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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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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...
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