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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.
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?
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.
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We are on a place called the motte. I’m not doing the motte and Bailey.
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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!
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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:
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.
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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).
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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.
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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.
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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
Blind hatred leads to nowhere. Before you start hating, do your research whether your enemy is representative of X, or just one bad apple.
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Well that's another common feature of hate ideologies -- the blood libel.
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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.')
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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.
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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.
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