i turned 76 last Tuesday. So did Bruce Springsteen. In my mythical world that gives me 100 times more manhood than andrew tate, whoever the hell he is. I also remember how amazed i was discovering that contemporary philosophy had "uncovered the possibility" that we are not one, we are multitudes, wowzers, who knew? and then contemporary philosophy split into a buncha 'social sciences' that helped us understand that we couldn't possibly be 'me' unless we was also, always already 'us'. So now, my friends, we're down to brass tacks, and the predators say we're a predatory species all the way, and the libidinally intelligent people are "hey, now."
as far as predator / prey goes, I like to think people are like bears… sure every now and then you get an off one who eats a camper but mostly bears like to sit in the sun and eat berries, catch fish, climb up trees…
i think of my two cats (my study of real predators 'all the way down'): one is our house cat, small, but a killer of course, yet several times a day she curls up in a fetal position in my arms, goes limp and purrs for 10-15 minutes. (makes me feel like a mommy cat.) The other, beautiful gray tuxedo alley cat, started coming in in winter about 2020, & migrated to our bed last winter. Now comes in at night and sleeps with us through the winter, always next to me, leaning on me. I'm still kinda scared of him.
Emily Witt actually sounds like a pretty nice person in this passage. She talks about liking it when men do wholesome things! There absolutely is or—maybe this is more accurate—*was* a style of social media misandry that says “you’re all monsters/losers, kill yourselves” and that is not what it sounds like.
If you're in a certain type of mood, kindness can be more painful than nastiness. The kind person has everything together, right, unlike nasty old you, so they must be condescending to you in some way. And since this is men who have some sort of attraction to women, the kindness (or niceness, I guess) stings all the more as they're being mommed instead of admired. Maybe this is obvious, I don't know!
I assume that if you're in the Andrew Tate zone, you are socially entangled with wanting women, whatever your private desires may be. But you're right, resenting a kind but detached tone is for everyone.
I think DT is commenting less on the content of the EW passage than the tone, which reminds me of circa 2015 twitter misandry. But ok I am still annoyed with EW for not matching with me on feeld so I may not be impartial here.
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.
my four year old read this book review in a british newspaper and now he's going to commit voter fraud for donald trump ): he told me I had "longhoused" him through the practice of "bedtime"… I tried to explain that actually I had "longhoused" him by kidnapping him from his parents and raising him in isolation as a social experiment but he wouldn't listen
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.
I totally agree with your point about age, which would not be helped even by my tongue-in-cheek WPA proposal. In general I think we've undervalued the social world enabled by weak ties and widely known past-times, like playing cards, or checkers, or whatever. Most of us don't do well at socializing that is just pure person-to-person interaction—you need some shared thing. (And then you have stuff that is something that is neither a weak tie nor family / religion, like the Rotary Club, etc…)
It's a totally unrelated thing but I thought about this a lot after I got Boswell. You cannot just go up and cold talk to people on the street, it's weird and it will alarm them, but… you can totally go up to somebody and talk to them about their dog. I had so many casual conversations with different kinds of people after I got Boswell and was walking him around the neighborhood.
There’s something special about the casualness and serendipity of those loose ties, as much as I do love “pure” talk-for-hours time with the people I’m closest with. And agreed on dogs facilitating it! A dog recently wanted to say hi to me,* and her owner gave me a treat to give? Amazing stranger interaction
* maybe made eye contact with the dog to encourage this situation
when I was a kid I had a whole "pick up artist" routine to allow me to pet dogs, where I would say "what a beautiful dog!" and then "is he a ___?" and then "can I pet him [or her if the owner had corrected me]" lol
This is why I can’t get mad at the bar crawl apps, even though they annoy me. Probably why people smoke again as well. That being said, two things that get a lot of hate on this app (writing classes and attending readings) are where I’ve made about half my friends in the last five years. I know people roll their eyes when you say this, but being in the same room with people is very nice!
i turned 76 last Tuesday. So did Bruce Springsteen. In my mythical world that gives me 100 times more manhood than andrew tate, whoever the hell he is. I also remember how amazed i was discovering that contemporary philosophy had "uncovered the possibility" that we are not one, we are multitudes, wowzers, who knew? and then contemporary philosophy split into a buncha 'social sciences' that helped us understand that we couldn't possibly be 'me' unless we was also, always already 'us'. So now, my friends, we're down to brass tacks, and the predators say we're a predatory species all the way, and the libidinally intelligent people are "hey, now."
as far as predator / prey goes, I like to think people are like bears… sure every now and then you get an off one who eats a camper but mostly bears like to sit in the sun and eat berries, catch fish, climb up trees…
i think of my two cats (my study of real predators 'all the way down'): one is our house cat, small, but a killer of course, yet several times a day she curls up in a fetal position in my arms, goes limp and purrs for 10-15 minutes. (makes me feel like a mommy cat.) The other, beautiful gray tuxedo alley cat, started coming in in winter about 2020, & migrated to our bed last winter. Now comes in at night and sleeps with us through the winter, always next to me, leaning on me. I'm still kinda scared of him.
Emily Witt actually sounds like a pretty nice person in this passage. She talks about liking it when men do wholesome things! There absolutely is or—maybe this is more accurate—*was* a style of social media misandry that says “you’re all monsters/losers, kill yourselves” and that is not what it sounds like.
It's true and we disagree about that (as you know through long arguments), but yes, I don't think it's what she's doing.
I've actually never been clear *what* our disagreement is about that, but yes
If you're in a certain type of mood, kindness can be more painful than nastiness. The kind person has everything together, right, unlike nasty old you, so they must be condescending to you in some way. And since this is men who have some sort of attraction to women, the kindness (or niceness, I guess) stings all the more as they're being mommed instead of admired. Maybe this is obvious, I don't know!
I don't know that the men are really all straight tbh. Not every Speaker For The Male is. Resenting mom is open to all sexual orientations!
I assume that if you're in the Andrew Tate zone, you are socially entangled with wanting women, whatever your private desires may be. But you're right, resenting a kind but detached tone is for everyone.
well and either way it's definitely mostly straight guys so i'm being annoying lol
I think DT is commenting less on the content of the EW passage than the tone, which reminds me of circa 2015 twitter misandry. But ok I am still annoyed with EW for not matching with me on feeld so I may not be impartial here.
you are truly the marco polo of the apps
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.
my four year old read this book review in a british newspaper and now he's going to commit voter fraud for donald trump ): he told me I had "longhoused" him through the practice of "bedtime"… I tried to explain that actually I had "longhoused" him by kidnapping him from his parents and raising him in isolation as a social experiment but he wouldn't listen
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.
I totally agree with your point about age, which would not be helped even by my tongue-in-cheek WPA proposal. In general I think we've undervalued the social world enabled by weak ties and widely known past-times, like playing cards, or checkers, or whatever. Most of us don't do well at socializing that is just pure person-to-person interaction—you need some shared thing. (And then you have stuff that is something that is neither a weak tie nor family / religion, like the Rotary Club, etc…)
It's a totally unrelated thing but I thought about this a lot after I got Boswell. You cannot just go up and cold talk to people on the street, it's weird and it will alarm them, but… you can totally go up to somebody and talk to them about their dog. I had so many casual conversations with different kinds of people after I got Boswell and was walking him around the neighborhood.
I was recently thinking, no joke, America needs Freemasonry.
okay what about the Benevolent Elks or whatever they're called. what if we did them instead.
There’s something special about the casualness and serendipity of those loose ties, as much as I do love “pure” talk-for-hours time with the people I’m closest with. And agreed on dogs facilitating it! A dog recently wanted to say hi to me,* and her owner gave me a treat to give? Amazing stranger interaction
* maybe made eye contact with the dog to encourage this situation
when I was a kid I had a whole "pick up artist" routine to allow me to pet dogs, where I would say "what a beautiful dog!" and then "is he a ___?" and then "can I pet him [or her if the owner had corrected me]" lol
This is why I can’t get mad at the bar crawl apps, even though they annoy me. Probably why people smoke again as well. That being said, two things that get a lot of hate on this app (writing classes and attending readings) are where I’ve made about half my friends in the last five years. I know people roll their eyes when you say this, but being in the same room with people is very nice!