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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 is a deeply entrenched mind virus. A social contagion that rode the waves of 20th century progressivism and the creeping post-WW2-ban on pushing back against leftism. It exists to propagate itself. To shut down those who disagree with it by painting them as villains, to promote those who promote it by lionizing them. That's all there is to it. It's come a long way and it remains in a fairly strong position.
That it's objectively bullshit is besides the point. Ask instead how it made it this far. Why it survive the moral outrages against it and has now, for multiple generations, been in a position to weild such outrage itself. To poison the water half population of the world swims in. Socially it's maladaptive and will die out eventually. That it's been originally adopted and later exported only by the obscenely wealthy Western societies that could afford it and the downsides it brings speaks to this. Demographic decline comes from numerous sources, but it seems plainly evident that feminism is one of them.
Social media, information bubbles, positive reinforcment cycles. Feminism is a good thing to have there. Elevate the ingroup, denigrate the outgroup, that never gets old. And what else does feminism do? Man bad, woman good, ad infinitum. It's blown past all its mottes of legal or political equality and now frolics in the baileys of patriarchy, systemic sexism and unconditional women-are-always-oppressed-yet-wonderful, with several sides of welfare designed for the benefit of women. But we could ignore all the legal, political and financial aspects. Those are barely even secondary. What matters is the narrative - a narrative that accords unearned merit to women, and undeserved scorn to men, which thanks to its wide reach and influence drives both to ever more stupid behavior. And thanks to the current media environment, this narrative is easily capable of self-reinforcing and acquiring new believers the moment they learn to talk.
As you can tell, I have little left for it except near-infinite disdain, limited only by the apparently finite shelf-life of humanity as a whole, with the expiration date approaching slowly but surely.
End social media. Destroy the internet with a flood of deliberately destructive AI agents designed to make it unusable. Shut down the universities, the public broadcasters. End public welfare. Flatten the playing field! Nuke it from orbit! Then see how much of feminism survives. One can dream.
When people write screeds like this about feminism, in my mind I always wonder "Which kind of feminism"? Because nowadays, "feminism" means pretty much whatever the person using the word wants it to mean, whether that is "Women should be able to vote" or "Evil civilization-hating penis-removing witches."
It's not just that there have been many different waves and schools of feminist thought, it's that it literally has become such a generic term that essentially anything other than a neolithic model of gender relations can be called "feminist." That's not even an exaggeration when we have people here on the Motte who literally believe that women should be property and it's those fucking bitch feminists who are the reason they aren't.
This is my personal opinion, not a mod note, but "feminism is a mind virus," "feminism is objectively false," "feminism is cancer," etc. reads as very boo-outgroup to me when you don't even specify what you mean by it. Generally I assume you more or less mean modern progressive feminism, 3rd wave or whatever, sex positivity and equal rights etc. etc. And before you think I'm white knighting or some shit, I think I have made it clear enough in the past that I largely agree with the criticisms of modern feminism. But I don't think someone who believes "Women should be allowed to vote" or "It should be illegal to beat your wife" is the same as someone who's pushing whatever specific progressive feminist thing is enraging you.
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