This isn’t the result of conscious, intentional political change. It is a side effect of unraveling of industrial era institutions and a sort of natural regrouping around institutions already dominated by women.
Conversation
Don’t expect all guys to retreat sullenly to video games, flirt with radicalization and mass shooting fantasies, or be able to participate in the last great patriarchal show: securitization and financialization of everything. The majority will attempt entryism by masculinization.
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“Bro” anything is entryist masculinization of a traditionally feminine activity.
Growth hacking = bro-marketing/PR was an early example.
1% genuinely different male approach, 9% rebranding, 90% survival desperation energy showing up in a placid place.
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The essential femininity of “bro” behaviors hit me forcefully when I caught a random episode of the Bachelorette a few years ago. I was racking my brains trying to tag the dynamics and then it hit me: the word I was looking for was “catty”. The guys were competing like girls.
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I was thinking recently of Virginia Woolf’s line that to write “a woman must have money and a room of her own”.
Increasingly true for men. The era of big-dick-energy male novelists writing 800 page tomes in nice wood-paneled studies while being waited on by women is over.
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There’s also an asymmetry emerging. Trad masculinity strikes me as 90% silly reactionary larping (think EDC and tacticool subcultures, MRA/MGTOW, wilderness survivslism etc). But trad femininity is not trad at all, but a refactored old stock that aligns with ascendant forces.
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If gendered subcultures were stocks, I would:
1. Short trad masculinity (it will self-destruct)
2. Go long trad femininity
3. Stay away from woke stocks like LGBTQ beyond a de minimis longshot exposure (volatile/temperamental like crypto)
4. Unwind industrial role bets slowly
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Replying to
By "trad femininity" you're talking Medieval (at the very least) or pre-modern, not Victorian, correct?
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No I’m talking 2019 sense of “trad” which is a reconstructed notion that draws from several historic tropes as well as modern internet enabled life habits. Google/search “tradwife” for both unironic and ironic versions. and others might have good links.
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Yeah, I'm familiar with it both in the white-nationalist and Quiverfull sense, but based on my readings this peaked about 2005ish. It's why the use of 'trad-femininity' rings so odd to me.
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AFAICT it really only took off in the 10s. You must be referring to an earlier chapter. Much of the current iteration appears to be underground on social media (secret/private groups and slacks) rather than high-public-profile things.
Ah. I spent 2009-2015 outside of the North American bubble and I'm finding myself with gaps in what was a much more comprehensive sense for this. Just went back over my feeds here and there's a lot of dead wood.
Always good (if terrifying) to find gaps in ones map of the world.

