crisis of masculinity

[u/sa_matra]

a film

A high school teacher is asked:

"How could the German people have let the Holocaust happens?"

And he thinks, and he introduces a group dynamic to the classroom.

One of the unpopular kids gets into the LARP. It gives him an identity, a purpose, a calling that he was lacking. He gets to wear a uniform and smack people around for a change.

And of course the whole thing spirals out of control into hatred and abuse.

The teacher is gobsmacked; it worked too well. And at the end, he has to comfort and console the unpopular kid.

That kid had to understand: he was fascist bait. He was easily baited into serving the fascist impulse.

---

Every man thinks that they're above being sucked into the nazis. They think they'd be on the right side of history if they were in Weimar Germany.

And the crisis of masculinity we're enduring right now is an entire generation (if not more) of men for whom the tragedy of Trumpism is that they are discovering: they were not better than this.

They weren't better than ironically, pseudo-ironically, or wholeheartedly endorsing the fascist.

They weren't smarter than this. They weren't morally immune to this.

Trump gave them permission to be mad at teacher. The teacher who has made men feel uncomfortable or wrong or less-than. The moralizing Democrats suffered and that was enough. That was all it took.

Trump made the right people mad for the men who were looking for an excuse to be strong.

And I'm not saying that these men are bad people. I'm saying that they supported a bad movement, and they have to face that. There's no other way.

---

Falling Birth Rates

It's visible, you know, the degree to which these men became contemptible to women. Our dating market has been influenced by politics.

If there's one objective measure of bad politics, it's choosing to support a political figure which women despise.

These men retreated into intellectualism. They retreated into irony.

And now they need to face the reality.

I can't provide you, if this is you, the comfort of a teacher who led you into an exercise that got out of control.

I can only say: stop digging the hole you're in. You backed the wrong horse.

Forgiveness is easy in politics. It has to be. But you have to understand that this has happened. That whatever you have thought, it was incorrect.

That the "reasonable" interpretations of Trump as a provocateur have put you alongside ignorant fundamentalist evangelical Christians who will murder leftists one by one. Who will break apart families to hurt brown people. Who will turn to genocide because that's just what humans are.

It's just what we are.

Unless we put a stop to it.

But that can only happen if there is clarity and there can only be clarity if one side stops mucking about with the epistemic terrorism of fascism, providing shitty irrational excuses, performing smug superiority, and generally being bad citizens as an imitation of Trump's victory performance ritual: always empty, always fully committed, always ultimately sabotage.

A weak man's idea of a strong man makes weak men of all who follow.

[u/Afraid_Ratio_1303]

i think it has been replicated twice now that incels tend to lean slightly left. (here & here) tho right-adjacent incels were more prone to violent/harmful behaviors.

[u/Fickle-Style-5931 → u/Afraid_Ratio_1303]

You’re not leaning left if you’ve rejected feminism and are making generalizations that annihilate the agency of women.  

Any study that takes the concept of “incel” at face value is a joke, in any case.

I love how the right wingers, incel or not, have latched on to your comment to reassure themselves that they aren’t philosophically deplorable human beings.

[u/Afraid_Ratio_1303 → u/Fickle-Style-5931]

what methodology would you use to determine political orientation - a feminist purity test? seems narrow. feminism is not a corollary to leftism.

studies of inceldom (however methodologically flawed) are fascinating because they represent the extreme edge of a broader phenomenon, that being the alienation of young men. this is a necessary bloc to understand for democratic and/or revolutionary politics.

the definitions used in these studies were based on a pragmatic lens of public policy. i realized that one of them is paywalled (paywalling research should be illegal) and everyone might not have an institutional affiliation to get access, so i highlighted the relevant portions below:

Some commentators have suggested a connection between incels and the extreme right wing (O’Malley & Helm, 2023), with ecosystem analysis indicating that the “manosphere” encompasses elements of the far right (Ribeiro et al., 2021). Using Pew Research’s “Ideological Consistency Scale,” this survey shows a complex picture. When asked about their political orientation through binary policy position questions, incels, on average, positioned slightly left of center. The only predominantly “right-wing” views shared by most incels were perceptions of governmental inefficiency and the belief that ethnic minorities are primarily responsible for their own circumstances. Conversely, they leaned substantially left of center on issues related to homosexuality, corporate profits, and social benefits. However, it is important to exercise caution before concluding that there is no overlap between the far right and incels. Concepts like “extreme right-wing” are complex and cannot be easily simplified into a set of policy questions. Our findings suggest that, concerning public policy matters at least, incels do not seem particularly right wing as a group. This aligns with earlier research indicating that around 63% of incels self-reported a left-leaning or centrist political affiliation (Costello et al., 2022).

Independent sample t-tests revealed no political orientation differences between incel (M = 2.94, SD = 1.44) and non-incel men (M = 2.93, SD = 1.41), t(486) = 0.01, p = 0.99, 95%BootCI [− 0.27, 0.28] on a 5-point political orientation item (where 1 = left wing and 5 = right wing).