Men
Yesterday, the Globe's Ideas section had an interesting piece that paralleled some things I've been thinking for a while, which must mean it's completely accurate, right, because it agrees with me? Heh.
I'll link it, but their paywall is particularly obnoxious, so you're probably not going to get very far: Women are becoming irrelevant in the manosphere.
In general I am sympathetic about newspapers doing what they need to do to survive. It's very hard out there for a newspaper in the post-reading, post-print, post-truth era, you know. The Globe has managed to survive, barely, and has done so without its editorial stance becoming a mouthpiece for some rich shitheel. Yes, it is owned by a rich shitheel but -- possibly because he has no interest in running the thing and has handed it over completely to his wife, for some years now -- it maintains its normal position without any interference. Of course, its normal position is "we have no readers under the age of sixty and thus must pander to their perceived conservatism at every step," so sometimes it's hard to tell. Anyway, I'm thrilled it survives, but that doesn't mean I don't hate its web paywall. I feel that, with news sites, paywalls do as much harm to the business as good -- yes, you get the revenue, but you also turn away people from seeing and sharing your news stories. I simply will not usually refer anyone to their site because I assume the articles are unavailable. That's not how you keep something alive.
The gist is that in, say, the last twenty-five-ish years, there have been several waves of thinking by men (collectively) about how they approach women, and there's a new one that's unlike some of the others that preceded it.
Now, I note -- this is not explicitly in the article, this is me digressing at length -- men have always been fucked up about women. This is baked into a society which teaches patriarchy, and there are no societies on the planet which don't, so it's been with us at least since we started having the notion of personal property as a species, which was sometime around when people switched mostly from hunter-gatherer to farmer-rancher as a lifestyle. Basically, when people started to have the concept of owning things, men decided that women were something they could own. We've been dealing with the repercussions of that ever since, permeating every aspect of our society, including things which might surprise you. There are whole books on how the respectability and acceptability and desirability of even the most unlikely things are controlled entirely by whether they are deemed to be "men things" or "women things." Colors. Brands. Professions. You name it.
But while this led to oppression and inequality and even worse things, such as tolerance and sometimes even cultural encouragement of sexual assault, it did not actually cause open psychosis in the men until the Narrative of Prosperity began to completely fall apart. Which was within my lifetime. As with so many other things in this country, it really started to go to shit with Ronald Reagan's presidency. That's where the implied contract between the money and the labor really began to collapse, after having a rough patch in the post-World War II lull but then having reached a stable equilibrium that allowed your Baby Boomer grandparents to have houses and send their kids to colleges that didn't cost nearly as much money as they do now.
So now you have a whole lot of young men who have nothing. They have no prospects, no identity of their own, no imagination, no creativity, no skills their culture teaches them to respect (because we have a culture that lives in the past and still gives the most legitimacy to hand work that has now largely vanished -- your grandfather broke his back in an auto assembly line and you just play on computers all day!), no relationships, no ... you get the idea. The great promise has failed them.
And they can't actually get at the real problems putting them there -- because to do that, they would have to disrupt the Big Money, and the Big Money isn't having any of that nonsense. So they are encouraged to blame the women instead. Women are the scapegoat. Young men are encouraged by a thousand internet ragegrifters to think "colleges all have admission biases in favor of women now" and "woke culture says that if I so much as look at a woman the wrong way she'll sue me" and "women all have standards about men that I cannot meet so there is absolutely no point in trying and anyway they all hate us" and other Greatest Hits of the New Millennium.
Remember always that the whole "you have to be an asshole to succeed, the biggest asshole always wins, you need to hate everybody else, it's a competition in blood" set of attitudes directly benefits Big Money and no one else, just as keeping potential workers in a constant state of needy desperation and economic fear does. Big Money just wants to squeeze every bit of utility out of you they can get for as cheaply as possible, and it never sheds a tear about the human wreckage it leaves behind.
The first new trend of the new millennium in this direction -- we are now back on the ground covered by the article, end of digression -- was the Maybe We Can Game It trend. The bellwether here was the publication of Rules of the Game in 2007 by Neil Strauss, first in a long line of what would later become manosphere grifters, seeking to make their buck by warping the minds of their peers. This is where we start seeing "negging" and other dubious pick-up artist techniques. The idea, the grift, the hope held out to the young men was "If you just play the game the way we tell you and memorize this pattern of moves for the boss fight, you'll get all the women your sweaty little heart desires and your troubles will be over."
This did not work.
The next wave -- and it was a long one, in fact it's still running -- was when the men just decided to entrench in bitterness. This is where we eventually started getting talk about "alpha males" (the concept was always festering in the corner but didn't really hit full stride until then) and "the virgin and the chad" and of course the "incel." This led us to things like Gamergate, which in turn is one of the forces that has led us to our current horrific political situation in the United States. Yes, seriously. The discontent of the incel is easily exploited, turned to nasty things like, say, fascism, or rechanneled into toxic evangelism -- and people have not hesitated to exploit it.
The thing that really chaps my ass about 'incel' is its built-in buck-passing. "Involuntarily celibate," meaning, "I can't get any and it is is no way my fault, absolutely not, and there's nothing I can do about it but sit here and fume and maybe go shoot something later." "Incel" is an avoidance of responsibility by a group of men who either honestly don't realize there's anything they have to fix about themselves, or who are too stubborn or too stupid to do it.
The Elon Musks and Stephen Millers of the world are building their respective trashfire disaster empires on the backs of disgruntled men who are pissed because they can't get any women, and who won't or don't or can't realize that they can't get any women because they are assholes who were deliberately given the wrong socialization, and anyway they don't want to hear any of that, you're just trying to emasculate them, compassion is failure mode, what is your problem?
I really have come to hate men. Collectively.
Which is one reason why this most recent wave of thought is such an interesting surprise. As the article says -- and again, this is something I've been noticing myself, I don't think it's an isolated observation -- the latest thing, only in the last year or less, has been you know, we really don't need to bother with women at all.
The "looksmaxing" crap, for example, is part of this trend. So is the tendency of the techbro types to take all kinds of dubious treatments or dietary supplements or exercise procedures. They're trying to game their health. They are minmaxing their bodies. They are trying to live forever, yes -- every single one of them is scared to death of death -- but they are also trying to make themselves as physically elite and appealing as they can.
But appealing to whom? Not to women.
No, they are doing this for their presentation to other men. Which is fascinating. Because, not to put too fine a point on it, they ain't gay.
Well, mostly. I'm sure there are a few, statistically. But the average techbro type, at least in my acquaintance, is not only not the least bit homosexual but is statistically likely to be one of the most homophobic. Even more than the jocks.
It is baffling. I think it's got to be a competitive thing -- it almost always is, with these people. I will be so stunningly fit that all the other dudes will be in awe of my alphaness. I can't come up with any other explanation ... unless, of course, it's just because they need something to chase to give meaning to their drab, wretched lives.
Because these men are, in addition to typically being enormous assholes, some of the dullest and drabbest people you ever saw. These are the kind of people who criticize computer games for having too much story; it gets in the way of running around shooting things. They have no real-world hobbies or interests. They have no real-world social connections. They work and then they go home and watch a movie or play Call of Duty and they drink a green protein shake for dinner and go to bed and don't masturbate (or don't admit to it) and they get up the next morning and drink a brown protein shake for breakfast and do it all over again.
You think I exaggerate, but I beg you not to underestimate the number of young men -- and some not-so-young men -- who are currently turning to fascism or equally corrupt things like tradcath cosplay just so they'll have something to belong to. Just so they'll have something to be.
We need to fix this, and since a biomorphic virus targeting and altering all men on the planet within a certain age range seems not to be a viable option, we probably need to consider violent overthrow of all our current social and political norms. That's probably simpler.
13 April 2026