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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.
Because people 'blowing up their life with porn' doesn't look like what you think it looks like.
It's not telegenic, interesting, doesn't get into the crime blotter, it's just sad and boring. Quite often they don't have a life to blow up in the first place. You think you have any reason to know or be friends with guys who apart from work spend 2-3 hours daily on porn? You think you can tell which guy at work has little drive because his reward system is completely screwed from superstimuli ?
For some unclear reason, serious porn use makes men even less sociable than can be ascribed to their solitary 'hobby'.
Have you counted the amount of men you encounter who fit that pattern, and compared it to how it was before mass internet ?
You do know people are more solitary and friendless today than ever before, right ?
You are aware of 'survivorship bias' right ?
Are we really supposed to think you'd be perfectly okay with your wife neglecting ..everything else and locking herself away for 60-90 minutes daily to masturbate over things that you are scared to contemplate as 'no biggie', right ?
60-90 minutes!? That's a crazy amount of time just to rub one out.
I don't suppose you've heard of "edging"?
Yes, and 'gooning' as well, but it still seems like a lot of time.
"I take a shower and open up at least 30 tabs of Overwatch SFM porn and edge for at least 2 hours until I feel better." This example comes from a woman, too, though whether you think it actually happen(s/ed) is up to debate.
My impression was that women generally do longer sessions less frequently and men do short sessions more frequently. But of course this isn't a subject I discuss with many people so my sample size is admittedly very small.
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Really? 90 minutes would be a disappointingly short session for me. Mine are closer to 7-11 hours but only every other week. But I don't feel like my life is particularly 'blown up'. Surely, it's not that big of a time commitment compared to a relationship? I still have time for university, parties, and other hobbies. I do, however, regret that the dopamine frenzy could have been used for more productive ends, like a programming project.
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I think the point is that someone who is truly addicted to porn isn't just rubbing one out. They are compulsively watching porn, not just having a quick orgasm and moving on with life.
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If you're on SSRIs it's not unusual.
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Then logically it follows that "just rubbing one out" isn't what they're doing.
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