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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026

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I of course favor One, but it is a hard sell.

Most men are too emotionally weak and bitchmade at the soul level to survive one other dude calling them a fag; imagine the difficulty if all of society is pushing down on you to be more manly.

I think that's the reason the dudes who decide to not lower their heads and take what they are given are so wildly out there as a rule; degenerate coded puppy play kink at pride Fuck You if you don't like it you can eat shit and die types, they are reacting against the immense pressure to do this set of masculine things or you are ...

Effeminate! what could be worse than that, you wouldn't want people to think you weren't a manly manly man, you should think about it all the time, you should neurotically worry about it all the time, you should punish other men for not aligning with the vague societal view of manliness, you should in fact die about it instead of acting one degree off the course society has set for you. Now go back to pretending to work at the mines or yer gay.

It's why I find the alpha male manly man types personally disgusting: Weakness is contemptible, and there is nothing that signals weakness more than letting the idea that people might tut tut at you dictate your entire fucking existence. Ford f250 in the marketing firm parking lot ass

Isn't this post a contradiction? The manosphere/machismo culture guys make a pitch that is a variant of: "You are weak and that is contemptible. Follow my view of how you should be, and you will no longer be weak and contemptible." You are basically making the same pitch, just swapping out what actions/beliefs are indicative of weakness. The core part is that both this post and the machismo ideology relies on shaming men for being weak, thus implicitly asserting that to be a good man you must be strong. That is an enforced gender role.

Here are your last two paragraphs, changed to be something a manosphere guy would say.

Chud! what could be worse than that, you wouldn't want people to think you weren't an ally, you should think about it all the time, you should neurotically worry about it all the time, you should punish other men for not aligning with the oppressed, you should in fact die about it instead of acting one degree off the course history has set for you. Now go back to pretending to respect women or yer cancelled.

It's why I find the male feminist types personally disgusting: Weakness is contemptible, and there is nothing that signals weakness more than letting the idea that people might tut tut at you dictate your entire fucking existence. HR Karen following ass

It's an established retort, analogous to saying that the manliest cocktails are the pink sweet ones because they prove that you have nothing to prove to anyone and drinking some pure vodka or whiskey is just insecure posing, or that driving a big truck/car is compensation for your dick size.

This is of course just counter-signaling, which is a form of signaling itself.

What they missed though is that the core manliness is not the lumberjack clothes and beard and whiskey and trucks and football stuff, but self-reliance, goal-oriented vision and ambition (knowing what you want), decision power and effectiveness (getting shit done), keeping one's word and honor (reliability and role in a community), standing up for one's dependents and friends, etc. etc. These can have some outward appearances but they aren't the core. It will still be countersignalled of course, because it looks even more secure and settled to say that you just don't even have to think about whether you are effective and ambitious, in fact you can self-deprecate and joke about how much you aren't, because in fact you know that everyone sees how successful you are in your life trajectory that you can even afford to downplay it.