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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.
Feminism, as an ideology for advancing women's interests, cannot survive in an open marketplace of ideas. It's Motte is 'Feminism is about equality between men and women' which is indefensible when presented with the flood of examples of Bailey exploitation where 'feminists' pick or discard gender roles according to whatever is most in their interests in the circumstance, equality be damned.
Boys and men can now drink from the firehose of the internet which facilitates easy noticing. Like many other ideologies crumbling in the face of evidence, Feminism's supporters have started pushing for suppression of information to allow the gaslighting to continue.
It's this broader desire for suppression to allow narrative control that worries me about the West right now. Its happening along other fronts such as Multiculturalism which also seems to now require suppression of speech to get incompatible cultures to coexist.
That politician from Australia notwithstanding, I don't actually think that Multiculturalism requires suppression of speech to function, it just requires some amount of cultural assimilation and little-L liberalization. It's really easy to go back and read something like H.P. Lovecraft's He, where he wrote:
And see it as a bit silly and overblown. New York city isn't dead just because it isn't Dutch or Anglo American. (Also, surely London has had some shift in ethnicity from its Roman founding to the time of Lovecraft? Like, what about the anglo-saxons and the vikings?) And it just seems obvious that many of the ethnic groups that H.P. Lovecraft was worried about, like Southern and Eastern Europeans, the Irish, and Asians just aren't that scary in the modern day. Surely, even critics of multiculturalism would find a passage about the scary Asians like this one:
To be utterly laughable. Seriously, I've been to Chinese New Year celebrations within my city, and it is a fun time. They do have drum performances, and dress in strange clothes, but I don't feel like a group celebrating their heritage once or twice a year is some death knell for Western civilization and culture.
The good, still mostly functional Western countries that matter like the United States, still remember what it means to be an empire (even if they don't call it that), and we've successfully anglified basically every white ethnic group that has come here, we anglified the Native Americans, and sufficiently assimilated Asians and Hispanics so that they're no great threat to our society. People look at the statistics of Europe's failed immigration policies, and assume that they also apply to the US, but they just don't. Regardless of whatever foolish policies Europe and the wider anglosphere adopt, the United States is doing fine and will continue to be a torchbearer for Western values even after those cultures have become just like the New York of Lovecraft's imagination.
I kind of don't understand people who look at the facts of succesful past assimilation, and who just assume that there is no soft or hard pressure to assimilate anymore in spite of political correctness and what the progressive left say. People who come here learn English. People who come here, learn a baseline of American culture and values. Just as the Chinese Empire of old hanified many of the disparate ethnic groups within its borders and failed to hanify others, so too America has and will succesfully anglify (or if you prefer, americanize) many ethnic groups and will fail to anglify others. But as long as we have the state capacity to stop the non-anglified groups from being too much of a problem (and we definitely do), it is a total non-issue for our civilization and way of life.
Like what? White supremacy or multiculturalism? Fascism or Marxism-Leninism? Scientific racism and social darwinism? Monarchism and the divine right of kings? Catholic integralism? These are all Western ideas.
I guess you mean liberal democracy. But how liberal should democracy be? Should voters be allowed to get what they want, or is that populism? What should be censored? Communists? Nazis? Porn? Anti-feminists? Islam? What should be taught in state education, what is the correct kind of history? Who should be debanked and suppressed? Who controls who is let into the country and in what numbers? Are there such controls? Or are they racist? Who can be murdered with impunity? Who can say certain words? Who runs the administration?
'Western values' as we mean them are a recent idea. They aren't even Anglo. The Anglos of old did not really believe all the things we believe today. The Americans of old believed in white supremacy, homophobia, all kinds of things that are unfashionable today.
There is indeed a Western culture, language group, philosophy, worldview to a certain extent. But it's such a vast tree with so many branches. It's like how 'America' in a certain sense includes Peruvians, Alaskan natives, Montreal latte-sippers, Texas cowboys, Venezuelan lowlifes. But that meaning of America is so broad as to be all but useless. It's ever changing and whole groups disappear in time, changing beyond recognition. The cowboys are mostly gone. The Aztecs are all gone. The Puritans are gone.
The issue is not just in 'not anglifying' others but in others changing what it means to be 'anglified.' The danger is deeper and more insidious than just seeing the Somali Learing Centre and thinking 'oh it's not so hard to get rid of these jokers' - it has to actually be done and not just talked about. Values have to actually be preserved, not just defended. Culture wars must be won rather than merely fought.
When talking about large groups of people over time, the only constant is change.
Dante might have been a Christian, but he also saw himself as an inheritor of Roman culture, and so his Divine Comedy ends up with a strange mix of references to Classical Mythology and the Aeneid, in a book about the Christian Afterlife. And before Rome "Hellenized" and adopted Greek philosophy and Homeric myth as its own, it saw the Greeks as foreign and other. We know that Cato the Elder considered Greek philosophy "un-Roman" and he probably would have hated to learn that his great grandson, Cato the Younger would be remembered as a sort of Stoic martyr and sage. It only took four generations for a resistant Rome to Hellenize in this way.
Just as there is no "truer" Rome, there is no "truer" West. All of those version of Rome are the real Rome, whether pro-Hellenistic or anti-Hellenistic, whether Pagan or Christian, all of them were Roman. So too, the West has been a lot of different things. The West is Greece and Rome, and Geneva, and London and Paris. It encompasses secular enlightenment ideals from the Encyclopedists of France, to the Marxists of Russia, and the Christians of the Crusades, and the Pagan Romans.
CertainlyWorse was expressing concern for the fate of "the West", and I was addressing him in those terms. But the simple fact is that the only thing we can say for sure is that "the West" is going to change in ways we can hardly predict, and would have no matter what happened. That's the weird thing about concerning yourself about a civilization instead of a nation or an ethnos or a tribe. Civilizations contain multitudes and are ever-changing. At least if you zoom in to the tribe level, you can say that there is a continuity of genetics, even if there is cultural drift and change over time.
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