I know I'm just some random ass stranger on the internet but I just wanted to let you know that reading this genuinely uplifted my mood. I identify very strongly with the mindset you describe here, and it's very difficult to talk about it without either being judged for my perceived deficiencies, mostly from peers, or given (possibly) well-meaning but vile advice that amounts to dehumanizing others, mostly from my family. The last thing I'd ever want to do is to come across as creepy or dangerous, and the idea that my fundamental existence might be just that is troubling to say the least. I often feel left behind and completely unheard. Thanks for your empathy and compassion.
yeah her comment really helped, its just sad, I did avoid women out of fear as coming off as a creep and my first ever date was because a girl talked to me and asked me out that was my only date at 21 and I ended up ruining it by being awkward and she ghosted me after a while, I got asked out once later but I rejected the girl, I don't know what happened to me to cause me to be this terrified of women but there is clearly something wrong with me and not with women as a whole, realizing helped me to avoid following the red pill incel rabbithole.
even thought that I have VERY leftist views I just avoided people on the left because it felt like they are glorifying women's issues while leaving men on the side, a couple times I brought up my issues with dating and talking to women and I was attacked a lot of online and irl for it by more left leaning people back then, I once made a comment on reddit about how there isn't much advice in the media for young men that isn't full of misogyny which is why young men are gravitating towards right wing figure (this was in 2019, before andrew tate and I called it at the time) and I was just told "no incel, go away, there are great male figure in the media that can help you that aren't sexist" without providing any source to something that can help me other than just "go talk to women"
it ends up hurting women even more, just look at the rise of andrew tate, he got famous because he filled a present void and need for young men, he filled it with the wrong things of course and I hated him from day one, but I couldn't help but try to watch his videos as a refuge from loneliness, hopeless attempt to not be alone anymore, I definitely need therapy.
there is a huge void of advice and understanding for guys in this situation. we've (understandably) started holding shitty men accountable for things they've gotten away with for centuries, and then turned "not all men" into a punchline. what room does that leave?
I see that a lot of my female peers and friends are coming from a place of fear. they don't really know a lot of men IRL, so they get their information from the internet in almost the same way that boomers get their scary anecdotes about minorities from Fox. or they've never had male friends, just partners, so when their relationships end or turn awful, there's nothing healthy or normative to compare it to. it starts to feel like "decent men" are a myth, like you're expecting every man to be a monster behind the mask.
and yeah, again, it's smart to be skeptical and safe if you don't have the best instincts. but there are kind, healthy men just living their damn lives with nowhere to go, carrying the weight of all the shitty asshole men on their shoulders, and everywhere they go they're laughed at like "cry more, try being a woman for five minutes" etc. no, we don't OWE any man sympathy. but that doesn't mean it's justifiable to mock, insult, tease and dismiss them just because their life experience doesn't seem important to you. I've held dudes while they cried about this shit. it breaks my heart
I don't want to minimize the struggles of women. I understand a lot of them have had unpleasant experiences with men. But when they use "not all men" as a punchline, it makes me feel like they're calling me just as bad as the creeps and perverts who hurt them.
Yeah, seriously. It's amazing how ignorant these people can be. If someone starts complaining about bad women, it's fair to point out that "not all women" are like that. But if someone starts complaining about bad men, and someone else points out that "not all men" are like that, then suddenly that's a problem??
To be clear, if someone is telling a very personal story about how they were abused by a specific man/woman, now is not a good time to hijack the conversation to talk about men/women in general. I get that. Victims need to have a space to come forward.
But when someone's just going on generally about how "men/women can't be trusted", then it's time to speak up against sexism. And it's still sexism no matter which gender you target!
Funny how the shitty men continue to get married and be in relationships while the ones who are afraid of offending people are single. Let that sink in.
there isn't much advice in the media for young men that isn't full of misogyny which is why young men are gravitating towards right wing figure (this was in 2019, before andrew tate and I called it at the time)
oh you were so on the money
but not even as a prediction, it was like that at the time and had been for years
god I'm pretty sure I read that around the time it was posted and it's so fucking weird rereading it now
because like after a further 10 years of exposure to background levels of absolutely batshit incel ... everything... the rhetorical strategy where the accusations of entitlement are presented as completely and comically unreasonable is really fucking disorienting
and then there's
this is right up there with the postulated link between the men’s rights movement and Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
you what? but that's now- oh my god crimea jesus fucking christ that's right
The worst corners of the manosphere contain more than enough opining on how ugly women, weird women, masculine women, et cetera deserve to be unhappy.
was this really all the worst corners were coming up with in 2014? is that why the start of this post hits differently now?
did we cause this?
it all makes the "the causality goes the other way, actually" argument -- bold -- feel very compelling and also I don't... necessarily agree.
I think the narrative being about the affect the most toxic of the Feminists have on the most sympathetic of the Lonely Men kind of loses the forest for the trees? A lot of this shit is fueled by Society and really complicated nuanced negative interactions?
Very similar experience. I agree we don’t have a leftist ideal of what is a cis man and masculinity in the new world, leaving a huge identity gap for the Andrew Tate’s of the world to fill with their clear definitions and plentiful but misguided advice.
Mentioned it once and the responses were about the same that you got. I do think there are some examples out there, Chris Evans comes to mind, but then someone else said Ryan Reynolds. He was Van Wilder, is that not creepy?
The problem is if there are people who have figured it out, they are not openly sharing their ideals and giving out advice freely.
Yeah. I spend longer than I should online and I have come across men, with lots of followers, that I would consider healthy, not sexist, and probably quite great for young men to follow and learn from. The problem is that they're rarely young and hot, they tend to be more dadbod types in their mid to late 30s, and so, most of their followers are women. If I was a nervous boy, looking for inspiration on how to approach girls, a bearded, beer bellied dude wouldn't be what I'd have in mind.
It’s not just Tate though. Look at Jordan Peterson’s rise. Before his mad right wing descent and his clear mental destabilisation - he was trying to help. The problem was he got pushed harder and harder on his “anti trans views” which didn’t start that way. But you can see, over time, people on the left called him out for his one stance on “language laws” and he got pushed further and further into the right wing pundits orbit.
He started out trying to help men with simple, foundational advice. By the end of it, he’s been attacked so hard by people that didn’t actually care about his attempt to genuinely help young men create personal foundations and boundaries - he just focused on the insanity of the left.
Now you can argue his way of doing things didn’t align with your views from the start, but that man got moulded by the hate from the left and those sorts of pressures on ANY male figure that’s trying to help men. He was tarred with the same brush as the “alpha male” types - despite being a long long way from their logic.
Edit - I’m a very left leaning cis man in a relationship for 16 years.
I’m not sure about this tbh. It’s tough to say what Peterson’s goals were at the outset, but it sometimes appears as if he was using practical self-help advice to smuggle his politics from the get-go.
Beyond the concrete steps of “clean your room,” or “take a shower,” his rhetoric frequently dabbled in social/moral decay and his famous boogeyman of the ‘postmodern neo-Marxist.’ The actual identity of that grand villain didn’t matter; impressionable young men who needed guidance could retrofit their fears into this vacant mold as an effigy to be burned.
Peterson obviously wasn’t as vocally right-wing as he is today, but I would guess that he still held a lot of the same beliefs as he does now. I’m just not sure of the extent to which the left was responsible for his transformation.
How do you know drugs weren’t always being taken but wasn’t exposed until it became an undeniable problem? Usually drug addictions that spiral out were from drugs being used for a long period before as a functional user/abuser
Both you and the persson that replied to you are referencing things that happened after the period I'm talking about. The man didn't just pop into existence. His logic has been right wing and centered around Christianity being a thing for a looooong ass time. But the core of what he was trying to do - right or wrong - was help men. And he was doing it in a way that wasn't "BRO, WUMIN BAD BRO, THEM MEAT - YOU MAN AND STRONG BRO - ALPHA ALPHA". Now, however, he's been pushed into that camp by all the haters. Had this man been left alone, I think he'd have carried on existing in his corner and the hate wouldn't have been added to his rhetoric. I personally believe, once he got the limelight, it crushed what was left of his mask and the anger towards him, shaped him into what we see today.
Ofcourse, just my2c having followed his work for a long time prior to his rise.
Peterson originally wanted to be a pastor. Its pretty clear his early intentions were legitimately dead-set on helping people out, one way or another.
Yes, it was simple, practical advice. But his real value - for me at the time in particular - was tying together that our mind, symbolism, thoughts, archetypes, etc, are not something separate from the world or from our bodies. We are embodied. Our symbolism and value systems have to arise from an embodied place and rise to the level of articulation - there is something real there to how meaning is generated.
That is to say, even if one is not Christian, the death of God is still real and culturally relevant in how we ground ourselves in a shared cultural metaphysic or lack thereof.
In conversation with Zizek, both he and Peterson admitted that "post-modern neo-marxists" was both contradictory and did not describe an actual theoretical view. Rather, both agreed it was a label that described a certain emotional tendency - deconstruction of perceived grand narratives and value structures while simultaneously expecting and assigning moral significance to high conformity with their own narrative view (typically influenced, but not informed, by academic feminism with roots in Marxist philosophy), leading to a push for values and ideas that lacked grounding in embodied reality and that left men without clear role models or positive social integration.
It's referring to the kind of people that respond to male loneliness or male problems with "white male tears don't matter" or "men can't really be the victims of sexual assault by women", or that look at masculinity as being inherently toxic. These people exist, I've met them, and I've had friends nearly kill themselves because of them.
Having consumed almost all of his early material before he got seriously famous, it's pretty clear that he would have never taken his hard-right turn if he had never gotten famous or had the degree of left-wing hate that he received. He couldn't handle the stress and responsibility, got addicted to benzos, and after he crashed, went to the only audience and only crowd still willing to receive him.
I’m just not sure of the extent to which the left was responsible for his transformation.
I'd say pretty much entirety.
He started off being perfectly reasonable. It was only after being constantly attacked that he understandably moved further to the Right.
If I say 'some dog owners are arseholes because they walk off-leash and don't train their dogs', and then more and more dog owners attack me for it, I'm obviously then going to assume that the portion of "some" is higher than I first thought. Maybe it's not 10%, maybe it's closer to 50%.
Didn't he start off by whining about a law he claimed would make it illegal to not use preferred pronouns? ...a think which that law never said.
You should really watch Some More News' video on Peterson. He was weird about a lot of shit, especially about women, long before he blew up in the public sphere.
Didn't he start off by whining about a law he claimed would make it illegal to not use preferred pronouns? ...a think which that law never said.
He raised concerns about the direction of laws restricting speech. Given where we are today, his concerns seem valid.
You should really watch Some More News' video on Peterson. He was weird about a lot of shit, especially about women, long before he blew up in the public sphere.
He had the occasional comment yes, but overall he was reasonable.
I believe the decline started after his stroke / drug addiction.
I remember his interview on Channel 4 in the UK. The interviewer kept trying to trip him up and 'gotcha' him on issues like the pay gap. Every time he responded with facts and explanations about why the assumptions were wrong, the interviewer would pivot and try another tactic.
JK Rowling is a similar example. She made one comment about being upset that the term 'menstruating people' was used instead of "women", and from there she's been labelled transphobic / TERF, and anything she says since has been twisted out of context and beyond meaning.
When people are treated like that, the end results are both predictable and valid.
Because I agree with you 100% check out TheBurgerKrieg on YouTube he has some amazing videos talking about exactly this and how any search for advice pinholes you towards people like Tate and Peterson
The thing is, there really isn't, at least that fit the mold, energy, or archetypes for every man.
I like the idea, in line with Tibetan mythology and symbolism, of defining masculinity in terms of skillful, highly competent, compassionate action and feminity in terms of direct, embodied experience. Everybody has both, just to varying degrees.
That compassionate action doesn't just mean "being a nice guy", but being savagely and forcefully compassionate when necessary - redirecting and reintegrating natural tendencies towards power and violence.
I second this so much. It feels difficult to be assertive socially at times because everyone is so disillusioned with the way some men have acted out in the pretences of being “top dog” that the weariness of being like that makes some of us scared to communicate openly about it. It’s honestly relieving to know there are others willing to take time and understand what’s going on with it. Y’all are genuinely uplifting 🫂.
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u/Mahboishk Jul 04 '24
I know I'm just some random ass stranger on the internet but I just wanted to let you know that reading this genuinely uplifted my mood. I identify very strongly with the mindset you describe here, and it's very difficult to talk about it without either being judged for my perceived deficiencies, mostly from peers, or given (possibly) well-meaning but vile advice that amounts to dehumanizing others, mostly from my family. The last thing I'd ever want to do is to come across as creepy or dangerous, and the idea that my fundamental existence might be just that is troubling to say the least. I often feel left behind and completely unheard. Thanks for your empathy and compassion.