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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.
I hate the framing of all of the anti-manosphere complaints. It treats feminism as inherently good and the neutral belief.
I loathe feminism. I think it is largely based on bad social science, bad economics, and bad evolution. I think it encourages dislike between the sexes. I think it encourages women to pick sub optimal lifestyles. To quote the broken clock, feminism is cancer.
That doesn’t mean the maosphere is right! But these pieces never seem to deal with the fact that feminism is also bullshit.
"feminism" means a lot of very different things. Do you actually loathe feminism, or do you just loathe certain kinds of feminism?
I can't answer for zeke5123a, but I personally loathe any ideology that dodges any criticism by going "actually we're 1,000 completely different things", despite those things all consistently pushing in a single direction and generally cooperating to hurt their mutual enemies.
Somehow, when people go "feminism is great and we should have more of it!", feminists don't rush to go "um actually, feminism means lots of different things" -- they just cheer. It's only when people want to criticise it that suddenly it becomes this nebulous, unassailable hydra.
Consider that perhaps you usually don't notice the feminists who don't just blindly cheer for feminism as a monolith, yet they exist. I'm one.
And if you think that I'm just politically biased, well, I would make the same argument about "the right" as I would about "feminism". That is, it's a very diverse group. In my case, I loathe some ideas that come under that term and am fine with others.
Consider that perhaps I've actually noticed reality, where approximately zero feminists ever push back against anything that moves in the direction of "more feminism".
Even the best that you can personally offer is "Well, I don't blindly cheer". Great -- do you actually push back against feminism doing evil things? Because yes, of course I've noticed feminists who'll be passively silent when other feminists do horrible things. If that's the best they can do, then no, there is no meaningful variation in feminism, because 99%+ of feminists have no interest in reining in the worst parts of the movement.
I've made no comment on you being politically biased; nor have I said anything about the right. My issue is this constant motte and bailey where any criticism of feminism is deflected with "feminism doesn't exist!", and any praise of feminism is encouraged with "yay feminism!"
Is this..."Silence is Violence", but from the right?
No.
I'm not saying "you must publicly disavow anyone in your movement who says X, otherwise you're complicit, and deserve to be hurt". That's the idea of "Silence is Violence".
I'm saying:
There are feminists like Goodguy who (roughly) describe themselves as being solely pro-gender-equality, with none of the nastier parts of feminism in them. (That's good!)
However, whenever I observe these people in a context where a nastier feminist is doing/saying evil things, I don't observe these milder feminists pushing back or disagreeing. This is both in a personal context -- e.g. at a social gathering, a work event, whatever -- and in the public or social media context as well. In fact, it's not even that they'll be fully silent: they'll nod along, support the conversation, and do everything short of saying "yes I fully agree that men are pigs".
Also, the nastier parts of feminism have a pretty well-observed pattern of bullying the hell out of anyone who dares to push back against them.
The combined effect of this: feminism, despite being apparently "many different things", ends up being a coalition that reliably pushes in a single direction. If a subgroup of feminism doesn't push back on X, and instead just is silent on X (but passively/socially supporting the parts of the movement that push for X), then these groups aren't meaningfully different, and do function as a single block that can be meaningfully criticised.
To put it another way: I'm not telling Goodguy "You must push back on X, or you're complicit!" -- I'm saying "Because feminists don't push back on X, you don't get to make the argument that actually feminism is made of lots of different things".
I think that's a pretty obvious difference between what I said and "Silence is Violence".
EDIT: Here's a right-wing equivalent.
ALICE: Republicans are homophobic.
BOB: Republicans are many different things, so it's meaningless to criticise "Republicans".
ALICE: But among all the Republicans I know, even the "mild" ones who say they're pro-gay-rights -- whenever a more homophobic Republican says "God hates fags", the supposedly milder Republican never pushes back. They just smile and laugh along, nodding their head.
BOB: Wow, sounds like "Silence is Violence", huh?
ALICE: No, I'm saying the supposed variation in your group doesn't prevent that group from having an emergent, collective goal, and I'm allowed to criticise it for that!
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