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Not to be flippant about what is a very sad event, but he really did want State-Issued Girlfriends? I mean, "do away with hypergamy (which I presume he means female hypergamy, and not men wanting to marry high-value women), disseminate biological consciousness to the dispossessed, strip women of any avenues except 'marriage without your choice is the only thing between you and starvation, enjoy being treated as the serf in the domestic sphere!'" all sounds like it would fit neatly beside seizing the means of production etc.
State bureaus to ensure women don't lie about their dating preferences, keep records of single men and women, and start matching them up so no man has to go without sex on demand and the woman can starve (or more likely turn to prostitution) if she doesn't want to marry the guy picked out of the list of "so Bob here is thirty-eight and never had a long-term relationship, it's time".
"Someone has probably made this argument on The Motte before."
Could have been lifted from several past discussion threads: prevent women going into higher education, prevent women having jobs outside the home, make women economically dependent on men again, take mate choice out of the woman's hands and give it to her family, and there will never again be any man without a wife to cook for him, clean for him, and fulfil his sexual needs (her sexual needs? don't be stupid, her role is to do what he likes, sex is not about mutuality).
There is still the problem of domestic violence, does the manifesto address this or is the presumption that once every man knows he is guaranteed a woman of his own as chattel, there will no longer be any impetus to beat and abuse their partners? Wouldn't that be nice if true, but violent men don't need an excuse to be violent.
The steelman of that position is that women, by and large, are already dependent on men but that this has been made impersonal and invisible and that men are hence alienated from the fruits of their labour.
The productive professions that enable the machinery to keep running, so the argument goes, are dominated by men while many of the high-status positions occupied by women are sinecures either created or mandated by the state. Care professions are the big exception but one might argue that the outsized need for them is an effect of greater female participation in the labour market.
If men could offer protection and provision directly and personally, their value as mates, and hence their attractiveness, would increase as well.
You are presupposing a difference in attractiveness that has been artificially created by exploiting men. If this exploitation were to disappear, all those yucky low-status men whose contributions women are eager to benefit from (but from a distance, thank you very much) would suddenly become better catches.
Ah, right. Because it's only men who are productive. So what great productive profession was our shooter part of? What amazing high value creating triumphs did he achieve?
This is the problem here: "I'm a guy who should be getting All The Stuff but I'm not, and it's because... women! They're at fault! They should be forced to kiss my feet or starve in the gutter, that will solve all the problems!"
Guy who works as a gas station attendant is never going to become any better a catch than he already is, and that's not to say he's no catch, but making all women desperate will not get him a better mate than he could get now. He may get a low-tier on his level mate, but does he want one at that level, or are men not hypergamous too (just in a different direction)?
You are very smart, so I am just going to assume that your reading of my already hedged statement as absolute is a rhetorical flourish rather than a lack of reading comprehension.
Irrelevant. Good ol' Karl was hardly slaving away in a Manchester factory either.
If the money he brings home is what sustains a family, I'd beg to differ. Incidentally, I bet that the reintroduction of literal pay packets would significantly lower divorce rates because it would make the husband's contribution to the household more visible.
It's not like there aren't any incels who would want this, but the steelman simply calls for a levelling of the playing field and for stopping the coercive and impersonal wealth transfer from men to women which would open the door for voluntary and personal wealth transfer.
Great! That would be a system working as intended.
No argument there. But they seem more flexible and more willing to settle (and better able to adapt to lowered expectations). Open to be proven wrong on that last one.
But that's the thing he's glossing over - women work easy, sedentary jobs so they can be replaced by robots, men work productive jobs.
I don't imagine he means every man will work down a coal mine or on an oil rig. Take women out of the workforce, and those white collar jobs are going to be filled by men - or they are just as vulnerable, the white collar men, to being replaced by robots. AI can now do your programming, why do I need you, Joe? What was this kid's degree in, and what kind of career did he hope for? EDIT: I see from one report that he had a degree in philosophy, so very much a non-productive field (by those who measure success in salaries with more and more zeroes).
I don't think he visualised working as an agricultural labourer or on a building site, the non-easy, non-sedentary work that women don't do.
So it's not about economic value, it's about dominance (and soothing his bruised ego over why he's not as successful as he imagines he should be. Women are to blame because society coddles them and devalues men. That's why he's not getting where he should be in life, because women are given an unfair advantage over him.)
We're concentrating on the part of the manifesto about women, but don't forget he also was anti-capitalism and blamed society for a lot of ills:
The guy does seem to have been socially isolated, feeling left out, probably indeed "university is supposed to be this party time of your life with friends and sex, why am I not getting that? it is the fault of society!"
EDIT EDIT: Armchair psychoanalysis, which is the worst kind, but I get the impression (e.g. studying philosophy, writing a manifesto) that the guy very much valued himself on his intelligence. Maybe going to college and meeting other smart kids, in a field he presumed would be the area he achieved triumphs, showed him he wasn't as smart as he thought/there are other, equally smart, people out there. Maybe he didn't make the impression he had hoped to make. That would sting, and drive him even more inwards to rationalise his failures - it's down to capitalism, it's down to pornography, it's down to women'n'minorities getting unfairly favourable treatment, it's this cocktail of social ills that are not my fault and so I can avoid facing the changes I need to make in myself.
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I would agree that his logic leads there, but he literally didn’t say government issued girlfriends. I suspect this is standard utopian logic.
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Not directly, that's just a meme. I don't see why he would have been opposed to state issued girlfriends. If his ideal totalitarian government replaces all the women in the workforce with robots to encourage monogamy it's not much of a step for the state to coerce any slow to pair with guns or assignments.
"Willingly" is doing a hell of a lot of work there. "I couldn't get a woman of my own until it was literally starvation or marry me" is not a recipe for good marriages, and all the old jokes about adultery and cuckoldry will get a new lease of life. If Sally can't stand Bob but likes Bill, unless Bob is keeping Sally locked up in the women's quarters then she'll find some way to meet Bill and have fun with him.
Swap in "men" for "women" in his manifesto there and see how that bites you. "Ugly, old, mentally ill or simply marrying this person is marrying down women can now have that husband they've always wanted, once men have no option but to marry and then will willingly take the ugly stepsister to bride". Yeah, do you think that works?
нет! Comrade Sally wouldn't dare offend the People's Revolution with counter-revolutionary acts of adultery against a fine worker like you, Comrade Bob. I don't believe it, a treasonous crime in service of the imperialist dogs. It would spit on the glory of the Party. As a precautionary measure, we shall re-educate her in Montana-lag for a period of no less than 5 years to confirm her commitment to the workers of the world. In the mean time you may take your pick of the comfort stock, Comrade Bob.
I suppose AI could arrange marriages based on some measure of physical attractiveness and compatibility. Still, it's hard to see how many would win with super egalitarian pairing.
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