I feel like I could write a book on these people that would be way better than the book that actually exists, but like, long story short: society absolutely created these people. just not in anything resembling the way they think it did
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In another era these men would have swelled the ranks of middle management at a big company with an unclear business purpose, married an underpaid woman coworker and their biggest crimes would have been, like their parents, bad parenting and casual racism
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Those jobs have now been made redundant, but herein lies the issue: since the things you need in life: purpose, social belonging, etc., have for Americans always been so deeply bound up in work, the purpose for which has been wealth and security, there's no discourse around them
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There's no mistaking: these people have material privilege. What they don't have is any reason to exist, since that's always been so tightly bound up in a path to acquiring material privilege which now no longer exists. I think these men are *actually* miserable
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So what does this have to do with men who become murderers because they can't get laid? Well, that's not actually what's wrong or why they become murderers at all, really. That's the result of a need on their part to explain their own lives using what they have at hand:
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I.e., longstanding cultural myths about masculinity, masculine hierarchy, the role of women as tools in a proxy war for dominance between men. Raised on a diet of Revenge of the Nerds and Neil Strauss' The Game, they've developed a religion around masculinity
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Their idea is this: these social changes that have put them in this position of basically "waste humans," just excess bodies that society doesn't need, haven't happened. What actually happened is they failed to Man hard enough. But they can fix it! Or rather, women can fix them
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Attempts to explain this fall into two camps: 1) these people are just bad privileged men--sort of true! But it really makes this all sound very arbitrary, when it's really the result of a conjunction of quite specific material and cultural factors.
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This often produces the knock-on "men are lashing out because they fear losing their privilege." Not remotely true! There is absolutely no threat to these men's material privilege or comfort, and they really have no social position to lose
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2) Buying into their explanation. This is the Nagle explanation: "these men have been left behind by societies stratified sexual hierarchy." There is no pervasive male sexual hierarchy in society. That's a longstanding cultural myth we have in our society
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That's how you get "if only women had slept with these poor men." Then what? They can't *actually* get the self-respect they need to feel ok from sex. I mean--adults should know this stuff!
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Neil Strauss went on a giant apology tour where he said that the ideas in The Game, that attention from women is a path for men to social standing and ultimately self-respect and confidence, were not only untrue but nearly ruined his life
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I mean, I think what you do with these people is pretty clear. 1) *Take away their ability to organize*, because they are all feeding off each other and this culture just keeps getting worse and worse and worse
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Honestly, it may be almost too late for a lot of these people, because I have read some of the stuff that's come out of these communities and they are *deeply* in the grip of this delusion. But honestly for people who aren't so far gone: they need, like, real therapy
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I think they need to come to understand how distorted their worldview is, the reasons behind why they've been doing this to themselves, and why it is they actually feel unhappy, or they're just going to keep getting worse
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Anyway, there's my "quick" explainer: who these people are, who they *think* they are, and what I think is to be done. Sorry for eating up so much space on the TL!
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End of conversation
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