"I still suspect there’s something calculated there, again, consciously or not. It’s a differentiating factor to be a young liberal woman saying, “Maybe we should listen to men, guys.”"
Ah, sucking up to men...how women have survived in patriarchal societies and religions from time immemorial. From exposing or killing female babies to aborting them before birth (once ultrasound technology was developed), to holding down their own daughters for FGM (to make men more willing to marry them), to feeding girl children less than boys. Sad, really.
First, I think it is just a male dominated space in alt-media that you consume. They will talk about men’s issues more prominently and side with men when there is some sort of gender discussion. I know there are women dominated spaces where it is the opposite. I assume you are aware that while you personally aren’t alone in these spaces, women are a minority.
I get your complaint of “token” women types. I personally think these people are mostly authentic, but the audience comes off as people desperate to hear what they want to hear. There are the obvious “token” black guy in conservative organizations, but I also think of how much boomers lavish money onto conservative groups that go to colleges and young spaces repeating boomer talking points. They don’t actually connect with younger people but boomers like that they say it for them.
While progressive spaces are pretty wildly inverted. I don’t have to go far into TikTok or academia alike to find it. Which is honestly what I think fuels a lot of rage bait that only makes things worse; some TikTok eGirl talking about how she hates men bounces off of some Fuentes Groyper talking about r*ping women bounces off some woman swearing off all sex because of politics bounces off some Tater Tot saying some shit about evopsych about women. It is all so tiresome.
But questions of the “token” phenomenon being true in leftist circles is 100% true. Hicklibs are a thing where rural progressives come out to trash their neighbors to progressive city folk lauding them. “I got out of the alt-right pipeline” was a major theme 5 years ago when former fascist was fashionable. There are throngs of Christians that get paraded in leftist spaces proudly proclaiming “Christ was a brown queer Marxist immigrant” and throw their fellow Christians under the bus for not meeting progressive pieties.
Most obviously for this topic, the past election season saw an incredibly astroturfed attempt by progressives to reframe masculinity with people like Tim Walz or White Dudes for Harris. But every year or so there seems to be a big progressive push to reshape masculinity by touting a bunch of men that agree with feminist talking points. Tbh, it seems to be the norm of every piece of media outside of alt-media to have men be male feminists. It is kind of why so many men are disillusioned with the mainstream and go to alt-media.
As far as problems with young people go, I generally accept that most people gotta decide to fix themselves and their own class is collectively responsible for pushing them there. This applies to men and women. I’ve had countless talks with men both online and irl to stop taking black pills and get the fuck out of their hole. While I’m usually very uncomfortable talking to women about fixing themselves. Maybe I’m being too spicy, but I see the same thing with racial topics. Both groups I generally don’t feel appropriate weighing in on. Their problems gotta get addressed from within.
I don’t think “coddling” is helpful for men from men. But I think it is a different story when it comes from women. Men feel a lot of hostility from women and just basic acknowledgment of their problems brings down the anxieties/stress quite a bit. That said it can easily be very counterproductive.
What is bizarre to me is that much of the promiscuity, selfishness, and materialism attributed to Zoomer girls really seem to be much more emblematic of their millennial counterparts, especially the ones who came of age prior to the crash of 2008 (when the oldest millennials were in their mid twenties). Antidotally, most of the zoomer age girls I know are generally well meaning and realistic whereas it is the women who are middle-aged and ought to know better who are the most entitled.
I do feel like a lot of culture commentary has flattened demographics and created caricatures of everyone involved, but that makes sense when viewed as entertainment vs. observations of one's world
It does - what I think back to is a story I read back when Limbaugh died about his career. What was interesting was that prior to being a pundant he spent two decades in radio doing sports talk radio which usually means spending a lot of time boosting his team and bashing a rival. His genius was realizing that this format would work for covering partisan politics and that there is a certain market would be entertained by such. Unfortunately much of the rest of the media has followed suit because it does play to the coalitional instinct that we as primates have.
Honestly I've never been much of a sports fan but most of the mentally healthiest and well adjusted people I know tend to be sports fans almost because the fandom satisfies the coalitional instinct leaving them free to view other subjects dispassionately.
Oh well maybe Mcluhan was right - violence is a quest for identity and the more old identity categories breaking down some must tie themselves more tightly to those that remain. Maybe this is why the black gender conversations seem more amiable - because whatever the gender both parties are self consciously black.
Maybe “having strong lifestyle opinions” as an identity is the problem. It wasn't always this way, you didn't always have people telling you everything all the time, there used to be mysteries in life.
I think what looks like coddling is itself a kind of underhanded fake benevolent rhetoric about young men's inner workings that's most convenient and flattering rhetorically to women. It's on a sliding scale or derisive and arrogant to pitying and patronizing but it's still all projecting about young men being confused or having warped perception. It's a mistake to think that's evidence of excess sympathy for men.
I'll be honest, I think women are annoying in all generations. Constant complaining. Used to be online only, now it's infected conversations in IRL. Women complain that work is filled with toxic masculinity. School is too hard. Expectations too high. Husbands don't do enough at home. Women have to carry the "emotional load" of the household. They have to cook Thanksgiving dinner while the men watch football. Football isn't female enough. I noticed it in the second half of the 2000s, when publications like Medium started propping up writers like Jessica Valenti. She constantly bitches, she who has made it to the big time as a writer, has a husband, child, everything the modern woman could desire, yet makes her living as a victim. Really? The thing is, I grew up with a mother who never stopped complaining. I left home at 18 hoping to be freed from this nagging, devouring feminine architype, only to discover it in every magazine I pick up, every headline in the Atlantic and NPR, every on line article shared by my female friends on FB, even the news now. If you were an alien reading our social media newsfeeds, you'd think women had it worse than ever in the history of humanity right now, which we know isn't true. Worse, I'm watching in real time as my mother and her friends (all bitching women as well) age. It's not good. Victim mentality destroys the last 25 years of your life. They are confused, angry, anxious, people in bodies that barely work and are riddled with pain. What we think is what paints our reality. This is why some of the most "disadvantaged" people in the world can sometimes seem so young and vital at very old ages. I asked my 100 grandmother what her secret to long life was and she replied, "I never take anything personally." We lack wonder and awe as women. We lack adoration and love. Instead we focus on microaggressions and safe spaces and pass this on to our daughters. Rather than teach them that men are the root cause of all evil, that childbearing is a curse, that being a woman is vulnerable, why not teach them of the wonders of love, raising kids, the bodies we've been given, the planet upon which we live, the amazing song of the stars? This of course goes for boys as well. Our children do not need to become victims to be coddled or criticized. Programming our minds toward wonder is the gift that lasts a lifetime. Perhaps this is impossible online, but I don't think so. The Internet was a wonder long before it turned into everyone's therapy room.
Well said. Accurately put. This started,well in a vociferous public way (it snidely goes back further) in the early 1970s when it seems like most persons on social media platforms weren't even born. The seedling of anti- male hatred emerged and now we are getting the fruit of it. The picture of girl chosen to accompany this piece is not a good choice to elicit sympathy for young females. I'm just going to yet again quote my favourite joke ( a social observation),in 1970 a whole lot of vocal fake feminists with their voices amplified by the popular media told women to stop cooking and get out of the kitchen. Cooking was boring drudgery only fit for morons. So women did,in droves and halved average wages so from being a privilege to pay for luxury extras it became a necessity for both of a couple to work. In the 1980s MEN took up cooking and it was Art and work of genius and it merited a TV series and book deal. So I think women shot themselves in the foot there.
But I love Gen Z women so much. 😆 They made cottagecore happen! If you see the Right ignoring them to an extent, it’s because some of us believe the masculinization of their peer group will lift the women of that generation by proxy. Trickle-down-betterment if you will. If we fix the boys, the women will follow them. It’s also really hard to try to mentor young women in general and a lot of people give up on trying to do so because tone matters far more than results to most women. IRL I have a lovely group of feminine Zoomers who are super approachable I’m glad to interact with and they give me hope for the future. I think Gen Z women are much kinder than Millennial women ever were (Obviously my own biased take).
"...nobody cares about her demographic..." yet barrels of digital ink are spilled daily analyzing this most analyzed demographic in world history. Although, to be fair, most is spilled on internal navel-gazing.
thesis antithesis synthesis etc etc. 99% of people just can’t develop nuanced opinions on anything so culture always has to shift in drastic overcorrecting swings instead of settling on “hey maybe life is bad for different kinds of people and we should acknowledge them to be individuals with individual concerns while still recognizing collective struggles exist” or whatever !
1. people need culture to move so far one way before anyone starts to realize that there’s something wrong or incomplete about the prevailing worldview.
2. then you get the “cultural commentator” social benefit of “nooooticing (sic) what others don’t”. then there’s the big phase (where we are now of criticizing liberalism/modernity/whatever) where people THINK they’re developing a critical attitude while actually expressing a consensus opinion.
Doesn’t sound like you’ve ever been a heterosexual man in the USA. Mid double digits by mid 20s pretty common for Anglo girls in my experience. They wanted to be wives. It wasn’t what they wanted. It’s just how things turned out.
“legitimate criticisms these women might have about dating”
The American system is in a death spiral 💀🌀 and the awful dating scene reflects that.
“I know that my own writing has favored Zoomer men while all but ignoring young women”
I’ve only been following you for a short time however this is not the impression that I got.
“Are you “allowed” to criticize the sex industry, for example? Or does that push you into the nether-world of right-coded content?”
Normalization of prostitution is an extremist political stance by any historical measure. Another symptom of the death spiral 💀🌀 of American society.
“conversations that were happening in the Black community decades ago”
The black family has been under assault longer than other groups because of their economic weakness - they’ve suffered longest from the neoliberal agenda. Trad family costs money. Increasingly unaffordable -> more debt issued to paper over the problems -> 💵 💀 🌀
Have you read “the Negro family” by sociologist and Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan? Many of the issues discussed in the essay now apply to American society broadly (which is, of course, the point you’ve already made). Was written in the 1960s.
I visited a black church (AME Zion) a couple years ago. It was about 90% women. The choir was all female. I smelled like lonely women’s perfume after I left, but it didn’t bother me as I understood. If black America is a leading indicator, that’s where America is headed.
I think this is another case where we’ve cut off macro supply of something we want by putting seemingly sensible roadblocks in front of individuals who produce it.
There’s a sense that women “own” discourse on women, and a man who comments on these issues is viewed with suspicion, either attempting to impose their ideas on women, or being performative to attract sexual interest.
However, the perception is that important topics are those which are talked about by everyone. Men-only discourse is cringe; women-only is unserious. The only way out seems to be when enough tomboys enter the male-dominated spaces that girls start feeling confident enough to enter, but the reverse doesn’t generally occur because of stigma from both genders (men will see you as unmanly, women as an interloper).
Because women are wholly unaccountable in the liberal world.
Gen Z boys are coddled because they're the most likely ones to go on shooting sprees. Society's trying to appease them before they get violent.
"I still suspect there’s something calculated there, again, consciously or not. It’s a differentiating factor to be a young liberal woman saying, “Maybe we should listen to men, guys.”"
Ah, sucking up to men...how women have survived in patriarchal societies and religions from time immemorial. From exposing or killing female babies to aborting them before birth (once ultrasound technology was developed), to holding down their own daughters for FGM (to make men more willing to marry them), to feeding girl children less than boys. Sad, really.
Your sources must be very different from mine. I do not see this at all.
I’m all over the place with this piece.
First, I think it is just a male dominated space in alt-media that you consume. They will talk about men’s issues more prominently and side with men when there is some sort of gender discussion. I know there are women dominated spaces where it is the opposite. I assume you are aware that while you personally aren’t alone in these spaces, women are a minority.
I get your complaint of “token” women types. I personally think these people are mostly authentic, but the audience comes off as people desperate to hear what they want to hear. There are the obvious “token” black guy in conservative organizations, but I also think of how much boomers lavish money onto conservative groups that go to colleges and young spaces repeating boomer talking points. They don’t actually connect with younger people but boomers like that they say it for them.
While progressive spaces are pretty wildly inverted. I don’t have to go far into TikTok or academia alike to find it. Which is honestly what I think fuels a lot of rage bait that only makes things worse; some TikTok eGirl talking about how she hates men bounces off of some Fuentes Groyper talking about r*ping women bounces off some woman swearing off all sex because of politics bounces off some Tater Tot saying some shit about evopsych about women. It is all so tiresome.
But questions of the “token” phenomenon being true in leftist circles is 100% true. Hicklibs are a thing where rural progressives come out to trash their neighbors to progressive city folk lauding them. “I got out of the alt-right pipeline” was a major theme 5 years ago when former fascist was fashionable. There are throngs of Christians that get paraded in leftist spaces proudly proclaiming “Christ was a brown queer Marxist immigrant” and throw their fellow Christians under the bus for not meeting progressive pieties.
Most obviously for this topic, the past election season saw an incredibly astroturfed attempt by progressives to reframe masculinity with people like Tim Walz or White Dudes for Harris. But every year or so there seems to be a big progressive push to reshape masculinity by touting a bunch of men that agree with feminist talking points. Tbh, it seems to be the norm of every piece of media outside of alt-media to have men be male feminists. It is kind of why so many men are disillusioned with the mainstream and go to alt-media.
As far as problems with young people go, I generally accept that most people gotta decide to fix themselves and their own class is collectively responsible for pushing them there. This applies to men and women. I’ve had countless talks with men both online and irl to stop taking black pills and get the fuck out of their hole. While I’m usually very uncomfortable talking to women about fixing themselves. Maybe I’m being too spicy, but I see the same thing with racial topics. Both groups I generally don’t feel appropriate weighing in on. Their problems gotta get addressed from within.
I don’t think “coddling” is helpful for men from men. But I think it is a different story when it comes from women. Men feel a lot of hostility from women and just basic acknowledgment of their problems brings down the anxieties/stress quite a bit. That said it can easily be very counterproductive.
Where is the female Jordan Peterson, anyway?
Louise Perry or Freya India, if conservative? Women certainly need one!
What is bizarre to me is that much of the promiscuity, selfishness, and materialism attributed to Zoomer girls really seem to be much more emblematic of their millennial counterparts, especially the ones who came of age prior to the crash of 2008 (when the oldest millennials were in their mid twenties). Antidotally, most of the zoomer age girls I know are generally well meaning and realistic whereas it is the women who are middle-aged and ought to know better who are the most entitled.
I do feel like a lot of culture commentary has flattened demographics and created caricatures of everyone involved, but that makes sense when viewed as entertainment vs. observations of one's world
It does - what I think back to is a story I read back when Limbaugh died about his career. What was interesting was that prior to being a pundant he spent two decades in radio doing sports talk radio which usually means spending a lot of time boosting his team and bashing a rival. His genius was realizing that this format would work for covering partisan politics and that there is a certain market would be entertained by such. Unfortunately much of the rest of the media has followed suit because it does play to the coalitional instinct that we as primates have.
Honestly I've never been much of a sports fan but most of the mentally healthiest and well adjusted people I know tend to be sports fans almost because the fandom satisfies the coalitional instinct leaving them free to view other subjects dispassionately.
Oh well maybe Mcluhan was right - violence is a quest for identity and the more old identity categories breaking down some must tie themselves more tightly to those that remain. Maybe this is why the black gender conversations seem more amiable - because whatever the gender both parties are self consciously black.
Great post - I thoroughly enjoyed it!
Maybe “having strong lifestyle opinions” as an identity is the problem. It wasn't always this way, you didn't always have people telling you everything all the time, there used to be mysteries in life.
Yes.
I think what looks like coddling is itself a kind of underhanded fake benevolent rhetoric about young men's inner workings that's most convenient and flattering rhetorically to women. It's on a sliding scale or derisive and arrogant to pitying and patronizing but it's still all projecting about young men being confused or having warped perception. It's a mistake to think that's evidence of excess sympathy for men.
Here for this analysis. As a 62 year old guy attempting to date, the ambient mutual resentment is palpable and seems to deepen over time.
I'll be honest, I think women are annoying in all generations. Constant complaining. Used to be online only, now it's infected conversations in IRL. Women complain that work is filled with toxic masculinity. School is too hard. Expectations too high. Husbands don't do enough at home. Women have to carry the "emotional load" of the household. They have to cook Thanksgiving dinner while the men watch football. Football isn't female enough. I noticed it in the second half of the 2000s, when publications like Medium started propping up writers like Jessica Valenti. She constantly bitches, she who has made it to the big time as a writer, has a husband, child, everything the modern woman could desire, yet makes her living as a victim. Really? The thing is, I grew up with a mother who never stopped complaining. I left home at 18 hoping to be freed from this nagging, devouring feminine architype, only to discover it in every magazine I pick up, every headline in the Atlantic and NPR, every on line article shared by my female friends on FB, even the news now. If you were an alien reading our social media newsfeeds, you'd think women had it worse than ever in the history of humanity right now, which we know isn't true. Worse, I'm watching in real time as my mother and her friends (all bitching women as well) age. It's not good. Victim mentality destroys the last 25 years of your life. They are confused, angry, anxious, people in bodies that barely work and are riddled with pain. What we think is what paints our reality. This is why some of the most "disadvantaged" people in the world can sometimes seem so young and vital at very old ages. I asked my 100 grandmother what her secret to long life was and she replied, "I never take anything personally." We lack wonder and awe as women. We lack adoration and love. Instead we focus on microaggressions and safe spaces and pass this on to our daughters. Rather than teach them that men are the root cause of all evil, that childbearing is a curse, that being a woman is vulnerable, why not teach them of the wonders of love, raising kids, the bodies we've been given, the planet upon which we live, the amazing song of the stars? This of course goes for boys as well. Our children do not need to become victims to be coddled or criticized. Programming our minds toward wonder is the gift that lasts a lifetime. Perhaps this is impossible online, but I don't think so. The Internet was a wonder long before it turned into everyone's therapy room.
Well said. Accurately put. This started,well in a vociferous public way (it snidely goes back further) in the early 1970s when it seems like most persons on social media platforms weren't even born. The seedling of anti- male hatred emerged and now we are getting the fruit of it. The picture of girl chosen to accompany this piece is not a good choice to elicit sympathy for young females. I'm just going to yet again quote my favourite joke ( a social observation),in 1970 a whole lot of vocal fake feminists with their voices amplified by the popular media told women to stop cooking and get out of the kitchen. Cooking was boring drudgery only fit for morons. So women did,in droves and halved average wages so from being a privilege to pay for luxury extras it became a necessity for both of a couple to work. In the 1980s MEN took up cooking and it was Art and work of genius and it merited a TV series and book deal. So I think women shot themselves in the foot there.
But I love Gen Z women so much. 😆 They made cottagecore happen! If you see the Right ignoring them to an extent, it’s because some of us believe the masculinization of their peer group will lift the women of that generation by proxy. Trickle-down-betterment if you will. If we fix the boys, the women will follow them. It’s also really hard to try to mentor young women in general and a lot of people give up on trying to do so because tone matters far more than results to most women. IRL I have a lovely group of feminine Zoomers who are super approachable I’m glad to interact with and they give me hope for the future. I think Gen Z women are much kinder than Millennial women ever were (Obviously my own biased take).
"...nobody cares about her demographic..." yet barrels of digital ink are spilled daily analyzing this most analyzed demographic in world history. Although, to be fair, most is spilled on internal navel-gazing.
Exactly. Even, hilariously, from a "bad thing happened to some men; women most affected" perspective.
thesis antithesis synthesis etc etc. 99% of people just can’t develop nuanced opinions on anything so culture always has to shift in drastic overcorrecting swings instead of settling on “hey maybe life is bad for different kinds of people and we should acknowledge them to be individuals with individual concerns while still recognizing collective struggles exist” or whatever !
1. people need culture to move so far one way before anyone starts to realize that there’s something wrong or incomplete about the prevailing worldview.
2. then you get the “cultural commentator” social benefit of “nooooticing (sic) what others don’t”. then there’s the big phase (where we are now of criticizing liberalism/modernity/whatever) where people THINK they’re developing a critical attitude while actually expressing a consensus opinion.
3. and so we iterate on.
truly MANY such cases
YES, #2 is so true. And I don't even necessarily *fault* people for doing this, I write about it because I notice it in myself
great piece as usual, thank u for ACTUALLY being someone with insight ! you are the cultural prognosticator everyone else wishes they could be!
Thank you T_T
“who have impossibly high body counts”
Doesn’t sound like you’ve ever been a heterosexual man in the USA. Mid double digits by mid 20s pretty common for Anglo girls in my experience. They wanted to be wives. It wasn’t what they wanted. It’s just how things turned out.
“legitimate criticisms these women might have about dating”
The American system is in a death spiral 💀🌀 and the awful dating scene reflects that.
“I know that my own writing has favored Zoomer men while all but ignoring young women”
I’ve only been following you for a short time however this is not the impression that I got.
“Are you “allowed” to criticize the sex industry, for example? Or does that push you into the nether-world of right-coded content?”
Normalization of prostitution is an extremist political stance by any historical measure. Another symptom of the death spiral 💀🌀 of American society.
“conversations that were happening in the Black community decades ago”
The black family has been under assault longer than other groups because of their economic weakness - they’ve suffered longest from the neoliberal agenda. Trad family costs money. Increasingly unaffordable -> more debt issued to paper over the problems -> 💵 💀 🌀
Have you read “the Negro family” by sociologist and Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan? Many of the issues discussed in the essay now apply to American society broadly (which is, of course, the point you’ve already made). Was written in the 1960s.
I visited a black church (AME Zion) a couple years ago. It was about 90% women. The choir was all female. I smelled like lonely women’s perfume after I left, but it didn’t bother me as I understood. If black America is a leading indicator, that’s where America is headed.
I think this is another case where we’ve cut off macro supply of something we want by putting seemingly sensible roadblocks in front of individuals who produce it.
There’s a sense that women “own” discourse on women, and a man who comments on these issues is viewed with suspicion, either attempting to impose their ideas on women, or being performative to attract sexual interest.
However, the perception is that important topics are those which are talked about by everyone. Men-only discourse is cringe; women-only is unserious. The only way out seems to be when enough tomboys enter the male-dominated spaces that girls start feeling confident enough to enter, but the reverse doesn’t generally occur because of stigma from both genders (men will see you as unmanly, women as an interloper).