we’re talking about the manosphere the wrong way

main characters in the Internet's history. Bear with me. The Manisphere, I know, and I'm not sure what troubles me more the fact that some people listening like me have known this term for years, or that people remain blissfully unaware

have to know what it is now. The manisphere, in short, is a loosely connected media environment that consists of podcasts, YouTube channels, TikTok accounts, and a shitload of intersection therein that promote at bare minimum misogynistic but often transphobic, homophobic, and racist ideals as well. It's white supremacy leading with misogyny,

but it's not that simple. Many of the shows and personalities we'll be talking about in this series began that way, and others became that way, And even so this is to varying degrees. There are believe it or not podcasts very successfully marketed to young men that will casually drop that women shouldn't be able to vote. This is a tweet from the Fresh and Fit podcast.

white supremacist, boldly fascistic people on their platforms. Joe Rogan, as many have pointed out, hosted and endorsed My boy Bernard Sanders back in twenty twenty, but just a few weeks ago, he was shouted out by the founder of UFC Ultimate Fighting Championship, Dana White, during a Trump acceptance speech.

have helped. Podcasts are a very parasocial medium where it's easy to sell people ideology over time, after establishing a trusted relationship with your listeners. Please buy my book Raw Dog. The conversation here is not a simple one, and I am probably not going to get everything right because this requires taking a look at the history of American misogynist spaces, and while women and transfolks have never reached parody, this is sliding backwards significantly even in the last few years.

In the month since the twenty twenty four election, young women on college campuses are already reporting higher rates of emboldened comments from men their age, inspired by comments like Nick fuent as, is your body my choice? In the same token, I don't want to participate in a moral panic by implying that all young men are under this umbrella. That's not true. But the fact that you young men are feeling more comfortable and are being more actively encouraged

to be openly misogynistic is pretty undeniable. But recently I have seen overwhelmingly unproductive conversations that scapegoat this space as the problem and not what it is, in my opinion, which is a symptom of a larger issue. So in our first installment, I'm going to give you a short overview of what we're even talking about when we say man is is fear mainly because my mom listens to this show and she drives to work, and I'm aiming to have her and you have a better understanding of it.

It's vast. It's hard to categorize. It's overrun with deflective, ironic humor that distances the salesman of this ideology from what they're actually saying. And today I'll tell you a little about it and speak to a journalist who's been

studying it much longer than I have. But before we start, I want to share where I am feeling at the top of this series, because I think that a lot of what is lacking from what I've seen in these conversations, mostly those led by men, is a lack of personal experience. And I'll cite my sources here. I get why the manisphere is a simple target here, but I want to start by saying that understanding and if possible, working to

dismantle this space would not solve the larger issue. It's not a bad instinct, and I don't want anyone to feel silly, because I get why the question is asked. But if there's anything I've learned from having participated in and carefully observed the last decade of feminist action, identifying the problem and pushing people out of our spaces is

a step in a much larger, more complicated process. If you want to get to the meat of this episode, skip ahead about ten minutes, but I want to start by kind of couching how I'm going to approach this topic using my own experience first, So if you'd like to stay, be warned that I will brief discussing sexual abuse here. Three two be in play, A little fart noise one great where postfart. It's the trigger zone as

it pertains to the manisphere. The more I dug into this world and its increasing influence, the more I genuinely fear that, on top of the policies that this space encourages, rolling back already insufficient and hateful policies towards trans people, fucking row being gone. The list goes on, I worry

about how these conversations are still centering on men. So the first thing is I worry about the targets of these men, once again not being asked to interrogate the way that they're perceived and treated, because that was my experience. I was in college in the early twenty tens when I was repeatedly sexually assaulted, and while that was a million years ago in internet terms, it is quite historically recent.

And I do think that with the sheer density of the last decade and the discombobulation of COVID lockdown era. A lot of us sometimes failed to see how much has changed in Western culture in the last decade, which is why it sometimes confuses people when I tell them that when a partner repeatedly assaulted me just a little over a decade ago, I didn't have the tools to understand what was happening and internalized all of it as

my fault. Tale as old as time, and the reasons why are more complicated than I realized at the time. Keeping as simple, the city I grew up in did not have a lot of sex education, basically none. In my case. It wasn't because the state I lived in

was draconian about abstinence only education. I'm from a firmly blue state, but rather because where I'm from was lower middle class to poor and was generally underfunded, whose status as a majority non white city in the Great State of mack Wahlberg often led to to our schools getting fucked over big time. When I got to my fancy little arts college, I knew very little about sex and

specifically consent. Really just my own experience and what I'd learned from watching TV and movies I'd been with my high school boyfriend for years who was very respectful and loving, and part way through college, I joined a comedy group. I had pretty intense social anxiety then and now and didn't want to go to the welcome party for the group when I got in, but a guy in the group told me that I had to in order to join, so I went. I was one of three girls in

a group of around twelve. I didn't make my drinks that whole night, and then hours later I woke up on a couch being assaulted by whoever was behind me. I didn't even know who I was scared. I had just woken up, and I just let it happen, because once I realized I was being violated, my first thought

was how could I let this happen? And as it was happening, I tried to focus and think of one of four men that it could have been behind me and what to do when I turned around and saw who it was, and I clearly remember thinking who would I be least upset to learn was doing this to me? And I feel comfortable sharing that I have a therapist. The point is this was twenty twelve, and I did

not know that this was assault. I spent that whole weekend placating my assaulter once I learned who it was, thinking I was this horrible slut who had cheated on my high school boyfriend, and I ended the relationship of over three years out of shame. And to his credit, he was the only person in my life to tell me that he didn't think that I had done anything wrong, but I was so convinced that I had. I had no anecdotal proof that I hadn't, including conversations with friends

and family. So when my assaulter got in touch and asked if I wanted to start dating him, I thought I had to because I had made this horrific transgression and I had to make it right. And I was afraid that if I didn't agree to date him, I would be sort of ostracized within this comedy group, something I had worked to be a part of for years, and I really didn't want to lose that. So hopefully this dynamic sounds fucking nuts now, but I want to

repeat at this time, I had a support system. I had peers and adults I could and did go to about this issue, most of whom were other women. And what was scary was that most of them, particularly older figures at the school and in my family, also did not understand that this was assault and that I hadn't

done anything wrong. And to this day I don't know to what degree my assaulter had been educated or conditioned to blow past a no, whether it was a case of he knew better and didn't care, or that he was operating on what he had seen and observed in media, I might never know. So again, this is in the twenty tens, and I would end up in this relationship that had begun with sexual assault for about three years.

You will probably not be surprised to hear this was not the last assault that took place, and that the instance of assault that finally made me realize what was happening would come months later and was far more straightforward. I said no, and it happened anyways. And while it took a long time to extract myself from this relationship fully, hopefully you know it often takes people in abusive relationships a lot of time to leave for all these different reasons.

I can tell you the exact moment I began to realize that what was happening to me wasn't right. This was within a few months of my first assault, when a fellow student at my college, which began to speak out against the school's failure to address her own campus's assault. The mid twenty tens had become this inflection point for

discussing the widespread rape culture on college campuses. Big examples were a Yale fraternity that both George Bush's had previously been members of, was suspended for five years because of the rampant allegations of rape, and the brock Turner case caused a lot of debate and clarification that campus rape was not less of an offense than any other. And even today it still feels a little embarrassing to admit.

But it wasn't until I read stories and accounts that were similar to mine that it was a wake up call that this had happened to me too. I didn't think of myself as someone who had experienced assault because I hadn't seen anything that had happened to me characterized as that. My understanding of rape was that it couldn't happen by someone you knew, and that it couldn't happen while you were drunk. I really just did not know and not to be callous, but I couldn't have been

assaulted at a more annoying time. I think twenty thirteen was a year that people were really waking up to this issue, specifically with college students, and you know, if this guy had waited another year to do one of the worst things that's ever happened to me, I think that the conversation and my experience might be a little different. But he didn't, so it wasn't. I went to a school counselor at Emerson College and they said, sorry, if it happn'ed off campus, they can't help me. And besides,

I had been drinking at this party. I went to people in our comedy group, people my age, and everyone, including other young women, nodded and said they were sorry, but either no one believed me or no one knew what to do. And so by the end of that year, I wasn't just feeling out of my fucking mind and self harming, but I felt like, oh, I guess I was wrong and I need to stay with this person

and make things okay. This is just my experience, but like, being assaulted was horrible, but being surrounded by people I trusted who felt the same way my assaulter did was more painful than anything in retrospect, I don't really know who in my life felt that this was a problem that was worth taking seriously. And while I held anger about it, particularly towards other women, for a long time, I don't know that any of them knew any more than I did about consent or assault, or what we

should expect in terms of autonomy and respect. And if I hadn't encountered stories like that other student on my campus and later seeing Amma sulkowit this mattress performance in twenty fourteen, where they carried the mattress they'd been assaulted on to protest Columbia University's unwillingness to address the assault. I genuinely don't know how long it would have taken me to understand that I wasn't crazy and that what

happened wasn't okay. But again, I was coming from a pretty privileged place, and I still had no information, And the less information you have, the more danger there is in a culture where discussion around rape culture and gender discrimination and subjugating other people's bodies is run by men. I say all this because while I think centering the manisphere as the problem is a mistake. I know that

it is a problem. My big fear here is that while the progress feminists have made in the last decade is characteristically flawed in intersectionality, as it always is, that there could be a teenager right now or in the near future who does not have the information to understand that they have been violated and will internalize it as

a personal failure. I worry about seeing the progress I have seen be replaced with Manisphere grifters who will always get algorithmic preference and be far better funded than their opposition. As things are now, it feels like twenty thirteen all over again, but worse because back then my assault could at least claim to not understand how consent worked and never be educated on it. But now there's people saying, your body, my choice. They understand consent, they just don't

care about it. And I want to do everything in my power to prevent anyone from going through what I did, or even less. What the manisphere in its current state is is a lot of highly monetized, regressive rhetoric that is aiming for young people specifically. I believe that then and now it's the people who have suffered tremendously under patriarchy and white supremacy who are always asked to do the most difficult work in deradicalizing and preventing its spread.

There's many other reasons I want to discuss the manispherer but I share this example to make two points. Points first and foremost that what happened to me was a pretty decisive systemic failure. Neither me nor most of my support system were equipped with information, and every institution from

the college to the Boston fucking Police did nothing. However, the manisphere does come in here and amplified the problem because in the middle of this relationship came gamer Gate, a targeted harassment campaign of women in gaming that the men I was surrounded by, including my assaulter, were decidedly on the wrong side of, and came up a lot.

The way that the manisphere affects people and exacerbates existing problems has only gotten worse in the last decade, and I do feel a certain amount of responsibility to try and have a coherent conversation about it. Because, to get back to the point of this, show boy has this

space generated a lot of main character misogynists. And here we are in a space where our technology increasingly makes it difficult not just to understand where the people who hate us are coming from, but what they're even fucking seeing. So if you're in a similar headspace right now and not sure how to have these conversations, or if you're shaking out of a manisphere fog, that's where I am coming from. That is why I would like to interrogate

and understand these spaces. I do believe that it's important to understand a space in order to protect yourself from it. Okay, so to my listeners who are not men, I can only speak for myself, but I have found it unbelievably frustrating to hear centrist men behind laptops pontificating about actually we had a Joe Rogan on the left, it was Joe Rogan and then call it a day, right. It's so obnoxious, and the churn of like I get it

content just feels like clocking in. My feeling is that men will encourage the target of this abuse, to show these young men bending towards fascism, empathy and grace in order to deradicalize them. And while I do think that would help. It makes me fucking furious. So let's get into how and why the Manisphere exists as it does a little history lesson when we come back. Welcome back to sixteenth minute. You thought I was over sharing when my dad died, baby, And without further ado, here is

a brief history of the Manisphere, sort of. And I'll make a quick note here. So much of how this space is written and talked about is in very gender binary language, so I'm going to do my best to keep the language inclusive, but note that this is often a feature of this line of study. I've asked everyone I've interviewed so far what they consider to be the origins of this space, and I tend to get one

of three answers. Was it backlash to the Me Too movement in twenty seventeen, was it gamer Gate in twenty thirteen, or was it all the way back in the nineteen

seventies before the Internet even existed. Sorry with regret, the Manisphere as we know it today, which ranges from the podcast that Dana White shouted out the night of the election all the way up to really extremist content that says women belong in the home and should no Longer be Allowed to Vote can be traced all the way back to the nineteen seventies, during the second wave feminist

movement in the US. I've actually covered this period of history pretty extensively in a past podcast series of mine called act Cast, where I took a look at how Kathy Guy Swyd's Kathy Comics commented on second and third wave feminist movements through the lens of a middle class, chocolate loving, working white woman. The second wave feminism ran approximately from the sixties during the Civil rights boom until the early nineteen eighties, when Ronald Reagan halted all social

progress and replaced it with wham singles. This period of feminist action was very flawed, but did accomplish quite a bit. While first wave feminism's big win was suffrage, second wave feminism focused on reproductive rights and equity in the workplace, a time that encouraged women to push back on the domestic goddess image of the post war era and to begin their own careers. The Equal Pay Act was introduced in nineteen sixty three.

pushed back on specific issues. The National Organization for Women and Eramerica focused on passing the Equal Rights Amendment, which we were never able to do, by the way, and the National Women's Political Caucus, whose ranks included Shirley Chisholm, focused on getting pro women candidates in office across political parties. And wouldn't you know it, there were a number of men marching alongside second wave feminists or men's rights. Stay with me, this was actually a pretty good thing at

the time. The original men's liberation movement was not a crusade against women, but rather a challenge of what the expectations of masculinity under capitalism were. They argued something that is categorically true that men suffer under patriarchy, and that with the shifting politics of the time, a hyper masculine John Wayne persona wasn't a realistic expectation of a man,

not that it ever was. If women were being confined to the home, they argued, than men were being exiled from the home, and this movement had these same intersectional failings as the feminist movement, but were positioned alongside them, not in opposition to them, as we think of the term men's rights now. Something called the California Men's Gathering began in nineteen seventy eight where men could convene and discuss how patriarchy affected them. And these continue to this day.

And I know it sounds weird, but the men's liberation movement was embraced by feminists of the time. By nineteen ninety two, there was an entire book on the subject that, while critical, was generally supportive, called Women Respond to the Men's Movement, a feminist collection. It featured a foreword from Glorious steynem and featured writing from Bell Hooks and Ursula Kay Legwin S.

And from here on out, with all due respect, I'm going to leave the pro feminist men in the rare view, although I love you guys, and I would love to cover the California Men's gathering fellows, please hit me up. The anti feminist men's movement built power throughout the seventies into the early eighties, citing texts like the Inevitability of Patriarchy, Why the biological difference between men and women always produces male domination by writer Stephen Goldberg sounds like a page turner.

And while the anti feminist movement was growing, the feminist movement itself was experiencing setbacks. There is a whole terrific book about the pattern of progressive feminist movements being pushed back in the decade following gains, called Backlash, originally published in nineteen ninety one by Susan Foludi, which illustrates how the first, second, and third waves of feminism were all followed by legislative and cultural backlash. Sound familiar, because that's

what's happening to fourth wave feminism right now. Throughout the eighties, the anti feminist men's movement was empowered by the notion that the cause of men's oppression was not patriarchy but feminism, or to their discontent, was not redefining what masculinity looked like, but rolling back progress to ostensibly put women back in

their places again. Most writing about this defines quote unquote a woman's place as a middle class, straight, white woman's place, but it's important to note that men's rights movements have been popular across racial and economic lines for decades. This mentality was expanded on by characterizing women as entitled, castrating liars, citing figures like Glorius Dynam, Lorena Bobbitt, and Anita Hill as women who wanted nothing more than to destroy and

oppress men without any acknowledgment of their oppression. Here we see the start of a repeating pattern. Instead of men's oppression stemming from the same systems that oppress everyone, we actually live in a matriarchy where women seek attention and power by punishing men, acting as nature programmed them. What becomes clear in the Men's Right space is that there's

no way that women can win with their ideology. If women return to the home as suggested, they are freeloaders, ripping off their husbands, wasting money shopping and going out. If women go to work, they're taking jobs from men and are outside of their own lane. It's impossible to be the right kind of woman for a men's rights activist, it appears, without not just being subservient, but to openly and actively agree with these misogynist views. There is no

call to action other than to roll back progress. To quote a twenty thirteen dissertation from Bethany Coston and Michael Kimmel called white men as the new victims.

be confused with true. These men do feel a lot, but their analysis of the cause of those feelings is decidedly off, especially when we see that the howls of pain have been transformed into rage, and the men's rights movement has become a movement of reappropriating power at all costs, no matter who gets in the way.

though the men's rights communities went along with it. No coincidence that white collar white men are still most likely to have Internet access, and once men's rite activists hit the Internet, they splinter over time into a number of

different factions. These spaces are covered extensively in Laura Bates's twenty twenty book Men Who Hate Women, a difficult but worthy read, and she identifies the following groups as prominent and empowered throughout the twenty tens, particularly during Trump's first administration. So we're not quite at the heyday of Joe Rogan that is making the rounds in the media outlets right now.

This is more of the online forum era. These groups were not small, but they also weren't really talked about in a mainstream way until closer to the mid twenty tens. In Cells Involuntary Celibates, this is a community that believes that women's rights have rendered them virgins and also a

place where pill ideology comes from. Taking the red pill means that seeing feminism has taken everything from you, which either leads to looksmaxing, which is a subt community where men try to make themselves look like a chad or traditionally desirable man, or the other direction, which is more common is black pilling, which is essentially a death cult that states that women will never like or be attracted to you, and therefore your life should be dedicated to

bitterness and vengeance. More in them next week pickup artists. Oh boy, these guys pre date the Internet significantly, but we're certainly very empowered by it. The vibe is very milady with an undertone of violence. These are the oft dunked on men in Fedoras, sure, but they do more than advise nagging women or insulting them to make them feel insecure and quote unquote more likely to sleep with you,

although that's never been my experience. However, on the more extreme end, pickup artists also have a history of explicitly advocating for and perpetuating sexual violence in or one of the many Manisphere groups that are pretty obsessed with how fake they think the rate of sexual assault against women is, framing it more as a way for women to exert power over and punish men with these accusations with PUA's

no means yes is the norm. Plow through resistance is a common phrase that was used in these forums, and, as with most of these groups, the way they talk about women also leans heavily into cruel, racial and cultural stereotypes.

Their seminal texts include the TV show The Pickup Artist, starring now prolifically accused of user Mystery and his protege Neil Strauss, who published the very successful book The Game, claiming to be a journalist who had infiltrated the space while he had demonstrably been a part of it for some time. Because all pickup artists they're cowards, he backpedaled on this ideology over time after profiting from it to the tune of millions of dollars. The Neil Straus journey

is a deeply frustrating one. I'm talking about starting here. This is a clip where he's attempting to seduce Jessica Alba on Jimmy Kimmel.

of seduction. One technique is called neegging. He writes, quote, the purpose of a nig is to lower a woman's self esteem while actively displaying a lack of interest in her, by telling her she has lipstick on her teeth, for example, or offering her a piece of gum after she speaks. Ten years later, Strauss is out with the Truth and Uncomfortable book about relationships. He opens up about cheating Monogaby and how he changed. Good morning, Neil Strauss.

women altogether. Migtao also subscribes to their own pill ideology, ranging from rejecting long term relationships with women to dropping out of society altogether. At their most extreme, their community is driven by a fear of women, often being convinced that women are hoping and trying to accuse you of rape in order to ruin your life. This group actually can be traced back to the eighties, with their predecessors primarily identifying as the Deep Masculine movement. Sounds pretty straight

to me. And finally there's MRAs men's rights advocates, And in the ultimate example of taking a real life problem that deserves examination and turning it into a campaign against women, there is a faction of men's rights activists that call themselves Father's rights activists, another community that predates the Internet that calls attention to the systemic tendency to give mother's custody of children over fathers, regardless of if it's in

the children's best interest, which is a valid concern, but this group believes this can only be addressed by removing the rights of mothers, and that these tendencies are proof positive that we live in a matriarchy, and MRAs have generally had the best luck breaking through to the mainstream because of their ostensibly more political mission, But make no mistake, the underlying beliefs are the same, be serious, and there

are more subcommunities where that came from. As this continued to grow online, we get a whole crop of media influencers, either appearing organically or pivoting from other areas like academia and right wing radio to create subcommunities like sigmas, and we'll be talking about them in the next episode. But as far as the first run of Online Misogynists, these were your guys Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, Julian Blanc, who gave way to today's Andrew Tates, and the Fresh and

Fit podcast hosts. The tricky thing here is that within these communities there isn't much unity, in spite of the fact that they have a common interest in taking women down a peg. Pickup artists aim to have transactional sex with women and find in cells pathetic black pilled guys, resent hypersexual men and looks maaxers, particularly if they have had sex with women before. I'm not encouraging these communities

to unionize. I fear the power they could accrue. But as a passive observer, it's pretty fucking reds to watch all these men who agree on one scary thing continued to bully each other in order to define a sense of community. And for a long time these communities were considered to be a niche until they weren't. I and a lot of people first became aware of this space

around twenty fourteen. This is around the time of My personal Ordeal, the stretch of years that brought in an intense culture war over campus assault, the brock Turner case, the Amisolkowitz performance, and on and on. The first reason for this, as I mentioned earlier, was gamer Gate, the biggest public feminist backlash in years, which grew to a year long fear mongering and harassment campaign that targeted women in the gaming community of how women were presented in games,

which was and is a very male dominated space. The primary targets of this hate were women who developed video games or prominent feminist media critic and past guest of my other show, The Bechel Cast, that same creator who my college boyfriend so despised, Anita Sarkisian. During these campaigns, anonymous users organized on right wing sites like four chan

and Reddit, before these spaces were more carefully regulated. The second example that empowered and made these communities more well known was the mass murder at Ala Vista by twenty two year old Elliott Roger in twenty fourteen. You probably know this story, at least in the abstract. Roger murdered six people and injured fourteen, including two young women, at

a sorority house. But as Laura Bates points out in Men Who Hate Women, while Roger's crime was widely reported, it mainly accomplished, starting yet another mental illness discourse, largely ignoring the misogynist manifesto that Roger left behind, leaving it as a footnote. The media didn't seem to know what to do with it, and certainly did and seemed to understand who he had left this manifesto behind. For Roger was an active member of in cell groups he'd left

it behind. For Inceelts, what Roger's manifesto, which would be cited by many other mass shooters in the years to come, should have been treated as was a harbinger that misogynists online spaces had become quite literally lethal. But if you recall this time, that conversation didn't really happen in spite of a trending Twitter hashtag hashtag yes all women and

a few articles. We are socially trained and the media reflects more empathy for white and white passing men, and so the conversation shifted to this young man needed mental health care as opposed to focusing on why he had committed the crime in the first place. Again, we are always centering white men in these conversations, bringing my blood

pressure down. Laura Bay's tracks Roger's legacy carefully in her book, noting that at every turn mainstream media outlets would mention the misogynist's creed that Roger had left behind, but never went so far as to prescribe it as a problem that extended beyond one mentally ill young man. It was treated as an isolated incident, a bad apple, certainly not

the kind of thing that would inspire future crimes. As we now know, this was not true and was a call to action for many, while not acknowledged in most media outlets, to take a closer look at what spaces Roger's violent, hateful beliefs had calcified inside of. And all this happened over ten years ago. Now, there's a lot to talk about in terms of how this space has developed in the last decade. First, I wanted to talk to a woman. Please let me talk to a woman.

When we come back, I speak with an expert on the ever expanding manisphere, researcher Becca Lewis. Welcome back to sixteenth Minute. My blood pressure is skyrocketing, and my first interview in this series comes to me by way of fellow Cool Zone media host Molly Konger of Weird Little Guys. Becca Lewis is a Stanford postdoc who researches the politics of Silicon Valley and the tech world, and she's been looking at the development of the manisphere for nearly a decade.

So as a point of entry, I think it's important to not just here an expert on the subject, but you know, not a guy. Here's our talk.

disinformation and fake news and all of that. And now, I you know, it seems clear that the manosphere and podcasts in particular are going to.

even when I started looking at this. I mean, in the late twenty tens, Paudiepie was like the biggest YouTuber and there were all of these things about it, I mean, particularly with race and anti semitism, but with gender too. I don't want to suggest like it was completely fringe before, but I think as you've had kind of like the influencer ification of everything, that you really have had this

particular style of misogyny and antifeminism just becoming ubiquitous. I've been thinking a lot about Gamergaate because it was ten years ago this August, I think is when it started. It was, I think, like such a breakthrough moment when online misogyny did kind of, you know, spill through into YouTube, into all of these different spaces and gained legitimacy and

popularity and visibility in ways it didn't have before. You know, it's very strange to me that for the longest time, when I would talk to like very online young people, gamer Gate would be like the reference point, and now when I bring it up to my students, they've never heard of it.

like concepts of masculinity. They weren't the alpha men, and so they already had this sense of like aggrievement that they weren't getting like the respect around masculinity that maybe they deserved. And so then to have these feminist commentators come in and start to critique the politics the gender politics of their video games, that kind.

for what you're experiencing. And then in terms of the tactics, I mean a lot of it is just like good old fashioned social networking that you know, gamer Gate started as the gamer driven thing, but then you had these these men's rights activists who were ideologues. They were explicitly in communities devoted to countering feminism and you know, trying

to change legal structures and stuff. And they swept in and saw this as an opportunity to spread their ideas and so they began doing social networking with gamers and so you had these kind of loose alliances getting formed.

became national news stories. And so you can see the role of like influence and fame also playing a role, because instantly certain things with skyrocket to visibility that just wouldn't have before. You have all of these different genres of online content, you know, gaming, comedy, any number of things, and these are genres where it's like politics isn't necessarily the first and foremost thing that people are focused on, but.

And there were a lot of YouTubers who were like open white and male supremacists at the time, and then there were a lot of people who would collaborate with them and who would dabble in those ideas, but they would never outright align themselves that way. And ultimately that proved to be the smarter strategy because the open white supremacists and male supremacists mostly got kicked off of the platform.

kind of not think about potential harms that happen. And you know, like, at what point are you interrogating someone's views? At what points are you just giving a megaphone for them? You know, draw the boundaries between that, and that I think is not something that Rogan or some of the other guys like him have any incentive to think about.

are going to go away. Like I do think that that's one thing that's maybe like when we look at the reaction to the election and everyone being like, oh my god, there's this whole world of podcasts, Like I do think that might be part of the reason there's this sense of like donning horror around it because podcasts are not always driven by algorithm. For a really long time, there was this sense of like, the algorithms are the problem.

They are radicalizing young men on YouTube in particular, and they are drawing them down into rabbit holes of far right content.

of now is this like influencer economy. You know, that's been like the past fifteen years. It has grown from essentially nothing into like this massive, massive entertainment ecosystem, and so the profit incentive is there. There's a certain genre of creator who has marketed themselves as like a provocateur, and so for them, certainly like saying the quiet part out loud is the whole shtick and kind of like

I will go there when other people won't. You know, I would say that that's like Andrew Tait, right, Like he he thrives on open misogyny and like saying the things that are like as shocking as possible, and he has made a massive career out of that.

media is getting consumed. First of all, it can end up making it seem like somehow older generations have not also been dealing with misogyny, right, And then also I think, yeah, it can really create these kind of moral panics that ironically end up reinforcing certain like conservative ideals of like we must keep the children safe and the way that you do that is kind of by like reinscribing traditional family norms and.

got more conservative? Why are we? I mean, and I think it is alarming us when it's young people, because you're like, is this going to be forever? But everybody got more conservative? And specifically white people got more conservative.

has been a massive collapse of local news. Local news used to be one of the primary sources that people got like information for their voting habits, like their vivic needs, all of these things. And you know, within the past couple of decades you have had these massive conglomerates coming in buying up local news, gutting the newsrooms and selling

them off. When you don't have those actual kind of public interest informed news sources, people I think very reasonably start to distrust a media that's focused on kind of horse race celebrity based coverage that often is driven by sensationalism.

facts are kind of downstream from that. Like I've seen I've seen a genre of like tweet a response in the later weeks of this election of like, well, we really have to be paying more attention to men and the male loneliness epidemic and all these things, and it can be easy for it to like fall into like we need to be coddling men more. Essentially, this isn't going to be solved just by taking like individual action

against like bad eggs or whatever. Like, we need to think about what are like how do you institutions or like education systems or information systems start to create this set like belief that men can and should be doing this in the first place.

of fun, here's pickup artists. Cringe all right, see you next week.