Capitalism makes women of us all

thoughts on the manosphere, and on a few other things

Hello all. I have a new personal “website” that I had a lot of fun putting together … check it out!!!! New playlist stuff in there, some fun facts, a housing request, etc… a website can be anything. Maybe one day I’ll put up personal ads from readers on there??

Today’s post is really three posts: some thoughts on Louis Theroux’s new manosphere documentary, then on an essay I supposedly wrote called “The Case for the Bimbo”, and then on my strange, uncomfortable feelings about Brandy Melville’s new-ish brand for adults.

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1. The manosphere’s forced feminization

I watched Louis Theroux’s new manosphere doc, and found it troubling if unsurprising (the doc is pretty good, but if you’ve been tapped in at all to the workings of the manosphere over the last few years I don’t think a ton of new ground is broken). I found it unsatisfying in a few ways, many of them effectively covered in this Twitter thread by Drew Daniel, but it’s quite effective in its portrayal of the contrast between these men’s “high-agency” personas — their insistence that true manliness is breaking free of “the matrix” and doing whatever you want, whenever you want — and their total submission to the demands of the algorithm. One influencer, in an effort to maintain a polygamous playboy persona on-camera, pretends he doesn’t know how many children he has (he has two daughters, he seems to really care for them, and he lives with them and their mother); another is forced to uncomfortably flesh out, in front of his girlfriend, his claim that he will one day keep multiple wives (its made obvious that this was likely never going to come to fruition, and his girlfriend eventually breaks up with him, leaving him with zero wives). HSTikkyTokky, a 23-year-old steamer who is arguably the focal point of the doc, is made visibly uncomfortable by Theroux’s presence and repeatedly tries to shake his cameras or end filming, only to call him back again and again when he realizes Theroux’s presence on his streams gives him a numbers-bump.

This is interesting. Despite their constant claims to agency and self-determination, each of these manosphere influencers appear to spend each day denying their desires to desperately chase the approval of an algorithm — one that rewards a type of hyper-exaggerated masculine caricature so bizarre and unintuitive that embodying it often seems to make even them vaguely uncomfortable. One gets the impression of a group of lesser mages cutting their palms and sacrificing livestock into the mouth of a volcano, making ritual sacrifices to an Old God in exchange for access to dregs of its corrupting power. They’re the first to admit that everything they have — money, influence, clout — is conditional; if they stopped performing, they’d lose it. The black magic would choose another host.

I don’t mean to imply, as many are depressingly wont to do, that the real problem with manosphere-culture is that it takes men away from the Good, True Fulfillment of traditional nuclear marriage. Like the political moderates who hate Trump because he’s vulgar instead of because he’s evil, many critics of the manosphere seem to wish we could replace its garish, hyper-visible misogynist violence with the privatized white-picket patriarchy of yesteryear. This isn’t a compelling idea to me (obviously), but what I find interesting is that many manosphere influencers seem to essentially wish for the same thing, or something like it: some want to privately enjoy the fruits of an extremely traditional misogyny (having essentially one “wife” that they exploit for her emotional and physical labour while cheating on her, degrading her, and abusing her) while promoting to their followers an accelerated, mutated misogyny that’s too ever-shifting and unsustainable for even them to actually fully embody — because it is optimized not for the individual man, or even just for the benefit of a broader patriarchal-capitalist society, but for the needs and wants of the algorithm. They are performing their lives according to the strictures and desires of something more powerful than them in the hopes of gaining some watered-down reward, shaping even their private selves to accommodate its never-ending demands, turning themselves into entertainment-objects to support the traffic of capital. In other words, the relationship they have with the algorithm is a bit like the relationship they would like all women to have with them: a hive of submissive servants, vacating themselves of individuality and autonomy to better fulfill the desires of their dominator, dosed sporadically with rewards to keep them on the line. Replaceable, interchangeable. Empty holes.¹

This condition is obviously not unique to the manosphere (capitalism, as many have playfully or seriously argued from almost every side of the political spectrum, makes women of us all). Whenever incels or men’s rights influencers or whatever else comes up, many are even quick to argue that women should foster total empathy for the ways that violent men have suffered under the thumb of modern society; in fact, women’s supposed lack of empathy is often cited as the reason men end up wanting to kill and rape us in the first place (OOPS! MY BAD!). As frustrating as I find this demand, the honest truth is that I sometimes find myself feeling an almost overwhelming empathy for awful men. I cried at several scenes of the documentary, grieving for these men who were once children, who have been so alienated from themselves and others by systems of power that they’ve cut themselves off from a real chance at a good life, a connected and embodied life. Empathy isn’t the problem, I don’t think. The problem is that the demand for empathy, explicitly or not, is often more specifically the demand that we have more empathy for those men than for the women they’d like to see dead or barred from public life. Women are lonely, alienated, financially insecure, traumatized, and disempowered too; in fact, it is those women who are usually most likely to be victimized by lonely, alienated, financially insecure, traumatized, and otherwise disempowered men. I think often about a line Andrea Dworkin wrote about the great male writers: “I will not live my life as if they are real and I am not.” I feel so sad for these men sometimes it could kill me, but I will not live as though they are real and I am not.

I imagine that the more powerless the manosphere-men feel in the face of the algorithm’s ever-shifting demands — the more time they must spend pandering to the needs of disembodied strangers in order to make enough money to maintain the semi-fictionalized lifestyle on which their “real” life depends — the more they need to reify their battered masculinity with violence, woman-hate, anti-semitism, and racism. The cycle continues, creating both reason and reward for them to become more extreme, more angry, more vicious, more conspiratorial. These men are monsters who have made themselves monsters on purpose: they have chosen at every turn to sacrifice their innate humanity in exchange for money, attention, and power, to pledge total fealty to death and domination. There is blood on their hands and almost nothing human left in them, and the tragedy of their loss — the fact that they will never feel real love, safety, or belonging — does not hold much weight to me anymore. Women have died because of the culture they serve; women have probably died as a direct result of the posts that have filled these men’s bank accounts. Some of the men that listen to their podcasts have almost certainly been emboldened by their rhetoric to slam their girlfriend’s head against the kitchen countertop, to force her into unwanted sex, to crush her windpipe until she blacks out. That the men of the manosphere are so patently ridiculous — their bulging, ill-proportioned bodies stuffed into too-tight suits, faces twitching and comically red, sucking on prop cigars like children in an elementary school production of Guys and Dolls — can almost distract, I think, from the full weight of the fact that they believe women are cattle. It shouldn’t.

related reading: Clavicular, the radical submissive by John Paul Brammer / Females by Andrea Long Chu

2. “THE CASE FOR THE BIMBO”

I recently stumbled across² a piece of writing that contains the following quote from my viral essay “The Case for the Bimbo.”

The trouble, of course, is that I have never written an essay called “The Case for the Bimbo” (a fact which hopefully should surprise no one). In fact, no one has ever written an essay called “The Case for the Bimbo”: “The Case for the Bimbo” does not exist, nor has that sentence been written anywhere but in quotation marks in the post.