Great piece. I think what you said is spot on for the people that have been unfortunately captured by the "manosphere". However, I still think a big piece is missing from the general conversation. I live in a decently progressive area and know a lot of Gen Z moderate to progressive men who are similarly as lonely. I think its the next step into seeing that this is something that affects a lot of Gen Z people regardless of affiliation/gender, its become even harder to meet people since covid and i feel like 2020 stripped a lot of people from enjoying a prime time in their lives to socialize and were seeing the effects now.
This larger point applies to people of all generations, it's not at all limited to Gen Z. Older people especially seem to be the loneliest, statistically.
True. We must also watch for US/western bias. The macros are different in say, Africa or Indonesia. In other words, the incel phenomenon can be seen as a symptom of the collapse of the West.
For sure, but were they as lonely in their 20s as Gen Z is today? I dont have the answers and im not acting like im going to, but that was more of the metric i was going for tbh
Probably not, but that speaks to a problem with what our culture has transformed into in the transition between generations, not the generations themselves. This epidemic of loneliness affects EVERYONE.
The Manosphere is FULL of liberal, progressive, leftwing, socialist, communist, and even anarchist men. It's even getting to be a problem that the rightwingers complain about and there are attempts to ban them. The Manosphere is NOT only for rightwing men. It appeals to lots of guys.
I'm the farthest thing from an incel but I used to hang out on incel boards. It sounds nuts but incel sites are FULL of regular non-incel guys. Even a lot of players drowning in pussy. Let me tell a lot of the incels on those sites are leftwing, socialist, communist, or anarchist. You would not believe how many.
As always, good work. You obviously put a lot of effort into the post.
We raised a Gen Z daughter in a relatively wealthy area, surrounded by a mix of both functional and monumentally dysfunctional families and/or single parents.
For the males raised by the divorced dad with the "Men's Rights" sticker on his poser Jeep, to the Dad who loudly asks his son where his "whore girlfriend" is at a Middle School parent gathering... one can see those train wrecks coming from early on. Both of those situations produced the males you would expect from that form of parental interface.
However, from one of the kids I used to talk with at the School Bus stop, who was occasionally surrounded by brown snow due to the hot chocolate leaking out of his poorly secured thermos, and who went through the standard fedora-every-day phase during the Jonas Bros era... whose father was nothing but average, focusing conversation on things such as the energy savings derived from insulating one's crawl space...
We now get this freak on Tate's sick podcast advocating the benefits of cocaine, steroids, gambling, etc. Same kid. Sister went on to be an accomplished scientist. Family was, so far as I can tell, entirely functional and charming, but generated this bizarre monstrosity barely recognizable from the small yet "normal" neighborhood kid we knew.
I assume some of it is the echo chambers established by social media, though the cultural shift can't simply be explained by the ability of any moron out there to get attention by aberrant behavior. Economics, what we value as a culture, sexuality issues, etc. all have a part in the dark road we've gone down.
This kid will, most likely, die before his time. The magic combo of roids and coke has a pretty established outcome. Every male that grew up on this block during our time here has already died. We're up to three dead, all in their twenties or before, so... Accidents, a possible suicide, whatever. It's all just bizarre for a community without poverty with all the opportunities in the world for it's children.
Thanks again for your post. Great work in fleshing out and humanizing issues. Best.
Thanks for this piece! Another resource, to add to the ones you listed, is this series on patriarchal masculinity by Celeste Davis. The link here is part 5, but the first 4 parts are linked at the top of the piece.
Everybody needs love and care, but patriarchal systems try to define love and care as feminine-only. That means men who aim for the most power or influence within the system must shun the yin-yang inside themselves just as they shun anyone who doesn’t fit patriarchal definitions of maleness. That seems like a really hard way to live, emotionally, but I’m a woman so I can’t speak from experience.
I prefer not to define the problem strictly as a matter of patriarchy’s hold on masculine self-image. Certainly, there is deep and historical imprint of gender norms, reinforced through cultural and social signals, on each and everyone of us. It takes a lot of focus and self-awareness all the time (for me) to avoid falling into gender normative thinking. For example, such thoughts could be about one’s self-worth in terms of the number of partners or the ease by which one obtains partners. It could mean resentment for when women are not “playing by the rules” when they rebuff someone who subscribes and achieves a certain set of predefined masculine traits. It could be a subtle resentment of my partner’s career success, when I am unemployed or ashamed of my own career prospects. I do think incel culture is at least partly this at a societal level.
However, at an individual level, men, and people in general, do not instinctively act with agency, and prefer attributing their loneliness and isolation from people they desire entirely to circumstances that are entirely outside their control. Circumstances like “shallowness” or “bitchiness” or “being stuck up” of the other. It provides a sense of certainty even if it comes at the expense of agency, especially if action can result in rejection and embarrassment and disappointment. I think this very human psychology can explain, at least partially, the catalyst for why men prefer the incel culture to changing their ways. Patriarchal culture explains the “what” in these incel belief systems. Human vulnerability and a sense of learned helpless explains why they gravitate towards these groups.
Women are FAR more demanding than men when it comes to requiring men to be hypermasculine. Most men have always accepted me because there is a part of me that is quite masculine and most men can see it. I sort of walk the walk and talk the talk. What got me by with men had girlfriends calling me pussy, faggot, wimp, ridiculing my masculinity or saying it didn't exist and cucking me other men out of contempt. Why does toxic masculinity exist? Because you women demand it.
I'm not denying this is true in conservative spaces, and areas where traditionalism dominates. But statistically the majority of women believe in equality and want the exact opposite of men being shamed into traditional gender roles.
This isn't being done by women to men, it's being done by CONSERVATIVE men and women to EVERYBODY. But if we're going to keep score there are nowhere NEAR the number of alt-right female influencers promoting this shit as there are male ones.
Some truth in this. Gotta say I had only one GF ever with such demands. It didn't go well. Or, zooming out, it was perfect: an encounter with the dark feminine is a rite of passage...
So sorry this has happened to you! In my experience, folks who care deeply about traditional gender roles can be aggressive in policing other people's ways of expressing masculine/feminine. And this definitely goes for women too.
Thank you. I'm no loser either. I've dated hundreds of women and girls basically because I received a gift from evolution and I'm a Chad. Women can't resist us. They'll have sex with us for 4-5 hours a day and then try to cut our balls off afterwards.
You are very much correct, thanks for this. What's interesting is women don't know what masculinity is. What gets you by with a shrug of the shoulders with other men (Yeah he's kind of weird but he's basically a man so fuck it be nice to him) doesn't cut it with women. They apparently have a different idea of what is masculine than we men do. That's weird because everyone thinks it's the other way around. Men are easy. Most don't want to fight and would rather get along. Women, not so much. Anyway I've had a good life.
I've dealt with this of course by trying to be a lot more masculine and I've even become mean to women during fights and called them names I never dared to before. And I've had the wildest love affairs of my life in my 50's, women who loved me more than any woman ever had. I don't know what to say but women respect it when you stand up for yourself. They scream and yell but at the end they like it.
😂! It comes from the incels. Chads are simply handsome, goodlooking, hot, etc. men. 7-10 on the scale. Chad’s hot girlfriend is named Stacy. Incels are pretty angry at Chads or more properly women’s preference for them.
Actually incels say most Chads were nice to them. Chads are often pretty secure.
The incels were right about a lot of things! And they don’t all hate women either. I used to read on their boards. I’m the opposite of an incel.
The incel boards are FULL of non-incels and even Chads, Alphas, and players. It’s so bad it’s gotten to be a problem and most sites ban them now.
The similarities and overlaps with Great White Replacement Theory are interesting to me. Thinking about how we are currently being threatened with erasure of nonwhyte history and its place/importance to society, I can’t help but think how similar it is to the current stats on why young men are feeling threatened. It’s all connected isn’t it?
They're all being fed the same sense of entitlement: That they have a right to force an entire society, to conform to a malignant social hierarchy, that artificially elevates them.
Their puppet-masters feed them an intoxicating/crippling fable of entitlement/victimhood.
It’s that mind-f..k that makes them so incapable of competing on a level playing field. Instead of doing anything remotely useful, they’re perpetually preoccupied with trying to dominate everyone.
And it takes a big lie — asserting that racist, sexist discrimination, is "meritocracy" — to obscure the disempowering manipulation that they’ve fallen for.
Worse: In order to make America’s devolution into Uniformity, Inequity & Exclusion permanent, The United Daughters of the Confederacy have been called back from hell — by Linda McMahon — to indoctrinate defenceless children, with a reanimated anti-factual Confederate maleducation (in place of any legitimate sense of reality, that could otherwise have empowered them). Children never truly recover from bad programming.
As Lisa aptly pointed out (but to summarize), the common thread is a belief in one's supremacy, based on a worldview of hierarchy. The equality that most women believe in and demand has no place in that worldview - in fact the two are utterly antithetical.
And really, this is the story of our time: an epic battle not between good and evil but between worldviews - the last thrashes of the old paradigm of domination and hierarchy slowly dying out as it is consistently, inevitably replaced it's opposite, a worldview of inclusion, acceptance, and equality.
The arc of history bends towards the latter but the process of change takes time, and unfortunately our time as a society has run out thanks to climate change.
As human beings, shouldn't we be moving away from objectifying each other by now? As a woman, as soon as a man objectifies me, they're no longer eligible as a partner. Do men want to be objectified? I don't think so. And neither do women.
"As bell hooks writes, “The truth we do not tell is that men are longing for love.” No matter what influencers say, men know that to be true. Just like everyone else we have that drive for connection and relationships that are fulfilling on a deeper level. We want and deserve love, just like women and everyone else is fundamentally deserving of love and care. It’s time to stop buying into the crap that keeps us apart, that makes us less likable, that tells us we have to dominate women and can’t have equal and loving relationships."
"Do men want to be objectified? I don't think so. And neither do women."
Of course we do. I had male model good looks as a young man and at 67, women still say I'm "hot." Even teenage girls! And they won't quit propositioning me. Yeah I love being a Chad of course. At some certain extreme level where she doesn't give a shit about me and only wants my body or my cock, it's insulting but that's rare.
Gay men have objectified me my whole life. I'm not wild about. I'm mostly mad about how they went about expressing it. I'd be walking down the street in Bevery Hills and one gay man after another in a car would be rubberneckinhg me and yelling AWOOOOOOOOOOOO! It didn't feel real great, I have to admit. Women and girls have done the exact same thing to me and it felt a lot better.
If we didn't objectify each other, no one would ever fuck.
My worldview is TRUE. But it's the last thing on Earth people like you want to believe. That's what I mean by the ugly truth. You don't understand the nature of male-female relations because the truth would be very upsetting to you as you would have to question so much of what you believe. I've had a very good life. I don't have much money. That's really the only downside. Everything else is pretty good and it has been for decades.
You sound homophobic—which may be a sign of insecurity. Are you generative towards other men? And in this day and age—post Epstein, Savile, Weinstein, Prince Andrew etc—it's thin ice for a 67 year old to be bragging about teenage girls, no?
Caught up in the mass hysteria I see. Do you hate straight men. Epstein was a hebephile. Most men are not. But every man knows Earth wants to fuck those girls. It’s just that you’re not supposed to do it.
I’ve seen the lab studies. Men are more attracted to 17 year old girls than any other age group of females.
The reason Epstein’s blackmail worked is because all men want to have sex with those girls and many will do it if given a chance. Most of Epstein’s girls were legal.
Saville was a pedophile. Pedophiles don’t fuck teenage girls. Normal healthy men do.
Weinstein didn’t fuck teenage girls. He raped women.
Prince Andrew is a normal healthy straight men. 17 year old girls are legal in most of the US and the world, so people are mostly fine with adult men and teenage girls. That girl was 100% legal in the places he had sex with her. It’s legal, it’s healthy, what’s the problem?
You misunderstand "generative." It means the capacity to be supportive and empathic. You seem to see things in binary. You admit negative feelings when perceived as attractive to gay men, and when I challenge you, presume I am gay and hate straight men. It's 2025. You're embarassing yourself here. "Normal healthy men fuck teenage girls." No! Mature, responsible men may **appreciate** a teenage girl. Immature, irresponsible boy-men abuse lopsided power dynamics to get their puerile way. If you can't admit that dynamic in the Andrew/Virginia Giffre (RIP) case, we have nothing further to discuss.
That’s bullshit. Most homophobes are not insecure or coveting something up. Same are but most are not. Also all honest straight men are homophobes. If not they’d have a dick in their mouth.
That’s just some bullshit the gays made up about their enemies. The Left knows nothing about homosexuality and neither do gays to be honest.
People can’t be objective about themselves and gay consciousness now is full of gay propaganda and lies. The Left won’t tell the truth about homosexuality because the truth is homophobic.
Social conservatives and straight women have a far more correct understanding of homosexuality than gays and the Left. They may not like them but many understand them very well.
If you can read I’m complaining about being objectified in public and having gay men after me everywhere I go.
Which is exactly what straight women complain about men. Do they hate men? Mostly no. Do I hate gay men. No. I just want a divorce. Gay men and straight men can’t be friends or even acquaintances. It doesn’t work.
"Most homophobes are not insecure or coveting something up." There it is right there— a Freudian typo. You won't take it from me but I genuinely think you should see a therapist.
Homophobes are really gay is some bullshit made up by the gays to smear their enemies. It’s a lame smear anyway because by doing this they imply that there is something horribly wrong with being gay. It’s idiocy. A LOT of gay men say it’s bullshit too.
You are so wrong. That theory is such bullshit. Homophobia is strongly associated with masculinity and toxic masculinity. The more masculine the man is, the greater the homophobia. In my father’s generation everyone hated gays. I guess those men were a bunch of faggots. In Jamaica 90% of men really hate gays. I guess they’re all prancing queers. Before 1900, homosexuality was often punishable by death and most all men hated it. I guess they were all a bunch of screaming homos.
Even the sane gays don’t believe this bullshit. Yes some homophobes engage in reaction formation, but most of the bad ones are just assholes, hypermasculine pricks who hate gay men as part of their masculine repertoire.
You got some evidence that “all homophobes are really faggots?”
A great read, as always! Thought you'd enjoy this success story about a guy in my neighborhood:
Skinhead guy, was always very kind to me, but with a vaguely hostile aura that i couldn't quite put my finger on. Came to find out that he was a genuine neo-Nazi skinhead for some time but has since moved to the Midwest, opened a gym, and built a whole community and lifestyle around bringing local racists into the fold and reforming them. Deprogramming by and for racist/redpilled white guys.
dude kicks ass, will come into my work with his iron cross tattoos and "don't tread on me/BLM" patches on his vest. he punches his boxes open for some reason and always says "thank you." if a man like him can reform, there's hope for everyone else i think.
I think when writing about these subjects is very important to be precise with language. Words mean things. For instance, you say: "Yeah, women have changed. Most notably, the vast majority of women believe they’re equal to men in every way and want to be treated accordingly."
I would argue that women don't believe they're equal to men in EVERY way. Certainly men are better at losing their tempers and writing their names in the snow while peeing. What I would suggest for more a more accurate telling of the situation would be something along the lines of the following: Since gaining access to their own bank accounts, credit cards, and business loans--along with entry to higher education--women have excelled at and even exceeded men in many areas they were previously barred entry to. Today women understand that they are men's equals, and, logically, expect to be treated as such."
I'm calling you out on this because I think it's important for men who are willing to speak up and do the work to make sure that their language is both accurate, and unable to be misinterpreted. "Women believe they're equal to men in every way" leaves a lot of room for negative interpretation. For starters, a belief is not necessarily a fact. People believe in the tooth fairy, in QAnon, that the Earth is flat, etc..
I hope you take this comment in the spirit in which it was given
Gay men are not incels, because they are not INVOLUNTARY CELEBATE with women for pity's sake. Sure, there are gay men who are misogynistic, sexist, and hate women, but they are not "incels". Incel culture is defined specifically by heterosexual men who blame women for their inability to obtain a relationship and/or sex.
Gay men are not "incels" they're just plain old misogynists who fuck men instead.
What a refreshing read. The manosphere really groomed a generation of young men into involuntarily ending their bloodlines with them. Let's not forget the bitter divorced dads either, who have the same off-putting toxic energy.
Great post, JP. And timely, too. I'm seeing a kind of fundamental divergence between men and women at the moment. In the first place, this is down to the crumbling of outworn, colonialist patriarchal structures/narratives. Second, it is a necessary part of our collective evolution. Third, a //lot// of men (and women) are struggling to adapt. To generalise, but not meaninglessly, it's harder for men. Why? Precisely because our self-esteem/self-worth is conditioned to be based on performance. Tate is a great example. What would he be without his lambo/villa/muscles/yes-men following? Incels lap up his tyrannical performances of ADHD-ish anger. Podcast hosts are scared of him. Women (save the botoxed influencer dolls and pro-Tate karens) are moving beyond this crap. Men are hostage to algorithms of their own fuelling. There is a way out: initiation. That's why I'm building https://circularise.substack.com....
I love your writing, the way you reflect. I agree with you but it’s hard to blame men entirely, as a 29 year old Haitian American woman who does well for herself, there are some women who think the same way if not worse than some men I’ve spoken to. Women have raised men to be this way, I hate to see men get ALL the blame.
I like much of what’s written here and I am mostly on board with the core argument of reframing the phenomenon as being voluntary choice, not involuntary enforcement, isolation from and by women. But I have a couple of issues overall.
Firstly, as some others have commented, I think overlooking the structural ‘involuntary’ aspect is a mistake. As someone mentioned, Covid struck my generation at a key time (I was in my first, supposedly most fun two years of uni) and has left scars and ruptures across social settings. Social media is also addictive and compulsive and stimulating in almost all the worst ways much of the time too, which my generation has never know anything apart from. And the material cost of living, never mind living well and socially, have become impossible for many. And countless other leading causes of isolation across generations. So obviously the diagnosis is wrong, feminism did not cause these issues, and the prognosis of fighting feminism is also not going to deliver. But we should caution when calling isolation an entirely ‘voluntary’ phenomenon, and propaganda psychology shows that people are highly impressionable. Hence we also need to urgently be teaching critical reasoning skills and materialist techniques of analysis.
Another point I would make is against the line of argument here about young men “facing reality” or “accepting the facts” about “how the world is now”. While I favour the sentiment, and I wish more young men would accept nay embrace real feminist principles, you’re basically proposing a sort of fatalism. It’s the same kind of fatalism which for centuries told women that they should accept how reality is and that it can’t change. The most obvious lesson of history is that things do change, sometime slowly or quickly, sometimes things revert and get worse instead of progressing. I don’t want these men to fight their caricature of feminism or the real thing as much as you, but I don’t buy the line “accept reality” and there’s good reasons that they wouldn’t too. They could quite easily say, as indeed they do, that they prefer the old reality more and they want to regress back to it. And with a concerted effort, like the one we’re witnessing from abortion access to DEI to trans rights and healthcare, they could and might. So they need reasons to be on board with feminism beyond being told “that’s the way it is”. We need to get them involved voluntarily, not involuntarily, in a word.
I think the world is quite different than the one in which older millennials grew up in. Smartphones have substantially changed how much people hang out irl overall, and I suspect that they have contributed to a culture where men and women spend a lot less time irl together than they did when I was growing up. And a world in which young women and young men aren’t spending much time socializing with each other is a world where it is going to be really hard for a lot of guys to find a date. Also, I suspect that online dating also makes it harder for most guys to find a date. Again because it replaces meeting and interacting with people in real life, in which it is way easier to know if you have a spark with someone. So I think that the author is being too harsh on young men. I think that it really is harder for young men to find dates now than it used to be, though whatever part feminism play in this I think that it does so only indirectly. Everyone is spending way more time on screens these days, but I think that hits young people harder than older people because when you are young is a peak time of life for meeting other people and forming friendships.
Great piece. I think what you said is spot on for the people that have been unfortunately captured by the "manosphere". However, I still think a big piece is missing from the general conversation. I live in a decently progressive area and know a lot of Gen Z moderate to progressive men who are similarly as lonely. I think its the next step into seeing that this is something that affects a lot of Gen Z people regardless of affiliation/gender, its become even harder to meet people since covid and i feel like 2020 stripped a lot of people from enjoying a prime time in their lives to socialize and were seeing the effects now.
This larger point applies to people of all generations, it's not at all limited to Gen Z. Older people especially seem to be the loneliest, statistically.
True. We must also watch for US/western bias. The macros are different in say, Africa or Indonesia. In other words, the incel phenomenon can be seen as a symptom of the collapse of the West.
For sure, but were they as lonely in their 20s as Gen Z is today? I dont have the answers and im not acting like im going to, but that was more of the metric i was going for tbh
Probably not, but that speaks to a problem with what our culture has transformed into in the transition between generations, not the generations themselves. This epidemic of loneliness affects EVERYONE.
The Manosphere is FULL of liberal, progressive, leftwing, socialist, communist, and even anarchist men. It's even getting to be a problem that the rightwingers complain about and there are attempts to ban them. The Manosphere is NOT only for rightwing men. It appeals to lots of guys.
I'm the farthest thing from an incel but I used to hang out on incel boards. It sounds nuts but incel sites are FULL of regular non-incel guys. Even a lot of players drowning in pussy. Let me tell a lot of the incels on those sites are leftwing, socialist, communist, or anarchist. You would not believe how many.
As always, good work. You obviously put a lot of effort into the post.
We raised a Gen Z daughter in a relatively wealthy area, surrounded by a mix of both functional and monumentally dysfunctional families and/or single parents.
For the males raised by the divorced dad with the "Men's Rights" sticker on his poser Jeep, to the Dad who loudly asks his son where his "whore girlfriend" is at a Middle School parent gathering... one can see those train wrecks coming from early on. Both of those situations produced the males you would expect from that form of parental interface.
However, from one of the kids I used to talk with at the School Bus stop, who was occasionally surrounded by brown snow due to the hot chocolate leaking out of his poorly secured thermos, and who went through the standard fedora-every-day phase during the Jonas Bros era... whose father was nothing but average, focusing conversation on things such as the energy savings derived from insulating one's crawl space...
We now get this freak on Tate's sick podcast advocating the benefits of cocaine, steroids, gambling, etc. Same kid. Sister went on to be an accomplished scientist. Family was, so far as I can tell, entirely functional and charming, but generated this bizarre monstrosity barely recognizable from the small yet "normal" neighborhood kid we knew.
I assume some of it is the echo chambers established by social media, though the cultural shift can't simply be explained by the ability of any moron out there to get attention by aberrant behavior. Economics, what we value as a culture, sexuality issues, etc. all have a part in the dark road we've gone down.
This kid will, most likely, die before his time. The magic combo of roids and coke has a pretty established outcome. Every male that grew up on this block during our time here has already died. We're up to three dead, all in their twenties or before, so... Accidents, a possible suicide, whatever. It's all just bizarre for a community without poverty with all the opportunities in the world for it's children.
Thanks again for your post. Great work in fleshing out and humanizing issues. Best.
Thanks for this piece! Another resource, to add to the ones you listed, is this series on patriarchal masculinity by Celeste Davis. The link here is part 5, but the first 4 parts are linked at the top of the piece.
https://open.substack.com/pub/celestemdavis/p/thats-nice-but-how-do-we-dismantle?r=kxnu&utm_medium=ios
Everybody needs love and care, but patriarchal systems try to define love and care as feminine-only. That means men who aim for the most power or influence within the system must shun the yin-yang inside themselves just as they shun anyone who doesn’t fit patriarchal definitions of maleness. That seems like a really hard way to live, emotionally, but I’m a woman so I can’t speak from experience.
I prefer not to define the problem strictly as a matter of patriarchy’s hold on masculine self-image. Certainly, there is deep and historical imprint of gender norms, reinforced through cultural and social signals, on each and everyone of us. It takes a lot of focus and self-awareness all the time (for me) to avoid falling into gender normative thinking. For example, such thoughts could be about one’s self-worth in terms of the number of partners or the ease by which one obtains partners. It could mean resentment for when women are not “playing by the rules” when they rebuff someone who subscribes and achieves a certain set of predefined masculine traits. It could be a subtle resentment of my partner’s career success, when I am unemployed or ashamed of my own career prospects. I do think incel culture is at least partly this at a societal level.
However, at an individual level, men, and people in general, do not instinctively act with agency, and prefer attributing their loneliness and isolation from people they desire entirely to circumstances that are entirely outside their control. Circumstances like “shallowness” or “bitchiness” or “being stuck up” of the other. It provides a sense of certainty even if it comes at the expense of agency, especially if action can result in rejection and embarrassment and disappointment. I think this very human psychology can explain, at least partially, the catalyst for why men prefer the incel culture to changing their ways. Patriarchal culture explains the “what” in these incel belief systems. Human vulnerability and a sense of learned helpless explains why they gravitate towards these groups.
Women are FAR more demanding than men when it comes to requiring men to be hypermasculine. Most men have always accepted me because there is a part of me that is quite masculine and most men can see it. I sort of walk the walk and talk the talk. What got me by with men had girlfriends calling me pussy, faggot, wimp, ridiculing my masculinity or saying it didn't exist and cucking me other men out of contempt. Why does toxic masculinity exist? Because you women demand it.
I'm not denying this is true in conservative spaces, and areas where traditionalism dominates. But statistically the majority of women believe in equality and want the exact opposite of men being shamed into traditional gender roles.
This isn't being done by women to men, it's being done by CONSERVATIVE men and women to EVERYBODY. But if we're going to keep score there are nowhere NEAR the number of alt-right female influencers promoting this shit as there are male ones.
Some truth in this. Gotta say I had only one GF ever with such demands. It didn't go well. Or, zooming out, it was perfect: an encounter with the dark feminine is a rite of passage...
Last sentence is perfect.
So sorry this has happened to you! In my experience, folks who care deeply about traditional gender roles can be aggressive in policing other people's ways of expressing masculine/feminine. And this definitely goes for women too.
Thank you. I'm no loser either. I've dated hundreds of women and girls basically because I received a gift from evolution and I'm a Chad. Women can't resist us. They'll have sex with us for 4-5 hours a day and then try to cut our balls off afterwards.
You are very much correct, thanks for this. What's interesting is women don't know what masculinity is. What gets you by with a shrug of the shoulders with other men (Yeah he's kind of weird but he's basically a man so fuck it be nice to him) doesn't cut it with women. They apparently have a different idea of what is masculine than we men do. That's weird because everyone thinks it's the other way around. Men are easy. Most don't want to fight and would rather get along. Women, not so much. Anyway I've had a good life.
I've dealt with this of course by trying to be a lot more masculine and I've even become mean to women during fights and called them names I never dared to before. And I've had the wildest love affairs of my life in my 50's, women who loved me more than any woman ever had. I don't know what to say but women respect it when you stand up for yourself. They scream and yell but at the end they like it.
What's a chad?
😂! It comes from the incels. Chads are simply handsome, goodlooking, hot, etc. men. 7-10 on the scale. Chad’s hot girlfriend is named Stacy. Incels are pretty angry at Chads or more properly women’s preference for them.
Actually incels say most Chads were nice to them. Chads are often pretty secure.
The incels were right about a lot of things! And they don’t all hate women either. I used to read on their boards. I’m the opposite of an incel.
The incel boards are FULL of non-incels and even Chads, Alphas, and players. It’s so bad it’s gotten to be a problem and most sites ban them now.
The similarities and overlaps with Great White Replacement Theory are interesting to me. Thinking about how we are currently being threatened with erasure of nonwhyte history and its place/importance to society, I can’t help but think how similar it is to the current stats on why young men are feeling threatened. It’s all connected isn’t it?
So right.
They're all being fed the same sense of entitlement: That they have a right to force an entire society, to conform to a malignant social hierarchy, that artificially elevates them.
Their puppet-masters feed them an intoxicating/crippling fable of entitlement/victimhood.
It’s that mind-f..k that makes them so incapable of competing on a level playing field. Instead of doing anything remotely useful, they’re perpetually preoccupied with trying to dominate everyone.
And it takes a big lie — asserting that racist, sexist discrimination, is "meritocracy" — to obscure the disempowering manipulation that they’ve fallen for.
Worse: In order to make America’s devolution into Uniformity, Inequity & Exclusion permanent, The United Daughters of the Confederacy have been called back from hell — by Linda McMahon — to indoctrinate defenceless children, with a reanimated anti-factual Confederate maleducation (in place of any legitimate sense of reality, that could otherwise have empowered them). Children never truly recover from bad programming.
As Lisa aptly pointed out (but to summarize), the common thread is a belief in one's supremacy, based on a worldview of hierarchy. The equality that most women believe in and demand has no place in that worldview - in fact the two are utterly antithetical.
And really, this is the story of our time: an epic battle not between good and evil but between worldviews - the last thrashes of the old paradigm of domination and hierarchy slowly dying out as it is consistently, inevitably replaced it's opposite, a worldview of inclusion, acceptance, and equality.
The arc of history bends towards the latter but the process of change takes time, and unfortunately our time as a society has run out thanks to climate change.
Joshua, I love this article.
As human beings, shouldn't we be moving away from objectifying each other by now? As a woman, as soon as a man objectifies me, they're no longer eligible as a partner. Do men want to be objectified? I don't think so. And neither do women.
"As bell hooks writes, “The truth we do not tell is that men are longing for love.” No matter what influencers say, men know that to be true. Just like everyone else we have that drive for connection and relationships that are fulfilling on a deeper level. We want and deserve love, just like women and everyone else is fundamentally deserving of love and care. It’s time to stop buying into the crap that keeps us apart, that makes us less likable, that tells us we have to dominate women and can’t have equal and loving relationships."
"Do men want to be objectified? I don't think so. And neither do women."
Of course we do. I had male model good looks as a young man and at 67, women still say I'm "hot." Even teenage girls! And they won't quit propositioning me. Yeah I love being a Chad of course. At some certain extreme level where she doesn't give a shit about me and only wants my body or my cock, it's insulting but that's rare.
Gay men have objectified me my whole life. I'm not wild about. I'm mostly mad about how they went about expressing it. I'd be walking down the street in Bevery Hills and one gay man after another in a car would be rubberneckinhg me and yelling AWOOOOOOOOOOOO! It didn't feel real great, I have to admit. Women and girls have done the exact same thing to me and it felt a lot better.
If we didn't objectify each other, no one would ever fuck.
Your worldview is sad, and I pity you for it.
My worldview is TRUE. But it's the last thing on Earth people like you want to believe. That's what I mean by the ugly truth. You don't understand the nature of male-female relations because the truth would be very upsetting to you as you would have to question so much of what you believe. I've had a very good life. I don't have much money. That's really the only downside. Everything else is pretty good and it has been for decades.
You sound homophobic—which may be a sign of insecurity. Are you generative towards other men? And in this day and age—post Epstein, Savile, Weinstein, Prince Andrew etc—it's thin ice for a 67 year old to be bragging about teenage girls, no?
Generative? Well I can’t help if girls and women find me attractive. It says nothing about me as I can’t control other people’s behavior.
Caught up in the mass hysteria I see. Do you hate straight men. Epstein was a hebephile. Most men are not. But every man knows Earth wants to fuck those girls. It’s just that you’re not supposed to do it.
I’ve seen the lab studies. Men are more attracted to 17 year old girls than any other age group of females.
The reason Epstein’s blackmail worked is because all men want to have sex with those girls and many will do it if given a chance. Most of Epstein’s girls were legal.
Saville was a pedophile. Pedophiles don’t fuck teenage girls. Normal healthy men do.
Weinstein didn’t fuck teenage girls. He raped women.
Prince Andrew is a normal healthy straight men. 17 year old girls are legal in most of the US and the world, so people are mostly fine with adult men and teenage girls. That girl was 100% legal in the places he had sex with her. It’s legal, it’s healthy, what’s the problem?
You misunderstand "generative." It means the capacity to be supportive and empathic. You seem to see things in binary. You admit negative feelings when perceived as attractive to gay men, and when I challenge you, presume I am gay and hate straight men. It's 2025. You're embarassing yourself here. "Normal healthy men fuck teenage girls." No! Mature, responsible men may **appreciate** a teenage girl. Immature, irresponsible boy-men abuse lopsided power dynamics to get their puerile way. If you can't admit that dynamic in the Andrew/Virginia Giffre (RIP) case, we have nothing further to discuss.
That’s bullshit. Most homophobes are not insecure or coveting something up. Same are but most are not. Also all honest straight men are homophobes. If not they’d have a dick in their mouth.
That’s just some bullshit the gays made up about their enemies. The Left knows nothing about homosexuality and neither do gays to be honest.
People can’t be objective about themselves and gay consciousness now is full of gay propaganda and lies. The Left won’t tell the truth about homosexuality because the truth is homophobic.
Social conservatives and straight women have a far more correct understanding of homosexuality than gays and the Left. They may not like them but many understand them very well.
If you can read I’m complaining about being objectified in public and having gay men after me everywhere I go.
Which is exactly what straight women complain about men. Do they hate men? Mostly no. Do I hate gay men. No. I just want a divorce. Gay men and straight men can’t be friends or even acquaintances. It doesn’t work.
"Most homophobes are not insecure or coveting something up." There it is right there— a Freudian typo. You won't take it from me but I genuinely think you should see a therapist.
Homophobes are really gay is some bullshit made up by the gays to smear their enemies. It’s a lame smear anyway because by doing this they imply that there is something horribly wrong with being gay. It’s idiocy. A LOT of gay men say it’s bullshit too.
You are so wrong. That theory is such bullshit. Homophobia is strongly associated with masculinity and toxic masculinity. The more masculine the man is, the greater the homophobia. In my father’s generation everyone hated gays. I guess those men were a bunch of faggots. In Jamaica 90% of men really hate gays. I guess they’re all prancing queers. Before 1900, homosexuality was often punishable by death and most all men hated it. I guess they were all a bunch of screaming homos.
Even the sane gays don’t believe this bullshit. Yes some homophobes engage in reaction formation, but most of the bad ones are just assholes, hypermasculine pricks who hate gay men as part of their masculine repertoire.
You got some evidence that “all homophobes are really faggots?”
A great read, as always! Thought you'd enjoy this success story about a guy in my neighborhood:
Skinhead guy, was always very kind to me, but with a vaguely hostile aura that i couldn't quite put my finger on. Came to find out that he was a genuine neo-Nazi skinhead for some time but has since moved to the Midwest, opened a gym, and built a whole community and lifestyle around bringing local racists into the fold and reforming them. Deprogramming by and for racist/redpilled white guys.
dude kicks ass, will come into my work with his iron cross tattoos and "don't tread on me/BLM" patches on his vest. he punches his boxes open for some reason and always says "thank you." if a man like him can reform, there's hope for everyone else i think.
I think when writing about these subjects is very important to be precise with language. Words mean things. For instance, you say: "Yeah, women have changed. Most notably, the vast majority of women believe they’re equal to men in every way and want to be treated accordingly."
I would argue that women don't believe they're equal to men in EVERY way. Certainly men are better at losing their tempers and writing their names in the snow while peeing. What I would suggest for more a more accurate telling of the situation would be something along the lines of the following: Since gaining access to their own bank accounts, credit cards, and business loans--along with entry to higher education--women have excelled at and even exceeded men in many areas they were previously barred entry to. Today women understand that they are men's equals, and, logically, expect to be treated as such."
I'm calling you out on this because I think it's important for men who are willing to speak up and do the work to make sure that their language is both accurate, and unable to be misinterpreted. "Women believe they're equal to men in every way" leaves a lot of room for negative interpretation. For starters, a belief is not necessarily a fact. People believe in the tooth fairy, in QAnon, that the Earth is flat, etc..
I hope you take this comment in the spirit in which it was given
Excellent article! Direct and unsparing without scolding or condescension- bravo!
Very heteronormative
True. In this piece I’m responding to a specific dynamic that’s cropped up among young straight men.
Yes, incel culture is heteronormative.
Have you never interacted with a gay man who is an incel? I have, world is full of them.
There are some gay men who are incels but they’re pretty rare. And where they do exist they’re responding to the same issues Josh points to here.
Are the dynamics //the same// though between hetero and non?
Hence my criticism of the article being heteronormative.
Gay men are not incels, because they are not INVOLUNTARY CELEBATE with women for pity's sake. Sure, there are gay men who are misogynistic, sexist, and hate women, but they are not "incels". Incel culture is defined specifically by heterosexual men who blame women for their inability to obtain a relationship and/or sex.
Gay men are not "incels" they're just plain old misogynists who fuck men instead.
Tosser.
You could call them that too.
Try looking up gaycel and gay incel. Instead of shouting at me.
They're almost nonexistent. Any young gay man can get laid, anyone knows that.
What a refreshing read. The manosphere really groomed a generation of young men into involuntarily ending their bloodlines with them. Let's not forget the bitter divorced dads either, who have the same off-putting toxic energy.
This was a great read. 🙏
Great post, JP. And timely, too. I'm seeing a kind of fundamental divergence between men and women at the moment. In the first place, this is down to the crumbling of outworn, colonialist patriarchal structures/narratives. Second, it is a necessary part of our collective evolution. Third, a //lot// of men (and women) are struggling to adapt. To generalise, but not meaninglessly, it's harder for men. Why? Precisely because our self-esteem/self-worth is conditioned to be based on performance. Tate is a great example. What would he be without his lambo/villa/muscles/yes-men following? Incels lap up his tyrannical performances of ADHD-ish anger. Podcast hosts are scared of him. Women (save the botoxed influencer dolls and pro-Tate karens) are moving beyond this crap. Men are hostage to algorithms of their own fuelling. There is a way out: initiation. That's why I'm building https://circularise.substack.com....
I love your writing, the way you reflect. I agree with you but it’s hard to blame men entirely, as a 29 year old Haitian American woman who does well for herself, there are some women who think the same way if not worse than some men I’ve spoken to. Women have raised men to be this way, I hate to see men get ALL the blame.
I like much of what’s written here and I am mostly on board with the core argument of reframing the phenomenon as being voluntary choice, not involuntary enforcement, isolation from and by women. But I have a couple of issues overall.
Firstly, as some others have commented, I think overlooking the structural ‘involuntary’ aspect is a mistake. As someone mentioned, Covid struck my generation at a key time (I was in my first, supposedly most fun two years of uni) and has left scars and ruptures across social settings. Social media is also addictive and compulsive and stimulating in almost all the worst ways much of the time too, which my generation has never know anything apart from. And the material cost of living, never mind living well and socially, have become impossible for many. And countless other leading causes of isolation across generations. So obviously the diagnosis is wrong, feminism did not cause these issues, and the prognosis of fighting feminism is also not going to deliver. But we should caution when calling isolation an entirely ‘voluntary’ phenomenon, and propaganda psychology shows that people are highly impressionable. Hence we also need to urgently be teaching critical reasoning skills and materialist techniques of analysis.
Another point I would make is against the line of argument here about young men “facing reality” or “accepting the facts” about “how the world is now”. While I favour the sentiment, and I wish more young men would accept nay embrace real feminist principles, you’re basically proposing a sort of fatalism. It’s the same kind of fatalism which for centuries told women that they should accept how reality is and that it can’t change. The most obvious lesson of history is that things do change, sometime slowly or quickly, sometimes things revert and get worse instead of progressing. I don’t want these men to fight their caricature of feminism or the real thing as much as you, but I don’t buy the line “accept reality” and there’s good reasons that they wouldn’t too. They could quite easily say, as indeed they do, that they prefer the old reality more and they want to regress back to it. And with a concerted effort, like the one we’re witnessing from abortion access to DEI to trans rights and healthcare, they could and might. So they need reasons to be on board with feminism beyond being told “that’s the way it is”. We need to get them involved voluntarily, not involuntarily, in a word.
They’re not celibate - please. They’ve clearly seen every porno on the Internet. That’s not celibate.
Good point. Porn is a huge factor here. It's not just effect of inceldom but also a cause.
The cause. The cause. They are simply pornified bachelors.
I think the world is quite different than the one in which older millennials grew up in. Smartphones have substantially changed how much people hang out irl overall, and I suspect that they have contributed to a culture where men and women spend a lot less time irl together than they did when I was growing up. And a world in which young women and young men aren’t spending much time socializing with each other is a world where it is going to be really hard for a lot of guys to find a date. Also, I suspect that online dating also makes it harder for most guys to find a date. Again because it replaces meeting and interacting with people in real life, in which it is way easier to know if you have a spark with someone. So I think that the author is being too harsh on young men. I think that it really is harder for young men to find dates now than it used to be, though whatever part feminism play in this I think that it does so only indirectly. Everyone is spending way more time on screens these days, but I think that hits young people harder than older people because when you are young is a peak time of life for meeting other people and forming friendships.