The inevitable cultural blow back from #MeToo and the alienation of toxic masculinity

I think we have done such a disservice to young men and redefining masculinity.

We have allowed the woke to define it and you have this insane situation where you mums and dads are more fearful go their sons being accused of sexual assault than their daughters actually being sexually assaulted.

I mean, when every TVNZ can see it…

Online toxic masculinity is on the rise and it’s not just damaging to women

Australian lecturer Kate Cantrell breaks down the contributing factors that make up the growing online ideologies of the manosphere.

“Imagine her tenderly pressing her soft lips against yours,” writes one incel on Reddit, before concluding, “you will never get to experience this because your skeleton is too small or the bones in your face are not the right shape”.

In his debut book, The Male Complaint, Simon Copland escorts his readers through the manosphere and into the minds of its inhabitants. He illustrates how boys and men who are “terrifyingly normal” become attracted to the manosphere’s grim logic – and the cognitive distortions of anti-feminist influencers like Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson.

While mainstream debates often cite toxic masculinity as the cause of online misogyny, Copland, a writer and researcher at the Australian National University, shifts the blame to a deeper cultural malaise. It’s caused, he argues, by the cruel optimism of the manosphere, the multiple social and economic crises of late-stage capitalism and a collective nihilistic misery in which complaint becomes futile and destruction “the only way out”.

The manosphere is a network of loosely related blogs and forums devoted to “men’s interests” – sites like The Rational Male, Game Global and the subreddits ForeverAlone, TheRedPill and MensRights. These online communities, separate in their specific beliefs, are united by their misogynistic ideas – and anti-women and anti-diversity sentiments.

They’re also united by the growing tendency of the men in these communities towards nihilistic violence: not only against others, but also against themselves.

In The Male Complaint, Copland relays his dismay at discovering “a constant stream” of suicide notes on Reddit, including a subreddit, IncelGraveyard, which catalogues close to 100 suicide notes and letters posted by self-identified incels.

“Since I was a kid I was fed up with ‘Don’t worry, it will get better’, ‘You will find someone’ […] it’s not even that I want a SO (significant other) anymore. Women are awful. People are awful. I have no friends.”

For Copland, the violence incels inflict on themselves is a form of passive nihilism. Incels “don’t just express disgust and despair at the world, but in themselves – their looks, body, lives, personality, intelligence, and more”.

Copland argues that simplified critiques of toxic masculinity minimise the problem of male violence. They fail to consider the context and history of gendered behaviour, assuming toxic traits are somehow innate and unique to men, rather than the product of social expectations and relations.

…We hate each other thanks to social media.

While we hate each other more than ever before, we are more lonely than we have ever been before.

We are lonelier, more depressed and sicker.

Our loneliness, our depression, our sickness are all fomenting the spin of social media hate algorithms which only further polarise our debate into All Tribe and No Village politics.

I think we are a clever ape who has evolved over 300 000 years. Because we have to compete against other sentient and self conscious clever apes and work with them as groups so our intelligence and ability to use tools could change our environment, we have had to bond and understand each other over hundreds of thousands of years of evolution.

When we meet in person, our bodies and brains and taking in millions of different details subconsciously and we are working each other out through facial cues, pheromones, gait, stance, smiles, eye contact, etc etc etc: we have taken those 300 000  years of evolution and replaced that  with flat screen interaction where we lose all that unseen evolutionary advantage and instead become brainwashed and trapped in rabbit holes of demented reality.

Flat screen interaction is warping our human capacity to tell what is true and what isn’t because we don’t have that sense of the person in front of us and all the million ways we asses each other in our evolved brain.

We have become an ocean of spite and resentment in an All Tribe No Village politics distorted by social media hate algorithms because 300 000 years of evolution can’t work in a flat screen interaction loneliness.

We need got fight against this anathematising of our hopes and aspirations.

We need a masculinity that isn’t defined by anyone else except ourselves.

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