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I'm flirting with a rather incendiary view.
Over the COVID era and the recent excessive developments in the LGBT movement, I've been looking into radical feminist worldview where my gripes with a lot of society overlaps with some of theirs. At least, a section of theirs. I can't help but think that they are at least partially correct in their analysis of gender dynamics, regardless of the solutions they purport. I also agree with them that men are by default degenerates that need tons of rigorous external tempering to get right. And that access to porn is a bad idea, I've personally seen what crippling porn addiction can do to a man. Now I don't buy into the rest of the grift attempting to promote what they regard as feminine features in men, and indeed such attempts at social engineering can be pretty disastrous. I watched this video last night about what it means to be a man in a sedentary, urbanite lifestyle that doesn't really key into our more primal instincts like before, say, the Second World War. A lot of cult classics like Fight Club and Taxi Driver had already impended signs of a male crisis. Combine with this the growing wealth inequality. The consumption of various media that bring to life our escapist fantasies across all genres like high fantasy or superheroes or science fiction or even highly romanticised high school dramas, actually serves to remind them exactly how mundane our life really is. Going forward, I think it'll only get worse as it festers with no easy solutions. Worse still, we're pursuing the wrong solutions by regurgitating the myth that all behaviour is socialised and not evolutionary, that we could get men to "unlearn" masculinity and "learn" femininity. In the end, such attempts will not only push the rejects over the edge, it might also risk creating more rejects. In many ways, I see Tyler Durdan as the "proto-red pill" media in how the persona gives the rejects what they desire and giving them an opportunity to pursue hightened competition in dominating in actual fights. The more woke the culture gets, and the more progressives freak out over the "red pill media" gaining traction and blame it as the source of "male entitlement" rather than a symptom of something a bit more complicated, the more these rejects' perception of society will overlap with the red pill crowd's. I realise the second part of my comment seems completely contradictory to what I'd said in the beginning, but what I'm trying to say is that radfems are correct in their analysis that the "degenerate phase" is the default phase of men and it requires significant external pressures to correct. Part of the problem could be that young boys being coddled might potentially give way to the mentality that life is a template where a series of events fall into place like they're a given like so: school -> girlfriend -> college -> job -> success. But if the habit of actively working towards your every goal isn't imbibed into you since a very young age, once reality confronts you, you become a doomer and just give up like you could do nothing about it. Like you were just born in the wrong household/class/society/whatever. I don't think the mainstream media is ever going to address this head on without being bogged down by what goes within the overton window of the culture war.
I know its a rather chaotic hodge podge stream of thoughts, but I hope I made sense in getting my point across.
I can feel the emotional appeal of this kind of "men in trouble" narrative, but I don't think it matches empirical reality all that well. Consider one of Fight Club's most famous quotes:
Sounds like a real crisis of masculinity. But where's the data? Male suicides per capita have been largely static or declining in almost all Western countries including the US. Reported mental health issues have increased, but this increase is driven more or less exclusively by worsening mental health in women; male mental health as measured by referrals has been relatively stable over the last twenty years - link to some UK data here.
I feel like this pattern is borne out among my friends and acquaintances too. I'm in my 30s, and I know quite a few women who have had serious mental health crises (usually associated with high stress jobs, especially in combination with parenting), whereas my male friends have mostly thrived, and now are happily ensconced in their careers and having kids. Quite a few of them had rocky spells in their 20s, but that's a normal part of growing up, especially for men where risk-taking is more common.
I don't know why so many right-wing Zoomers are obsessed with the evils of porn. I don't think porn is necessarily a great thing, in the same way that watching loads of TV isn't ideal for you, but I've yet to see anyone blow up their life with (legal) porn, whereas I've known people blow up their lives with alcohol, opiates, cocaine, gambling, and reckless driving, none of which are exactly new (though the opiates are getting worse). And when I look at subreddits like /r/loveafterporn, I'm much more inclined to see the person with the mental illness as being the controlling/BPD or psychodrama-seeking wife who is treating her husband's porn use as an existential threat to the relationship, rather than the poor guy who's jacking off to legal teens behind his wife's back.
More broadly, I think some of the male Zoomer doomerism (Zoomerism?) is just a matter of people looking for a romantic narrative around their gender generation. Which is fine, Palahniuk was doing it for GenX in Fight Club. But absent supporting data, I'm inclined to view it as a narrative rather than fact.
So I opened the URL. "Almost all Western countries including the US" does not equal the entire world.
Between 2000-2018, suicide mortality rates rose by 35 percent in the United States.
https://www.bu.edu/sph/news/articles/2022/us-suicides-are-stagnant-or-on-the-rise-among-many-groups/
More data is available here:
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7108a7.htm
Supposedly there was a slight drop in the rate in 2019, but I'm sure that the worsening continued since 2020.
We also need to keep other things in mind. A high percent of drug overdoses, car accidents, disappearances are probably suicides. (It's also true that murders are sometimes faked as suicides, but whatever.)
The effects of these are difficult to hide from your social circle. In the end, you probably go broke, get into an accident, and either die, or need to get treatment. The people around you will know and see, and you won't be able to hide the symptoms anyway. But the effects of porn addiction are more likely to remain hidden. The only other person who is likely affected is the spouse. Of course you don't see it happening. You'll hear about a divorce, but chances are that nobody will tell you the real reason it happened.
But the more important factor is this: mainstream society has found a way to give license to your contempt of porn. I'm sure most posters here are familiar with anti-porn arguments from the past. There was the one about porn being immoral, and it being degrading to women. These narratives were pretty much thrown into the memory hole (there's no point in discussing the reasons here). Then there was the one about porn causing erectile dysfunction, which seems to be rather popular among homely women but, as far as I know, the scientific proof is sketchy.
The current, and most effective, one is that "porn distorts young men's expectations of sex" (this basically means the women you see in porn vids are unrealistically hot compared to average women of the same age, due to the obesity epidemic, and pretend to enjoy getting jackhammered and giving head, and actually seem to know how to give head) and "watching porn screws up men's brain chemistry". These are popular theories because they fit into the general narrative that "unfortunately we haven't yet arrived to our utopia, because weak men are sabotaging feminism", "toxic men cannot adapt to the modern world" and "if anything bad happens to a woman, it's men's fault". Zoomers, whether right-wing or not, would never propagate such sentiments if they didn't get mainstream encouragement.
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