I keep seeing posts mentioning this phenomenon more and more often.
For instance:
‘Andrew Tate phenomena’ surges in schools - with boys refusing to talk to female teacher
Like, why? Why now? Why even? I really wish I had a time machine where I could go to the future and ask them what the general reasons were for this social development. But I feel like I’m looking for the specific thorn on a cactus that popped my balloon.
I could be wrong but I think it’s the end result of hyper-competitive free market capitalism and social media algorithms that boost outrage content. The rise of neoliberalism and globalization in the 90s led to a rise in high-paying executive positions in the corporate world. Just one problem: there’s only a finite amount of those positions to go around. This creates a environment of competition and many don’t make the cut. Business education is expensive and connections are hard to come by. This left many talented men unable to get not even decent paying, let alone high-paying, jobs that would allow them to advance in life.
The rise of mainstream social media platforms in the 2010s also gave a voice to misogynistic and reactionary content. Men who wouldn’t have been exposed to such content otherwise were now inundated with creators telling them (falsely) that the world was against them. At first, it wasn’t much of a problem. Take fitness Youtube for example. It was mostly educational content about things like growing a certain muscle group and increasing one’s 1RPM. Think of guys like Scooby1961 and Scott Herman. Rarely was there outrage content associated with fitness content. Guys like the Hodge Twins and the more overtly right-wing Golden One were the rare exemptions. Little did we know that the rare exemptions would be the progenitors of the ‘manosphere’ (i hate that term). Sometime during the late 2010s and early 2020s (I forget we’re halfway into the decade), ‘gym bro’ content merged with reactionary content. This meant that any guy who was looking for content to help them with their physical health and physique were suddenly recommend videos by the likes of Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan. Couple this with my previous paragraph, a decrease in critical thinking skills and media literacy and you have a perfect (shit-)storm.
There were also two smaller factors: Gamergate and increased mobility of women in Western, liberal democracies.
I’m not going to rehash the entire history of Gamergate here but, needless to say, it brought out a lot of ugly characters. Carl Benjamin, Rageaholic and Thunderf00t being prime example. Bogus yet widely believed conspiracy theories like Cultural Marxism were touted as being responsible for all of society’s ills.
As for women’s increased mobility, this actually predates the internet. Women were taking birth control, pursing education and careers, having more causal sex and thus were less focused on domestic affairs and institutions like the church or the mosque. But with the rise of misogynistic/sexist and anti-feminist voices online, women’s freedoms were caught in the crosshairs.
Ultimately, you have to remember that Andrew Tate and his ilk insert themselves into otherwise innocuous content (gaming, fitness, self-improvement, etc.) and exploit a volatile time in our shared history. They want to create an environment of discontent. They want us direct our anger and disillusionment to the wrong target. Whether they’re true believers of their own output or simply grifting, I don’t know but it’s had devastating consequences.
Because they’re lonely, aimless and disenfranchised
Nah, they’re not victims.
I feel like there is also a pathologization of being single. I was a teenager in the late 90s/early 2000s, so before most of social media. I’m also from a village where most people knew each other.
There were a couple of nerdy, shy guys who never had a girlfriend by the time of graduation. I only had one boyfriend at 16 for 6 month before his friend told me he was only dating me as a dare. I was “ugly” and “not a real girl” because I didn’t wear makeup and mostly wore jeans and Tshirts. Stupid village kids.
Anyway, similar things happened to the nerdy guys. But no one started crying about all men/women being awful and no one became an incel. Several girls and boys in my class never dated by the time we graduated and that just wasn’t a big deal. Nowadays everybody’s being told there’s something wrong with them if they’ve never had a partner by age 17.
I always have to push back against this pathologization narrative. The very obvious alternatives are:
(1) that these guys you are talking about would have easily fallen into the trap of the right wing manosphere if it had been available, because being unable to find a parter when your hormones are urging you to and when everyone else around you seems able to find one is intensely painful. But you wouldn’t hear about it, since no one talks about it, because the least attractive thing you can do is talk about how you are frustrated by your lack of romantic success.
(2) the nerdy guys might just accept their lack of partners, but these days the demographic of unpartnered young men is significantly more diverse, and more likely to contain, let’s say… less discerning thinkers…
It’s kind of like saying “back in my day, no one really cared about getting kicked in the head by a horse. Yeah, it happened, and it sucked, but it just wasn’t a big deal. There wasn’t the social stigma that getting kicked in the head by a horse was bad, or that you shouldn’t get kicked in the head by a horse.”
while I agree, I think there are people who ended up choosing (1) because of pathologization, because they were ridiculed and the increased stress made them decide it’s easier to hate women
Lol…
Looks away
https://mediachomp.com/teenage-boys-being-indoctrinated-online/
Edit: I’d imagine the issue is exacerbated by the ease with which every flavor and speed of pornography over broadband internet is available to auto-objectify women, misdirect post-auto-orgasm oxytocin, and misrepresent intimacy.
Part of it is that women have achieved an educational level as a group that allows them to make better choices. They no longer have to choose which is the nicer wife beater in their town.
The incels seem to have a problem with this. The idea of having to compete based upon personality, likability and in general the ability to treat another person as a human being bothers them.
And if we let this follow the path it’s on, they’ll try to put us in burqas rather than working to become better people.
Referring to men in general as “wife beaters” is exactly the kind of rhetoric that fuels Tate’s popularity.
It’s also pretty dishonest to lump his followers in with incels. Tate openly despises incels - he sees them as quitters. His whole message is about power, self-discipline, and taking control of your life. Incels, on the other hand, are rooted in despair and nihilism. They believe the game is rigged, that the problem is in their genes, and that there’s nothing they can do to change it. It’s a fundamentally different mindset.
Referring to men in general as “wife beaters” is exactly the kind of rhetoric that fuels Tate’s popularity.
They are referring to the fact that it was common in the past for society to force women to get married so strongly that at least some of them had to put up with the wife beaters just to exist. They didn’t mean men in general.
Also. When a legal system, religion, and political parties undermine women’s humanity, domestic violence in a population goes up.
The incels
Weaponizing shaming like this is part of the issue. Young boys and men are bullied and called incels because they don’t conform to whatever BTS image girls and women fantasize about these days. They’re not given a chance to come out of their shells, and being shamed, won’t ever try to.
It’s a shame that body shaming boys is in vogue and perpetrated by those who support big models and HAES.
I think you have incel confused with something completely different.
I’ve heard young women call men “incels” as an insult, what are you talking about?
An incel is someone wbo claims ro be involuntarily incelibate, as in no one wants to fuck them. The incels claim it is based on looks, but it is because they have shitty, hate filled personalities where they blame women for their problems.
It doesn’t have anything to do with looks. It might have something to do with dressing like an Tate fanboy though.
Yes that is the definition.
However, it’s now being used as an insult as well. I’ve been called this even though I’ve been married 20 years with children, by a 40 year old spinster.
And you don’t think it may have had more to do with what you were saying / the way you were behaving than your looks? I don’t doubt that incel may be thrown around more as a basic insult these days - it’s just reaching that level of ubiquity in everyday speech - but I have more often heard it used towards men who are saying or doing things that are misogynistic. The same kind of misogyny that betrays a deeper insecurity has long been common in adolescent boys who are going through puberty and dealing with feelings they don’t know how to deal with yet, and the word incel has become a convenient way to call it out, but I do feel that when it comes to adolescents there should be some charitability and understanding. Andrew Tate and the rest of the Manosphere are giving these kids the opposite of what they need, though.
Oh it wasn’t used aptly which pissed me off even more.
Being called an incel to an awkward teenage boy has an equal but opposite effect to an innocent teenage girl being called a slut.
I’m advocating neither term should be used to either of them.
Calling someone a spinster in that context gives off incel vibes.
I’ve been incel for years and never hated or blamed women. I was aware of hateful incels but I avoided them.
I wish people would stop generalizing.
Incel has never been a label without the part about hating and blaming women, although it has expanded to hating men too over time. It has always been about not getting laid and expressing frustration and anger. There isn’t some neutral meaning to reclaim or anything like that.
If you don’t blame the gender(s) that isn’t having sex with, you are not an incel. That just means you haven’t successfully found someone which can be for a wide variety of reasons, most of which can be addressed by changing behavior and how one tries to connect with the desired group.
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I feel like there’s always been a culture of boys and young men who didn’t respect women, there’s just never been podcasters actively promoting it.
The internet allows idiots to broadcast their message worldwide and social media promotes the most controversial stuff in order to drive engagement and, more recently, to promote a culture war that keeps the populus divided.
there’s just never been podcasters actively promoting it.
Before podcasts, we had a bunch of AM radio, grindhouse movies, pulp fiction, skin mags, and incel blogs. Joe Rogan is an archtype that echoes through the ages.
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I think the answer is obvious: Tate tells them “you’re awesome”. No one else is doing that. People seek validation.
I think it’s another message. Tate says “The world is fucked up” and then proceeds to say “I have the secret, if you want to make it in this fucked up world you have to be tough, uncompromising, domineering, cheat, and act like me” and “you’re a sucker and a cuck if you don’t do what I say”. First message sets up the world, 2nd sets up a “”“”“solution”“”“” to success that only a “few” people know, and the final thing is him attempting to make anyone who believes otherwise look weak which gives any of his followers the ability to a) feel a sense of superiority and b) make fun of others for being “weak” or “cucks” or “betas” or whatever.
To me his message is closer to “you’re a useless piece of shit, but i will help you become the strong man that women love. If you listen to me and work hard you will have a family and be happy. Fuck the world and society they lie about what you need to do to keep you docile and weak.”
He also has a lot of stuff about embracing all the masculine traits that society hates like aggression and psychopathy. Then just general unhinged statements that contradict his core message and no one notices because cult
I feel like the contradictions are the point. The most desirable trait of people like Tate or Trump is their impunity. They keep getting away with heinous shit, it’s the one thing that makes them demonstrably powerful, despite being disgusting, unimpressive scumbags.
This is the short of it. Tate explains in no uncertain terms that society is to blame for the insecurities they feel, and provides an easy answer on how to fix it that kind of works, because it emulates self-confidence.
I mean it’s right wing politics in a nutshell
Dupe fools with simple, comforting lies over complicated, uncomfortable truth. If people don’t understand reality they can’t change it.
And organized religion, as well.
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That was a conversation I just had with someone today. They did not appreciate my saying so.
Part of it is that propaganda works. A lot of people are trying to make fascism happen and this type of content fits right in.
But also, there’s a growing issue of men not knowing how to act around women, and there isn’t much non-misogynist competition for Tate. It seems like for a lot of people (both men and women) it’s harder to make personal connections these days than it used to be, and apps like Tinder exarcerbate the issue.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately and I’d abstract it to “losers in a shameless culture”.
Generally our society would have time to correct itself and face saving would be important enough to contain the losers in their own circles. However the current western culture is completely shameless and incredibly fast meaning that being a loser is kinda ok and easily justifiable. This leads to a bunch of losers getting together and cognitive dissonance themselves into some sort of dumb pointless ideology that’s wouldn’t be sustainable otherwise. Add money into the mix and you’ve got yourself real growth.
I lived in Japan for a while and still come back there every now and then and its such a good illustration of this concept. It’s an extreme face saving culture. So you have this Tate-like world of Japanese incels hiding under internet anonymity but if you are not Japanese you will never see this because the losers are contained as they’d never dare to display themselves in public.
That being said, I’m quite optimistic and I think cancel culture and western face will come back from the current slump and restore some balance eventually.
But everyone says that cancel culture isn’t real.
Not sure what you mean by that. Cancel culture is absolutely real and while there are cases of it overextending and being misused it’s obviously a net good for our society overall. People organizing and putting pressure on injustice is what society should be all about.
The right often makes a Boogeyman out of it while leftists say it’s not a thing.
For an example: https://youtu.be/szybEhqUmVI
Because hes alpha and fucks
/s
Were you not young before/after the start of the internet? Not trying to be snarky, it’s more trying to understand perspective.
I could have been MAGA, no question. Here’s my anecdote: (edit: too lazy to correct so please don’t pay close attention to the tense of my words here, I was partially speaking from the perspective of being a kid again but I didn’t stay consistent)
- been a loner irl. Not that many friends
- most of my friends are online
- most of my friends say offensive stuff and while I don’t really mean things (at first) I want to fit in
- this can spiral pretty easily with a bunch of kids. And it did. I’ve said my fair share of atrocious things online that I wish I could take back
- as a youngster, 20+ years ago, as a loner/nerd if I’m not playing games, I’m (probably) watching YouTube or anime. Rarely hangin with friends
- now as someone who’s book smart(well, on some things, ofc), but especially at this point has absolutely 0 like street smarts & real people skills? Hooked into conspiracies.
I grew up in a diverse area, so I’ve really never believed in racist stuff. Those kind of conspiracies I used to just handwave the racism stuff away cause it wasn’t the important stuff to me that I did kind of believe in. I literally even used to watch some of Alex Jones conspiracy videos.
Really easy to get lost in this crap as a teenager alone at 4am.
Like I said I grew up in a diverse area, and in one of my first real relationships, I got a lot of pushback about certain things (I was kinda blue lives matter for a bit for example) and when that ended, one of the big things I took from it was I wanted to be a more accepting person, and I’ve been an increasingly-raging leftist ever since.
With the rising loneliness epidemic (which actually extends to both genders - EVERYONE is increasingly isolated) I can only imagine this sort of story is increasingly common. And not everyone comes to the same conclusions about wanting to be more accepting, etc.
I was very lucky to go through those experiences and learn what I did from it. There’s probably another universe where I instead got increasingly angry & further into all those things - from the cruel & crass words to the conspiracies - and am wearing a red hat
🤮🤮 at the thought of that
Very self-aware comment.
I have to agree, we’re very easily swayed, especially as teenagers.I had to suffer through a lot of rejection by girls I was interested in as a teenager, and also pondered some very misogynistic ideas, that I ultimately rejected only because I couldn’t bring myself to extend that hate to the one girl that ever loved me back for a while. Otherwise I could have totally turned to a sort of incel (before I knew that term even existed), some of the ideas I came up with are shockingly close to what I later learned that they believe.
I can only imagine how easy it would be to fall into that trap, when you’re feeling frustrated and are being bombarded by Tate and the likes through the self-enforcing ideology machinery that is social media.
We really need to teach young men a healthier way to deal with the frustrations that occur in life and lead a better example of how to deal with negative emotions other than turning to hate like that.
I feel the same way. I find it near miraculous I didn’t fall into the trap that’s being sold to young men these days.
I’m hesitant to share too much of my own story, but it makes me feel real sympathy for the guys being ridiculed for following Tate and such. I know the leaders are garbage, but its hard to not feel attacked when I hear the general internet lashing out at the followers for being ensnared.
I know what its like to be young and dumb, to be told you have so much potential, but then to also feel direction-less and like a loser.
I know the leaders are charlatans that are selling snake oil…but I don’t know what to tell these guys to get them unhooked from that crowd.
Haha I tried to be… mostly vague
I’m not sure either. It’s really hard for me to come up with things since it took a breakup for me to WANT to change, and of course I’m lucky that it’s for the positive.
I really hope it doesn’t take such powerful inciting incidents for a significant portion of them to change how they feel.
I was absolutely on a version of the alt-right pipeline a decade ago. I was raised by far-right, Mike Johnson-style “Christians,” so I was already pretty far down that path before I was drawn into any pipeline.
Luckily, I ended up on a weird libertarian branch of the pipeline (LearnLiberty rather than Prager U), and somehow the YouTube algorithm steered me into Veritasium’s content on climate change, and clips from Adam Ruins Everything. It sounds a bit crazy, but those things started opening my eyes and expanding my worldview. Probably didn’t hurt that my favorite TV show at the time was Leverage, which had plenty of its own anti-corporate-grifting themes.
Eventually, I realized that the Libertarian utopia doesn’t work because greed is an unlimited resource, and that makes regulation important.
Of course, there were other things that helped me escape my upbringing and the alt-right pipeline during gamergate (I wasn’t into gaming at the time, so that probably helped), but looking back and seeing how easily I could have ended up being a January 6 insurrectionist. I’m so thankful for all the little things that nudged me out of that worldview, and helped me see reality.
I wish there was an easy way to show young guys that the people they are listening to are liars and grifters who are manipulating young men into believing that their real pain is somehow the fault of women. But if I look at my own journey, it was a thousand little nudges. I didn’t change overnight, but there was a day during the 2016 election cycle that I remember realizing that even though I had spent almost 8 years despising Obama, that he had been an alright president - especially compared to the Republican nominee, Trump.
‘Greed is an unlimited resource’ absolutely slaps.
This is an opinion from someone who used to work as a children’s teacher after college in 2016:
We socialize our young men in spaces that only promote competition; sports, gaming circles, schools. The way that they interact with other children and the world in turn is one of competition and selfishness.
The way our modern families are structured give less freedom to our children to find meaningful friendships with boys and girls. social relationships have become more distanced, not just because of the internet. It’s just the rapid pace in which we live today.
They come in contact with porn at very young ages, some of them way before building meaningful friendships or relationships with girls. Pornography is a very cold and blunt product; It has a tendency to skew perceptions of what sentimental relationships are and it creates distorted expectations for sex. It gets worse for young generations that find it difficult to distinguish reality from fiction. I’ve talked to young men who only see relationships and sex from the filters of pornography and this is very concerning. To make matters worst. A lot of adults also have this optic. Middle aged men that have very little experiences with committed relationships friendly or intimate and pass down their skewed point of view to younger generations.
Our social media and political discourse promote atomization and alienation; it is easier to find things you disagree with other people than things in common. This was made by design. Division creates a passionate voters and consumers. young men and women are in the crossfire.
With this in mind; It is very profitable to become a social media grifter like Andrew Tate, Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson and so on. There is a large market for easy answers that take the blame elsewhere. I also feel these grifters find funding easily. I don’t think internet misogyny is at all grassroots, but there are a lot of right wing thinktanks and foundations that move money to boost voices that create this type of division. It’s not new and young men are particularly susceptible in a time with so much economical uncertainty because society tends to put a lot of expectations on them.
Countries that avoid to regulate their media are very susceptible to astroturfed political division. And when dealing with propaganda, adolescents are an ideal target. It turns out you tube and social media did not bring us a golden era of democratized education but instead an easy access to our children by malignant actors. And in countries like the US where any type of media regulation is considered “doing a comulism” attacking children with propaganda is a feature of the system, not a bug.
Insecurity exacerbated by the rise of social media. It’s really easy for impressionable teens (not just them, but they are the most vulnerable group) to be affected directly by the consequences of social media. Toxic masculinity allows them to fall into the andrew tate trap because it tells them that this is the easy solution to the insecurities they face. I’d argue covid also made this problem worse as well
I’m a 50+ dude, married for 25+years and I have no idea who this Andrew Tate is nor who young men identify to nowadays (I wanted to be Michel Strogoff and an astronaut and Maria Callas too, as a little boy) but I would say that it was enough for me to read some of the comments (way too many of them) in this discussion to get a pretty good glimpse of what may be causing such a split. At least partly.
Could it be that young men and teens are growing tired of being told they’re a threat (to women, when it’s not to the whole society) or, when they’re not a threat that they still are a nuisance, just because they have a dick and because that dick may sometimes grow bigger and harder when they feel attracted to another person?
My childhood was what today’s press would call ‘traumatizing’ (and not just once, mind you) but at the very least I did not grew up afraid of my dick getting hard because I was attracted to someone. And I was never too afraid to ask that person if they felt the same interest and if they would be willing in exploring it further together (more often than not, I was being told ‘no’).
For the rest, one simply needs to add a lot of partisanship, militant certainties and self-proclaimed righteousness with hordes of so-called experts and journalists that have no clue what their job is supposed to be about (hint: it’s not about making the buzz and not about collecting page views, or Likes) and then, on top of that, add a handful of smart-ass people (some real assholes too) that want to profit from all that stupidity that is raging-on everywhere, in every ‘camp’.
It’s easy to tell people, boys and girls alike, what they want to hear and nothing but what they want to hear. That they’re right, that they’re great and that the other group is just assholes that hate them. And to profit out of that.
It’s so easy that I’m seriously starting to wonder if the next generation or maybe the one after them will still be able and willing to make love or even just to enjoy some intimate good time together, and to make babies by themselves? Maybe I should invest a few cents in whatever startup will undoubtedly show-up and try to profit from that situation. Pretty sure I would make a fortune…
Sad times, indeed. I will go make some coffee and pour a cup for both my spouse and I.
Edit 1h later: you’re welcome to downvote till the end of times if that helps you feel any ‘righter’ in your opinions, or if it helps you think you’re punishing me (really?) but may I remind you that without any explanation no amount of downvote will help me understand any better why you disagree with what I wrote. Also, I won’t be able to read or contribute any further to this very interesting exchange we’ve had so far as I’ll leave for a long walk to and back from a tiny bookshop that is set nearby the Seine. A real nice shop and a real nice and long walk which means that, taking into account the fact I will probably spend some time there chatting with the lady owner (there are much are closer bookshops to our place, like a lot closer, but I really like how she works and how she really cares to help customers find the right book for them and not just try to shove them whatever the latest trendy book is and be done with them. So, I shop at her place). Considering all of that, I shouldn’t be back before at least 3 hours. PS: our cup of coffee was great.
That’s what happen when identity politics mark a group as less important and the enemy.
It happens when right wing do identity politics an the marginalized minorities group together against it.
Left wing for some reason decided to use exactly the same strategy as the right wing and took identity politics as a way to do politics and they are having exactly the same result. The “marginalized” identity turned against them.
Surprised Pikachu face.
Yep…
