Here’s a post from Derek Thompson I found puzzling:
If you read the quote and then read the characterization of the quote, you may also be puzzled. It’s not very inflammatory, is it? She’s not like, my friends and I have a groupchat where we make fun of lonely men, but rather, “the male loneliness crisis,” the talking point. But if you read the article—which is a review by Emily Witt in the London Review of Books—and then come back to this post, you are going to be even more puzzled. One thing that’s clear when you read it is that the people who talk to men like they are pieces of shit who should kill themselves if they have any aims other than pure self-aggrandization, are… male “influencers” like Andrew Tate. The very title of Witt’s review (“Do you feel like a failure?”) references this story about Tate:
Jamie Tahsin and Matt Shea’s Clown World follows the authors through the making of two documentaries, The Dangerous Rise of Andrew Tate and Andrew Tate: The Man Who Groomed the World. Tahsin, a self-described ‘mid-90s millennial Vice journalist who spent his time trawling the internet for cults and conspiracies’, first heard about Tate in 2019 from a colleague who knew of a young man who had fallen under his spell. At that point Tate was still relatively unknown, although he was already skilled at acquiring followers by generating a particular kind of internet pile-on. In 2017, he responded to a comic book artist who was raising money for his son’s operation by tweeting: ‘Do you feel like a failure that the amount you need to help your own son is less than a quarter of what I spend on one of my five cars?’
I am not playing a game of “gotcha” here, by the way. Everybody in this conversation agrees Andrew Tate is a malign influence, myself included. What interests me is that while the takeaway for some liberals is that the way to attract male voters is to be overtly nice to them, that’s not exactly how the people who are regarded as “speaking to young men” talk to them. The Andrew Tate brand is not to listen sympathetically to your problems, it’s to be awesome in contrast to your problems.1
That men (viewed as a group, not as individuals) can take certain messages better from other men than from women strikes me as true. I don’t have a problem with it. Your mom told you to clean your room? Annoying. Jordan Peterson told you to clean your room? A totally different thing because he explained that this was how you channeled your dragon slaying instincts. As an example of liberal messaging that I’d imagine is trying to tap the same vein, Witt quotes Rahm Emanuel as saying that the housing crisis is worse for men because they think of themselves as providers. That’s a bizarre thing to say and the underlying logic doesn’t really flatter men much—the suggestion seems to be if an issue does not affect men more, they won’t care about it, even if it negatively affects them the same as women. More to the point, I don’t think it’s what men who tune into Andrew Tate are getting. They are seeing an aspirational lifestyle (five cars, babes) delivered by someone who is unconcerned with being kind to them. Who is perhaps actively nasty to them. Why?
To cut to the chase… I don’t have an answer. Part of the answer is probably that, as with the original pickup artist trick of the “neg,” the first move is to make sure your target has no visible self-esteem. If you aren’t a weak member of the herd, you aren’t part of the audience. But I’m not really comfortable thinking about people in large groups this way, frankly. I don’t like being thought of that way and I don’t like thinking about other people that way. Still, I think it is worth observing that somebody like Tate isn’t so much empathetic toward men as he is callous toward men and nastier toward women. What he’s selling is not just wealth and how to get it but the promise of having somebody to kick around.
I don’t know if men are really lonelier than women, but the classic “manosphere” has always been a lonely place. I remember reading the subreddit for the “Red Pill” and finding men giving tips on how to make sure your wife or girlfriend didn’t find out you had cancer. Because if she found out you had cancer, you’d cease to be an alpha, and she’d leave you. The repeated mantra of “all women are like that” was one way of saying: you will never be loved, you will never really find companionship. You won’t find it with other men because you are in competition with them and you won’t find it from women because they are perfidious and always looking to trade up. A woman is always only with you as long as she thinks you are the best she can do, which is why it’s important both to make sure she has no self-esteem and to make sure she can’t see any vulnerabilities.
The bleakness of the message is not incidental to its appeal. I don’t think this insight is helpful for anybody trying to do “messaging.” But the fact is, you will almost certainly date somebody who breaks your heart. You’ll get dumped, or cheated on, or used. (You might even be more likely to end up dating people like this if you exclusively filter for “hates themselves.”) Plenty of people, men and women, do get dumped when they become ill or lose a job. You will also date people who simply are not you, and therefore will make decisions from their own self-interest, and you can interpret that as betrayal if you are primed to do that. Again, this is a cold world and what it offers the men who buy in is not comfort but a kind of self-reinforcing misery.
Still, being told it’s exactly as bad as you think (or worse) can be very comforting. (This is why, when I’m stressed out, I like watching horror movies.) I think this is the bigger question people who want to become self-appointed “speakers to the male” have to deal with sooner or later—why it is that “the world is shit and you are a piece of garbage but maybe by buying what I’m selling you can become king of your own shit mountain” is a message that resonates. Not because you want to copy it—please do not—but because I don’t think any quantity of invocations of male loneliness, or finger-wagging at women who are insufficiently pious, are going to amount to much against its appeal.
Something I see sometimes when I run across guys fantasizing about being trad husbands on a farmstead is that they are imagining basically living in Stardew Valley, where you get up, kiss your wife, she gives you your coffee, you wander around with your chickens, you pick a mushroom, then you go back home and sleep with your wife. You have nine children and they are all beautiful, are never ill, and also skip around with the chickens. These guys don’t think about the trad life as a life that has obligations as well as privileges. I don’t mean that “farming is hard” (though it is) but that you might, for instance, have to work at something you don’t especially love to take care of your wife and nine kids. Maybe you have to be an accountant and not a farmer. For the man, the price of a trad life is increased responsibility and decreased freedom of choice. If these guys get what they want, they figure this out pretty quickly—unless they are influencers, in which case they’ll probably sell the image.
Citizenship, too, is a matter of obligations and privileges, as well as levels of reasonable entitlement: I pay taxes, my bridges don’t collapse. Despite my discomfort with talking about groups of people in this way, I think giving “men” stuff to do may be a better form of outreach than we feel your pain. It is in fact a pretty bad life to be the lonely and unloved king of shit mountain in the United States of Shit, but the way out of that aspiration may not be the same as the way in. A WPA for fixing the country’s infrastructure or whatever2 might be more effective at helping lonely, isolated men who don’t feel like they have much of a purpose or a future than a PSA or twelve. My two cents, I suppose. (Like two cents, they aren’t worth much.)
I’m not saying “oh the solution is social democracy,” I am saying the solution to “alone and without purpose” is perhaps “doing stuff with others.” Which could be social democracy, if that’s what you’re trying to push. It could be something else.
But also, the people responsible for the messaging American politicians want to use when running for office are politicians who are running for office. It is not my job, as the writer of an email newsletter, to ask myself before hitting send whether or not my email will play well in the midterms. It is not Emily Witt’s job either. I am not running for office or working for a campaign. I get to say what I want and so does she. This “I don’t know if it will play in Peoria” tsk-tsking is silly. Making things play in Peoria is a politician’s business.
I am going here mostly off of tweets I remember reading… I have but one life.
in case the “or whatever” was not enough of a clue, this is not a super serious suggestion
I’ve only met one self-proclaimed incel IRL, and it nearly broke my spirit. My friend and I spent so much time trying to get him to hang out normally—just not hit on every woman that speaks to him—for several years before he threatened to kill us all. It was disturbing, and sad. So many hours wasted trying to teach someone how to make friends, without him understanding that friendship is its own reward.
But in terms of an actual male loneliness epidemic, I worry most about men my dad’s age, who simply do not know what to do with themselves when they hit a certain age. That does bother me. Part of it is the way America treats older people (as an annoyance), but a lot of it is how there is simply nowhere for them to go but the internet, which is an increasingly dangerous place for them. We can ask them to be smarter, but how do you teach a 70 year old with his first smartphone internet literacy? The algorithm certainly doesn’t help. Facebook is ghastly.
I think about how my grandfather, after he retired, got a job working at a liquor store frequented by old Greek men. They played cards and talked a lot of shit, but they were rarely actually drunk, and mostly they were glad to see each other. They told stories, and they kept each other company. The store is still open, but the outside seating is gone, as is whatever community existed around it.
Many young men hit a point a where they need to detach themselves from women for a while and really cannot hear much from them. If the process goes well it does not last forever. There is also a point in many young men's life where they look around and realize "this is not working."
The point of all these online father substitutes is to take these two points and funnel the energy and discontent generated perpetually into content consumption, to convince them that Western Women or Western Civilization are the primary problem limiting their action right now instead of [weed, porn, video games, door dash burritos, general faithlessness], to convince them that for a low subscription price there will be some way they can run without having to crawl.
The idea that endless tentative tip-toe tenderness from every single unrelated person on social media is doing something for the well of shame and frustration in a young man squaring up to fight his Grendel inside seems pretty stupid to me. Which is not to say there are not very serious needs there. But when I hear these like non-toxic boy mom influencers talking about how they are educating their four year olds in male feminism I'm like ok, you are nuts, and when I read po-faced Atlantic writers wagging their finger like this I'm like do you KNOW any young men you are close to and care about in ways beyond a potential political constituency.
Anyway idk about male loneliness my uncles are always busting into my dad's house like Kramer.