The online incel community has taken a break from blaming women for their ongoing failures in life to issue a collective tantrum over Netflix’s new drama Adolescence, which dares—dares, mind you—to portray incel culture as the toxic, rage-filled echo chamber it so demonstrably is.
Imagine if the “manosphere” actually did things like raising awareness for testicular and prostate cancer, teaching men how to be good dads/husbands/sons, how to be financially sensible, how to build a career, etc. instead of blaming all their problems and all the world’s problems on women and feminists lmao
The current manosphere is basically a pipeline to the alt-right and additional radicalization. The distance between incel to proud boys is quite small.
The problem is that any attempt to make a pro-men group with any of the positive agendas you list will attract the same people as an audience that are already in the manosphere. And then you have the Nazi bar problem.
Yes, theres a massive link between incels and all kinds of hate. It’s horrible.
This. The right owns men. Even if you are a liberal they basic decide how the word views you because that is the only group of men that ever get talked about.
They have won on this front and there is no hope of turning it around. All we got now is to hope measles takes out most the population
Ironically feminism gets you closer to this than anything they’ve cooked up over a very long period of time
It’s exactly why reactionaries have spent decades demonizing feminism: it keeps men defending the patriarchy that damages them too (although not as much as other people).
I’d argue patriarchy is a bad model for the social dynamics regarding sex. It’s just another rebranding of Marxist class conflict onto something other than economic class, and as a consequence it works about as well as that something actually resembles (or alternately is a proxy for) economic class. This means it works OK for race in the US (except for Asians, who get to be functionally white in some cases) but it it’s a bad fit for sex.
It’s why there are so many apologetics around patriarchy for all the myriad cases where reality just doesn’t seem to align with what you would expect based on it a priori. “The patriarchy hurts men too” is probably the most common, though you’d be hard pressed to argue “Capitalism hurts billionaires too” or “white supremacy hurts whites too” in the same kind of fashion. Because the moment you stop looking at the fraction of a percent of the top performers the idea that society was created by and for men to benefit men above women first and foremost just doesn’t align with observation.
What seems to be a more fitting model to me is malagency, the idea that agency is inappropriately assigned based on the sex of the party in question. Specifically that in general women are assumed to have less agency than they otherwise might while men are assumed to have more agency than they otherwise might. This fits neatly with lots of observations - ideas presented by a man being given extra credit or consideration than the same coming from a woman (because he’s seen as more responsible for his ideas than a woman might be), the very highest tiers of things having over-representation by men but also when men are also over-represented at the bottom (for example, rough sleeping homeless) because they are seen as more responsible for their own successes and failures as well, or why the criminal justice system treats men much worse than women (women are seen as less responsible for their transgressions). Etc, etc.
I take your point, but look at the way power is arranged in our society from the makeup of the ownership class to the way unpaid labor usually falls to women.
I do like the framing, but I see it as evidence of the patriarchy and how it damages men too and I don’t think it’s a difficult argument to make. Women have only recently, within my mother’s lifetime, been able to get their own credit lines separately from their husband. They recently lost their hard-won reproductive freedoms. They are far more likely to be killed by their long-term partners than are men. Furthermore, the issues that you bring up where men are worse off is also due to the expectations this system puts onto men, and who is worthy of charity & support.
There has been a long and sustained project to keep women from the levers of power through subjegation, and the perpetrators are the reactionary men who vote, terrorize, and argue that women shouldn’t be the equal of a man. Their ideology comes from a long western tradition that is thousands of years old. It seems in my mind incongruous to suggest that there was not a patriarchy in Roman times, when a paterfamilias could legally kill anyone in his family (including his wife), or during the middle ages or Renaissance when women were kept from political or religious offices (with minimal exceptions), or today when women are legally restricted from moving between States due to pregnancy. There is certainly a continuum between what constitutes patriarchy or not, but I don’t think it’s time to slide over to the “not” side yet, especially as the hits keep coming.
I do appreciate your well-thought out post though, and will certainly incorporate your points into my position in the future.
We need another big wave of feminism, this time learning all the mistakes from previous decades
The rising movement of questioning gender identity from and alongside the queer folk might hopefully be another nail in patriarchy’s coffin
Tbh, I think it’s the opposite. The focus is - ultimately - on individual outcomes rather than substantial societal changes. I think it’s the Zion in Matrix at the moment: the way the status quo has designed its own opposition should look like.
I think there’s been a lot of room for this incel type stuff because not enough attention has been paid to the welfare of boys. It’s very common to hear how it started from the feeling that nobody cares.
https://artofmanliness.com/
I remember back when no shave November was kind of a meme thing and it was used for mens health awareness. It was so wholesome and awesome! But yeah the closest we have now is that guy on YouTube who does the Dad videos.
Yep! And notice how you’ve been downvoted for saying that.
Wouldn’t know, my instance doesn’t show downvotes 😄
Sometimes it is their fault. Protests against equal custody laws, for example. Kentucky was the first state to pass one that required the judge in contested custody cases to start from the position that equal custody is best for the child unless there is a reason it might not be. The closest other states had gotten before that were laws that required judges “consider” equal custody as a possibility, as opposed to having to work from it as a starting point.
Ever seen the Big Red angry feminist meme? She’s a real person from Toronto and the meme started because she was protesting a talk on suicide in men at the University of Toronto by shouting a Jezebel article at the crowd, and if anyone tried to engage with her yelling “shut up fuckface!” or similar at them. A few different phrasings but she was fond of “fuckface” as an insult in particular. If you check out The Red Pill documentary (it’s creator did a Kickstarter to fund finishing it) one of the interviews is of Big Red herself.
The organization behind that talk on suicide in men later went on to found what at the time (and possibly still is though I haven’t checked) the only shelter for male victims of abuse in Canada.
Not the first such shelter, as that was Men’s Alternative Safe Housing which was founded by Earl Silverman and had to be run entirely on his own resources and private donations because he couldn’t get government funding for it because it was a men’s shelter and not a women’s shelter. Eventually he couldn’t afford to keep it going, and when he had to shut it down hung himself in the garage of his now-defunct shelter the day after he sold it.