The misogyny is for losers
I have written and rewritten this post many, many times over many, many hours. And as my babies know, I’m much more of a stream-of-consciousness girlie. Re-reading for typos before publishing is a fairly recent development for me.
I can’t marshall all the evidence I’ve found and arrange it all in a readable, sense-making way. So I’m just going to say some stuff I’ve been thinking and feeling and then maybe puke out some sources and facts below.
At the end of the day, I think the GOP is going hard on the misogyny right now to target young, lonely men in rural areas who are single, childless, and don’t have college degrees.
I think these men are losers with bleak prospects. I think they’re angry at women and immigrants and queers and DEI. I think they would be scared, or at least they would admit they were scared, if masculinity norms allowed men to feel fear. But anxiety and fear are feminine while rage and resentment are masculine.
These men are safer, better fed, and more comfortable than any generation of men at any place in any time through human history. And that is precisely the problem. Because they are being raised in a culture of the Protestant Work Ethic and the self-made man. They are taught that men don’t have any intrinsic value. They learn from a young age that their self-worth comes from what they can provide to others. They believe they must be needed and valuable in order to deserve to take up space.
But they’re not necessary. They’re not valuable. They’re not working. And no one depends on them or ever will.
They have everything they could ever want or need except anything that might give their lives meaning.
And so they rage. They look to the manosphere. They look to the GOP. They look to strongmen dictators abroad. They discover Catholicism. They tweet about no-fault divorce.
This is good, actually. Their fathers just killed themselves. Their grandfathers just drank and beat their wives.
I don’t necessarily think the Democratic Party needs to win over young losery men to win elections. Some of these men will stop being losers, and start voting Democratic. I suspect that most of these men will stop voting. That’s what tends to happen to low-status, low-resource people in a country where one party has gone to great lengths to make voting inordinately difficult. A lot of them will die young. The rest will run through the energy of anger and eventually succumb to despair and apathy.
I want the Democratic Party to win over young losery men because it’s the right thing to do. We should not pander to their base instincts, like the GOP. We should start by showing them how much we care about them. I want the Democrats to show young, losery men that they have value outside of what they can provide to others. The whole fucking point of DEI is that every human being has intrinsic value – based solely on the fact of their being alive and human.
Probably we don’t call them young, losery men. I’m not writing this for them. I’m writing this for you. Actually, to be real, I’m writing this for me.
I have so so so much to say about all of this. But I’m going to end this here for now. I guess I’ll leave with an ask. How can we show young, losery men that they have intrinsic value?
How can we show young, losery men that they have intrinsic value? Easy. We don't. Just look at the messaging that got women to conform to patriarchy. Sure, there was SOME 'there's value in staying at home, making husband happy makes you happy.....' but it was mostly just 'do it because you don't have any other choices'. That simple. Marry because that's the only path to securing resources, because men are hording it. Do what your husband wants or he hits you. And then women mostly did the work of convincing themselves they liked their lot. So, yeah, guys are losing their status in society right now because society is valuing and paying more feminine coded skills better than traditionally masculine ones. That trend is just going to increase. And women won't need to market to men why they need to get in line, the economy will do that for them. Men must choose to take on a more active parenting and domestic role, or get dumped. Younger boys will look at the men who take on more domestic and empathetic roles having better lives than men who live alone in the woods and gripe and younger boys will have better behaviors modeled to them. Right now, in this transitional period, there will be people who cannot evolve and are upset about that, but that was true in every generation since the beginning of humanity. Some men struggled to transition to the industrialized economy in the 1800s. Some struggled to integrate back into society post the World Wars. Some people will always wash out. There's only so much catering to those we should do, and in general it's simply not good policy to making 'aligning with the losers' a policy concern.
Women are over half of the US voting population. And over half the world. As modern tech and science gets better, the status of women globally will continue to improve. I don't think women need to focus on winning over loser men. We can out vote them, and they can evolve or expire. The thing I'm more interested in is how to deprogram the women who are still so male centered they will vote against their own interests and rights. The Handmaids. Those I think can be swayed through a conscious effort, those women are the more obviously illogical. Women need to adjust to the new world order of their increasing dominance, and a big part of it is spending less time thinking, 'but what do men want?'. That's subordinate's thinking. 'What do women want?' was mostly treated as a punchline in men's circles for hundreds of years. Because men in power knew they didn't need to persuade women, they could compel women. So I say the same to women now. Stop acting like you need to persuade men. Stop thinking you need to make an emotional appeal. To care about their pain. Stop being a bleeding heart for men who absolutely were not that for women's issues. Just continue to succeed, let the men who are butthurt about that be butthurt, and the chips will fall where they may.
Isn’t there a shortage of pilots,air traffic control controllers, electricians, plumbers truck drivers and construction workers , based on that alone, and the fact that those jobs pay 80 to 120k. I think Democrats would be better off selling that, than victimhood. Even Black Males are starting to reject victimhood even though there the main demographic that would appeal to.