A growing network of online communities known collectively as the “manosphere” is emerging as a serious threat to gender equality, as toxic digital spaces increasingly influence real-world attitudes, behaviours, and policies, the UN agency dedicated to ending gender discrimination has warned.
Is there even an incentive for solving men’s problems? Feminism can use men to portray the ultimate evil; influencers can use that portrayal to criticize men, engage in rage bait, get attention and secure brand deals.
Capitalism can appease women to promote consumerism wrapped in feminism. Corporations can capitalize on men’s loneliness and low self-worth.
I have noticed that men with low self-worth find meaning in work, which ultimately profits corporations, the money they will earn will be expanded on consumerisms/additions which again can be profited by capitalism and corporate.
The rich can have as many resources as they want, so why solve it? Other than individuals (men) taking matters in their own hands and rescuing each other I don’t think there is enough incentive to help men as community or whole
Well said, I will note Women have been the target of beauty ads for over 100 years already. Media will make us feel ugly so we buy thier products. They feed on our insecurities for profit, and it’s been this way for generations of women.
In the last 10-20 years, I have definitely noticed an uptick with capitalization on men’s insecurities. The whole manosphere schtick is about just that, exploiting insecurity.
I can’t reject the idea that with the current P2025 goals, and the billionaires pushing for their techno fudalism, that these things are related in some way.
You make some good points, but i cant resist the thought experiment:
Is there even an incentive for solving women’s problems? Patriarchy can use women to portray the ultimate evil; influencers can use that portrayal to criticize women, engage in rage bait, get attention and secure brand deals.
Capitalism can appease men to promote consumerism wrapped in misogyny. Corporations can capitalize on women’s loneliness and low self-worth.
I have noticed that women with low self-worth find meaning in work, which ultimately profits corporations, the money they will earn will be expanded on consumerisms/additions which again can be profited by capitalism and corporate.
The rich can have as many resources as they want, so why solve it? Other than individuals (women) taking matters in their own hands and rescuing each other I don’t think there is enough incentive to help women as community or whole
I understand your thoughts experiment, and I assure you that I am not assuming that this thought comes from a place of malice. The second thing is that I would be using an LLM model to fix my grammar, so it might sound like an LLM response, and my word choice might not be as precise as native ones.
I want you to understand that my comment wasn’t in contrast to women but to society. Helping women isn’t coming from goodwill or a soft spot but as a means to an end. What end? Exercising soft power for powerful people¹, brownie points for PR², and more consumers for capitalism.³
Saving women and children is still shown as a positive attribute, not as some general attribute. The thing is, people doing this are well aware of that. Recently, when Trump blocked the USAIDs and some other beneficiaries that helped victim groups, a lot of people who championed feminism and the welfare of the weak straight up on camera started babbling about how the USA will lose its soft power in other countries. You can call me naive, but it baffled me. You don’t have to pretend that there is no soft power, but at least keep people’s welfare as the central piece of your argument or concerns.
Brownie points: Saving women or appearing to work for helping women is used for PR by political figures, corporations, and people who want to be at the center of attention. Though recently, this one isn’t going very well because, due to the internet and the large availability of information, it is very easy to check for credibility. However, there is still enough bias that can be exploited.
How can I explain this one? Think about it: you don’t want half of your customers locked away and banished when you can sell them consumerism as rebellion (the search for cigarettes as feminism).
If you paid attention, all these three situations are beneficial only as long as women are presented as victims or oppressed. Since there is no David without Goliath, we get men as the oppressor or ultimate evil.
No, these both can’t be promoted to the same extreme, as it will lead to people resorting to gender roles while expecting others not to, creating extremely competitive conditions for men, as the patriarchy will push the gender role of men asking out, taking financial responsibility, etc. If we assume misogyny is high too, they will soon check out of the dating scene, leading to a fall in the birth rate, which isn’t too great for capitalism. We have a whole country as an example of why capitalism’s incentives don’t lie with promoting misogyny; can you guess that country? :::Yes, it is South Korea.:::
For capitalism to thrive, it needs just enough modulated patriarchy and misogyny where men remain competitive with each other, and even those who give up remain consumers in the form of some consumerism addiction. If misogyny and patriarchy are promoted enough and spiral out of control, people will check out of society.
I can’t comment on this, as it was anecdotal from my side, and this can be anecdotal from your side.
You are completely wrong on this one. The divide is very important. If they (the rich and powerful) let go of this illusion of helping women or the underprivileged or making it all appear as meritocracy, it will turn into rich vs. poor, and this has never worked in favor of the rich. To maintain this illusion or facade that they are not the perpetrators of the current worsening of society, they need bogeymen, which, of course, we know who they are, and make them appear as saviors they need victim too, and we are back to square one.
You know what is ironic? This portrayal of bogeymen and its consequences isn’t backfiring on the rich and powerful but is becoming a tool to exchange power between different factions of the same wealthy individuals.
Uh, yes? Obviously. If there wasn’t then “manosphere” content would never be monetized.
Mate, what many of those so-called gururs of “manosphere” do is called capitalising on misery of others, not solving. Which I have already covered in my comment above.
Don’t think for a second that I’m approving of Andrew Tate types lol. I’m just saying if there wasn’t incentive then they wouldn’t be able to profit off of it. Maybe we’re using different definitions of incentive. Or maybe you mean to actually make a true working long term fix for men as opposed to just content that monetizes off of it.
What are men’s problems? What problem do we suffer that also doesn’t affect women?
Isn’t that what you are doing to feminist right now? Isn’t that what the article is talking about with the man-o-sphere?
Lol, like we men are immune from corporations promoting masculinity? Old spice, axe body spray, every sports based commercial… What gender do you think the majority of the CEO for these companies are?
Capitalism isn’t a fucking gender problem…it is the thing making everyone’s lives miserable. If we wanted to examine gender in capitalism we can take a look at which of the genders gains more from the system. What percent of the oligarchs are men, how many billionaires are men, how many senators and judges that keep the system going… it’s mostly dudes.
And the rich switch genders or something? Women can’t be part of the struggle against capitalism? What is wrong with you guys, do you not have mothers, sisters, women in your lives who are just friends?
I can’t be the only one here who thinks this is insane, right?
Young white men are being squeezed out of the ownership class for the first time and it’s because it’s the only demographic that hasn’t already been squeezed at this late stage of capitalism. The problem isn’t with women, it is the economic system that dangles a carrot for some, so they’ll wield the stick against others…and we’re all out of carrots. Welcome to the party, everyone else has been getting the stick the whole fucking time.
Eh. Nothin’ to lose.
Women have strong support movement on their side. It’s not something they gain only through their sex, but rather something they gain I think mostly due to the same gender stereotypes that also act against them.
Same stereotypes which isolate men and make them suffer in silence and alone, making showing any sign of weakness a fatal mistake.
I honestly don’t see your point here - what commenter above you said is right, and sure as hell they didn’t mention that it doesn’t work the other way around.
What are men problems, huh? Like, dunno, expectation to always go after that false masculinity. Also, as far as I understand it, what you quoted above this part is just continuation of the point above it, nothing to add here.
Yeah, but affects genders differently. Men are eaten, ground to a paste and then spat out. Women are bellitled and their work is seen as substandard. One side doesn’t make the other any less, both are problems and commenter above you didn’t say men have it worse, just that they suffer from it.
What commenter above you is alluding to is the point of the whole post - Men do not get help. We do not have the same societal networks that women have to get together and stand up. And even if women decided to fight for us, it’s for naught until we are able to start getting up by ourselves.
'kay. What’s with that obsession with women? Commenter above you mentioned once that feminism can use men to portray them as evil, which they do because guess who makes them suffer most, and yet due to that you immediately went and threw everything they said as if they did nothing else but accuse women of men’s suffering.
All in all, as far as I understand the comment above you, all boils down to:
Which are answers to question at the beggining:
IMO, the incentive is for us to move our asses, take notes from women and build our own support networks. But that is actually fought against by conservatists/right-wingers, because lonely and lost men make cheap and easily influenced canon fodder.
That seems like a self inflicted issue… What are women supposed to do about this? In my life it has usually been women begging their husbands to speak to them or to go to therapy.
And who propogates and sustains this stereotype? Sounds like you should be mad at men.
That would imply it’s not simply a mens problem…
The person I responded to was saying women were being targeted by capitalistic marketing… How is that a mens problem. My point is that it’s not a mens problem it’s a capitalist problem.
Lol, so it’s a class problem… Of course the poor suffer, that’s why we’re supposed to have class solidarity, not become misogynistic.
That doesn’t explain the blatant misogyny in this thread and in the youth in general.
This whole thread and post is about the gender dynamic and the blooming network of misogyny. And because his interpretation of economics is devoid of class consciousness, he and you only focus on the problems of young men, which is a demographic and not a class.
How do women gain? Who runs the corporations?
Who do you think runs the fucking world already…its us, men.
So obviously nwe don’t need much support that is just based on gender. Of the people doing well right now…it’s mostly men.
What separates us and the people who run the world isn’t gender…its class. You can’t build a supportive class network and only focus on young men.
I hope you realize how alienating a sentence like this is, for someone who is as stomped by society as many women are.
This narrative is exactly what prevents any form of class solidarity, and I really can’t understand how someone can write it in the same comment where class struggle is raised.
How? How am I alienating anyone by telling them something they already know?
What the fuck are you talking about? Did you not read the rest of the post… My point was that if being a man isn’t the inherent source of your struggle then it must not be the real problem…the real problem is class war.
Saying “it’s us, men” (to rule the world) is inherently a narrative that avoid discussing the class division, because being a man is not being part of a social class.
I might have misunderstood what you meant, but this argument is put forward quite often by certain groups that lost completely touch with the class struggle, hence my remark.
I wasn’t the one who claimed white young men were being systemically oppressed… If you are examining class division through gender then it is an impossible topic to avoid.
You can’t have it both ways. I’ve been saying the whole time it doesn’t make sense to examine class struggle through the lens of gender, my claim about “us men” was made to highlight the contradictory nature of the original claim.
That is what I’ve been saying the whole time…
The reason I brought it up was to dispel the claim that white men were being specifically targeted in the first place.
Did you not read the context of the post?
Thank you for making sense!
This fucking thread is crazy… especially these dudes trying to wrap their misogyny in faux leftist babbling.
There is no struggle but class struggle. They’re just pissed they missed the bus on being invited to the ownership class and now they’re stuck down here with everyone else.
The same can be said about you too, you know you are not getting shit done against the ownership class so resorting to insulting and demeaning anyone who appears privileged to you.
You want to really fight a class war? How about starting by not out of frustration humiliating anyone who has different symptoms of the same problem as you.
Sure men talking about their problems is misogyny, you can’t gate keep the left, and anybody who is reading this, some people at left accept you and adversiory despite of your gender . your are not abonded. Seek out help. There are still people who will help you.
Lol, I’m the same because I’m upset that people aren’t engaging in class consciousness?
I’m making fun of people who claim to be leftist, but only care about their own demographics. You can’t be a leftist and abandon the very basic idea of class consciousness.
It is when you talk to them about their problems and all they do is bitch and moan about dei.
Again … This isn’t about their gender. I’m a dude. Its about how they’ve abandoned class consciousness and are demeaning the struggles of their fellow working class by claiming they somehow have it worse than everyone else. And when you ask them why… You just end up getting thinly veiled misogyny.
A commercial incentive?
If you want to commercialize solving the ills of society, you end up with death camps as being simply the end result of efficiency.
If you want to solve the problems of various demographics rather then viewing them as gender-specific instances in order to benefit the whole of society you get, among other benefits, a lot less genocide.
Incentives don’t always have to be of commercial value; they can also be moral and assumed.
You don’t usually receive commercial value for rescuing an animal, helping a child, or sheltering a woman. What I am saying is, why can’t we offer the same moral incentive to men? They are often portrayed as oppressors, and more value can be extracted from the “oppressor bogeyman” than from actually addressing and solving the problems.
What you are describing is not solving the problem; it is, at best, putting the problem under the rug, or at worst, getting rid of the problem altogether.
Men are by default worth less really. One man can impregnate many women. If you look at society from a more cynical perspective as just resources, it makes sense that men are inherently far less worth than women.
Value as people? Pfft, forget it. When was that ever practiced?
I just want to point out, men are not by default worth less.
Women are the big spenders online.
Spenders? That’s not what it’s all about. You simply need less men to keep humanity going, and you basically just exist to do the heavy lifting, and protect women from beasts (that are no longer a threat). So if you are born a man, you lost the lottery. You are forced to engage in dumb, detrimental behavior, or be ostracized. You are forced on a death march.
Or you start being a ‘man’ or rather human, and create the life that you want.
If you see yourself as human resource, you are not worth more than that commodity and that value is all you have. Instead, meet other people and start creating.
I’m sick and tired of hitting a wall. I can’t live with a hostile family constantly sabotaging my efforts. I’m supposed to at least have some respite at home, people aren’t supposed to laugh at you when you try to improve yourself. I have no other recourse, I will just finally blow my fucking head off next pay. Then maybe they will finally ask if they did something wrong.
Listen to me: try putting maximum effort into improving yourself.
What makes you think that people who have not acknowledged your efforts until now will suddenly gain enough self-awareness to realize that they are the problem after you take your own life?
Join an offline community, engage in fieldwork, sports, or anything where you don’t have to be the best—just be there. Just know that I am rooting for you.
Get some counceling first. Seems like you could use some help communicating your needs.
Yep