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With the release of the recent Barbie movie, the old gender debates on the internet have been reignited. (Admittedly, I haven't watched it yet, might pen down my thoughts once I do.)
I recently encountered another article by a heterosexual, middle-class woman discussing how we can assist young men in discovering their masculinity. The piece, confidently titled map out of the wilderness, repeats the narrative tropes that countless similar works in journalism tend to focus on.
Does it argue that men are disoriented because women are no longer subservient? Indeed. Does it accuse men of falling for 'destructive' ideologues such as Jordan Peterson and Bronze Age Pervert whose political ideologies aren't personally favored? Yes. Does it claim men are discontent because women wish for them to behave more femininely? Absolutely. Does it state there's a lack of 'positive masculinity?' Oh, for sure.
To credit the writer, Christine Emba, she does highlight some of the more sinister issues that venture slightly beyond the bounds of conventional discourse. She openly criticizes feminists and women in general for refusing to assist men, citing an instance where Obama was chastised for attempting to help boys, and thousands of women denounced him in protest.
What prompted me to respond to this article was a moment of blatant self-awareness by the author, who admits when reproached by a man that she doesn't want to be intimate with men who heed her advice (emphasis mine):
Yes, dear writer, you recoiled in acknowledgment. If you, a talking head opining on this topic, felt this way, consider the reaction of those numerous women with lesser self-awareness when they encounter these feeble, effeminate men.
However, all the discussions around gender roles, sexual relations, power dynamics, and 'incels' are missing the real issue. They're distractions, veils obscuring the core problem.
At the risk of being cliche, I'll reference Nietzsche's most well-known line:
Why has this single paragraph echoed throughout recent centuries as one of the deepest and most frequently reiterated explanations of modernity's moral crisis? Obviously, Nietzsche, a self-proclaimed atheist, doesn't imply we've executed deicide in the literal sense. What we've done is obliterated any transcendent reason for existence. There is no apparent reason why young men should exhibit concern for their neighbors, work towards self-improvement, curtail their desires, or even make an effort to contribute to society.
For a young man in a contemporary world that is entirely individual-centric, what is the appeal of any altruistic act?
Regardless of the religion you choose, these systems provided us with a motive beyond primal, materialistic pleasures to care. They provided us with an aim to pursue. Most importantly, they offered us a social framework within which we could strive collectively with others and receive commendation for our benevolent deeds.
Nietzsche's suggested solution is that the New Men must 'become deities' to be worthy of God's murder. Regrettably, as we've found out, not everyone can ascend to godhood. Certainly some of the highest status and highest agency men can create their own values, but what about the rest of us?
How is a young man in his twenties, armed with a useless college degree and forced to work at a supermarket to get by, supposed to find purpose in what he's doing? How can he feel accomplished, or masculine, or empowered? He definitely can't rely on God or religion for that feeling. If he tries, he'll be overwhelmed by relentless mockery and cynicism from his society.
Returning to Ms. Emba's proposed solution, she states that men need to experience masculinity by:
This, she asserts, is 'Constructive Masculinity.' Let's look past the glaring issue that it's a woman attempting to define what masculinity should be - the question remains: why?
Without some larger mission, most men aren't going to be motivated whatsoever. Men need a reason to exist. And not a poor, weak reason like 'following your dreams' or 'getting money' or 'being a good person.' Men need something to strive for, something worth dying for, something that they can use to shield themselves from the terror of the void.
Of course this problem is applicable to far more people than just young Western males. This lack of meaning, lack of purpose, is at the core of modernity's societal problems. It waits like a tiger in the shadows, seizing us in our moments and weakness and pulling us into a black pit of despair, nihilism. Emptiness.
When you're on your deathbed, where will you look for comfort? What force or being or god will let you face your own death without flinching? What water will purify you?
How will you cleanse your hands of blood?
Much of this article is just mainstream pap, whipsawing from gleeful enjoyment about how women are better than men nowadays to lamenting how much men suck. But there is one part I want to highlight:
Yes. If society has become anti-male or anti-masculine (and I would argue in large part it has), and "good" has come to refer to feminine virtues only, then worthwhile visions of masculinity will be anti-social. You cannot have an anti-masculine society without anti-social masculinity, unless you have no masculinity at all.
Eh, from what I know of Emba her feminism is motivated entirely by the fact that she thinks women aren't happy with the current situation either.
If I were a cynic I'd say that this recent reactionary feminist wave is precisely about women and the easiest way for people like Emba and Louise Perry to distinguish themselves is where the current status quo shows serious cracks: how it handles men's problems (
alsomainly sex for women, going by her book topic)My personal view on stories and articles like this is that it reflects a growing (if still subconscious) awareness that the Chesterton's fence of traditional masculinity was actually holding back something dangerous - and now that the fence has been torn down the bull is getting restless and realising his newfound freedom. There's now an urgent need to build a new fence (prosocial construction of masculinity in this metaphor) because there's a very high chance that the fence the bull decides to build will be substantially worse for women than what we've thrown out - just look at the bargain between the sexes in the rest of the world. The more sensitive (in the same sense that Nietzsche was sensitive, this isn't an insult) women are already starting to see what is taking shape among modern western male populations and it is absolutely something they should be scared of because there is a lot of potential for things to get very, very bad (for women). Sure, we might have tossed out the social guardrails on handling sexuality, but men can just look over at how Islam does it and see that things would actually be much, much better for them under a set of rules like that - and whatever else you can say about a brutal patriarchy that keeps women barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen, it is stable and incentivises both prosocial male behaviour and reproduction enough that those beliefs will absolutely have a voice in the deliberations to come if only by virtue of the sheer numbers of children they produce.
I don't really think there's a prospect of actual Handmaid's Tale-style RETVRNing. Feminists love to complain (or fantasize) about one, yes. But frankly I think it's part of a general tendency towards neuroticism and over-selling threats (especially in the Trump era) to justify their movement.
The failure states people like Perry claim as motivations are much more mundane: failures of the sexual revolution's model of male and female sexuality, failures in guiding women to make decisions that they seem to want to make but don't (e.g. having families), failures of omission like the absence of Good Men^(tm).
The regime isn't really at risk of collapse from male revolt; they've totally won. It's telling that the only reactionary turn allowed is that of feminists like Perry or males who share all feminist assumptions like Richard Reeves who spend their time begging to be taken seriously by feminists and will not go against their interests.
The reactionary turn is precisely because of the inherent downsides and contradictions of liberal feminism that smart feminists realize can't be written off by claiming there's some pocket of sexists we haven't eliminated yet. It's an attempted perestroika of an inherently (at least according to them) flawed system.
I think that the current system of relations between the sexes is untenable and producing large numbers of frustrated young men with nothing tying them to society. I have my doubts about Handmaid's Tale manifesting in the real world (that series always struck me more as female pornography than a serious social position), but I think that sharia-style treatment is absolutely on the table. In a lot of western countries, immigration means that there are decently sized populations of people actually living that culture, right now.
Who? I have no idea who this person is and I can't see any links to her work, so I'm not going to talk about her or her positions at all.
Hard disagree - the cathedral is currently in serious disarray and is openly failing in new and exciting ways every single day. There are serious problems with the government of the west as it is currently constituted, and these doctrines and ideas have been spreading through the population like wildfire. Prosocial illusions about femininity have been largely destroyed and women are unhappier than ever, even as male dysfunction finally grows noticeable enough that people are talking about it. The regime absolutely has not won - they have a rapidly failing grip on society that is forced to grow more nakedly authoritarian and less credible as time goes on. If that's what counts as winning, I'm curious as to what defeat looks like.
Allowed? Who said the regime has the ability to disallow anything? Schoolteachers are currently having to deal with the fact that messages running completely counter to their ideas are running rampant in schools. The reaction is building and these are the early signs of what is coming down the pipe. This isn't a case of perestroika so much as people inside the system finally noticing that the alarm bells are ringing, and trying to communicate that from inside a system which makes even talking about this kind of failure grounds for social ostracism and shaming.
True. Luckily for them it's an evolutionarily novel environment and the most frustrated men are basically poisoned by fast food and the internet.
Those men are disappearing into video games and porn and, even if they weren't, simply don't have the psychological and physical profile for rebellion (incels are well overrepresented in traits like depression and low internal locus of control).
There ARE roving bands of men (or close enough) but that just seems to be due to lax law enforcement (and, tbh, I doubt low-IQ criminals are as sexually frustrated. From what I know it's the opposite; they tend to have higher partner counts).
Louise Perry, who has also written a book attacking liberal feminism and the sexual revolution. In my head women like her and Emba are of a class.
All of this is true. And yet dissent is not manifesting in any sort of constructive alternative. Young men are unhappy, they either buy into the prog line in some way or dig into a variety of reactionary content creators playing whack-a-mole with the censors. Women are unhappy, they either get increasingly desperate talks on how misogyny is still the problem or maybe they read works like Emba's and Perry's that offer critique but no solution. Anything that even looks vaguely constructive is written off as misogynist or unviable.
It's a form of "feminist realism": complaining about capitalism means nothing if no one can actually conceive of or execute a replacement vision. Socialists can talk all they want about the system being this close to collapse, it clings on.
"Incels" existed in every generation and always have, but they're not really who I'm talking about. There are a lot of more average men who are now falling through the cracks and failing to start, who now often get clumped in with the actual incels (I don't pay much attention to incel vocabulary, but I suppose the actual incels I'm talking about would be what they call "trucels"). They're distinctly aware that something is wrong, and there's a lot of anger motivating them too. They're already a significant political force in Korea and were widely considered to have played a key role in their recent elections, for instance. Furthermore, they don't actually need to have the ability or inclination to rebel - their existence as a large group means that the individuals who actually do rebel or work against the system can count on them as allies in exchange for giving them some of what they want. The "incels" in Korea didn't rebel - but they (supposedly) won the election for the candidate who promised to give them some of what they want.
On the other hand, I agree that the roving bands of men are distinct from this phenomenon - in my view those are the nascent warbands that show up on the periphery of dying empires very consistently throughout history.
She doesn't seem like she has a particularly interesting perspective from what I've seen here, but if you have an actual good article I can read without giving her money I'd be interested.
"It's true that the warning lights are on and weird noises are coming from the engine, but the engine hasn't actually stopped so there's no problem." These are the early warning signs of impending trouble, and those constructive alternatives are largely crushed in their formative stages because of the threat they represent to the current elite and social order. While a bunch of dudes noticing that the official messaging in their culture regarding women is all completely false and makes you less successful if you listen to and internalise it isn't really a big problem by itself, there's an idea floating around rationalist circles that makes the issue a bit clearer - that lies are contagious. Once the ostensibly prosocial illusions regarding women evaporate, the people who notice this are going to start seeing all the other little lies and deceptions that modern industrial western societies rely on, and when those lies are gone we're going to be in for some very interesting times. We're now seeing reports from school teachers that they have to stage special interventions because boys are sharing Andrew Tate content - https://www.newsweek.com/andrew-tate-teacher-school-misogyny-1783709 Boys are increasingly failing to respect or respond to conventional messaging, and political polarisation between them and girls is increasing.
Why include the "looks" qualifier? Any constructive or positive response to the system is labelled as misogynist and squashed by the arms of the Cathedral, and this will continue until well after the point at which people stop letting "misogynist" as a slur have any impact on them or their behaviour. The system may be clinging on, but at the same time my contention is not that it is close to collapse - it is collapsing around us as we speak, right now.
That sounds like a description of modern incels (obviously we don't care that much about the floor of men who'd just never reproduce, we care that the number seems to be growing....)
But let's say we mean some people who haven't totally blackpilled themselves. Sure. It's a more viable demographic. But I wonder to what degree they aren't subject to similar problems like obesity. After all, what did they fail to start? School sports and all those other physical virtues?
I read her book, and I more or less agree tbh
No, I think you're thinking of the late USSR or Impeprial China and I'm thinking about a random awful African country.
Like, both have problems. But one collapsed and was replaced by a new, perhaps more viable model. The other just continues to dwell (or spiral) in a low-level equilibrium with no end in sight.
That's how I see it. Bad regimes and systems can persist for a long time without a real counter. When we're talking about some of the richest and most mature democracies with ever increasing government-corporate control of the digital infrastructure and their visible testing of means of curbing revolt (e.g. the attack against the bank accounts of trucker protestors)...
The public is way too divided and been trained to both hate each other and feel fatalist about a lot of this. They've already proven that plenty of them are for authoritarian tactics so long as it's framed correctly.
This is without even getting into more speculative (though unfortunately less speculative every day) uses of autonomous tech to put down prole revolts without even depending on the usual "class traitors" that make up the thin blue line.
The psychological fragility and neuroticism of the average leftist activist or booster doesn't mean the system is won't strike back. Quite the opposite
The system has its problems yes, but it uses panics like Andrew Tate to justify more control.
You point out that they're holding interventions with teenage boys. I'd note that they moved to curtail his influence online and he's literally on trial right now... In the meantime sixty different "experts" are probably calling for increased intervention against "misinformation" and "radicalism" and the social media sites are probably tuning their systems (we now know they have a lot of coordination with the government) to make sure it never happens again.
To emphasize the totality and...arbitrariness? A better word is escaping me, but the image that comes to mind is a scared cop shooting anything that moves
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