The Manosphere: The Lay of the Land

It had wonderful beginnings in the 1970s. It morphed after 9/11. It just elected Trump. And no woman is safe from these guys. Nor are her rights.

Photo: Westerend61 / Adobe Stock.

“Leftist women are more third-wave feminist and less feminine than ever and now, you’re not even women anymore … either your [sic] women, and if you are, please stop fighting men, or you’re not women and your face is now punchable.”

— The Proud Boys, quoted by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

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To be aware of them as they are now is to lose one’s peace. Mark Zuckerberg has always done a hideous job of keeping Bad Guys off Facebook / Meta. His one sterling moment was banning Donald Trump for the January 6 Insurrection—but Zuckerberg just forked over a cool $25,000,000 as punishment for having done so. He sat, ashen-faced, near Trump at the inauguration, the fund for which he fattened by a million. Frankly, Zuck looked scared.

Now Zuckerberg is entirely in Trump’s pocket. Andrew Tate, allegedly banned from Meta, is all over Facebook. Absent, as of this morning, are most of the sites offering counseling on doctors prescribing mifepristone and misoprosto, so there’s no question Zuckerberg has slithered on over to the dark side.

And where you’ll really see it is in Facebook Reels, where the upper, least cloaked layer of the Manosphere exposes itself in men with such hateful attitudes towards women that only the term toxic could possibly do.

The Toxic Manosphere had a soft, really beautiful beginning. It rose as a parallel movement to the Women’s Rights Movement, and it began with supportive men who wanted to see women fairly treated and wanted a new, more nature-attuned model of masculinity. They also wanted a sense of brotherhood with other men.

Simultaneously, as divorce rates soared and women’s success in high-paying careers steadily rose, men started having big problems with their “brave new world.”

First, men lost privilege. On a conscious level, many men in the early Men’s Movements realized that they’d had an unfair advantage and made immense efforts to change their behavior. And many were splendidly successful. But the loss of privilege began to wear on them, and the erosion felt severe.

Privilege is a strange thing because in cultures that have entrenched privileged groups, the ones with the privileges have never known anything else—so they feel entitled to their privileges because they’ve always had them. They’ve always been there.

And, in fact, entitlement is learned in infants the same way they learn racism, xenophobia, hatred of people of other religions and all foreigners. They absorb it from the people around them, and it goes in under the radar. We don’t realize we are learning this stuff—that women are less-than, that the poor got that way because they are morally inferior and lazy. We buy the bill of goods that migrants are criminals who steal our jobs but paradoxically contribute nothing to the culture!

Why? Because it’s being learned as reflexive behavior in pre-verbal infancy, which means we don’t have the brain power to evaluate what’s being taught. If we unlearn a damned thing, it’s because we consciously take it up and decide it evaluate it much later in our lives. That’s why, long after we’ve “learned the lesson” we are still having “knee-jerk responses”—coming up with racist or sexist or anti-Semitic or anti-foreigner emotions or outbursts. How many anti-Polish jokes did Americans hear before they were two? We learned most of what “know” about people before we were even capable of forming a memory—so we have no memory of what we learned! So it settles into us as EMOTION and believe it to be THE WAY OF THE WORLD.

Now …

Beginning in the 1960s, the granddaughters of the suffragettes suddenly had three great gifts rain down upon them in rapid succession: The Pill arrived for married women in 1960, enabling couples to have fewer children, or no children. By 1972, The Pill was available to single women who would begin to view marriage and childbearing as choices, not as inescapable fates. Sandwiched between was the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which enabled women to transcend low-paying jobs as teachers, nurses, secretaries, and factory workers and move into top-paying professional careers.

As these spectacular gains began to diffuse throughout the culture, men had to compete with women for jobs. And now—this is huge—men no longer had control of all the money in the culture. Women had their own money, and by 1975 they could have their own bank accounts and their own credit cards. Whereas inheriting money had been legal in some states, now it was legal everywhere. A woman could buy her own car (without a man’s signature) with her own money (without asking him for it). The same went for getting her own apartment without a man’s signature. And in 1973, the Supreme Court heard Roe v. Wade, and the upshot was that a woman had the right to an abortion.

Now the rubber met the road. Before these immense changes, most men could look forward to having a wife and kids because women could not earn a living, be self-supporting, be free, have an apartment or a car or a bank account or a credit card in her own name. Yes, she could do domestic work or teach school or be a nurse and wind up a pretty happy Cat Lady Spinster. But most didn’t opt for that: they married out of perceived necessity and wound up doing child rearing and providing domestic services for free that are now valued at roughly $130,000.00 a year—yet she would remain powerless for the most part for the rest of her life. So, she’s stuck in a low-paying job, and going home at night and putting in $10,800 a month in free domestic labor—while he goes to work and comes home and doesn’t help with maintaining the house. Or, she does domestic labor, has kids (I’m all for it!), and is generally confined to her home sphere and shut out of the public space.

But all that changed. Now women had the buying power to say no. And they did it huge numbers. Men now had to compete with a woman for a job that he felt should have belonged to him—A LEARNED “KNEE-JERK EMOTION”—were angry. They were angry that women were in the board room, which meant that now they couldn’t dick-wave with other guys and then snap a finger and have a sexy lassie come in with coffee for them. They lost their coveted Navy aviator spot to a woman. They were angry that, suddenly, women were all over their public sphere in the middle of the day. They were angry some women made more than they did, which, given the “men have the money” LEARNED KNEE-JERK EMOTION that having more money made a man a man, hit them in the gut. They were angry that women showed up in the gym. They were angry that suddenly, some damned woman got their spot in medical school (worth millions). They were furious some woman was their MANAGER. They were angry they couldn’t get a date.

And then — and then — and then — THEY GOT KILLED BY SCREENS. No, I’m not kidding. One of the main reasons for the development of the Manosphere is that most of the men on it have screen addictions and try to date online.

CUTTING TO THE CHASE AGAIN. If you’re a guy and you need to get a date, get a job or volunteer. Don’t sit home all day playing video games and surfing the Mansophere for bad advice and a heavy dose of hate indoctrination. More on that later.

So, we’re going to be talking deeply about the four major groups of the Manosphere:

• The INCELS — involuntary celibates. They believe no woman wants them because they are short, or bald, or don’t have (a lot of) money. Some of them have committed mass murder. They feel they are owed sex and owed a wife. I would remind them that Robert Reich is 4’10” tall—that Ben Ferencz, the most successful prosecutor of the Nazis was 5’0”—that Martin Scorcese is 5’0”—that Danny de Vito is 5’0”—that Mel Brooks is 5’4—that Daniel Radcliffe is 5’5”—that Tom Holland is 5’5”—and that Tom Cruise is a stratospheric 5’7”. It won’t help. They’re convinced.

• The PUAs—pick-up artists. These guys are the prey of hideous predators like Andrew Tate, who tells them he can groom them to be able to manipulate women into bed—at a cost, of course. For $6,700.00 paid on the dark web, he’ll teach you how!!! Note that this whole idea hinges on making a woman do what she does not want to do — hence the manipulation — and Tate also teaches men how to make money off women by getting them to make porn movies for them to sell on the Internet. Tate believes women are on this planet to provide sex, get trafficked for HIS profit, and clean up the house. Some are almost worse, and we’ll get to them.

• The MGTOW—which stands for Men Going Their Own Way. If there is a definition for toxic male most of the men in this group will fit that definition. They reek hatred. Some MGTOWs believe most women should be exterminated and that those saved should be exceptionally beautiful to have sex with and be impregnated. Otherwise, they serve no function.

• The MRAs—the Men’s Rights Activists. They believe all the problems men face are caused by feminists and that the culture is biased in favor of women, not men. The ADL puts it: “[MRAs are a] broad set of male supremacist, anti-feminist, misogynist and sometimes violent movements that exist largely online. MRAs embrace traditional masculinity as the ideal state of men in society and vehemently reject the principles and advancements of feminism. In the modern era (roughly 2015 to present), MRAs, who have adopted a narrative of victimhood, tend to congregate online, populating websites, forums, image boards, subreddits and social media platforms. White men appear to be particularly drawn to MRAs’ internalized victim mentality, in part because it aligns with their claims that feminism has eroded their social and political capital.”

We are going to study each of these movements in detail. They dove-tail and align with white male supremacy and alt-right Christian Trad-wifing sermonizing. The Three-Percenters, the Proud Boys, and the Oath Keepers are in overt alignment with these groups.

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Now there’s one other group that is often lumped in with these guys, and they don’t belong there. They are the father’s rights group members, and they are often divorced men.

The Divorced Guys

When a man divorces, he normally loses the house to his wife and kids. Much of the rationale for this is that if she’s going to raise the kids, she’s going to need the house (yes)—and the divorce is hard enough on the kids that they don’t need to be traumatically displaced as well (yes).

But this is going to have a crushing effect on the man. First, he’s going to be saddled with paying all the bills for his new space in addition to alimony and child support payments. Then there is the immense issue of child visitation. Having already just gotten a divorce she presumably wanted about as much as the man did, the wife doesn’t want him hanging around the house all the time. This means his visitation gets whittled down to twice a month, or once a month, or summer vacation, or Christmas every two years. And it kills him.

Often there are also bitter disputes about how the children are to be raised. Maybe he wants to push the woman around about it, but just as often she wants to the set the rules, and this conflict is shredding.

The upshot is that many divorced men wind up severely depressed. And it’s a life-and-death situation.

Divorced men are nine times as likely to commit suicide as divorced women are. For every divorcee who takes her own life, nine divorced men kill themselves.

To understand the chart above, if men have a lower rate of suicide than women, the color of the country would be blue. If they have the same rate—a one-to-one correspondence—it’s light yellow. It it’s 2-3 times higher than that of a woman, it’s a medium orange color. As the rates at which male suicides are multiples of those of females, the colors get darker and darker and darker.

Worldwide, men commit suicide 3.5 more often than women do. This holds even when things like gender expression, age, ethnicity, race, national origin and religion are figured in. And even though men’s means of suicide are more violent than women’s are, that’s not why this is happening.

Men’s lower resilience in exposure to loneliness, especially from women, may be part of the reason why. Men aren’t allowed to express and process emotion in most cultures. And they don’t have the social networks women have. In America, for example, about 60% of married men consider their wife their best friend—but only 30% of married women looked up their husbands as their best friend—a fact attributed to the social networks of emotional support women have. Men have friends, too, perhaps many friends, but very few friends with whom they can talk about things frankly and process emotional tangles through to resolution.

If men get that from someone at all, they likely get it from a woman.

Married men, especially those with higher education, outlive most women. Women who are married die younger than single women or divorced women—a fact attributed to overwork from putting in 16+ hours a day in domestic duties.

The upshot of this is that: MEN ARE BETTER OFF MARRIED, AND WOMEN ARE NOT MARRIED. And when a man loses his marriage, it is devastating for him in a way it is not devastating to the woman.

The longest-lived, healthiest, and happiest group of human beings on this planet is absolutely, unquestionably the woman who has never married and has never born children. That’s the science of it.

This makes groomers like Naftali Moses (we’ll get to this creep) FURIOUS, but it’s true. Men have never done domestic duties for a whole family. They also have not suffered from the “MENTAL LOAD PROBLEM” that comes from tracking everything for the house and everything for the kids. They have also not suffered so much sleep deprivation: women who have kids are extremely light sleepers—they sleep only 25% as deeply as men do—so they are almost never properly rested. It takes a huge toll on her long-term health.

But let’s get back to the suicide rate of divorced men:

If, overall, the suicide rate for men is already 3.5 times on average higher than that for women, and divorced men are coming in at 9 times the suicide rate for women, that means that a divorced man’s suicide rate is more than 2.5 times as high as his rate would be if he were single or married.

And it’s not just because his financial life gets exposed to immense strain in the divorce—hers does, too, and she may not be able to hold onto that house—it’s because the stability she brought to his life has evaporated and he has largely lost his kids.

And this I wanted to point out because I am going to separate the Father’s Rights groups from the Manosphere because they don’t properly belong there. Theirs, I feel, is a desperate attempt to try to equalize and heal the situation that turns out for him to be disastrous.

These are men who are in trouble because loss of affection and endearment hit them hard, their physical losses are huge, and the loss of their contact with their children is unbearable.

So before I introduced you to the really nasty characters of the Manosphere—and you can see from the quote at the top something of what’s out there!—I wanted to make sure you know that these guys are having a big, big, big problem that isn’t, strictly speaking, their fault: it’s cultural, and it’s a problem that we as women and men need to encounter together, and I deeply hope we will.

More coming in a day or two …