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Notes -
Society vs Male Radicalisation II - Male Role Models/Surely This Time Our Plan Will Work
I was on the internet this week, and I found this:
Labour to help schools develop male influencers to combat Tate misogyny
It is interesting to note that there is an increasing shift towards talking about "role models" for young men and boys as a means of cooling the gender kerfuffle, rather than by repeating feminist talking points at males until they concede as was the case when I was a teenager. The Labour Party, the UK's apparent next government, has come up with policy to reduce the influence of Andrew Tate among schoolboys with the intended aim of safeguarding women and girls. It means to do this by creating counter role models to whom boys can look up to. This would not even the utterly embarrasing 30 year old boomers trying to guess what resonates with children, but would consist instead of older volunteer boys taken from within the same school. This if it is implemented, will have educators select the real life version of Will from Inbetweeners as its senior male role model and think themselves of sound mind for doing so. You are only ever going to get uncool loser types volunteering, and it is the fear of becoming an uncool loser (or worse) that motivates young men to go and consume manosphere content.
Feminism's defenders will counter that there are many existing role models available for men, often listing real or fictional people like Ryan Gosling, Marcus Rashford or Ted Lasso. These men are either fake or literal one percenters whose lifestyle an average young man has no hope of to attaining. This betrays a complete lack of understanding about why men choose the role models they do and how they attempt to emulate them. These role models are deliberately or implicitly chosen as role models for young men by people who aren't young men often because they display qualities that are useful, rather than valued, to society. This is because almost all policy dreamt up by institutions concerning Men and Boys is not to their benefit, but instead to neuter a perceived threat against Women, Girls and the wider society. For every Marcus Rashford, there are multiple Mason Greenwoods or Kurt Zoumas who continue to receive all the signifiers of male success and receive no punishment for any of their transgressions.
It is clear that what educational and social institutions want are meek, inoffensive and productive men who do not question the rules of society. This is in direct contrast to what young men want, which is to be outspoken, to be popular with women, to be socially and economically successful. No role model ever produced or selected by the state could manage this, particularly not when operating under the notion that it must maintain women's liberation, which itself requires the stifling of men. I question for how much longer this approach will be kept in place. There are hundreds of people like Andrew Tate across SM, each ready to teach boys what society is unable to teach them. Educators can more easily dispel Tate because of the sex trafficking offences and because Tate himself is a clown, but people like Hamza, whose lived experience is much closer to the boys he is trying to proselytize to than that of Tate's, they have no counterargument.
It is... interesting... to see all this discussion about "progressive male role models" given that the progressive memespace has long been, and mostly still is, dominated by gender eliminativists. The elevation of fringe-of-a-fringe transsexual issues to the "cause du jour" has of course introduced irreconcilable metaphysics into the discourse, but coalition building has ever been thus. The philosophical work underpinning extant views on gender goes back over a century, to Nikolay Chernyshevsky's declaration that
and philosophical feminism has been broadly gender-eliminativist pretty much ever since.
All of that to say: progressives can't do "male role models" because progressives are fundamentally opposed to the existence of men. Sure, sure--ask your local progressive, they might very well deny it. But this is the standard motte and bailey that exists between thought leaders and political movements everywhere, the disconnect between political theory and political practice. You can't read feminism without stumbling over gender eliminativism, and progressivism is avowedly feminist. "Eliminate gender" is right up there with "abolish the family" on a list of things progressives explicitly and actually want to accomplish, even if these are things they're willing to compromise on for the moment, for the movement.
And you can't really believe that gender needs to be abolished, while simultaneously believing that anyone needs male role models. At best you might say something like, "well, we have to meet the little troglodytes where they are, so we need some... mannish... role models--but not too mannish! Nothing, you know, toxic, nothing overtly heteronormative..." and you've already lost the plot.
This is just another clear case of progressive dreams running headlong into the unyielding embrace of biological reality. People are incredibly plastic! And yet we are not, apparently, infinitely plastic. "Cultural construction" can do a lot, but it cannot lightly obliterate thousands of years of natural selection.
Talk of "misogyny" simply misses the point, and the problem. The only really committed misogynists I've ever met have been women. The men I know who seem to hate women, very obviously genuinely love women--but are angry that they have been denied access to women, by whatever means and for whatever reason. Sometimes it's literally just their own unrealistic expectations. Sometimes they have been badly mistreated by women. Sometimes they are bewildered by the refusal of women in their lives to behave as women. You cannot use "role models" to train people away from this kind of behavior; heterosexual men denied access to women will never just accept that fact. At best, maybe you build sexbots sufficiently indistinguishable from tradwives or something, allowing biological women to pursue whatever bland "non-binary" life they imagine lies at the end of the eliminativist project, but until those bots can do particularly biological things like have babies, there will still be men who dedicate their lives to finding a woman--and, sometimes, going off the rails when faced with sufficiently brutal failure.
Or so it seems to me. I think the progressive response is probably retrenchment on the idea that, surely, anyone can be taught to be anything, given sufficiently quality teaching methods. ("We just need more government!") But their real goal isn't to make better men, it's to make a world where there are no men, in the sense that the social gender binary has been eradicated. Recruiting masculine role models to achieve that end is flatly contradictory.
It's not impossible to hate someone you want to fuck. My experience is that a minority of men do in fact hate women, insofar as they have visceral contempt for the interests, behaviors, habits, and mannerisms of women, and if you zapped these men with a ray that made them gay or asexual they would never interact with another woman again if they could help it. My experience is also that women are much freer with casual "men suck" and "I hate men" talk but women who actually walk the walk and really seem to hate men on a gut level are rarer than the reverse.
I love women and it’s far more than just wanting to Fuck.
If you made me gay or asexual I do not see any reason to ever talk to a women again. I can barely think of any women with any capability to be interesting. There are no female Elon Musks. No female econ writers I’ve ever read. The only fintwit personality I follow ended up being tran. Ruxandro Teslo is the only female writer I’ve found that has said interesting things. Jane Fraser is the only female executive I know of who seems to be talented. I feel like I’ve looked for smart females they are just very hard to find. When you remove the female energy and traits there just aren’t many doing anything.
I don’t believe I’m discriminating and setting a higher bar for female writers and thought leaders but it seems statistically significant of the two twitter “females” I found worth a follow on Twitter one ended up being a man.
One of these things - well, here we go again.
I wouldn't take a man as a spouse/romantic partner if you gave him to me in a box with a ribbon on the top. But I do talk to men anyway - I'm on here with youse guys, ain't I? 😀
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There is nothing more beautiful than watching a commenter lay out a considered plan to capture the Bailey only to have a reply that is ostensibly on his side of the debate shit all over it in real time.
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It doesn't sound like you like women that much beyond wanting to fuck them.
I've always liked hanging out with girls, even (or especially, since it can get weird otherwise) ones I'm not sexually attracted to. I'm not really bothered by the dearth of female CEOS or substack pundits.
You just go too far saying men would have to hate women.
A simple thought experiment for me is if I were the coolest guy in the world and anyone who I wanted to be my friend would gladly be my friend and I then I got to pick 5-10 people as my crew all the people I would choose would be male.
Now if I lowered the standards to those who would be my friend as I am now and not picking from my betters a few women would make the cut.
Out of curiosity, what kind of hypothetical friends are you thinking about? No need to be specific.
I find that I can't recall any person I'd want to talk to who's currently "too cool" for me.
I thought about this but if I created my crew it would be something like Elon Musks, Michael Jordan, Milton Friedman, MBS, Milei. Visionary people with a lot of accomplishments.
As in Mohammed bin Salman? He sounds very wealthy and not particularly interesting, possibly convinced easily by idea-guys, and rather thuggish. Certainly not someone I’d choose to hang out with if I could pick anyone in the world.
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I know you're just giving a fantasy scenario, but that doesn't sound like a "crew." They'd all have huge egos and would fight like crazy on who gets to be the leader. Not to mention they mostly have totally different interests and skills. They'd probably just leave and go their own way. Wouldn't you rather have friends that would stick with you?
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