For many years now, a dark question has haunted parents, teachers, the internet, and media institutions: What’s wrong with young men?
Why, people ask, are boys so politically extreme, spouting misogynist rhetoric, and increasingly drawn into risky crypto schemes and online gambling? How did they become so lonely, with their depression symptoms often overlooked? The male youth vote broke for Trump in the 2024 election following a GOP campaign built on naked appeals to meathead machismo. Yet there are signs that his second term in office has done little to stem the anger of Gen Z men, whose support for the president is now plummeting.
The most common explanation of these interrelated phenomena is that younger men have banded together online under the umbrella of something known as the “manosphere,” usually conceived as an organic right-wing rebellion driving the culture wars. A new study, however, suggests that this is entirely backward: The digital ecosystem that produces red-pilled men is less of a movement than it is a pyramid scheme.
For a treat, look up Gamergate. Hint, it predated the Alt-Right movement while pioneering many of those same techniques that lead to Donald Trump’s election in the USA (I also note that many of these identical techniques are used by tankies here on the Threadiverse too, like whataboutism and didoing).
There is nothing new under the sun - only pre-existing concepts that cycle up and down in popularity. That said, the rise of an anonymous internet that has platformed these types of “alternative” thinking processes has emboldened trolling behaviors and helped it cross over into the mainstream and even bring it forth from hidden chatrooms into irl - e.g. voting in election polls, based on a concept such as bOtH sIdEs SaMe.
lol no. No that movement did not predate the manosphere. At all. What so ever.
I… never said that it did. In fact I think you misunderstand and have things swapped: Gamergate is much closer to representing the “manosphere” (which people say dates back to perhaps the 70s with the “pickup artist” content - although obviously toxic masculinity goes back to probably prior to the emergence of homo sapiens) than the Alt-Right movement, which itself began to supplant the prior Tea Party fiscal conservative movement in the USA (examples: Ted Cruz, Newt Gingrich), in contrast to the old guard Republicans (Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham) before that. So while populism is as old as democratic style systems (and in the more general sense significantly older than that concept even), the Alt-Right movement specifically is a relatively new one, emerging only as a result of Donald Trump’s campaign when he won his first term. I remember that iconic line delivered to the news media by Kellyanne Conway where there were “facts” (e.g. names of specific places, or battles that has happened, etc.) and then there were the uh… ah… “alternative facts” that whatever Trump said simply “felt right”.
Stephen Colbert, as a joke, used to call that “Truthiness”, like factually speaking it doesn’t have to be accurate, so long as you “feel it in your gut”. So now everything - what wars we get into, tariffs applied, our entire economy, whether people get vaccinated and other overall health concerns, etc. - are all based on vibe checks, primarily of rural people. Which I suppose is what fueled the manosphere too? Like a guy can’t get a girl to go out with him - maybe he isn’t negging her enough!? Try a hair gel product, or buy whatever other bullshit the angry yelling man suggests, rather than e.g. getting a job for gainful employment and taking a shower.