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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.
Selecting "role models" from within the system just continues the current system. The flavors change like all seasonal consumer goods.
I've written before about the cartoonish man-boy masculinity in current marketing. (I mean, Jesus, they literally have a boy with a beard in the first 20 seconds of the clip. This is what the marketers think of you). What is marketed and allowed is a no-consequence, no-potency masculinity that's safe and fun for all ages. There are uncountable YouTube clips that draw the obvious parallel between a boy at toy shop and a Dad at Home Depot / Fleet Farm. Adult manhood in the west is a cute "awww, look at them play!" trope.
Even within the current system, you hear complaint about prolonged boyhood and doughy soft man boys. SNL keeps almost pointing at it. For the greatest example; Seth Rogen's entire existence and career. In fact, this is also where clowns like Tate fall short. Tate was a kickboxer - not a soldier. His "manly" development was in a tightly controlled professional sport. I will always remember the time when I got into a scuffle with a fraternity brother who was a Division-1 Wrestler. He handily stomped my drunk ass but I was surprised to see him obviously shaken up after the fight. In our drunken bro-hug reconciliation, he let me know that "that was the first time I've been in a fight, man!"
I think the crux of it lies in the fact that a society wide ritual of real consequence to mark the transition from boy to man has been effectively eliminated.
Through the 20th century, the transition I'm talking about was when boys banded together for a hunt or tribal level military service. Consequences were real, people got hurt, women weren't only not "allowed" - it would've been actively detrimental to have them involved. Thus, you also had real and meaningful identification of a fundamentally male activity (hunting / war). While that no longer exists, women still absolutely have their sacred capability and activity; motherhood (or, at least, the ability to be a mother even if not chosen). (For a different post, but I also think that moterhood is under systemic attack as well.)
In another post (which I'm too lazy to link to) I pondered about how to get something like this back up and running today. It's hard for a few reasons; 1) Hunting isn't at all "necessary" the way it was in societies past, so the social honor / social proof reward would be absent for some sort of rec-league hunting team 2) War is a contest of human-techno-logistical systems now and you need committed professionals. As much as I love my Marines, the "warrior spirit" can't help you against guided munitions 3) I can't actually bring myself to be okay with something on the order of 1-2 in 10 young men being permanently maimed / killed for no other reason than to help generally promote good society wide models of masculinity. The closest approximation I came up with is a re-worked National Guard program (male only) that would start at the end of High School with something like quarterly musters until the age of 50. So many legal / logistic problems with that and I don't know if it would actually result in much more than a federally subsidized "guns and bowling" league.
In short - I just don't have any good ideas for this one, but I know it's a massive problem.
Until we figure out that idea, modern secular man will be one version or another of perma-boyhood --- the "giggling at my own farts" of Seth Rogen or the "pussy and punching" paper Tiger of Andrew Tate.
Quick side note: I believe there are viable traditional religious solutions to this (surprise!) but those simply aren't broadly implementable without sprinting towards a theocracy.
I don't think it's a coincidence that the transition involved dangerous activities. The men who survived were also elevated into more prestigious roles- what feminists would call the patriarchy. But the whole point of an "elite" is that you can't have too many of them, you need some way to "thin the herd." It doesn't work to have everyone in society be part of the elite- the power structure is a pyramid.
(It didn't have to so dangerous as going to war or hunting mammoths. For a long time, just doing your job as a farmer or factory worker was somewhat dangerous, which I think gave men enough respect to enter the middle class. For women, too, giving birth was difficult and dangerous- not everyone got to be a mother, even if they wanted to)
So much of modern politics, to me, just seems like a power struggle to enter that elite. The feminists and media influencers want that power for themselves, so of course they're not going to help others take the elite roles. Instead it's this endless popularity contest of saying witty, popular things, which don't really have to make sense.
I like the term Steve Sailer came up with it: "Rule by Actresses." Instead of an aristocracy or a meritocracy, we now have a system that gives power to those who can performatively display strong emotions in an entertaining way. Mostly pretty young women crying very loudly. That's... not the best system, but I suppose it's better the anarchy of civil war.
I think it's even better if you use the old 18th century term for "actress" (the Junior Anti-Sex League exists as a desperate attempt to disclaim this reality). In a post-material-scarcity environment (like the one described in 1984), assuming the balance of gender stays the same, the shortage shifts to being a shortage of women.
Once that happens, there's nothing left to prevent pathological behavior (concern trolling, etc.) by that gender, much like a market with limited suppliers that co-ordinate can extract a rent so high it distorts every other adjacent market. This has been true for the last 150 years, Boomer era excepted (market distortions pushed this back towards equality, but no efforts were made to ensure that victory would last).
You mean "prostitute?" I'm not exactly sure what you mean, although I know there used to be a fine line there for actresses in the past.
Have you read the book Seveneves by Neil Stephenson? It has a part where there's a bunch of young people floating around in space with absolutely nothing to do except talk to each other on social media. And the leader they end up with is a pretty teenage girl who doesn't seem to have any practical skills (unlike the people chosen as astronauts who are all super accomplished) but she's both pretty and very good at talking on social media. I keep thinking of that, as the vision of the future.
Yes.
Is this meaningfully distinct from "cute girls doing cute things" anime, I wonder? Most of those tend to be basically this- they have widespread appeal, but it's a very... masculine (or to a point, childish/innocent) way of looking at that concept, since women tend to be a lot more Mean Girls about it.
(Come to think of it, maybe the real root of anxiety mean(er) girls feel is that they sub/consciously realize they don't have any conception of this? I'd certainly feel like a defective woman if I didn't have the "I should fuck with people unduly and take their stuff rather than make anything new myself" bone in my body, so maybe the reverse is true? Come to think of it, do old portrayals of authority gone mad all have more equal gender representation than would otherwise be expected for the time period?)
The difference I see is that CGDCT is usually men's idea of a utopia, with everyone happy, getting along well, and doing fun things. The situation in that book is more of a dystopia, everyone is miserable but they're still stuck following the orders of this random teenage girl. Noone is really friends, it's just this battle of fake-friendships to get more social clout.
I am skeptical of the extent to which CGDCT is a man’s idea of utopia. For starters, I’m skeptical of how much your average guy would enjoy CGDCT: to the extent that I am friends with (1) normal guys who (2) watch anime, they’re not watching Hidamari Sketch [^1], they’re watching series with fights and battles like Demon Slayer or Jujutsu Kaisen and similar “battle shounen”.
That’s fine, these series aren’t intended to portray utopias. But then, if you limit your attention to the subset of series aimed at providing pure escapism for men, you’ll find that this role is largely filled by isekai power fantasy stories, with premises like “I am the strongest in another world and win battles and also a ton of girls want to have sex with me” rather than “a couple of girls talk about chocolate coronets”.
The point I’m trying to get at is that utopia for men seems to require two things (if judging by idiosyncratic tastes in anime is a good way to determine this): (1) competition/fighting and (2) winning. Hell, to some extent, I think that utopia for men is almost impossible to conceive—what men want is utopia for a man, to be the sole victor, the only one desired by women and admired by men. Otaku-targeted series like isekai webnovels and dating sims — which frequently only have a single male character (the protagonist) or two male characters (the protagonist and a bumbling male foil intended to make the protagonist look better by comparison) — might be a pathological expression of this desire, which is more healthily expressed in sports series where you can share victory with your beloved teammates and friends. But at the end of the day, I don’t think that it’s possible to have male utopia without competition, and when you have competition, you gotta have losers.
(As an addendum: where does CGDCT fit into all this? One idea, which I personally relate to, is that it’s intended to be a nice way to relax after a hard day. If you’re an overworked Japanese salaryman who’s been getting scolded by his boss all day, maybe you don’t want to ruin your escapism with more competition and more working hard; maybe you just want to see some cute girls having some fluffy conversations. Another less charitable possibility (which I also relate to) is that men who enjoy CGDCT are men who have “dropped out” of seeing themselves as viable competitors. The idea of competition itself is repulsive. It’s like the old saw about how there’s the rich, the middle class, and the poor, where the rich want to stay on top, the middle class wants to become rich, and the poor want a world where everyone is equal; in this analogy, the CGDCT viewers are there poor.)
[^1] The one time that this came up in conversation, my interlocutor was largely disgusted, presumably by a sense of voyeurism inherent to the genre.
Well, different strokes. I don't want to imply it's like the one singular vision of utopia. But I do think it presents one type of utopia, with lots of happy emotions and cute girls. They can still have competition, it's just more about like "winning the school musical competition" than "fight off an alien invasion."
This is pretty funny though:
I'm not sure if you're aware, but shounen literally means "boys". it's explicitly aimed at children and adolescent boys. The magazines it runs in usually have limits on how much nudity and violence is allowed, and has simpler kanji with the pronunciations written next to it in furigana to help out the kids who aren't good at reading yet. That said, it's also popular with adults because in part because it's so simple and easy to understand, and maybe because there's nothing controversial.
The one you listed, Hidamari Sketch, is a seinen, like most of the CGCCT series. Their manga run in magazines with an older demographic, so they're allowed to have more nudity and more complex words and stories. Some of the seinen magazines also have softcore porn of swimsuit models and ads for beer. The animes for them usually run at night, after children are supposed to have gone to bed. So yes, it's very much aimed at adult men. It might be more embarrassing for adults to admit that they watch/read it though.
I think part of what I like about CGDCT is to get away from that shit. Like I can't hang out with other men without this constant struggle for domination, with guys trying to fight over every little thing, even the most irrelevant shit that doesn't matter like "who's got the best fantasy football team?" Women just seem to have better friendships, at least in theory.
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I mean, it is now. I think CGDCT kind of ran its course through the late '00s but things were less polarized back then.
It's not possible to have female utopia without this either, but women express that differently than men do. You kind of have to go beyond male and female to tolerate more than one winner in either case.
Interesting; actually, that reminds me of something.
The only gender-swapped CGDCT series, Free!, is about a sport that isn't really competitive in this way.
No, I think it's because a zero-shot response to the genre is "wow, this has definitely got to be for people attracted to little girls".
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So basically, just Mean Girls then.
Yeah, but the problem in reality is that this state of affairs if not defended inevitably becomes Mean Girls.
In the same way, any such organization not explicitly and constitutionally oriented around doing fun things will sooner or later end up with everyone miserable and fighting each other; this is Conquest's Second Law.
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