You can sway a thousand men by appealing to their prejudices quicker than you can convince one man by logic. —Robert Heinlein
Darth Vader voice: “If you only knew the promotional power of the dark side!”
In the simplest of terms, there are a lot of people on Earth who are both biologically and culturally driven to want a certain thing. And yet they are denied that thing. And so, they may come to hate that thing. Their hatred was stoked by others using their denied desires as a crack in the armor of their humanity, in which to whisper toxic words of victimhood that fester into an-all-too-often murderous rage.
There is a lot of money to be made in telling a loser that they’re not actually a loser, but rather a victim.
I’ve written numerous articles on so-called men’s rights activists and incels (involuntary celibate), and yeah, they’re basically losers who’d rather rail against the evils of women and feminism than admit that maybe their lives would be better if they tried just a little bit to not suck so hard at life.
Telling people what they want to hear is a powerful marketing tool; it is what permits numerous industries to grow and prosper, from self-help to cosmetics to multi-level marketing to weight loss to motherfucking religion. And loser men want to hear that they’re not losers, and that it’s not their fault. And they will pay money to hear it.
Behold the burn heard ‘round the world.
Richard Cooper is a veiled men’s rights activist (MRA) promoting his “be an alpha male” bullshit to losers, and he’s very successful at it. My burn on him was seen by many millions, having spread far and wide through social media and covered in multiple publications including Yahoo, but I doubt it cost him much in the way of followers. He has over 60,000 followers on Twitter, and his YouTube videos total over 60 million views. And the Amazon rank for his alpha book is pretty decent.
The man profits handsomely from selling hatred of women, because hatred of women is a hot commodity that loser men willingly purchase. Cooper is not the only MRA earning a good income via selling misogyny. I could name others, but I don’t want to. Because fuck them. And by that, I mean that no one should ever fuck them.
Oppression of women is ingrained in our society, beginning around the time of the first agrarian revolution, which saw most humans evolve from hunter-gatherers toward settling in one place to grow their food. It was during that time women and children began to be viewed more like property, for what they could provide dominant men: hands to work the fields. Inheritance also became important, because no fucking way I want some other dude’s crotch goblins getting what I’ve worked so hard to accumulate. And so, women were transformed into a breeding class of humans to support this new patriarchal structure of land occupation.
That’s the overly simple explanation. It’s far more complicated than that, which is why I am working on a book titled Greedy Sexist Religious Bigots that explains the evolution of patriarchy in far more detail. You can read the Introduction here. But suffice to say that technology is only just beginning to allow for a more equitable society between genders. As women gain more control over their reproduction, maternal and infant mortality plummets, and as machines take over the work of child laborers, we have the ability to look at the unfair striations in society and say, “Hey. This is some fucking bullshit and totally not fair.”
Advancements are made, and those who profited from the old ways don’t like it one bit.
The typical MRA believes in a mythical time of when women cowered, and testosterone ruled. They believe that masculinity has been unfairly maligned, attacked, and we manly creatures must take back our manhood from the feminist bitches who “swung the pendulum too far the other way” so that we no longer have equality, but rather live in a “gynocentric matriarchy.” It’s not men who rule the world any longer, but women! (Read my piece “There Is No War on Men.”)
FYI, any man who proclaims to be an “egalitarian” is really saying women have more rights than men and he views the fight for “equality” as men getting more, and women getting less.
What is the connection to white supremacy? First off, it’s not just about elevating the white race, but white men.President LBJ said, “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket.” Holy shit is that accurate. But it also applies to such low men believing they’re better than the best women. Status is everything to these guys. Research into the gaming community provides some insight.
A July 2015 study published in the journal PLOS ONE examined the threat posed by female gamers to men who were “low status” players in a first-person shooter game (these men had few kills and were killed often). They saw women as a risk to their rank in the gaming hierarchy and lashed out with negative comments toward women at a rate much higher than toward other men. Conversely, those men who were “high status” players (lots of kills and rarely got killed) were much more positive toward women.
A partial explanation for why this is so can be found in a 2013 study of 63 college males, published in Evolution & Human Behavior, which found that social dominance rather than attractiveness was associated with having a higher rate of sexual success.
The PLOS ONE study asserted, “Low-status and low-performing males have the most to lose as a consequence of the hierarchical reconfiguration due to the entry of a competitive woman.” Also, “the increase in hostility towards a woman by lower-status males may be an attempt to disregard a female’s performance and suppress her disturbance on the hierarchy to retain their social rank.”
A 2016 meta-analysis published in the Journal of Counseling Psychology examined 20,000 people across a decade of research regarding the psychological impact of traditionally masculine attitudes. The attitudes studied included taking risks, needing to control people, the urge to win, violence, homophobia, promiscuity, and wanting to have power over women.
Things like seeking status via work and taking risks weren’t determined to be either good or bad traits in terms of psychological effect, but “playboy” behavior and wanting to dominate women are strongly correlated with psychological problems. Beyond the harm it does to women, being sexist is toxic to male psychology. And yet, some see it as simply “What it means to be a man.”
In 2014 Elliot Rodger committed mass murder because he believed that women were “starving him of sex.” In so doing, he was elevated to the moniker of “St. Elliot” by the incel community for having “martyred” himself to the cause. That is way fucked up. It’s not just that these guys want sex but don’t get it because women don’t want to sleep with creepy losers, but they feel harmed in their social ranking because they don’t have a beautiful woman to hang off them and proclaim to the world that their penis is the greatest in all the land. It’s about showing off to other men how many attractive women they can bed.
As a fucked-up aside, there are many men whose innate desires have them preferring larger women, but they feel pressured to pursue thinner ones in order to gain acceptance from other men by having a thin girlfriend. Because to them, women are simply property to be displayed. They pursue sexual partners not based on their desires, but on what they believe other men will approve of. Jesus Christ.
Their thwarted desires to use women for sexual satisfaction and for social display create a breeding ground for misogyny that MRAs tap into. Once they’re taught to hate an entire gender, it’s a short step toward being radicalized toward hating people based on race and religion.
Hatred of the “other” is encoded into our genes. From the Greedy Sexist Religious Bigots Introduction:
Imagine three different ancient tribes. One is full of ruthless killers. They’re so ruthless, they can’t get along with anyone, including themselves. Fuck cooperation, I’ll kill you! It’s not evolutionarily adaptive. Scratch that tribe. Another is all hippie peace and love, whether you’re in the tribe or not. The third is peace and love within their own tribe, but otherwise xenophobic as hell. If you’re not part of their group, they’ll ghost your ass.
Which one survives?
Which one conquers, spreads, and sprays their DNA all over creation? Us. We do. . . . the embracing of bigotry was naturally selected for via evolution. That’s what millennia of history has produced: Mean motherfuckers ready to kill the outsider, with the spoils of continued existence going to the victor.
The transformation that these men are led through is gradual, insidious. At first, they’re sold the idea they’re doing something “good.” They’re helping to re-establish “real men” as the leaders that have been sorely lacking in modern society. The “feminization” of society is, well, obviously, the fault of feminism, they are told. Feminism makes victims of such real men when once they were considered heroes. You’re not a total fucking loser who can’t get laid. You’re a hero being cock blocked by feminazis. And it’s not just feminists, it’s those dirty liberals.
It’s worth noting that self-styled pickup artists (PUAs) are closely affiliated with this train of thought. They preach getting laid via treating women like submissive things. The tactics they teach men run the gamut from misogynistic to outright rape. To them, the word “No” isn’t a complete sentence, it’s the beginning of a negotiation process.
The feelings of entitlement among young white men are at ridiculous levels. It’s not just feeling like they’re owed sex from beautiful women, but owed leading roles in society by making all other races subservient to their supremacy based on nothing other than skin tone. Because once you’ve been taught that women are beneath you, a thing to be dominated, the move to including everyone who isn’t a white man isn’t that far of a leap. Misogyny is the gateway drug.
John Barth wrote “Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story.” That means these men don’t see themselves as sexist or racist, but as righteous warriors in the battle against the imagined oppression of their gender and race. For them, life is a zero-sum game. If women and non-whites have gained rights, then it means white men must have lost rights. And this merging of targets of ire absolutely played a role in Trump’s 2016 election victory. It wasn’t just about the embracing of a blatant racist in Trump, but the rejection of a highly qualified female candidate. To them, Trump’s victory was seen as a triumph of good over evil.
It doesn’t stop there. There is plenty of hate for the LGBTQ+ community as well. Jordan Peterson was a relative nobody, an academic of little note, until he very publicly fought against providing equal protections to transgender people under Canada’s hate speech laws. He very erroneously spewed the most brainless bullshit about how this was an attack on free speech, referring to it as “radical leftist ideology that I detest, and which is, in my professional opinion, frighteningly similar to the Marxist doctrines that killed at least 100 million people in the 20th century.” Jesus, Mary, and motherfucking Joseph what a histrionic dipshit.
Legal experts repeatedly exposed his argument as being so full of shit that Peterson’s eyes were brown. But it didn’t matter. This selling of hatred toward trans people skyrocketed Peterson to fame, and he sustained that meteoric rise via the inclusion of countless examples of misogyny in his speeches and his writings. And no, I didn’t take him out of fucking context.
Trump may be out, but the feelings that got him elected remain strong as ever. On April 26, of the 10 most popular posts on Facebook, nine of them were made by far-right pages:
It’s pretty fucking terrifying. We cannot let down our guard. Such hate must be repeatedly exposed and combatted. Young white men are at risk, and as a good human being you are responsible for being a bastion of rationality, inclusivity, and compassion in their lives to help prevent them from being led astray by the toxic influences in their lives and online. A lot of these guys are just looking for friends. Having good friends can help prevent them from seeking out bad friends.
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I really appreciate, as always, a male voice against the alarming anti-feminist backlash in the "manosphere," which I've been loosely following for a while. Thank you for writing this. You're also dead on the mark about "egalitarian" being a buzzword for anti-feminism...I've run into this, and been suckered into it, FAR too often.
If I may offer what I think is missing from this general conversation sometimes--we sometimes boil down incels as "losers who’d rather rail against the evils of women and feminism than admit that maybe their lives would be better if they tried just a little bit to not suck so hard at life." Certainly those who embrace incel ideology are very dangerous and toxic individuals, and they do exactly what you describe.
But I've noticed a trend to describe incels/MRAs/manosphere dwellers as only interested in sex. I think they PROJECT that image /due to patriarchal propaganda/, and that it doesn't necessarily reflect what men want (which you hinted at re: men hiding their attraction to non-thin women.) Men are humans, and most humans want some combination of hugs, cuddles, affirmations, kisses, sex, affection...connections. I've read many a desperate guy who can't get a girlfriend, and his focus is not on sex but on desiring connection and support.
I think men feel pressured to over-emphasize their desire to get laid, because /this fits the patriarchal narrative/ of sexual conquest being a measure of male achievement. I wonder how many men turn to PUAs from the starting place of wanting a girlfriend, but change their self-narrative to be about "getting laid" due to Manosphere influence.
My bottom line is that I think we, as feminist-minded individuals, need to do our best to scrub any connection between "can't get laid" and "loser." I got a slight hint of that connection in a couple excerpts. Because I seriously doubt that was your intent, I wanted to add my two cents.
Thank you again!
Maybe “... that Peterson’s eyes were brown.” could be “that the whites of Paterson’s eyes were brown.”?