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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 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:
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.
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