy they would be with traditional values + modern Starbucks beverages. Traditionalism also uniquely buffers against the depression-increase when women marry:

Detailed reviews of epidemiological findings suggest that marriage may have detrimental effects in females, possibly due to gender-specific demands posed by marriage and the resulting limited number of roles available to females. Similar reasons may explain why looking after small children is associated with greater risk of depression in females. Both home-making and child care reduce the likelihood of females being in paid employment or put additional responsibilities on those who are employed. Married females with no paid employment have to rely for identity and self-esteem on the role of housewife, a role that carries many frustrating elements and has been increasingly devalued in modern societies […] Indirect evidence for the strong effect exerted by social and cultural factors is provided by those studies showing no, or limited, gender differences in depression rates […] in cultural groups where high value is attached to the female role, such as in Mediterranean countries (Reference Mavreas, Beis and MouyiasMavreas et al, 1986; Reference Vázquez-Barquero, Diez-Manrique and PenaVázquez-Barquero et al, 1987), among the Old Order Amish (Reference Egeland and HostetterEgeland & Hostetter, 1983) or among orthodox Jews in the London area (Reference Loewenthal, Goldblatt and GortonLoewenthal et al, 1995).

In light of the data, I’m not sure why anyone would take manosphere / feminism discourse seriously. Neither of them have any evidence-backed plan to make men and women happier. Maybe the manosphere increases male happiness by providing a sense of cameraderie? I doubt feminism makes anyone happier as feminists always seem distraught.

and more likely to instigate divorce when the status differential is changed in their favor

Ok, my second anecdote in a row, but yea. Friend of mine's little brother is overweight, and was married to an overweight woman. Well, she lost the weight, he didn't, and you can guess what happened next. My friend's wife said she saw it coming, a tale as old as time.

If feminism is making women on average less happy, that is not necessarily a strike against feminism. There is also freedom to consider. If freedom makes you less happy on average, that does not necessarily mean that you should do away with freedom. Perhaps it can mean that, in some cases, but not as a general rule.

Children generally become less happy at first when parents stop just providing everything to them and start to demand more adult behavior. That does not necessarily mean that it is bad to at some point start to demand more adult behavior from children.

An adult man who makes his own living is probably less happy on average than a sheltered boy who has everything provided for him. That does not necessarily mean that it is better to be a sheltered boy than it is to be an adult man.

It is not surprising that as women went from having a sort of middle status between children and adult men to having legal freedom equal to men and being expected to make their own economic decisions, they also became less happy in some ways and developed various new stresses different from the stresses that they had before. It is especially not surprising given that this is a new development in history, with few precedents. So there is no guidebook.

But this does not mean that women's liberation is a bad thing. In any case, the journey of women's liberation has only begun. It will be interesting to see where it goes.

Note, though, that conservative old-order Amish sects have a retention rate of up to 97%. The women in these communities are allowed to leave, and there are organizations that will even help them transfer over to our Mad Max universe if they so desired. But they prefer their way of life because they have been conditioned to value it. The Amish are practicing the exact God-given freedom that the Founders had in mind when they spoke about freedom of religion, because this freedom permitted the plurality of religious sects to do pretty much whatever they wished in their communities. Freedom in the context of American mythology originally meant that families could raise their kids and police their communities according to a faith tradition of their choosing, free from any government intervention: like the Amish, the Quakers, Mohammedans, Freemasons, anything. The Founders envisioned a society in which thousands of strict microcultures could develop or flourish unregulated, two of which could be atheism and feminism, but by no means were these considered a kind of default setting that every kid must pass through before becoming an adult with substantially less neuroplasticity.

When we say “women are now free”, what we mean is that their values are no longer decided by anyone who loves them deeply, but instead are decided by nameless bureaucrats who they will never meet, whose opinions are informed by the lobbying of corporate interests upon politicians. This is not really freedom. You have exchanged one kind of social conditioning (decided by loving figures in their own community) for another kind of social conditioning (decided by unknown people interested in maximizing their bank accounts). We can call this feedom, to differentiate it from freedom proper. In the system of feedom, women are raised to pay the most fees, in the form of taxes to the government or in the form of labor to corporations. Their lives exists to increase the wealth for the rich and oligarchic families that rule over the government, the publishing industry, the corporations and the media. The wealth that the fee-women generate ensures that the women in the oligarchic households never really have to do actual work; they live lives of incredible leisure masquerading as Socially Important Work. They will acquire a small business for its aesthetic value, or they might sit at a sinecure law firm because of their family reputation, or they will get involved in the “art world” or NGOs which is really just partying.

Yeah exactly, freedom is bound to make tons of people unhappy, because they make bad choices for themselves in at least one area. Like every fat ass is unhappy with their freedom over food consumption instead of big government controlling calorie intake. It's a tradeoff situation, big government authoritarianism favors the retards who can't control themselves and make choices so bad that having someone else tell them what to do works out better. From people who eat a little too much to the morons who go and take a mortgage on their house to gamble with or whatever else. Even the midwit of government can be better than their own idiocy.

Freedom favors the smart and responsible people who can control themselves and make good decisions. Freedom says you are accountable to yourself. Freedom is for the people who make better decisions in their life than a central bureaucrat on a power trip could do. If you're less happy in a free society, that's on you for overeating or being an asshole or choosing to gamble or whatever stupid shit you do.

I don't think of myself as a retard, I think of myself as someone who knows better for my life than the government would. I want my freedom to do with myself as I wish. If the retards want their king, I guess we can have an opt in no freedom program for them or something where you can sign up and live in a government facility that stops you from overeating and drinking too much and changes your diaper for you. They'll tell you when it's work time, play time, nap time.

Freedom favors the smart and responsible people who can control themselves and make good decisions.

And strictly speaking that is no one, as we all need guidance on what good decisions are, and that indoctrination is itself unfree. Your perception of what choices you have and what the consequences of those choices are, is to a large extent a product of your indoctrination. And people tend to even seek out the indoctrination that they prefer (hence: bubbles of like minded people).

Freedom says you are accountable to yourself. Freedom is for the people who make better decisions in their life than a central bureaucrat on a power trip could do.

This is a false dichotomy, because freedom or a lack of it does not merely come from what a government allows and demands, but also what a culture allows and demands, both explicitly and implicitly.

I believe that traditional society had a strong sense of noblesse oblige in the sense that the intelligent would accept being restricted by rules that work for people who think that they are smarter than they actually are, which actually also includes many smart people.

I don't think of myself as a retard, I think of myself as someone who knows better for my life than the government would. I want my freedom to do with myself as I wish.

Of course, but this perception is very much a product of modern culture, where narcissistic individualism is encultured in people. So of course you think that you know better than others and consider 'beating' others at the game of life to be an ego-affirming testament to your worth as a person. But is it not evidence that your 'freedom' is a mirage, that your perceptions fall so much in line with current culture, and thus do not seem based in independent thought?

Freedom favors the smart and responsible people who can control themselves and make good decisions. Freedom says you are accountable to yourself. Freedom is for the people who make better decisions in their life than a central bureaucrat on a power trip could do. If you're less happy in a free society, that's on you for overeating or being an asshole or choosing to gamble or whatever stupid shit you do.

This is one of those things that seems obvious, but also seems like it's not talked about nearly enough, to the extent that people actually don't understand it as obvious. I certainly wish the feminist movement talked more about these downsides and the fact that many women will end up less happy (and, quite possibly, less good for whatever they might judge as "good" in terms of their life), but that this is a worthy cost to pay for the freedom that feminism offers them. Because, right now, I see so many women being failed by the feminist movement, having been convinced that freedom won't have these severe and significant downsides and then conclude that their own lack of happiness despite their freedom means that the movement clearly needs to keep doing more until morale improves somehow both greater freedom and greater happiness is achieved. Without that grounding in actual reality - and the tradeoffs that are always present in reality - it's become a movement that just keeps inviting greater and greater justified pushback while leaving its supporters dissatisfied.

Of course, the market movement can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent alive, and there's a sucker born every minute, so its inability to - and apparent lack of desire to - accomplish its stated goals doesn't mean that there's going to be some correction anytime soon.

and then conclude that their own lack of happiness despite their freedom means that the movement clearly needs to keep doing more until morale improves somehow both greater freedom and greater happiness is achieved.

This is kinda true but in a different way. It's more possible for the average person to do a stereotypical "traditional life" of a working husband and stay at home wife than ever before, and it'd be far cozier since the women back then actually had to do hours and hours of meaningful domestic work. If you want to be the "loyal Christian wife who serves her husband instead of working" you could do that and get to watch soap operas or makeup tiktoks all day. Or at least it would be, if it wasn't for two things.

The main one of Housing. It's basically impossible to have the cheap and small homes people lived in back then, zoning and land use regulations saw to that. Owning a home on a single income is more difficult when you're competing against richer households on less stock. More freedom to build would allow for these one earner households to also get a home. This is where "we need more freedom" is true, just not of women's liberation.

And the second one of "keeping up with the Joneses". Obviously having someone sit at home watching Tiktok while the laundry machines and dishwasher do most of the domestic labor for them is less contribution to society than having them go out and do a job, so your household is gonna earn less money than your neighbors who have two working adults. You have to sacrifice somewhere else like not having fancy cars and new stuff for the kids as often or whatever if you want a one income life. Unhappiness here is just "waaah I want the same pay as someone who is smarter and works more than me" complaining.

But if you're willing to accept that one earner is obviously less money than two earners, and live in a smaller home with less stuff then freedom allows you to do that for yourself. You have no excuse for unhappiness there except for your own fault. There are no feminism police coming to break down your door because you're a wife without a job.

and it'd be far cozier since the women back then actually had to do hours and hours of meaningful domestic work.

When industrialization resulted in all kinds of machinery to make women's lives easier, they actually appeared to become much less satisfied with their lives.

get to watch soap operas or makeup tiktoks all day.

Does that really make women happy? Is not one of the reasons that women want to work today because the old neighborhoods that were alive with women and children are now mostly dead during the day, so they go to work to socialize?

Women's liberation isn't a bad thing, unless it ends up with society overcorrecting because people refused to implement corrections before things got out of hand.

Humans respond to whatever incentive structure that is laid out for them. If society allows a group to maximize their advantages and minimize their disadvantages they will respond accordingly, and that might come at the expense of some other group. In the case of women's liberation, that expense appears to be laid at the feet of the modern day average Joe.

But are we allowed to question what message women's questionable dating choices (made of their free will with no external pressure) send to young boys and girls? We have a clip of an (allegedly) attached woman melting for a high value male on camera, yet the discourse pivots to “protect boys from the manosphere”.

I think this is a good point. It's helpful to tell girls and young women (1) they shouldn't dress like that; (2) the shouldn't jump into anyone's lap; (3) when it comes to dating, they should look for a solid guy who isn't a player. This is good both for the woman herself and for society in general. It's like telling people they should choose fresh fruit over soda.

And there's a nice secondary benefit: The more girls who start behaving this way, the fewer boys who will be tempted by red-pill manosphere types.

Of course the main problem with this is that our society is uncomfortable doing anything that shames or otherwise attempts to control female sexuality.

There's also a large element that in the current dating environment, if the average male and female singleton swapped bodies, the male-in-female-body would likely be able to secure a reasonable boyfriend within a week or two. The woman piloting a male body would be absolutely unfucked.

There's also a large element that in the current dating environment, if the average male and female singleton swapped bodies, the male-in-female-body would likely be able to secure a reasonable boyfriend within a week or two. The woman piloting a male body would be absolutely unfucked.

I think that this is a separate but related issue. Ultimately, man is a tournament species, i.e. in the absence of laws, rules, or norms, there would be a minority of males with harems while the majority of males get very little in the way of mating opportunities. Over the last 20-40 years, there has (1) been a relaxation in social norms around sex and reproduction; and (2) technologies have emerged which allow people to circumvent some of these norms.

So to me, in hindsight, it seems pretty much inevitable that a greater and greater percentage of men will encounter difficulty in getting into sexual/romantic relationships.

This is more directed at female friends and acquaintances I have who are constantly bemoaning the dating scene. They tend to have unlimited matches with 6/10 kinda doofy but solid providers and could easily get a relationship if they just used a productive mindset and acted conciliatory. This is how the majority of human history functioned.

I met my wife and have kids due to the apps, it really didn't take much from her end to just be agreeable

Here's the truth nuke: Clavicular is not an incel. He is living proof of the sexual marketplace the manosphere describes, which is heavily determined by looks, money, height, race, social status, etc. He pulls taken women with minimal effort.

Everyone already knows this. The only reason we don't discuss how much pussy NBA and NFL players get is because it's banal. Every rapper consistently brags about this (besides buying jewelry and cars you don't need, taking a "broke nigga's bitch" is the ultimate sign of success.)

These people are, however, rare. And so their transactional and/or hostile approach to sex is seen as just one of life's natural inequities. We don't like that a star gets better treatment in some domains but we just live with it because we almost never directly compete with stars.

PUA/Looksmaxxers/etc. and the rest are, in their critics' eyes, an attempt to mainstream a bleak and transactional attitude amongst men who don't have the excellence for it, made even worse by the ressentiment that drove them to find those tools in the first place (the Nietzschean take being that they're more bitter and cruel than the natural aristocrats). Those men probably don't benefit from having the hostile attitude rappers can afford to sing about and, if those men "abuse" women, it'll be regular women not career groupies or pass-arounds who orbit high status males.

And, of course, if they buy into the worse beliefs and become doomers their parents' bloodline ends. Westerners don't have many kids, you can't afford to throw away one as a failure.

Lastly, since #notallmen was mentioned as a gotcha, can I point out how this "collective guilt" only flows one way? If every man should feel ashamed about the manosphere because we share genitals with them, what about the (overwhelmingly male) miners, linemen, firemen, welders, construction workers, road workers, steel workers, etc etc who commit to physically intensive and dangerous labour everyday to keep your lights on?

The simpler charge of hypocrisy is that this only applies to men generally or white men specifically. Nobody ever suggests that Muslims should suffer collective guilt because "most of the M&Ms may not be terrorists but would you take the risk?". It's pretty laughable to be focusing on white incel terrorism when places like Britain haven't even reckoned with the grooming gangs and refugee rapists and the audience of people like Tate are disproportionately Muslim.

I haven't watched this doc beyond some Twitter clips, but I did see Louis Theroux's original doc on PUAs maybe a decade ago. There's been a generational turnover. The original cadre was much whiter*. Less misogynist? I dunno. But less nakedly so. Myron Gaines especially comes across as someone who loathes women. Like, not just sexually frustrated but actively loathes that they have any power.

* And much less incel/blackpill. People like Neill Strauss did have some experience with women to temper their doomerism, they just didn't know how to transition into the relationship they wanted.

Here's the truth nuke: Clavicular is not an incel. He is living proof of the sexual marketplace the manosphere describes, which is heavily determined by looks, money, height, race, social status, etc. He pulls taken women with minimal effort.

Everyone already knows this.

That's not true, though, unless you're using some sort of "subconsciously know in a way that is directly contradictory to their behavior, their words, and their conscious beliefs" meaning of "knows" here. We have vast swathes of the population who genuinely believe that the part quoted above is merely the delusions of old, crusty, conservative ignoramuses who don't understand the Correct Feminist way that romantic relationships actually work among humans. The existence of these vast swathes who don't know this is pretty much why incels have become a noticeable issue at all in the culture wars.

It doesn't even make sense on a feminist view to say race doesn't matter, because feminists are progressives and progressives believe that racial/aesthetic inequity is a real thing. That's why fat and ugly and black women were everywhere when the revolution triumphed in 2020, that's why Sydney Sweeney became the topic of (inane) culture war discourse when those brands pulled back and did the conventional thing.

Are we really going to argue that people don't know that celebrities have groupies, that fit men are more attractive (where's the male slob sex symbol?). I think what's new is the doomerism - that it's over if you don't meet some ridiculously high baseline. This isn't purely about social messaging but about tech (it becomes much more serious if you can just filter out 5'11 manlets online) and people being more neurotic.

I think the feminist position is deeply flawed in that it's narcissistic and refuses to take sex differences (or hell, basic facts about how crimes and abuse cluster) seriously. It fails to factor in that even a bad plan is better than no plan for men (and, likely, older feminists simply overcorrected and assumed men would always be as socially adroit as their generation no matter what bad incentives they created).

But there's only so far you can get with the argument that people are this ignorant, that they think Chris Hemsworth takes his shirt off because women are attracted to Aussies. Either they're neuro-divergent to the point of suicidal credulity (in which case I don't trust that you actually read society's message correctly, there are implicit messages), very young or are actively in denial. Someone like Lindy West or the fat acceptance types are not unaware of their lower status, they reject it and reject anything that could fix it because they've decided a political situation is the only moral one. I suppose you can say that the last group were brainwashed into it but they're not ignorant. They're willfully opposed and you have to know what you're fighting to fight it.

Either they're neuro-divergent to the point of suicidal credulity (in which case I don't trust that you actually read society's message correctly, there are implicit messages), very young or are actively in denial. Someone like Lindy West or the fat acceptance types are not unaware of their lower status, they reject it and reject anything that could fix it because they've decided a political situation is the only moral one. I suppose you can say that the last group were brainwashed into it but they're not ignorant. They're willfully opposed and you have to know what you're fighting to fight it.

This seems like just a semantic argument. Yes, these people are "aware" of these things happening, but, like you say, they "reject" it, because it's "immoral." Part of that rejection is the "suicidal credulity" and "denial," which causes them to lack an understanding of the fact that the reality of some fat acceptance type having "low status" due to their fatness is something that you can't rout society around through wishful thinking and bullying, at least not longer than the emperor can walk around naked before some kid asks why. I think that they don't know that their model of sexual attraction in society is useless in the face of the underlying reality, as evidenced by their behavior which leads to self-suffering, shows that they're still missing some core knowledge about how the "sexual marketplace [as] the manosphere describes" is accurate

But there's only so far you can get with the argument that people are this ignorant, that they think Chris Hemsworth takes his shirt off because women are attracted to Aussies.

The actual factually inaccurate but morally right explanation is that the only reason Hemsworth's good body attracts women is that women have been hopelessly brainwashed to value those things (similarly to how men have been hopelessly brainwashed to value youth, skinniness, etc. in women), and that simply freeing them from the brainwashing would make women exactly as attracted to Danny Devito as to Chris Hemsworth if their personalities were the same (similarly to how simply freeing men from the brainwashing would make them exactly as attracted to Oprah Winfrey as to Sydney Sweeney if their personalities were the same - that this hasn't happened indicates that we must free them even harder from their oppressive brainwashing that they cling on to so hard). This kind of thinking is basically universal in most Blue tribe environments I've been in (which has been roughly 3.5 decades in a row now), due to many Blue tribe environments enforcing this ignorance through heavy censure of any sort of inquisitiveness or curiosity at analyzing the situation (in a way that isn't intentionally biased in order to arrive at the Morally Right conclusions).

I hate the framing of all of the anti-manosphere complaints. It treats feminism as inherently good and the neutral belief.

I loathe feminism. I think it is largely based on bad social science, bad economics, and bad evolution. I think it encourages dislike between the sexes. I think it encourages women to pick sub optimal lifestyles. To quote the broken clock, feminism is cancer.

That doesn’t mean the maosphere is right! But these pieces never seem to deal with the fact that feminism is also bullshit.

"feminism" means a lot of very different things. Do you actually loathe feminism, or do you just loathe certain kinds of feminism?

Virtually every ideological/social movement with enough support and adherence becomes "a lot of very different things"- this is nothing more than a cowardly evasion, sorry.

Humanity is not a hivemind and the crushing majority of supporters of any given movement have not read or studied literally every piece of associated literature or thinkpiece that their movement builds itself upon. Everyone has their bubble and everyone familiarises themselves with an ideology through specific filters and lenses through which an ideology is presented and mediated. Do you think a wealthy adventurist from the 19th Century like Louis-Auguste Blanqui, who's fervent communism took the shape of romantic banditry, had the same definition and personal beliefs around Communism as a 19th Century working-class single mother who's main anxiety was worrying about what might become of her orphaned children should she die in a workplace injury? Communism meant "a lot of very different things" for different supporters, i.e. bourgeois communists engaging with it as a kind of moral destiny leading towards an apocalyptic showdown between the historic forces of good and evil, while the working class itself mainly understood it as a pragmatic method to lastingly improve their standard of living (which is why they permanently abandoned it the microsecond it stopped improving their living standards, while the bourgeois romantics still cling to it today) - does that mean that one can't simply talk about Communism as an ideology because of these internal differences?

Furthermore, feminism is actually, despite its vast support across many societies and varying institutions, an incredibly rigid belief system with a massive amount of in-built and internally sacrosanct a priori beliefs, to the extent that you will get essentially identical responses about any given feminist topic from a 15 year old girl scrolling Tiktok as from a tenured Sociology department chair at a respected university. It's extreme conformism truly is one of it's defining characteristics - well exemplified, for example, by its incessant use of rehearsed slogans that are nothing more than in-group signifiers originating from group chants at protests, but are treated as if they are political/philosophical positions in their own right during political discussions.

Here in Austria, it's virtually impossible to have a discussion with a self-proclaimed politicised feminist without her inevitably using English terms in an otherwise German-language conversation - because her thoughts are simply not her own, they are just regurgitated formulas imported from elsewhere. Feminists here never say "Gemeinschaft", they always jarringly insist on the English word "Community" - same with "Race" instead of "Ethnie", "Gender" instead of "Geschlecht", "BIPOC" (a term that of course means virtually nothing in Europe, since WE whites are the "indigenous" people here) instead of "Minderheiten", all the way down to easily translate terms like "unpaid labour" or "weaponised incompetence"! They actively refuse to translate these terms into the language they are speaking in, despite there being zero linguistic difficulty in doing so, because even that minuscule act of deviation from the source would require a minimum of cognitive agency and intellectual independence - the only feminists I can think of that do sometimes translate US-imported terminology are the French, and that's really just because of their deeply ingrained cultural-linguistic chauvinism as francophones.

Feminism means a lot of very different things to the extent that any large enough ideology/Weltbild does - be it Christianity, Islam, Liberalism, UFOlogy, Fascism, Red Pill, whatever. Where Feminism does however stand out is that it manages to maintain a chilling level of conformism despite this variety of support - there is no feminist space that would ever dare profess a general inherent love for men as valuable beings both on the personal scale (friends, family, neighbours) and society at large (men who work dangerous and vital jobs, men as victims of war, etc.) - the baseline rapport is cruel apathy at best and foaming, fanatic hatred at worst.

Actually, I take that back - there is one notable feminist group that does have a positive view of men: Némésis, the French feminist group that focuses on resisting mass immigration from the Third World as a means of protecting women's rights and safety. They are very clear about wanting to curb mass immigration, but have an overall very sympathetic and conciliatory view of European men as mainly good people who want their female counterparts to be free and happy.

It it any surprise, then, that the virtual totality - without a single exception - of French left-wing and feminist groups call them Neonazis and demand they be legally banned and their leaders persecuted? Not really.

The most powerful figure of the current French Left, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, very recently went so far as to say that if the government didn't ban Némésis and the group showed up at one of their protests, they would "take care of it" - an explicit threat of violence, greeted by cheers and applause from his audience.

Is it any surprise that Erin Pizzey, the founder of the first and largest domestic abuse shelter system in the world and a true hero of the vulnerable and the oppressed, had to leave her native UK after receiving systematic death threats and aggressions from feminists for having dared to say that many men also face domestic abuse and that women have the capacity to be violent partners, too?

In 1981, Pizzey moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, while targeted by harassment, death threats, bomb threats[36] and defamation campaigns,[15] and dealing with overwork, near collapse, cardiac disease and mental strain.[23]: 275  In particular, according to Pizzey, the charity Scottish Women's Aid "made it their business to hand out leaflets claiming that [she] believed that women 'invited violence' and 'provoked male violence'".[15] She stated that the turning point was the intervention of the bomb squad, who required all of her mail to be processed by them before she could receive it, as a "controversial public figure".[23]: 282 [37]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erin_Pizzey

Her complete blacklisting from all feminist organizations (all down to her own refuge shelter she founded, which kicked her out and banned her from even visiting), constant violent harassment campaigns forcing her to repeatedly move to new homes, coerced efforts to deprive her of sources of income to the point she was rendered homeless for a while, entirely and exclusively stemmed from her believing that helping abused men is good and in the interest of women for a better, more harmonious society.

So no, feminism does not mean "a lot of very different things" beyond any large movement's basic internal distinctions - it actually mainly only means one thing: resentment of the male gender and the desire to harm men. Any feminist who deviated from this ideological bedrock (be it Camille Paglia, Erin Pizzey, or Némésis) got threatened, harassed, brutalised and forced into flight by the crushing iron heel of feminist conformism.

We are on a place called the motte. I’m not doing the motte and Bailey.

I can't answer for zeke5123a, but I personally loathe any ideology that dodges any criticism by going "actually we're 1,000 completely different things", despite those things all consistently pushing in a single direction and generally cooperating to hurt their mutual enemies.

Somehow, when people go "feminism is great and we should have more of it!", feminists don't rush to go "um actually, feminism means lots of different things" -- they just cheer. It's only when people want to criticise it that suddenly it becomes this nebulous, unassailable hydra.

Consider that perhaps you usually don't notice the feminists who don't just blindly cheer for feminism as a monolith, yet they exist. I'm one.

And if you think that I'm just politically biased, well, I would make the same argument about "the right" as I would about "feminism". That is, it's a very diverse group. In my case, I loathe some ideas that come under that term and am fine with others.

Consider that perhaps I've actually noticed reality, where approximately zero feminists ever push back against anything that moves in the direction of "more feminism".

Even the best that you can personally offer is "Well, I don't blindly cheer". Great -- do you actually push back against feminism doing evil things? Because yes, of course I've noticed feminists who'll be passively silent when other feminists do horrible things. If that's the best they can do, then no, there is no meaningful variation in feminism, because 99%+ of feminists have no interest in reining in the worst parts of the movement.

I've made no comment on you being politically biased; nor have I said anything about the right. My issue is this constant motte and bailey where any criticism of feminism is deflected with "feminism doesn't exist!", and any praise of feminism is encouraged with "yay feminism!"

Is this..."Silence is Violence", but from the right?

No.

I'm not saying "you must publicly disavow anyone in your movement who says X, otherwise you're complicit, and deserve to be hurt". That's the idea of "Silence is Violence".

I'm saying:

There are feminists like Goodguy who (roughly) describe themselves as being solely pro-gender-equality, with none of the nastier parts of feminism in them. (That's good!)

However, whenever I observe these people in a context where a nastier feminist is doing/saying evil things, I don't observe these milder feminists pushing back or disagreeing. This is both in a personal context -- e.g. at a social gathering, a work event, whatever -- and in the public or social media context as well. In fact, it's not even that they'll be fully silent: they'll nod along, support the conversation, and do everything short of saying "yes I fully agree that men are pigs".

Also, the nastier parts of feminism have a pretty well-observed pattern of bullying the hell out of anyone who dares to push back against them.

The combined effect of this: feminism, despite being apparently "many different things", ends up being a coalition that reliably pushes in a single direction. If a subgroup of feminism doesn't push back on X, and instead just is silent on X (but passively/socially supporting the parts of the movement that push for X), then these groups aren't meaningfully different, and do function as a single block that can be meaningfully criticised.

To put it another way: I'm not telling Goodguy "You must push back on X, or you're complicit!" -- I'm saying "Because feminists don't push back on X, you don't get to make the argument that actually feminism is made of lots of different things".

I think that's a pretty obvious difference between what I said and "Silence is Violence".

EDIT: Here's a right-wing equivalent.

ALICE: Republicans are homophobic.

BOB: Republicans are many different things, so it's meaningless to criticise "Republicans".

ALICE: But among all the Republicans I know, even the "mild" ones who say they're pro-gay-rights -- whenever a more homophobic Republican says "God hates fags", the supposedly milder Republican never pushes back. They just smile and laugh along, nodding their head.

BOB: Wow, sounds like "Silence is Violence", huh?

ALICE: No, I'm saying the supposed variation in your group doesn't prevent that group from having an emergent, collective goal, and I'm allowed to criticise it for that!

You keep saying feminism is not a monolith, but any actual deviated positions that would exemplify this flourishing diversity of thought feminism harbours is notably absent from your comments. Can you maybe provide some specific examples of serious differences of thought that are accepted and openly fostered within feminist discourse?

Do you believe in "the Patriarchy" as an active force that permeates all levels of Western society and acts as a kind of Original Sin determining and undergirding all male-female relations, be they familial, professional, or personal?

If yes, then what exactly is your grand distinction from those who blindly cheer for feminism as a monolith? If no, then in what sense are you a feminist and not just a basic egalitarian who wants everyone to get a fair chance at a good life?

I know this questioning is suggestive and biased, but since you're repeatedly guaranteeing diversity of thought within feminism without providing any examples, I feel the need to accelerate the conversation to a point where we get actual information instead of evasions.

I loathe feminism. I think it is largely based on bad social science, bad economics, and bad evolution

I agree, but I think the bad science, economics, etc. are secondary -- primarily, feminism is a hate ideology. In the same way that neo-Nazis blame all the world's problems on Jews; and BLM types blame all the world's problems on white people, feminists blame all the world's problems on men. In practice, the goal of feminism is to transfer goodies (money, social status, power) from men to women to the greatest extent possible. Bad social science and such are one technique used in service of this goal.

Feminism is really diverse. There are kinds of feminism that revolve around hating men and there are also kinds of feminism that just support legal equality between men and women. Supporting legal equality for women is not a hate ideology.

there are also kinds of feminism that just support legal equality between men and women

Where?

Here in Austria, we still have mandatory military/civil service for men only - literally defined as gender-based "forced labour" (Zwangsarbeit) in our constitution. Since our demographics are shrinking, this vital pool of manpower (these 18-year old boys drive most ambulances, do most dirty work in retirement homes, hospitals, integration homes, not to speak of yearly dangerous cleanup missions when our rural regions periodically get flooded) is shrinking too - begging the question if maybe women could also get conscripted to these tasks.

Our female defence minister - a self-proclaimed feminist from the CONSERVATIVE Party - immediately rejected the idea that women should also receive this legal obligation, called it sexist, and instead proposed extending the amount of time young men are conscripted into forced labour. This forced labour is also paid far below average wages (I believe its almost half of what the minimum wage for a full time job would be) and is routinely described as a "Hungerlohn" - a "starvation wage" that is by design not sufficient to survive off of.

This is a feminist from the f*cking Conservative party of Austria, openly saying she would rather exploit young men more and harder rather than simply enact gender equality and have this massive burden be shared equally by both genders.

In Germany, they abolished their mandatory conscription of males, but are now gradually phasing it back in again - do you want to guess which political groups where most vehemently opposed to the proposal of also having women added to conscription? Yes, it was feminist groups and political parties who self-define as feminist, obviously. OBVIOUSLY.

Sorry, I don't see any feminists who support legal equality between men and women - probably because said legal equality has already been achieved for women half a century ago and all remaining discrepancies (sentencing disparities, men not legally being able to be victims of rape by a woman, divorce court, conscription, etc.) benefit women and harm men indisputably. All said remaining discrepancies are actively supported by feminists across the spectrum, without exception. If any sincere feminist was only seeking legal equality, their unique remaining cause today would be erasing these remaining legal distinctions that harm men - but these feminists do not exist, because that's not what feminism is.

There are kinds of feminism that revolve around hating men and there are also kinds of feminism that just support legal equality between men and women.

In other words, there's bailey feminism and motte feminism. "we just want equality" is simply a Trojan horse used by feminists to deflect and distract.

Supporting legal equality for women is not a hate ideology.

If the support is being made in good faith. In practice, it almost never is.

But perhaps I'm missing something important or misunderstanding you. Would you care to identify (1) three important ways in the United States where men and women don't have legal equality; and (2) three significant feminists who are working primarily to end these inequalities?

I'm sure that "we just want equality" is a Trojan horse for some feminists. Not for others.

Men and women currently have do legal equality in the United States. However, that does not meant that feminists whose primary concern is legal equality have just vanished. I sometimes argue online against people who would like to get rid of that equality. So I am a feminist whose primary concern is legal equality, yet in that capacity I still find things to do.

Why even bother replying if you won't address the 2 direct questions asked for you to clarify your positions? We can all read, so your ignoring of the main substance of the message you're replying to isn't lost on anyone.

Again: what are some examples of men and women not enjoying legal equality in current-day America? These must exist, since according to you there are feminists who's sole goal is legal equality - hence these feminists can only exist if legal inequalities still persist, so what are they?

For one, women are not legally allowed to register with selective service. The feminist "equal rights" take on the situation is certainly something:

This lawsuit is vitally important to all women in America because a similar lawsuit is now pending in California, but it was filed by a man who claims that the Selective Service law discriminates against men. We take a slightly different view, and argue that the Selective Service law denies women equal treatment under the law. The difference is important. The California case is about discrimination against men. Our case is about equal rights for women.

The case in California (Valame v Biden) was filed by a man who asserts only one claim – that his rights under the Equal Rights Amendment have been violated because women are forbidden to register for Selective Service. He refused to register because he is angry that women don’t have to register.

...

Women, not men, should be front and center in any Supreme Court case that will determine whether women are finally fully equal citizens under the United States Constitution. We have fought much too hard and for far too long to allow a men’s rights case to decide the legal status of women.

Interestingly, unlike in Valame v Biden, there is no mention of seeking true legal equality with men, as Equal Means Equal merely seeks the court determine that women be allowed to register unlike men who are required to and thus does not seek to have women suffer the same statutory penalties for not registering. Nor do they even mention that aspect of legal inequality for that matter.

Yes, this is exactly what I expected. The very idea that a man could sue for legal discrimination is such an existential threat for feminism that it needs to be dismissed and restated through a lens in which it’s about women gaining rights instead of men alleviating discrimination against them.

The mere suggestion that men as a gender could gain something by equalizing the law is registered as innately dangerous by feminists - which is only coherent since feminism today is about harming men first and foremost.

Men and women currently have legal equality in the United States.

They pretty clearly don't have legal equity, though. I believe the feminists/progressives are correct when they say this matters; where they're wrong is that they have excess privilege and will on balance be more oppressed than men if it was to be equalized. (Which is why they're not exactly in a hurry.)

Equality was supposed to be a stepping stone to equity, and the liberals were correct that it would [and did] help in that regard, but it's gone as far as it realistically can and other solutions are now needed. Strict egalitarianism was perhaps OK in the early-mid 20th century, but in the 21st now leads to destructive nonsense, like forcing women to permit men to compete in women's sports so long as they claim to be female, institutional sexism (gender quotas, etc.) in companies, moral hazard enabled by human instinct to value women more than men, etc., which helps nobody, intentionally frustrates your high performers, and weakens the social contract for everyone else.

So no, I don't think strict legal equality is desirable any more. I think women need to be punished for hysteria just as much as men do for violence as hysteria is their biological way of marshaling violence (we punish those who hire hitmen in equal measure as the hitmen themselves for this reason), and that human dignity must be balanced against pure safety concerns when drafting laws (for in its majestic equality, the law prevents both men and women from activities and socialization preferred by men).

However, that does not meant that feminists whose primary concern is legal equality have just vanished.

Ok, please identify three prominent feminists in the United States whose primary concern is legal equality.

Edit: My mental model based on years of observations is that (1) feminists -- generally speaking -- are man-haters, grifters, and generally bad people; and (2) the idea that feminism just wants legal equality is a fantasy used by feminists to deflect attention from this.

But I am open to be proven wrong. At a minimum, if "we just want legal equality" is a significant part of the feminist movement and not just a motte, it should be pretty easy to identify 3 prominent feminists whose primary concern is legal equality. But I doubt you will be able to do it. I'm pretty confident that if you identify these individuals, it will be apparent that in reality (1) they spend little or no effort pursuing legal equality; and (2) most of their effort is spent man-bashing, grifting, and/or demanding special treatment for women.

Admittedly, demands for special treatment for women are often disguised as demands for equality. For example, demands that more women be put on the boards of directors of big companies. But what gives the game away is that (1) these demands are not for legal equality but rather demands for equality in results; and (2) inevitably, these demands are very selective -- there is little or no complaint about the fact that the vast majority of coal mining deaths are male or the fact that the vast majority of homeless people are male.

There's feminism that revolves around hating men and there's feminism that support women having every advantage a man has and then some. The latter styles itself as supporting legal equality but it does not.

I agree in part. I think it is generally (although not exclusive) appealing to women who hate men (almost always their dad). But if the claims were even close to true, maybe they’d have a reason to hate men!

... are you saying the rule is "if any member of X group hurts you, you have a reason to hate X group"? Does that apply to all groups, or just men?

EDIT: lack of reading comprehension on my part, sorry -- thought "claims" referred to your comment, but I see now you were referring to omw_68, making my comment dumb

are you saying the rule is "if any member of X group hurts you, you have a reason to hate X group"? Does that apply to all groups, or just men?

Blind hatred leads to nowhere. Before you start hating, do your research whether your enemy is representative of X, or just one bad apple.

I agree in part. I think it is generally (although not exclusive) appealing to women who hate men (almost always their dad). But if the claims were even close to true, maybe they’d have a reason to hate men!

Well that's another common feature of hate ideologies -- the blood libel.

I think one could reasonably assess that feminism and the manosphere are the same type of thing, in the same way that fascism and socialism are the same type of thing. One is simply the incumbent.

You aren't even saying "fascism and communism", but comparing it to socialism, which is more or less incumbent all over Europe for some 80 years now without operating any concentration camps or starting world wars? Is this just mirroring the "everything to the right of me is literally fascism" line as "everything to the left of me is literally equivalent to fascism"?

'Socialism' is a word with multiple contradictory meanings -- in that sense it's even worse than 'fascism,' which people generally agree means one thing, even if they can't agree on what counts. Marx used 'socialism' and 'communism' interchangeably to refer to the stateless, classless society that would emerge after the old order was torn down completely. Needless to say, this socialism isn't incumbent anywhere and never has been. Lenin used the term 'socialism' freely to describe his own form of ultra-authoritarian Vanguardism, and that form is mainly today embodied by North Korea, which does describe itself as 'socialist.' And, yes, in much of Europe the word 'socialism' is used today to describe center-left welfare capitalism.

But it didn't always mean this. There was a time when socialist parties did actually intend to implement real socialism; the term just got watered down to virtually nothing through many cycles of moderation and compromise (and attempts to distance themselves from the USSR). Socialism as per Marx is impossible and socialism as per Lenin is transparently awful, so if you want to win elections rather than achieve your ends through force, you'll quickly find that some ideas play better than others. Repeat for many election cycles and all you've got left is the name.

('Communism' isn't really any better: China is the largest and most influential self-described communist nation today, and they practice state capitalism. And, actually, they also describe themselves as 'socialist.')

As an outsider to the left, I do see the socialism/communism distinction as a relatively meaningless one of branding. But for what it's worth, I've become a lot more sympathetic over the years to the "everything to the right of me is fascism" line too, or at least to the application of the fascist label to right-authoritarian regimes and movements since WWII that don't claim the label for themselves for obvious reasons. But at the end of the day, I think we're all somewhat liberal, somewhat socialist, and somewhat fascist, just as we're all subject to each of the deadly sins. Some just in greater proportions than others.

Yeah I think that’s right. Fascism and socialism are the same thing with different aesthetics. Manosphere and feminism are h to r same thing with different targets of hate.

But are we allowed to question what message women's questionable dating choices (made of their free will with no external pressure) send to young boys and girls?

Young men are not “corrupted” into noticing these patterns. They notice them first (through lived failure) and then find the subculture that names the pattern instead of shaming them for noticing.

Well, I don't doubt there's some truth in this but if we're in the noticing game it seems crucial to also notice something else: there is a strong psychological motivation to generalise from some women's questionable dating choices. It lets men who are feeling difficult feelings blame them on women. Then they get served algorithmically with more "opportunities to notice" the questionable dating choices, and become more invested in an explanation that excuses what they may see as their own failure. And conversely, they are highly motivated not to notice women's "good" dating choices.

To be sure this is a form of torture for the men who are sucked into it, and you have to feel for them, but it is going to be hard to be clear eyed about these things if you miss out that massive piece of the puzzle.

there is a strong psychological motivation to generalise from some women's questionable dating choices.

True, and I think this is a thinly disguised "permission" to take the black pill and opt out.

Then they get served algorithmically with more "opportunities to notice" the questionable dating choices

Perhaps, and sure there may be some incentive to not notice the good ones. However, this is also due to the disproportionate share of loud online voices pinning men's dating struggles on some form of personal moral failing, like their perceived rightward shift and the so called manosphere. No man who's struggling will enthusiastically listen to platitudes about feminism, male privilege and women's issues. And they can tell you're gaslighting them because some of the worst men they know don't face these struggles to begin with. You can't preach compassion and empathy for someone's feelings and mock someone else for getting their feelings hurt. The first hurdle for the anti-manosphere folk is to acknowledge certain experiences that may be inconvenient to feminism, so I'd say there is also a reciprocal motivation to not clear it to begin with.

Yes. Social algorithms are inherently polarising and the same forces are at work in the opposite direction for many women, in such a way that knowing what the "other side" is looking at makes people dislike each other even more and even (worse) become genuinely more unlikeable. Ban algorithms! (I don't know if I think this but probably could be persuaded.)

Oh I think that. Social media has dramatically hastened the senescence and unraveling of society when organic bonds, cohesion and shared reality were already in a state of entropy. I'll happily freeze the clock to the late 90s if this timeline was inevitable.

The situation sounds somewhat like the complaint that young teen girls who feel insecure about their appearance go on instagram to see what the norms are, where the algorithm, sensitive to stopping and viewing times, will feed them more and more unattainable images and anorexia content. Whereas it won't show it to their mothers (I have a lot of pretty landscape paintings and handmade historical costumes on Instagram). I can't remember a real person spouting the male collective guilt line, but then I don't linger on such a thing when I find it, so the egrigore doesn't bother feeding me a stream of it.

Here's the truth nuke: Clavicular is not an incel.

This stuff keeps popping up in my twitter feed, and I'm left with the intense feeling that the people yearn for Pro Wrestling storylines, with heels and faces and obviously manufactured storylines.

But on to the main event...

The current verdict is that boys should have their screen times monitored or limited so they don't get corrupted by the manosphere, and raise them with feminist values. Okay. I agree with some of this.

The problem is that the spaces that seek to inculcate "good" values, whether they be the campus Feminist Collective or the Youth Bible Study at your local church, give absolutely terrible advice on how to get a girlfriend. Whether they are telling you to carry extra tampons to give to girls like a weird creep, or they are telling you that the best girl for you is the one that has no urge to have sex with you, they give bad advice.

Raising your boy with feminist values is unlikely to have much better retention rate than Evangelical christianity, which according to a Lifeway study, has about a 1/3 success rate for kids who attended church regularly as kids making it through college age (though it gets about 10% of them back by their late 20s).

Boys are going to do the things that get them what they want. What do they want? Sexual attention from girls, status from their peers. For the most part, those amount to the same thing, as getting attention from girls is the single most important form of status among their peers, and status from their peers is the single best way to get sexual attention from girls.

When you cede the field of good advice for getting girls to assholes, then you end up with boys listening to assholes. Take away the assholes' ammunition, pre-empt them by raising your boys to be successful. Dan Savage successfully inculcated perverted homosexual values in a generation of liberal millennial boys because he also gave them the tools to get laid, the manosphere started as good advice for getting laid and that spoonful of sugar got the medicine of misogyny down, those seeking to inculcate other values in boys have to do the same.

as getting attention from girls is the single most important form of status among their peers

Indeed, and I can somewhat understand the sentiment behind attempting to dismantle attached status to male sexual success. But this gives "progressives talking about sex instead of having it". I'd wager it's the conception error that underpins the conviction that conventionally gendered preferences and behaviours in young boys and girls are byproducts of external socialisation, and therefore, can be overturned. Since female sexual success carries no comparable status premium within the culture, the instinct is once again to refashion men in the image of the female ideal.

Since female sexual success carries no comparable status premium within the culture, the instinct is once again to refashion men in the image of the female ideal.

I'm curious what you mean by this, female sexual success delivers a huge premium to women's status. Female sexual success places a higher premium on quality of partner over quantity of partners, though I think there is a large premium for that in men as well. You wouldn't admire a man or label him high status for fucking a LOT of fat ugly women.

Female sexual success is default assumed, that is why virginity is valued in women. It is a choice. A modestly attractive woman can easily gain sexual access to her looksmatch. Male sexual success is not default. It requires social proof, status, dominance, or standout traits to access desirable women. And of course, "success" implies that the women the man is having sex with are at least somewhat desirable.

So you're defining female sexual success as "getting laid." I don't really think that's accurate, female sexual success is getting commitment, or devotion, or admiration, from men. And that carries a very large status premium.

When you cede the field of good advice for getting girls to assholes, then you end up with boys listening to assholes.

You can't avoid that without changing girls. Because, in the parlance of an older generation, "Chicks Dig Jerks".

You can't change girls. What you can do is force them to be with non-assholes. Which we did, for a very long time. Until we suddenly decided that we are too good for that. And now we are going extinct.

You can't change girls. What you can do is force them to be with non-assholes. Which we did, for a very long time. Until we suddenly decided that we are too good for that. And now we are going extinct.

There's no need for anything extreme. There are plenty of subcultures in the West where social norms (1) strongly discourage women from having sex outside of marriage; and (2) require that potential marriage partners be approved by the parents. This does a reasonably good job of filtering out the sort of men who are best avoided (and encouraging a lot of men who would otherwise be players to behave more constructively).

Social pressure was one of the ways women were coerced into marrying nice guys, along with religious indoctrination, the threat of economic privation, and physical force as a last resort. But you really need all of them.

Social pressure was one of the ways women were coerced into marrying nice guys, along with religious indoctrination, the threat of economic privation, and physical force as a last resort. But you really need all of them.

Based on my observations, I would say that physical force is unnecessary. In the sense that 99% of women will respond just fine to social pressure and economic incentive. Yes, you might need physical force for that last 1%, but in terms of preserving the numbers and cohesiveness of a group, letting that 1% go isn't a big deal.

Indeed, that 1% will mostly hoist themselves on their own petard(sheltered religious girls dating players, uh, wind up regretting their choices) and all of their peers will know this.

make-women-property-again

And now we are going extinct.

As I pointed out in my top post, inspired by recent demise of Paul Ehrlich

The overpopulation panic was used to justify respectable tally of atrocities all over the world. It turned to be, even if you disregard any humanist soy crap about "value" of human life and well being, at best unnecessary, at worst counterproductive.

Now, the depopulation doomers salivate at the chance of running killing fields of their own. Nothing changes, no one ever learns anything.

Women were not property in the USA, 1955(a recent TFR peak), and have never been legally property in this country.

I'm not sure "the guys who argued for the opposite of you have been decisively proven wrong" is the own you think it is.

People who argued: "The end is near! No time for sentimentality, we must pile up pyramids of skulls to save the world!" were in recorded history always proven wrong.

But this time it is different!

This is a generalized argument against all large claims, that is to say it proves way way too much. Some claims are true, some claims are false, you need to actually address each on their merits.

You can't avoid that without changing girls. [...] "Chicks Dig Jerks"

I think that's confusing a subset with the whole set. Because really, Chicks Dig Confident Men. And jerks are very good at appearing confident. Easy mistake, happens to most women...

But that's good news, teaching boys confidence (and to display confidence) might not be easy, but at least it's straight forward.

I don't think it's that clean. "Chicks dig" the whole dark triad, not just confidence.

The notAllMen part of that really annoyed me. The daughter correctly identifies that a lot of the manosphere fans were mistreated by women and then generalized to all women and that makes them wrong and sad. But all men, including her dad, need to feel shame for the choices of those 15 year olds. I know that if it weren't for double standards the woke wouldn't have any standards at all but the brazenness of it never fails to shock me.

But all men, including her dad, need to feel shame for the choices of those 15 year olds.

It's called "internalized misandry".

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