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  • I talk about this in another comment on a different post, but I'll give you the TLDR, plus a bit more musing:

    • At the highest level, this type of thinking stems from an erosion of parenting and the evolution of the digital age. It's not that parents don't care, but they have less time than they have historically to parent, and both parents have to work to support the family in most cases.
    • Kids now socialize less due to time spent online
    • The algorithms online are powerful and meant to keep you watching, even if it's not great for you
    • Because of the lack of parenting and being terminally on there is less and less interaction with positive male role model, so kids figuring themselves out latch on to anything they can find and it ends up being Tate and ilk because fear and anger sell, and they make us feel like if only we were just a bit better, we would have what the tatertots have.
    • To combat this, we need to make morons afraid again
    • Saying something outrageous used to cost you social capital but now everyone is too busy to care and there's been the rise of the ideal that all opinions are equal, confrontation, unless approved by the talking heads online, is bad, and everyone need to feel safe, heard, and their opinions as valid (at least to a degree)
    • We can best deal with this weaponized misogyny by calling people out - especially kids - as it crops up. If you're a coach on a hockey team and someone starts up, shut them down. Leagues have diversity and inclusion policies - use them to back yourself up.
    • Even if it's just someone else's kid you are around, while you may be afraid of speaking up, but chances are most parents would want to know their kid is calling women 'holes' or the like and will deal with it.

    The only way this goes away is if we address it at every stage, and every time it comes up.

    • Very well said.

      literally grew up in prime misogyny zone.

      Listening to old Opie and Anthony clips where they called women holes. Was my 11 to 16 background noise.

      You are right. My experience of what prevented me from deep ending:

      Empathy. Empathy. Empathy.

      I remember the look on my first girlfriends face when I was such a piece of shit to her. I was an asshole.

      That internalized guilt feeling of hurting another person made me change.

      Dated a man, saw the amount of trauma men can put vulnerable people in.

      Allowing your worldview to change with new evidence. Admitting fault. All increibly valuable. But the act of putting yourself in someone else's shoes and really understanding it, or at least wanting to, cannot be beat.

      I'm scared for the algorithm generation. I was and to an extent still am terminally online, but your interests being weaponinzed against you is another beast completely. Being too young to know you're being pigeon holed into hate

      Happy to have changed. Love is the thing

    • It’s not that parents don’t care, but they have less time than they have historically to parent, and both parents have to work to support the family in most cases.

      I'll spot you one deeper. Working families have been the norm for the bulk of human history. But we've also had large tribal communities full of extended family to provide social and economic support.

      But the nuclear family, privatization of social services, and the wealth gap have closed off this network of relationships. In the modern world of commoditized labor and class politics, you either have servants or you are a servant.

      Fascists translate the class politics to a social structure. For fascist men, the women become the servant gender to which men are entitled.

      Further, as wealth aggregation generates a gulf between poverty and aristocracy, the aristocrats have a habit of monopolizing young people for their own personal demands. This leads to a problem of Surplus Males whose struggle for survival leads to domestic and criminal violence.

      All of this degrades quality of life for the next generation.

      • You're on point at least on the capitalism behind this. I didn't want to dive into it because my comment was long enough, but I'm glad you did

    • Not wanting to be that guy but there is a part missing from your list (I think) where myogeny used to be much more wide spread and much less cared about than today

      Slapping a woman back in her place was, shall we say, less socially awkward a hundred years ago than it is today. Especially the last twenty years a lot had changed in making misogyny visible, making people losers like Andrew Tate stand out much more.

      I'm not saying it's not a problem, I'm not saying that Andrew Tate hasn't made things worse, I'm just saying that it used to be so so much worse, still.

      Having said that; we need to bring back responsible role models, everywhere. I grew up with good parents who were role models but I also grew up with Star Trek TNG which influenced me greatly and I'm proud of that. I grew up with practicing kyokushin Karate which taught me humility and respect, both for men and especially women because woman that practice that are humble but don't take your "I'm the guy!" shit for a second.

    • there’s been the rise of the ideal that all opinions are equal, confrontation, unless approved by the talking heads online, is bad, and everyone need to feel safe, heard, and their opinions as valid (at least to a degree)

      We can best deal with this weaponized misogyny by calling people out - especially kids - as it crops up.

      Just to be clear, we call it out IRL. I 100% agree there.

      Calling out tatertots and such online is feeding the trolls, and counterproductive. They thrive on the discord because algorithms love it, so the best move is to pretend they're invisible, just like with real narcissists.

      I see a lot of online sentiment of "we stay to fight," especially on Reddit and Twitter, when that's exactly what's feeding the machine. Finite attention is so much better elsewhere.

      • Calling it out in person works a lot better than online. Online it's just mean words on a screen they have to deal with. A living, breathing person telling them they are dumb has more sting.

  • I've had way too few Garys in my life.

    My dad is a Bill O'Reilly / Donald Trump / William Shatner kinda guy. Now in his 80s he's total MAGA.

    In my twenties, I noticed I really didn't care about gender norms. Wasn't into cars or guns or football (was way into tech but this was still in the DOS age so everyone else thought tech was weird).

    After Trump I turned in my man card. Real men, society tells me, look like Trump, like Matt Walsh and Ben Shapiro and Joe Rogan. There are some great guys like Gary out there. But the thing that makes them great isn't their masculine representation

    My hero as a young adult was the NORAD officer at the beginning of Wargames ( NORAD Officer played by John Spencer, seen here) who wouldn't proceed with a nuclear launch command and kill twenty million people. A friend of mine -- and coven mate -- talks about an uncle who was a total 60s hippy in the USAF assigned as an Air Force Missileer. He openly admitted to his superiors that he wasn't going to turn that key for them no matter how dire the circumstances were. He just refused to launch a nuclear tipped ICBM at anyone. They kept him in the position anyway.

    This was my understanding of manhood in the 1980s. Restraint. The capacity to hold power without using it. Maybe Atticus Finch bears a rifle to put down a literal rabid dog, but never in circumstances any less dire, and the weapon is put away afterwards. Also taking care of business. To man up (related to pony up ) was to pay bills, to call the utility office to negotiate a late payment to align with a paycheck, to deal civilly with exes and rivals to make sure no one was without power or heat or food. -- And then in the 1990s all that became adulting. The bearing of responsibilities had no gender; we were all expected to do it.

    Except then in the late aughts came the subprime mortgage crisis, and nearly a trillion dollars was spent defying capitalist theory (that failed companies are left to collapse and their investors suffer the consequences). We learned that if you're big enough or powerful enough, you don't have to be responsible. Instead the government will bail you out, even as minimum wage wasn't keeping up with living expenses, homelessness was rising, and tax cuts to the wealthy were not recinded. It was the era of OWS, who were quietly swept away by law enforcement while the cameras were turned off. It was a sign of things to come.

    Now manhood is about raw power. Neitzsche was right: A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength—life itself is Will to Power; self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent results thereof. Manhood in 2025 is the privilege to assert force upon others without concern or consequence, to stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and not lose any voters.

    The rabid dog is afflicted. It doesn't have any choice. In 2025, manly men choose violence: They discharge their power to assert their power, showing the world how masculine they are.

    So I don't want anything to do with it anymore.

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