Miles Watson's Blog: ANTAGONY: BECAUSE EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO MY OPINION - Posts Tagged "manosphere-misogyny-men"

A week or so ago I promised to balance my fiery diatribe (is there ever an ice-cold diatribe, I wonder?) against modern feminism by making sport of the so-called "manosphere." For those unfamiliar with the term, the manosphere is defined by Wikipedia as "a group of loosely associated websites, blogs, and forums all concerned with masculinity and men's issues, and includes input from the MRM, pick-up artists, anti-feminists, and fathers' rights activists." In short, the manosphere is for men the virtual equivalent of the beauty salon used to be for women: a place to vent their frustrations, express their concerns, and seek help with their problems. It contains a vast spectrum of personalities, from the blatantly misogynistic to the gently comedic, from those nursing grievances to those seeking advice, from those looking to cash in on the loneliness and frustration of younger generations of men to those sincerely trying to guide them. In short, it's the usual Mos Eisley mix you find on the internet, neither good nor evil in itself, but containing both and everything in between. I have spent some months terminally online in the hopes of understanding its attraction to men of all ages, and I am ready to report my findings.

It's important to begin by stating that I don't want to get into the chicken-egg argument of "did the internet expose how fucked up everyone is or did it make us fucked up?" because the answer to that question is simply "...yes." The web both exposed the dark corners of our minds and managed to make them all the darker by its very existence. But even if this were not so it would be irrelevant, because we have to look at the situation as it is: how we got here, for once, is of little importance. The manosphere manifestly does not represent the views of all men, because the internet itself only represents the opinions of those who take an active part in it, and those people are often clowns, fools, hucksters or absolute shitheels; but it does provide us with answers to some of the more important questions about those who are terminally online or who draw their opinions primarily from the net and social media.

The first thing that I would say in regards to the manosphere is that there is less overt misogyny than I expected, and far more intelligent observation and criticism. This is not to say that I did not encounter misogyny: I did, and in some quantity and varying levels of intensity, from subtle and backhanded to strident and hateful. But the content creators I sampled, black and white, conservative and moderate, Gen X to Gen Z, male and yes, even female, tended more toward a defensive or even a defeatist attitude toward modern women, than to active antipathy. Their comments were generally marked by some or all of the following:

1. Loneliness.
2. Hostility toward/distrust of modern women.
3. Sexual and socio-sexual frustration.
4. A feeling that masculinity is under attack.
5. Nostalgia for clearly understood sex/gender roles.
6. Frustration over historical gaslighting.

To tackle these in order:

1. When the internet first began to make itself felt in society, there was a near-universal assumption that it would help human beings connect with each other: this assumption was well-founded and, for a time, completely validated. But like any drug, the initial, connective effect of e-mail, instant messaging and chatrooms gradually faded and became curiously isolative in nature over time: in fact, one could argue that the more connected people became with the advent of social media, cell phone apps, etc., the more isolated they became. This seems to be because birds of a feather flock together, and people who feel isolated and alone often seem to gravitate to others who are similarly lonely. This creates an environment where these qualities, and the psychological baggage that comes with them, become normative, accepted, and even lauditory. They make a fetish of their own loneliness, their own social awkwardness and inability to make flesh-and-blood friendships and sexually intimate relationships. And it is from this soil that the more radical, misogynist elements of the manosphere grew their mutated offspring. But this is not the whole or the end of the story. There are many men whose sin is to be basically average -- in looks and earning power -- and who feel as if because they are average, they are ignored by the 90% of women who are gunning for the top 10% of men. Thus they end up being rejected even by even average women. In this they have some grounds for complaint. Modern feminism has all but championed this 90/10 math, insisting that all women, regardless of their looks or attractiveness or baggage or emotional stability, can land a so-called "high-value man," when in fact the supply of such men is necessarily very low, and such men have no obvious reason to commit to any one woman. It has helped create a situation in which neither women nor men tend to ge what they want, which only fuels additional anger toward the opposite sex, and certainly does nothing to ease loneliness. Thus the whole thing has become a self-perpetuating cycle.

2. There is obviously a lot of anger in the manosphere, but it tends to come from different places. The first is rooted in a feeling that women are responsible for placating men's sex drives, the old Beavis & Butt-Head logic of "you made me horny, now do something about it." The second is men who've had bad experiences with women in the past, which some men make a religion which they preach to others who have had similar experiences or fear them. The third is a fear that women are generally only out to marry to gain access to a man's money and property; and will cheat on him, dump him, loot his bank account and take custody of his children the moment it suits their whims. There is a great deal of confirmation bias in this aspect of the manosphere.

3. Sexual frustration is a self-explanatory condition; but this oft-ridiculed issue among men is not less serious because it is the butt of jokes and gaslighting. The sex drive in young males is so intense that if it does not find expression in the act itself, it can lead to seriously distorted thinking, and consequently, to bad behavior over time -- again I reference the incels, some of whom I would categorize as functionally insane. But the real issue is socio-sexual frustration: that the below-average man has no hope of having sex or intimacy with any woman, much less one he finds attractive. That his ugliness, plainness, social awkwardness, and low earning power, are conditions have no remedy. This is, in essence, at the heart of a lot of manosphere anguish: defeatism, depression, hopelessness. This is a mirage, but it is a dangerous one because perception is reality, and the soul is dyed the color of its thoughts.

4. The manosphere definitely has a siege mentality, and it is here that I find the greatest level of justification in male anger and resentment, for there is no question that traditional masculinity has been under attack for decades, even generations, in this country and elsewhere -- George Orwell repeatedly documented how, in Britain, physical courage was subject to ridicule throughout the interwar period of the 20s - 30s, now a full century ago. The sort of man we see so often in commercials -- pale, unshaven, unmuscled, slightly flabby, not very large -- who seems fuddled, somewhat stupid, and most definitely unintimidating, and who mutters "yes dear" a lot while sipping is craft brew, is basically the modern man as modern society seems to want him to be. He is unthreatening, unassertive, unaggressive, and projects neither sexuality nor strength nor any outward sign of intelligence. I am not going to get into the nuances here -- the attack on masculinity is a curiously race-specific thing, and we will have to revisit that issue later -- but it is hard to watch contemporary television or film and not come away with the idea that the contemporary man would be acknowledged as a man by his own grandfather. In fact, men used to be rated by women for their ability to dominate: for their boldness and resourcefulness, especially in a crisis. Now they are condemned when exhibiting these qualities -- as toxic, as feral, as predatory. Obviously this siege mentality has gone too far with some men, who have retreated all the way into misogyny; but it strikes me as sheer foolishness to attack the manosphere here, at the place it is most defensible.

5. As I just mentioned, there used to be a time when men clearly understood what was expected of them and were judged by both women and other men by their ability to meet these criteria. The whole idea of "women and children first" on a sinking ship stems from the idea that the central role of a man is to protect, if need be by laying down his life: 2,900 years ago, Spartan women told their men going into battle, "Come back with your shield or on it." They would literally rather see their husbands, brothers and sons dead than know they had lacked courage on the battlefield. And it was partially to avoid being publicly or privately shamed by women that so many men volunteered for military service as late as WW2. To an only slightly lesser extent this applied to work: a man brought home the bacon for his wife and kids or he was not a man. Whatever pains he suffered on the job, whatever humiliations he had to endure, were his problem alone: to be a man, he had to meet his burdens, period, or surrender claim to manhood. If this seems like a role few people would want, consider that it has long been recognized that in life, happiness tends to stem from knowing one's place in the scheme of things -- one's roles, duties, responsibilities, privileges and powers. Ambiguity means confusion, anxiety, crisis of identity. Men used to know more or less exactly what was expected of them in life. There was a clearly defined role for them to occupy. This has been destroyed. They no longer know what the rules are. God, or nature, has designed them to do certain things, think a certain way, and now they are being told this is wrong and makes them objectively bad or primitive people. Some anger and resentment at this is understandable, because, as Jordan Peterson remarked, "It's in responsibility that most people find the meaning that sustains them through life." To take away the way men define their sense of responsibility is to take away their identity and offer them nothing in return.

6. A highly divisive and controversial aspect of the 'sphere is a belief that the contributions of men to history are being erased, minimized, or rewritten in such a way as to turn positives into negatives. That men have been systematically devalued by the very people who benefit the most from the achievements of men: women. "You live in the world we built!" is common refrain among content creators, and it is not without merit. It was men who killed the enemy, cleared the land, farmed the soil, invented the tools, paved the roads, drove the cattle, built the machines, fought the wars. Yet none of this is permissible to say nowadays, because of the presumption that saying it means women did not also make contributions. Their contributions, however, were of a different sort, and to negate one side of the equation while benfitting from it is gross hypocrisy. An example of this negation might be a man saying "we tamed this land"; whereupon the response is usually of the "yes, by killing the Indians" sort -- as if the person uttering this remark were not also a direct beneficiary of that slaughter.

No discussion of the manosphere would be complete, however, if it didn't dive into its darker waters. There is misogyny in its depths, and indeed, in the shallower end of the pool as well. This manifests in ways subtle and gross. The gross disinterests me because there is no use analyzing it: when someone of the Andrew Tate stripe opens his mouth, you can generally be certain that even when what he says is objectively true, the motive for him saying it is rooted in his dislike and fear of women and his desire, even his need, to see them subjugated. The belief that women should provide "sex, silence, and sandwiches" is not worth discussing, and I suspect his embrasure of Islam has less to do with religious feeling than a desire to find spiritual validation for an indifensible position. More subtle misogyny I found in content that I often frankly enjoyed watching for its humor, insights and penetrating observations: these content creators were generally intelligent, articulate and reasonable in their arguments, but seemingly driven by motives they were not necessarily prepared to confess, or -- to be charitable -- they may not have been aware motivated them. Overall, some of the more common themes I encountered were:

1. Contempt for single mothers on the dating scene.
2. Contempt for men who date single mothers.
3. Contempt for women who are sexually promiscuous.
4. Contempt for women who regret being sexually promiscuous.
5. Contempt for men who get married.
6. Contempt for women who divorce, regardless of circumstance.
7. Contempt for women's perspectives.
8. Distrust of women's motives generally.
9. Goalpost shifting of women's value.
10. Assumption that all women want the same kind of man.

This is a lot of contempt. Some of it is easier to analyze, some of it is not, and I have no intention of tackling this point by point, because it is pointless and distasteful. However, call necessitates response, so I will touch on a few things. For example, many manosphere pundits assume that the demise of any relationship, especially marriage, must be the woman's fault, and while statistics may back this up on the subject of divorce, especially for certain populations, it glosses over the fact that the roots of divorce are often deep and tangled, and that the filing party is not necessarily the guilty one -- there may not even be a guilty one. It doesn't take a great deal of insight to grasp that men burned by divorces or terrible breakups make up a certain segment of the vlogging/podcasting population, and that their grudges and bitterness have shaped their own philosophies toward women.

Goalpost shifting is worth mentioning because it is the process by which some men -- Kevin Samuels comes to mind -- create a playing field by which a woman's value is determined solely by men (specifically "high value" men). This playing field discounts a woman's education and income in favor of her youth, looks, and willingness to submit to a man's authority ("fit, feminine, fertile, friendly"). It is not wrong as a traditionalist outlook on suitability for marriage per se, but it hardly fits the world we actually live in, and its inherent dismissiveness of accomplishment and earning power stinks of gaslight.

Assumptions that every woman secretly wants a "Chad" or "Tyrone" -- the wealthy, bad-boy stud horse -- plague the manosphere. This is a fear which stems partially, no doubt, from humiliating anecdotal evidence, but it is nonsense to say it applies to every woman. Women are as diverse in their romantic and sexual tastes as men, and not all of them are vulnerable to surface charm, bleached teeth and platinum credit cards. To assume that the behavior patterns of human females are entirely shallow, sensual and materialistic, and can be predicted in the same manner as birds, or insects, is worth taking the time to laugh at, though I would agree that the misogyny beneath the assumption is not funny at all. Stereotypes, especially negative ones, are a backhanded attempt to dehumanize people. And dehumanization is a path that leads in only one direction.

This at any rate is my takeaway from the manosphere. It is incomplete, scattershot and slovenly, but so is the manosphere. I would not agree with those who condemn it in toto or simply hang the "woman bashing" label on it and then walk away from the discussion, because much of what I found there had substance, and was at least worthy of listening to even if one totally disagrees with the arguments being presented. The internet, in its ideal form, is for discourse and the acquisition of knowledge, and men have every right to meet virtually to seek and give advice, talk about their problems, relate their anecdotes and express their fears. On the other hand, I am not in the habit of whitewashing garbage -- or crap, for that matter, and believe-you-me, there is a lot of crap in the manosphere. Some of it is harmless, but taken as a whole it has a cumulative effect, especially on men who are embittered by bad experience, or adolescents whose raging hormones and social awkwardness make them fertile soil for dangerous ideas to grow. The manosphere is probably necessary, or as necessary as anything can be in the internet era, because it serves as a kind of psychological pressure release valve for bored, frustrated, alienated, leaderless, or simply curious men. But it is not serving these men very well, and is too easily a conduit by which the most desperate of them can be radicalized into dangerous beliefs. It bears study, but it also bears watching.