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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.
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.
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.
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 (all lower status groups) 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.
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
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).
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