The only people who benefit from people at the bottom fighting each other are those at the top
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I recently showed my only-reasonably-online sister a TikTok poking fun at the “manosphere” and she asked me to explain the joke. Then Dell Cameron tweeted about the Proud Boys, a self-described “western male chauvinist” organization whose members have been charged with domestic terrorism.
Founded ostensibly as a movement to empower American men to step into leadership in their homes and communities, the Proud Boys have devolved into mostly getting drunk and threatening and harassing women and ethnic minorities under the misguided assumption that they, and not rampant corporatism, are why native-born men are struggling.
I think it’s worth pointing out that native-born white men in the United States aren’t in a great way right now, and haven’t been for a while. As always, women and native-born non-white men have it worse across every measurable dimension. But we never believed we were entitled to a life we now find ourselves unable to achieve due to forces largely outside of our control.
NEET is an acronym used by economists and people who spend all day on Twitter. It stands for "Not in Education, Employment, or Training."
Starting in the 1970s, when labor productivity and average wages started to decouple for the first time in American history, the percentage of men in their prime working years who are “NILFs,” or not in labor force (and not looking for work) has exploded and continues to climb.
Even pre-pandemic, fully ten percent of men in the prime of their lives were NEETs. They’re more likely to be native-born, as immigrant men have higher average labor force participation rates. A 2017 study by Alan Krueger showed almost half of NILF men reported daily use of some form of pain medication.
This relates to the Proud Boys and manosphere more generally because, as MEL writer Miles Klee put it, “The NEET hub lies in perilous proximity to misogynist elements of the manosphere.”
There really was a time when being a native-born white man all-but-guaranteed a living wage in the US. Your average native-born white man could expect a stable job that could afford him a decent home and enable him to financially support a wife and children.
That time has passed. Not only are large swaths of men out of the workforce entirely, but average wages for the bottom half of earners have stagnated since the 1970s while the cost of basic needs like housing, education, and healthcare have risen dramatically.
These men are sexless and angry. Sexlessness in the US is on the rise, most especially among young men.
A 2019 study showed that nearly one third of men between 18 and 24 reported no sexual activity in the past year and that sexual activity declined significantly among men and women ages 25 to 34 years old. Adults ages 35 to 44 did not see a decline in that period. And of course NEET men are more likely than others to not be having sex.
Gavin McGinnis, who founded the Proud Boys, is a vocal proponent of NoFap. Despite claims by McGinnis and the manosphere, there’s no evidence porn use is a factor, since porn users have more sex on average then abstainers.
Tressie McMillan Cottom explained on the Ezra Klein podcast what happens when native-born white men experience a perceived loss of status:
Klein: There’s almost nothing more destabilizing in politics than a group that the way they are talked about and the way they talk about themselves in terms of merit and status is not recognized by society because it creates a deep sense of unfairness, of shame, of resentment for individuals for whom it happens to. I think it collapses a person’s psyche, oftentimes. But for groups, particularly when it’s a group that is told or actually has power, but then society isn’t treating it like it does or stops treating it like it does, that becomes, as you’re saying, it becomes very violent.
Cottom: How else do you explain people arrested on Jan. 6 who perceived loss of status? And they engaged in — if you think about self-selecting into a conflict with armed police as a dangerous health behavior, that’s one way to think about it. You can quite literally get hurt, right? They elected to go into this risky behavior that could end in loss of life, and for several people did.
That’s about perceived status, and that we haven’t thought concretely enough about how dangerous privileged people will become if they just perceive that they have less privilege, not actual loss of privilege, but they perceive they have less privilege.
Status is necessarily zero-sum. You really do lose some of it when someone else gains.
We’re unlikely to ever go back to when being white, male, and native-born necessarily conferred a large amount of status relative to other groups.
But meaning, purpose, fulfillment, and opportunity are positive-sum. Economic growth is positive-sum. The more each person has of each of those things, generally speaking, the more there is total to go around.
All the empirical evidence indicates bringing women, immigrants, and non-whites into the labor force has driven economic growth. And in a functional economy not captured by incumbents a growing economy benefits all.
I fear the “manosphere” is the tip of the spear in terms of ideas that are gaining widespread acceptance.
A large cohort of angry, aggrieved, native-born white men with time and a small amount of money on their hands are perfect marks for grifters to get rich and famous selling them the lie that marginalized people are to blame for their economic losses. It’s a lie that finds fertile soil in these men’s minds due to decades of right-wing propaganda about “welfare queens,” loose women, the birth control pill, affirmative action, etc. Elites knew they were setting up an economic system that funneled money upwards, and needed scapegoats so no one looked up.
And it’s not just men buying into this lie. There’s a whole movement of aspiring and actual “tradwives” advocating women dropping out of the labor force, stopping immigration, and sometimes even advocating for a white ethnostate for the purpose of restoring native-born white men to their “rightful” place in society and in the home.
I feel for these men and women. I, too, wish the average person in the bottom half of earners could afford to buy a home and start a family on the average salary. I wish the cost of living were such that families could thrive with just one earner. I wish people didn’t have to move away from their extended families for decent-paying jobs or could easily afford to move their extended families to growing cities. I wish the average woman without a college degree could have a reasonable likelihood of finding a husband who could be a breadwinner for their family.
These influencers are certainly onto something. People in the top half of earners tend to at-best ignore the situation and at worst lay the blame for it purely at the feet of those in the bottom half.
I’d like to see more people speaking to the plight of native-born white men and women in an empathetic, fact-based, and useful way.
I’m not saying the current crop of manosphere and manosphere-adjacent influencers are outright lying. But you need to be pretty disconnected from empirical reality to think that economic opportunity is a zero-sum game by default and that women and ethnic minorities entering the labor force is the reason white men can’t catch a break.
There simply is no compelling argument for blaming women and minorities for the losses native-born white men have experienced. Sure, native-born white men are now competing with us for jobs. But there are also more jobs now than at any point in history.
The problem is that most of these new jobs don’t pay what they did for the bottom half, especially relative to the current cost of living. But this is due to policy choices made by and for those at the top. It’s not due to women and minorities.
But right now, a whole bunch of people are making a living telling men that women and minorities are at fault for what’s happened to native-born white men. This message does absolutely nothing to help native-born white men. It instills in them a sense of victimhood, which is in a way correct. But it points them in the entirely wrong direction in terms of perpetrators.
Whatever these people are trying to do, what they’re actually doing is distracting people from looking into and advocating for the kinds of policies that might actually help them achieve meaning, purpose, fulfillment, and economic gain. Organizations like the Proud Boys are motivating people to commit violence against people who are also oppressed, mostly by the same structures.
I don’t know what their endgame is. But I do know this. The only people who benefit from people at the bottom fighting each other are those at the top.