Pretty sure cultural conservatives like Charles Murray have been saying that white people in the US are following the same path of degeneracy and declining marriage which black people followed in past decades. Unsurprising that white men are adopting similar "solutions" to those that black men adopted.
I wonder if there's an infinite loop of the form PUA -> 4b -> Prince Charming -> bored women. Bored women create aggressive men, aggressive men create anxious women, anxious women create caring men, caring men create bored women.
I don’t feel like Fuentes fans or Fuentes himself would agree with your read on him, nor would I! (And I don’t like him)
Sneako’s not a fountain bubbling with original thought, you can watch a few videos and get a gist. Tate explains himself “well” and can be understood in 4-6 hours.
But Fuentes. A month? Two months? He’s a jester. He’ll never say what he explicitly means. He deserves more nuance. If you can stomach his tirades (too depressing imo) and make it onto his humorous content you’ll understand what I mean. He’s not a written mind. He’s formulates it over 2hr+ podcasts.
They all reject the “framework”. Tate rejects it for money, Sneako because it’s all bullshit man, but Fuentes rejects it for something else closer to independence.
This is a typical lazy leftist take on the manosphere, that completely misses the forest for the trees. Since it's leftist, the only explanations can be random cultural trends (blank slate). As opposed to certain innate tendencies in men (pursuing markers of status in order to impress women), that lead to certain convergent behaviors
Surprised you didn't bring up the more recent cross-pollination of blackpill/incel communities and the more standard MRA/PUA stuff. They seem to have very different roots.
Scott Galloway often says that in modern culture man lost ability to show competence. Almost everyone is sitting in front of displays. Ergo outside performance as only option.
And epidemy of lifted F-150, same root. As someone called it "emotional support vehicle".
Why was the Moynihan report ‘obviously racist’ when it was based on reams of data and was commissioned with the intent to discover lack of investment in predominantly black school districts but found the opposite?
Woke progressives have a fairly short script of things which it is OK to say about black people. If you say anything about race which is off that script, they are likely to consider it racist.
Example: "Black people struggle to obtain ID, therefore voter ID is discriminatory." That's on the script, therefore it's not racist. "That black guy was very articulate." Off-script, therefore it's racist.
"Racist" just means "non-compliant with woke ideology". It really isn't much deeper than that for progressives.
mind kinda blown at the idea of all progressive ideology is just a script ... reminds me of all the corporate statements post-Floyd that look like they were all drafted in the same conference room.
Re the non-Tate part of this and politics, the extent to which coronavirus and the 2020-at the latest 2022 moment of Zoomified homogenisation meaning all activities were turned into webinars undermined the traditional publications and very briefly allowed people to pole-vault their way past traditional gatekeepers by being allowed in/"geographically" in a room they'd have no chance of being in IRL prior to 2020, part of the anti-tech and anti-social media pushes is reasserting boundaries so say the New Yorker retains its distinction. This is a sociological aspect of what he discusses here https://substack.com/@jefflawcdm/note/c-201838781?r=439xv7&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action
Great piece. Very enlightening: I had never made the connection between the Pimp archetype and the later Manosphere, but it's an entirely compelling argument. One little nitpick: I think you may have let an error slip by in this sentence: "The first is the mid-twentieth -century convergence of pick-up artistry and men’s rights discourse". Surely this convergence is more "late 20th c./early 21st c.", and the Black discourse that preceded it belongs to the "mid 20th c."...? Am I reading you wrong? In any case, great stuff, more please.
Left many more comments in the chat, it's not straightforward but if the manosphere is a variant of hip-hop Pimp My Ride and also Man Show/2000s Kimmel style masculinity and we all know of the new femininities in recent years, it is all the more disappointing there is no family tree descendent of emo other than parts of trans and alt right (outside the actual music tradition continuing in tribute-type bands)
Friend reminded me of this classic, the OG PUA! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tuLRIMnGNoI
Pretty sure cultural conservatives like Charles Murray have been saying that white people in the US are following the same path of degeneracy and declining marriage which black people followed in past decades. Unsurprising that white men are adopting similar "solutions" to those that black men adopted.
I wonder if there's an infinite loop of the form PUA -> 4b -> Prince Charming -> bored women. Bored women create aggressive men, aggressive men create anxious women, anxious women create caring men, caring men create bored women.
I don’t feel like Fuentes fans or Fuentes himself would agree with your read on him, nor would I! (And I don’t like him)
Sneako’s not a fountain bubbling with original thought, you can watch a few videos and get a gist. Tate explains himself “well” and can be understood in 4-6 hours.
But Fuentes. A month? Two months? He’s a jester. He’ll never say what he explicitly means. He deserves more nuance. If you can stomach his tirades (too depressing imo) and make it onto his humorous content you’ll understand what I mean. He’s not a written mind. He’s formulates it over 2hr+ podcasts.
They all reject the “framework”. Tate rejects it for money, Sneako because it’s all bullshit man, but Fuentes rejects it for something else closer to independence.
Fuentes has legs, you’ll see him into the future.
I’ve never heard or read the Moynihan report referred to as racist
This is a typical lazy leftist take on the manosphere, that completely misses the forest for the trees. Since it's leftist, the only explanations can be random cultural trends (blank slate). As opposed to certain innate tendencies in men (pursuing markers of status in order to impress women), that lead to certain convergent behaviors
This is a very astute read. I love your takes. You see through things, which is why I subscribe only to you and Matt Taibbi. Thanks for this!
This is such a problematic yet thought provoking take.
Surprised you didn't bring up the more recent cross-pollination of blackpill/incel communities and the more standard MRA/PUA stuff. They seem to have very different roots.
Scott Galloway often says that in modern culture man lost ability to show competence. Almost everyone is sitting in front of displays. Ergo outside performance as only option.
And epidemy of lifted F-150, same root. As someone called it "emotional support vehicle".
As they say, there is nothing new under the sun.
one side hyperbolically expresses the issue while the other side pretends it doesn't exist.
Why was the Moynihan report ‘obviously racist’ when it was based on reams of data and was commissioned with the intent to discover lack of investment in predominantly black school districts but found the opposite?
Woke progressives have a fairly short script of things which it is OK to say about black people. If you say anything about race which is off that script, they are likely to consider it racist.
Example: "Black people struggle to obtain ID, therefore voter ID is discriminatory." That's on the script, therefore it's not racist. "That black guy was very articulate." Off-script, therefore it's racist.
"Racist" just means "non-compliant with woke ideology". It really isn't much deeper than that for progressives.
mind kinda blown at the idea of all progressive ideology is just a script ... reminds me of all the corporate statements post-Floyd that look like they were all drafted in the same conference room.
Re the non-Tate part of this and politics, the extent to which coronavirus and the 2020-at the latest 2022 moment of Zoomified homogenisation meaning all activities were turned into webinars undermined the traditional publications and very briefly allowed people to pole-vault their way past traditional gatekeepers by being allowed in/"geographically" in a room they'd have no chance of being in IRL prior to 2020, part of the anti-tech and anti-social media pushes is reasserting boundaries so say the New Yorker retains its distinction. This is a sociological aspect of what he discusses here https://substack.com/@jefflawcdm/note/c-201838781?r=439xv7&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action
Great piece. Very enlightening: I had never made the connection between the Pimp archetype and the later Manosphere, but it's an entirely compelling argument. One little nitpick: I think you may have let an error slip by in this sentence: "The first is the mid-twentieth -century convergence of pick-up artistry and men’s rights discourse". Surely this convergence is more "late 20th c./early 21st c.", and the Black discourse that preceded it belongs to the "mid 20th c."...? Am I reading you wrong? In any case, great stuff, more please.
Left many more comments in the chat, it's not straightforward but if the manosphere is a variant of hip-hop Pimp My Ride and also Man Show/2000s Kimmel style masculinity and we all know of the new femininities in recent years, it is all the more disappointing there is no family tree descendent of emo other than parts of trans and alt right (outside the actual music tradition continuing in tribute-type bands)
And that's why I stopped trying to be a man...these guys simply make explicit what the societal expectation of manhood has always implicitly been.
I'm opting out.
TERFs will go on and on about how evil men are, and then they won't even let you become a woman! How hypocritical is that???