The manosphere to man, is as feminism to women

[Breadandsticks]

And isn’t that scary! I believe that some of the people (I sadly know females that also carry some of these beliefs) that are deep rooted in the manosphere believe that the beliefs are equivalent to what the feminist movement is for women.

The difference is, feminism is rooted in a genuine need for change for equality for women and girls and includes law changes, system changes, increased support to achieve a level of equity.

Whilst the manosphere is actually about stroking men’s egos. It’s more about the women you date and the cars you buy over actual help and useful life advice.

It doesn’t seem to be about systemic changes for a fairer “male experience” such as encouraging mental health support (which is happening but not as a plea from the movement), or supporting dads to be equal in childcare. Or even helping boys do better at school (on the back of the stat that girls tend to be higher achievers younger).

This might be simplistic (and over said) but it’s scary that such a movement is brainwashing boys and men.

This is interesting but I'm a bit wary of this :

'boys definitely prefer to have a male lead. Also the kind of discourse that takes place around a novel is important. Too much focus on feelings, rathar than on themes and plot structure can be detrimental'

• I get boys preferring to have a male lead but I still think it's important for them to engage with female protagonists. On average women tend to score higher on empathy, and literature can be a powerful tool for building that. It obviously wouldn't work as well if boys haven't already engaged with books enjoyably. That's why it's crucial for boys to learn to enjoy books young and hopefully in a gradual way without academics being forced too early.

School curriculum now do often include quite a few women though. Austen, Brontes, Shelley for classics, then more modern authors like Harper Lee, Atwood, Alice Walker, Andrea Levy, Jeanette Winterson. Plays & poetry also often have female playwrights taught.

Very interesting post : I want to reply more fully, but for now, can I ask about the point about newsreaders 2006-2011? Obviously it depended on the program, but according to stats women were roughly half of presenters then. https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/53583/html/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

Men still tended to dominated expert commentary slots, and surely there were many prominent male presenters? The Dimbleby brothers, Paxman, Andrew Marr, John Humphrys, Fergal Keane, Huw Edwards...

Some, most certainly. The female teachers that can command respect by being very strict and by holding blundaries gain more respect.

I think most schools are still using the same old books that they have been using for many years; often very dated - certainly when it comes to contemporary young people's fiction, and then old predictables such as 'Of Mice and Men' and 'A Christmas Carol' for example.

I think girls will look for emotional connections and an ability to empathise with a character more so than boys - even if the book is generally boring.

Most teachers are not particularly academic and I would say that quite a few female English teachers are also overly 'Mumsy'.

Sorry, not detailed responses, I'm too tired and may have another go tomorrow.

I agree. I think that can hold for girls too, though maybe not quite in the same way. Both my grandmother and my mother (who went to single sex schools) have memories of teachers who couldn't keep order and got tormented by otherwise fairly well-behaved girls.

That gives me a memory of the bit in Anne of Avonlea where Anne loses her temper with the dreadfully behaved Anthony Pye and whips him. She's heartbroken to have whipped someone when she swore she wouldn't, but Anthony ends up now loyal to her because her whipping was 'just as good as a man's'!

Thanks for the encouraging words.
There was a transition to so many newsreaders especially on the BBC being young female Asian. Maybe more 2010-2015. It really felt like a thing, either positive discrimination or some other editorial PR decision.
Likely was at the tail end of my terse persona. Certainly the Kardashians thing used to push my buttons, but looking back, they along with Big Brother and the dumbed down reality TV revolution was probably what irritated me the most.
I'm thinking the female aspect was less peaking to me than the "WTF have this lot done to deserve all this visibility, and money?"
To lighten the mood, my other bugbear back then was...Deal Or No Deal with Noel Edmonds, lol. Yes, I was a strange boy back then.
2005-2015 was such an interesting period culturally, the hyper aggressiveness we see today, but the culture war was only in its infancy.
I don't think I was aware of TRA as late as 2015.
And pre Brexit, Trump, and the worst effects of the Great Awokening.

Thank you, I'm also tired and will reply more later, but that's given me some stuff to think over... I agree re girls more easily connecting with a text, even if boring.

I'm not fully sure about the 'old, dated books' issue. Part of the program will have to be classics, and by definition those will be old and have often been used before. I get the 'dated' issue but I'm not sure either 'A Christmas Carol' or 'Of Mice and Men' is dated in the sense of 'irrelevant to today's world'. Of course this is subjective...

Prince Harry's 'Spare' might not be the best example (who knows what was true?), but it didn't seem out of this world that he claimed to have enjoyed Of Mice and Men because it was short & George & Lenny reminded him of him & William. I'd imagine it's one of the books that would be at least more likely to connect with boys who are reluctant readers.

Personally, as an avid and advanced reader who was consuming adult novels from the age of eight, I found that the books we had to read at school were mindnumbingly boring to all and sundry. I'm not sure a single child, boy or girl, enjoyed them. If one didn't already enjoy reading, then school assigned reading would likely put them off forever.

I think it's silly to say that school readers are more aimed at girls than boys as well - they always feature male protagonists, and female characters are often only an afterthought, if there at all.

I'm side-eyeing the 'feminine sensibilities' comment too. Are we living in the 1850s?

Regardless, school readers make me think of this quote by Brandon Sanderson:

"Perhaps, even, you have been given books by friends, parents, or teachers, then told that these books are the type you “have to read.” Those books are invariably described as “important” – which, in my experience, pretty much means that they’re boring. (Words like meaningful and thoughtful are other good clues.) If there is a boy in these kinds of books, he will not go on an adventure to fight against Librarians, paper monsters, and one-eyed Dark Oculators.

In fact, the lad will not go on an adventure or fight against anything at all. Instead, his dog will die. Or, in some cases, his mother will die. If it’s a really meaningful book, both his dog and his mother will die. (Apparently, most writers have something against dogs and mothers.)"

I stopped teaching in 2010, though my daughter is now teaching. She is using some of the same books I was using 20 years ago...modern youth oriented books such as 'Holes' by Louis Sachar, 'Skellig' by David Almond and 'The Boy in The Striped Pyjamas' by John Boyne. Most schols don't have, or certainly don't prioritise,the budget to buy new class readers every year and most sets have been used for decades and are often in poor condition to boot....sometimes pupils have to share a book.(' Of Mice and Men' is now sometimes considered too sensitive because of its use of graphic racism etc )

'A Christmans Carol' is still widely used because that is the classic book the school has a full set of, and in schools with established schemes of work there may well be lesson plans to accompany it. But these days a whole novel is very infrequently ever read and there is a tendency to use just extracts - in order to focus on certain 'text level skills'.

This goes for Shakespeare too. Never the whole play, and in some schools i've seen film versions used instead. Many teachers are not particularly confortable with Shakespeare themselves, nor with poetry.......and this obviously impacts the way they are taught.

Also regarding teacahing styles and methods - there was certainly an emphahsis on embedding the practices of sharing, turn taking and group work - with collaborative group work often being the 'go to' method of teaching. Personally, I didn't particularly enjoy this ( not in fashion when I was at school - certainly not at secondary level, anyway) and I suspect it doesn't suit all types of children, though it may tend to suit girls better, more generally ( I can't be certain, at this point I'm just intuiting based on impressions).

I don't think girls are necessarily any better at English than boys - generally speaking. I taught A-level in a mixed sex grammar school and there were as many boys as girls in the class, and the stand out student for me, was a boy. They were all very bright and engaged, but he stood out for his otriginality and verbal and mental dexterity. Our main whole contemporary novel reader was 'Bird Song' by Sebastian Faulks ( a love story set against the reality of the trenches during the first world war)

Sorry, still intuiting rather than disecting specifics. I've been out of schools for almost 16 years now - though still keep in touch via my daughter. Boys are generally different to girls, though, in the way they process information and the things they focus on.

'A Christmas Carol' is still widely used because that is the classic book the school has a full set of, and in schools with established schemes of work

It’s on the GCSE syllabus.

Well either we need to pay teachers significantly more to attract more men into the profession, or accept that boys aren’t very bright and set them all to unskilled manual labour while girls learn academics and run the world.

That’s my contribution to help make feminism more equivalent of the manosphere.

"WTF have this lot done to deserve all this visibility, and money?"

This is the core of it.
Men suffer under a post-industrial capitalist system because so few men have any kind of social status. There is only so much room at the top.

Capitalism and the modern workplace affects men and women differently, but I think we often overlook how brutal it is for men.

And because it is not discussed and not understood, when a low-paid divorced man with no career prospects ends up in a crappy bedsit or studio flat, he blames women, not the capitalist system that has effectively discarded him.

Oh, I'd have said this if the Kardashians were a bunch of no talent pretty boy brothers. But there's no doubt that 2005-2015 period of increasingly coarse and aggressive wall to wall reality TV/pure media generated multi millionaires/AND the increasing visibility of women, was quite a brew if you were at all manosphere-minded, as I was.

People suffer under a post-industrial capitalist system. There's not any more room at the top for women.

But men are more hierarchical in the way they see the world. They need it in a way that women don't.
A lot of women don't want to achieve in a public social hierarchy in the same way, their social hierarchies mostly relate to status in extended family.
Women have public status as mothers. Men's status as fathers is nowhere near as socially prominent.

When men worked in male-dominated industries many decades ago (factories, docks, car-making, mines, ship-building, etc) there was a clear hierarchy - foremen, shift leaders, etc. and an informal one whereby old-timers with high skills were acknowledged and respected and socially deferred to.

I think it is an evolved trait, related to the way hunting bands and war bands in tribal society need hierarchy and roles and rules to be successful.

There is definitely something in modern society that is missing for men.

To get back to the original question, I think you have to define 'manosphere' a bit more clearly before you can compare it to feminism. And perhaps be clearer about which bit of 'feminism' you are talking about - I assume the political feminism of the second wave (1960s and 1970s) but that should be specified.

I'm just not sure what the desire for hierarchy has to do with actual suffering.

Not only that, but in your previous post you said, "Men suffer under a post-industrial capitalist system because so few men have any kind of social status. There is only so much room at the top."

I disagree with your first statement (more men than women have high social status and real power imo), but also your second sentence seems to contradict what you say about men being disgruntled they don't have hierarchical structures, as most men would (of course) be at the bottom.

I'm just not sure what the desire for hierarchy has to do with actual suffering.
Because if you need status in a hierarchy and don't have it, that causes mental suffering

I disagree with your first statement (more men than women have high social status and real power imo)
But even more men don't have any public social status - and that matters to them more than it matters to women.
Yes there are more men than women at the top, but what about all the men nowhere near the top? (This is not 'whataboutery', it is directly relevant to the themes of this thread).

but also your second sentence seems to contradict what you say about men being disgruntled they don't have hierarchical structures, as most men would (of course) be at the bottom.
But there was hierarchy all the way down. Everyone had a place. Men in a dockyard or car factory had hierarchy within their teams and shifts, both formal and informal, related to both skill and age. The young apprentices and school leavers were at the bottom, but that was okay, as it should be.
The older men "socialised" the younger men, put them in their place if they were being arseholes or arrogant twits.

I am a little unclear exactly which words you mean when you say 'your first statement, and 'your second statement' - are you talking about paragraphs or sentences, in just this post or in my previous one? It is easier if you copy and paste what you are referring to.

@EuclidianGeometryFan
Because if you need status in a hierarchy and don't have it, that causes mental suffering

I'm sure that's terrible for the poor men.

But even more men don't have any public social status - and that matters to them more than it matters to women.

But in a hierarchy, most of them would have no social status either! They'd mostly be firmly at the bottom, so how would that be helpful? And where is the evidence that it matters more to men? Women seem to place more importance on establishing social hierarchy in wider friend/village groups if you go off stereotypes.

But there was hierarchy all the way down. Everyone had a place.

But how would that help the men who are angry now, that there isn't enough room at the top? Wouldn't they just chafe at their 'place' and think they should be at the top, instead of the bottom? I can't see why they would be happy about that.

The older men "socialised" the younger men, put them in their place if they were being arseholes or arrogant twits.

This sounds a bit like rose-coloured glasses to me - but if indeed they did that, then why did they stop? And I certainly don't think young men now would be happy to be told they're at the bottom of the hierarchy.

First statement: "There is only so much room at the top."

Second statement: "But men are more hierarchical in the way they see the world. They need it in a way that women don't."

You're saying that men are angry they're not 'at the top' but then you're also saying they need hierarchy...but that would just keep most of them at the bottom...and they're angry they're not at the top. So how would that fix anything?

The problem is if you take the idea about men being happier in hierarchies:

1. All hierarchies have much more people at the top than the bottom
2. Men are unhappy/feel disenfranchised if they are in a hierarchy but not at the top. I would argue that women/people in general are unhappy being at the bottom of the hierarchy too. It sucks to be at the bottom

So most men would be unhappy either way. Either their is no hierarchy for them to be at the top of. Or this is a hierarchy but mostly they aren't at the top. I'd argue the men who are at the top aren't happy either (Elon Musk the richest man in the world doesn't seem like a content person).

We still have a hierarchy today. The ongoing saga of the Epstein files shows there are still some very powerful, very immoral people. Who seem to have used that power to torture girls and quite possibly boys too. As well as to make lots of money for themselves, manipulate politics etc. Aside from the child rape, men and women have every reason to feel angry at the dominance of the system by people who use those networks to maintain their place and keep others down. It's a perfect working model of what classic feminism calls patriarchy. On a smaller scale, there are hierarchies in the workplace etc etc.

The way the problems of hierarchy were mitigated in the past was saying to men at the bottom "at least you are above women". At least that's an interpretation of how patriarchy functions. But if women start to get more rights, then those men at the bottom lose the status they did have. Which is probably difficult but doesn't make it OK to kick women. They aren't the real architects of those men's problems. But it probably does suit the Steve Bannons of this world to direct ire that way and not at the actual system.

It's the problem of Caesar and Anthony. One will tolerate no superior and the other will stomach no equal. So you will always have a clash between people who don't want to be at the bottom of an oppressive hierarchy, and people who have a strong desire to be at the top. You could categorise those groups as women and men but really it's more complicated because not all men are (wannabe) Bill Gates/Elon Musk/Donald Trump. Thank god. At least I hope most men's anger at the Epstein files is not "I wish I had a chance to be like those guy's".

I know you are out of that headspace now. But it's astonishing how fucked up and manipulative it was when you stop and think about it.

On the most basic level, the reason young, pretty women who were prepared to show flesh got so much visibility was largely because men like to look at them so it sells commercials/music videos/magazines. Women watched reality shows about the Kardashians which kept them at the top. But they first rose to fame when that porn video leaked. It wasn't women watching that and making it go viral.

On a more deep level men who do have power (in TV networks, the music industry, bussines) like having young, voiceless, easy to manipulate pretty women around. So they create opportunities using their existing power to do that. Which means a small number of women being pushed centre.

Im not saying some women weren't able to make that work for themselves, and play the game. But below that there was something much much darker going on. Think about Victoria's Secret shows which were a huge deal. It's literally (beautiful, thin, highly sexualised) women with Angel Wings walking down a catwalk. The surface level impression is a celebration of female youth and beauty. BUT the impossible beauty standards they set were criticised for giving young girls (who the brand was ostensibly targeted at) body image issues. And if it seems odd that a brand targeted at young teens was so highly sexualised... It makes sense when you realise that the owner, Lex Werner, was the close personal friend of Jeffrey Epstein for years. Giving him a role at the head of the company and eventually giving him power of attorney over all his business affairs. This was a business that sold underwear to teens and preteens and did so with a hypersexual, big-boobed thin everywhere else ethos. You could make a similar point about Abercrombie and Fitch which celebrated a hyper sexualised male body and whose owners later turned out to be raping the male models.

But if you looked at with a really surface level men's rights analysis the fact some women got to walk down a catwalk wearing angel wings would be proof women/young girls had more rights in society. Or that women were all willing whores. Meanwhile women, and young girls (and probably boys) were being raped and abused and trafficked by the men in that same company.

I wasn't really happy in my relationships with women (got lucky, finally), which might explain a lot, but I'm wondering now if it was more the increasing aggressiveness of that age 2000-2015, and the change to a 24/7 and way more superficial media news entertainment complex, with a much more upfront female image that heightened my reactiveness? I suspect a mixture of everything.
I've had quite a few female family law barristers as clients of mine, and a majority of them feel that many husbands/partners/fathers were given a rough ride during that period, not helped by the secrecy of family courts proceedings.
Yes, I know the retort will be that men don't keep up maintenance payments or act as responsible dads after divorces. But my strong impression from my manosphere period was that many men got a very bad deal.
Tbh, I haven't followed this area at all since the early 2010s, I think that evolved into more of a general dark mood about the escalating female face of the media, culminating in my own personal brain worm, the Kardashians wall to wall exposure 10-15 years ago.
I also threaded this into the infantilsation of our media landscape, Big Brother, reality TV, Russell Brand in our faces, the apex of kiss'n'tell exposes. And hated it all.

@OtterlyAstounding @persephonia

You refer to 'the bottom' and 'the top', as if there were only two (or perhaps a few) rungs to the ladder. But society is not just 'the rich and the rest'.

A quick search tells me the British army has about 19 levels, for example, then within each team at a formal level their will be informal hierarchies, perhaps multi-dimensional taking into account many different qualities and personal characteristics.
I am talking about male society in general being a ladder of 50 or 100 rungs - numbers just made up for illustration. The levels are not clearly defined, hard to describe, very subtle, but there nonetheless.
Perhaps women are generally not aware of how massively status-conscious most men are.

If a man feels he has a status of about 20 out of 100, that is fine because there are still 19 levels below him, and people tend to look down not up, and concern themselves more with the few levels immediately above and below in their daily life, rather than think about level 90 or 99.
Plus age and skill and seniority at work were valued, so over the course of your career (20 or 50 years at the same firm) you naturally moved up, like an inevitable law of nature.
Companies now don't value age and seniority at work.

Maybe part of what is wrong now is that with 24 hour celebrity-driven media, we are all shown far too much of the top rungs, so inevitably feel our low status in comparison. This is worse for men especially if their personal status is not daily displayed and reinforced by social contact away from screens.

So your take is that men need there to be people who are lesser than they are, in order to feel a sense of satisfaction about themselves? That would explain the way they, as a demographic, treat women and children, I suppose...