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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.
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.
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.
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