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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.
(Edit: the TL;DR is that the feminist orthodoxy of the time was that male romantic success was contingent on personal virtue, with personal virtue being defined as being politically Feminist, and later anti-racist and pro-LGBTQXYZ, with any lack of romantic success being proof of lack of personal virtue. Now the orthodoxy seems to just be that men=bad)
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.
The manosphere stuff appeals to two kinds of men -- men who can't get laid, and men who can get laid more than they think is reasonable. You see that in the distribution of complaints about dating on the motte: on the one hand you have the Hock guy, and on the other you have Sloot. One side talks up to women, even if they're complaining; they see women as having more power and options than them, and are annoyed/frustrated/alienated by the gap. The other side talks down to women, seeing them as weak souls with no emotional resilience or backbone who, in the words of Sloot, defend their wonderfulness even as they violate it.
The point of the manosphere, and perhaps why the outrage is so high, is that it consists of men who are in the latter group trying to recruit men in the former group to join them. Feminists get upset at this because its goal is to convert men with less power than women into men with more power than women, who look down on women and see them as manipulable, and it's not hard to see how feminism would find that alarming. Conservatives/normies/romantics get upset at this because it asserts that any kind of complementarianism/egalitarianism/mutuality is false consciousness, and that's their whole orientation towards intimacy. Traditionalists get upset at this because it argues that women are weak souls with no emotional resilience or backbone, and men should exploit this for their own benefit. Traditionalists instead make the very different argument that women are weak souls with no emotional resilience or backbone, and men should be beneficent to them because of it. That tension is pretty explicit; some of our trad posters will say essentially just this, and then in the next breath call Sloot a sexist.
That said, I have no clue what feminism is actually saying to men nowadays. I actually think they're saying nothing. Like you said, normies/trashy women are spilling their tea all over the internet now, and so exposure to women's concerns about dating is unregulated and not filtered through feminist beliefs except insofar as young women reach for feminist concepts they've heard of to ground whatever feelings they have in something concrete. For that reason, a lot of the dating and marriage complaints just come across as petty and boring, not meaningfully different from the complaints that you could hear about boyfriends and husbands in 1980 or 1999.
Excuse me, I call Sloot a misogynist. There is a difference.
Men are beneficent to women because of civilization; we don't live in a might makes right world where the weak suffer what they must. I mean we could, but we would be unable to maintain running water and colour TVs and microwaves and all those nice benefits of civilization. Resenting this beneficence specifically towards women(yes, many women are trashy, self absorbed etc) is misogynistic. Noting that they need it is I guess technically sexism, but it's a justified sexism. Sort of like how I guess you could term it paedophobia or something equally ridiculous to argue that 5 year olds shouldn't have driving licenses, but the retort to that isn't playing definitional games or getting mad at some poor kindergartners for not being able to drive. It's what we were already doing.
"Golly these people are sexist. Women do do better with male supervision but only if those men don't hate them for being women."
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