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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.
Honest question, how widespread is feminist messaging regarding dating towards men these days? Women don't actually claim to want nice guys (but date jerks) anymore, they just date jerks (the most-panty-melting man in their Hinge inbox, who has no reason to treat them well) and complain about it. Part of this is that there's a lot more median and trashy women visible on the internet these days, and they don't seem to maintain the previous kayfaybe as tightly as the FeministTM bloggers of yesteryear did; the shallowness is very on-display. What "official" messaging that does exist consists of shitting on men for being a gestalt of the Patriarchy, rapists and abusers, and that hot guy who won't text them back after fucking them. They don't even call them NiceGuys anymore. I suppose there's ideological demands on men to be rabid protesting leftists (these demands coming from women who are themselves rabid protesting leftists), but its all abstract stuff to do with abortion, transphobia, Orange Man Bad, and anti-racism.
I'm old and don't really hear young guys talking about women at all, cut myself off from as much mainstream dating discourse as possible online, and I'm in a horrible bubble IRL where every woman compulsively says "Men are all such trash, amirite?" as a greeting, so I'm very aware my perspective is distorted.
Even the man-o-sphere stuff these days is plainly targeted at median/normie men, with an emphasis on those who actually do seem to have toxic masculinity (ex: the huge Muslim fanbase), whereas in the past, when the internet was just nerds, it very clearly was coming from/to nerdy experiences and frustrations.
Sometimes I hear women complaining about being on dates with man-o-sphere guys, and I'm a little bit skeptical. What fucking guy is the unlikely combination of hot enough to get a woman to go on a date with him, romantically frustrated enough to engage in Man-o-Sphere content, AND clueless enough to talk judgy redpill lingo about bodycount and hypergamy to the woman he's on a date with?
My last point of contact for the Apex Predator of contemporary playa appeal-maxxing is five years out of date, and it was to be hot while also being a black gay communist and say cringey soy things about Believing Women and Pronouns. And I don't know of any Man-o-Sphere influencers or dating coaches who give guys the advice that apparently works; self-identify as "queer" and use leftist buzzwords while treating women like shit.
Are these really such an unlikely combination? I'm sure these streamers are largely scams like any overpriced self-help program, but equally, the ideology would hardly have persisted for decades if it literally never landed any of its believers a first date, so the first two items in conjunction don't seem especially hard to believe. That leaves the third, which is handily rephrased as "what percentage of guys who only got a date at all from studying dodgy PUA-type techniques will proceed to flounder once they have the real flesh and blood woman in front of them and need to engage her in conversation?", to which I would be very surprised if the answer was in the single digits.
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