I’m so old that I remember when the definition of masculinity was taking responsibility for yourself and others around you. Chainsaw-wielding billionaires like Elon Musk and his president-of-somewhere sidekick, Donald, are most insistent on their role as champions of Western Civilisation™, so I wondered how they missed the instruction that one should “not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment”. These are the words of the Apostle Paul in the Bible, so I guess the source is pretty niche.

How great that Maga identities have Project 2025 to explain to them the gender roles they’re so rigorously policing. Should we be concerned that the campaign to politically erase trans people – so en vogue both in America and among America’s political lemmings in the Australian right – is a symptom of their endgame of reducing “men” and “women” to binary 1950s stereotypes that didn’t even reflect the reality of their time? Yes.

The thing that really gets me is how these “manosphere” complainers seem to have not considered alternatives such as being respectful in interactions – why learn to be a better person when grievance is so much fun? The classic “I’ve tried nothing, and it isn’t working” applies heavily here.

Asserting dominance as an introduction is for animals, not people. Fuck, you don’t even do that within the BDSM/kink scene, where dominance may play an outsized role once you’ve established a dynamic based on respect. Not that these woe-the-hell-is-me-I-can’t-get-women-to-do-whatever-I-want-as-soon-as-we-start-talking complaints are anywhere near kink, just a failure to grow up.