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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 stuff keeps popping up in my twitter feed, and I'm left with the intense feeling that the people yearn for Pro Wrestling storylines, with heels and faces and obviously manufactured storylines.
But on to the main event...
The problem is that the spaces that seek to inculcate "good" values, whether they be the campus Feminist Collective or the Youth Bible Study at your local church, give absolutely terrible advice on how to get a girlfriend. Whether they are telling you to carry extra tampons to give to girls like a weird creep, or they are telling you that the best girl for you is the one that has no urge to have sex with you, they give bad advice.
Raising your boy with feminist values is unlikely to have much better retention rate than Evangelical christianity, which according to a Lifeway study, has about a 1/3 success rate for kids who attended church regularly as kids making it through college age (though it gets about 10% of them back by their late 20s).
Boys are going to do the things that get them what they want. What do they want? Sexual attention from girls, status from their peers. For the most part, those amount to the same thing, as getting attention from girls is the single most important form of status among their peers, and status from their peers is the single best way to get sexual attention from girls.
When you cede the field of good advice for getting girls to assholes, then you end up with boys listening to assholes. Take away the assholes' ammunition, pre-empt them by raising your boys to be successful. Dan Savage successfully inculcated perverted homosexual values in a generation of liberal millennial boys because he also gave them the tools to get laid, the manosphere started as good advice for getting laid and that spoonful of sugar got the medicine of misogyny down, those seeking to inculcate other values in boys have to do the same.
You can't avoid that without changing girls. Because, in the parlance of an older generation, "Chicks Dig Jerks".
You can't change girls. What you can do is force them to be with non-assholes. Which we did, for a very long time. Until we suddenly decided that we are too good for that. And now we are going extinct.
There's no need for anything extreme. There are plenty of subcultures in the West where social norms (1) strongly discourage women from having sex outside of marriage; and (2) require that potential marriage partners be approved by the parents. This does a reasonably good job of filtering out the sort of men who are best avoided (and encouraging a lot of men who would otherwise be players to behave more constructively).
Social pressure was one of the ways women were coerced into marrying nice guys, along with religious indoctrination, the threat of economic privation, and physical force as a last resort. But you really need all of them.
Based on my observations, I would say that physical force is unnecessary. In the sense that 99% of women will respond just fine to social pressure and economic incentive. Yes, you might need physical force for that last 1%, but in terms of preserving the numbers and cohesiveness of a group, letting that 1% go isn't a big deal.
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