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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 30, 2026

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If you are poor, fat, and socially inept - as a man, you will be harshly judged and looked down on within our society. This is - arguably - one of the main appeals of the manosphere to begin with. If one really wants to see the manosphere go away - we need to start looking at these realities of life straight to the face. Only then can one begin to provide meaningfully positive alternatives.

Isn't this one of the ironies of the situation? The anti-manosphere folks generally also claim to oppose judging people for being any/all of "poor, fat, and socially inept". Maybe they even believe their own propaganda, but fail to actually deliver on their stated values: maybe things would be different if all these men easily found dates among "progressive healthy-at-any-size neurodivergence activist" women who consider each other high-status, but clearly they're not.

There isn't a shortage of people who claim to be "looking at these realities of light straight to the face", but I don't think that's "meaningfully provided positive alternatives", in part because they've largely gone in different directions with this. As a guy, I'm somewhat more sympathetic to "nose to the grindstone self-improvement" (although I won't endorse the chauvinism) over virtue signaling for ineffective change in society, but it's not hard to see that everyone is really just talking past each other. Not that I have a better proposal.

In practice, being fat and/or socially inept as a woman will get you some pretty harsh judgement too. Maybe not right to your face, because a) that's not how women interact and b) it's a faux pas to say this stuff out loud. But women are judged more harshly, not less, for weight issues or social ineptitude.

How exactly are women judged harshly for social ineptitude?

Because women are rewarded significantly more for social adroitness and therefore the difference between the haves and the have nots is greater for women than it is for men. Thus it depends on how you measure the "harshness". Is it the loss that is measured (if so, women are judged more harshly) or the final destination (if so, men are judged more harshly).

Are women generally expected to have social adroitness though? As far as I can see, this is not the case. If a woman lacks social skills or acumen but is otherwise no actively unpleasant or obnoxious, she's usually just considered a cute dork or a clumsy goofball, I think.

Look at it this way, men's range of judgement is 0-50 while women's is 10-100 (note, scale entirely made up for illustrative purposes). Women don't bottom out as low as men, but their peak is much higher since social skills aren't as major a contributor to men's status as they are to women's. Thus, if you judge the "harshness" as the difference between the highest and the lowest judgement, women are most harshly judged, while if you judge it instead as the depth of the lowest men are.

social skills aren't as major a contributor to men's status as they are to women's

Frankly I find this mind-boggling. Where did you get such ideas? Why do you think nobody expects female comedians to actually be funny, women in general to be good conversationists or good initiators of conversations even, to be able to tell jokes etc?

The anti-manosphere folks generally also claim to oppose judging people for being any/all of "poor, fat, and socially inept".

This is just the scaled-up social version of the stereotypical "I wish I could find someone like you!" and "Just be yourself!" from a woman to a friend-zoned guy, isn't it? She thinks she's judging him positively! They're good friends! She wants to see him find a girlfriend, and thinks it should be easy for him! She just "doesn't think of you in that way", for what she assumes are inexplicable random reasons uncorrelated to what other girls will think, certainly not for any reasons that might sound superficial if identified and examined.

It's tempting to be critical of people who can lie to themselves in such a fashion, but just about everybody seems to do it (about some topic, if not this one), so by induction I'm probably doing it too, so self-interest alone says I probably want to vote for mercy over justice here.