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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 haven’t watched the documentary yet, but IMO if you wish to increase the sum total happiness in society, it’s better to lean into “women should be ashamed of their gender” than “men should be ashamed of their gender”. This is because women are more sensitive to shame, threats of social ostracization, and other kinds of social stressors, while being more socially conformist, and while also being more “vain” in their choice of mate (hypergamy, which is just nature naturing), and more likely to instigate divorce when the status differential is changed in their favor [1, 2, 3]. Men, contrarily, are more likely to take risks and break social norms in order to secure a mate, and so any attempt at shaming them into not getting laid will be less effective. So there is a qualitative difference in the effect size of any behavior-policing social intervention: with the same amount of shame, you can modify more of the behaviors and values of more women than if you tried the same for men. We know from a study on the Lancaster Amish that women who are controlled according to traditional values have less stress, fewer symptoms of depression, higher aggregate scores of mental health, lower levels of intimate partner violence, higher levels of social support, and even report lower levels of unfair treatment owing to gender (lol, lmao even) compared to the general population. We can only imagine how happy they would be with traditional values + modern Starbucks beverages. Traditionalism also uniquely buffers against the depression-increase when women marry:
In light of the data, I’m not sure why anyone would take manosphere / feminism discourse seriously. Neither of them have any evidence-backed plan to make men and women happier. Maybe the manosphere increases male happiness by providing a sense of cameraderie? I doubt feminism makes anyone happier as feminists always seem distraught.
If feminism is making women on average less happy, that is not necessarily a strike against feminism. There is also freedom to consider. If freedom makes you less happy on average, that does not necessarily mean that you should do away with freedom. Perhaps it can mean that, in some cases, but not as a general rule.
Children generally become less happy at first when parents stop just providing everything to them and start to demand more adult behavior. That does not necessarily mean that it is bad to at some point start to demand more adult behavior from children.
An adult man who makes his own living is probably less happy on average than a sheltered boy who has everything provided for him. That does not necessarily mean that it is better to be a sheltered boy than it is to be an adult man.
It is not surprising that as women went from having a sort of middle status between children and adult men to having legal freedom equal to men and being expected to make their own economic decisions, they also became less happy in some ways and developed various new stresses different from the stresses that they had before. It is especially not surprising given that this is a new development in history, with few precedents. So there is no guidebook.
But this does not mean that women's liberation is a bad thing. In any case, the journey of women's liberation has only begun. It will be interesting to see where it goes.
Yeah exactly, freedom is bound to make tons of people unhappy, because they make bad choices for themselves in at least one area. Like every fat ass is unhappy with their freedom over food consumption instead of big government controlling calorie intake. It's a tradeoff situation, big government authoritarianism favors the retards who can't control themselves and make choices so bad that having someone else tell them what to do works out better. From people who eat a little too much to the morons who go and take a mortgage on their house to gamble with or whatever else. Even the midwit of government can be better than their own idiocy.
Freedom favors the smart and responsible people who can control themselves and make good decisions. Freedom says you are accountable to yourself. Freedom is for the people who make better decisions in their life than a central bureaucrat on a power trip could do. If you're less happy in a free society, that's on you for overeating or being an asshole or choosing to gamble or whatever stupid shit you do.
I don't think of myself as a retard, I think of myself as someone who knows better for my life than the government would. I want my freedom to do with myself as I wish. If the retards want their king, I guess we can have an opt in no freedom program for them or something where you can sign up and live in a government facility that stops you from overeating and drinking too much and changes your diaper for you. They'll tell you when it's work time, play time, nap time.
And strictly speaking that is no one, as we all need guidance on what good decisions are, and that indoctrination is itself unfree. Your perception of what choices you have and what the consequences of those choices are, is to a large extent a product of your indoctrination. And people tend to even seek out the indoctrination that they prefer (hence: bubbles of like minded people).
This is a false dichotomy, because freedom or a lack of it does not merely come from what a government allows and demands, but also what a culture allows and demands, both explicitly and implicitly.
I believe that traditional society had a strong sense of noblesse oblige in the sense that the intelligent would accept being restricted by rules that work for people who think that they are smarter than they actually are, which actually also includes many smart people.
Of course, but this perception is very much a product of modern culture, where narcissistic individualism is encultured in people. So of course you think that you know better than others and consider 'beating' others at the game of life to be an ego-affirming testament to your worth as a person. But is it not evidence that your 'freedom' is a mirage, that your perceptions fall so much in line with current culture, and thus do not seem based in independent thought?
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