Ask Lemmy

It's what uneducated men do when they end up making society so hostile to women that women don't want to date anymore.

A more extreme version of this happened durning the Arab Spring.

Because people in the far left attack masculinity as toxic. This is blowback.

Hasn't this always been the case? Men flocking to an idolized image of masculinity with a sense of superiority over women?

Weak fathers, in the sense that the recent generations have been abandoned and ignored a lot more. Turns out that is on par with fucking beating your kids. At least the boomers got attention from their fathers.

How to deal with women and sexuality from a young male perspective is practically impossible in modern society without a good role model for how to approach the reality of certain issues revolving the truth that men and women are equal and at the same time the young males have much more strength, while the girls have other ways of being mean, that are perceived as being not regulated as harshly, and that's glossing over so many other significant biological differences. The conflicting messages feels unfair to them, loneliness in this as well as a lack of belonging will more often than not become unbearable if they don't find guidance.

That's my view of the issue at least. It is redicilously easy to grift these young men, that yearns for answers surrounding sexuality and relationship with the other sex (to be clear, for hetero young males that are developing or adults with stunted development) that anyone can learn the cultures' accumulated trigger words and key issues that appeal to their supposed inner private pain, can be predated with little effort. They don't care or know it's shared with so many boys and adults, that a grifter can basically trawl bountifully for men that feel this way, and once you have "vibe" by appealing to these, you can then elevate yourself to an iron man role model by lying that you get women often by being in a certain way. (Not surprisingly, the mindset is flawlessly unsuccessful with women.)

The absolute truth is that all women like different kinds of men just as men like different women, and to be anything but you leads to extreme stress and in this case potentially wasting years or decades on some testosterone fever dream that never existed. The allure for a man or boy in this state can become so strong that, not unlike with traditional "pick up artists" and other forms of grifting, conspiracies and cults, it just does not matter that most know it is a lie, or if people submit evidence to that end. It's because these people do not connect with the young male and provide lasting guidance to replace their fears, which are very hard to uncover because of the vulnerability issues (more on this later).

If I could say something to these young or adult men suffering I would say, imagine you did succeed to become an "alpha", hustle your ass off and become rich and get women. If they can imagine it, they must realise that at that point, you will be utterly sad. Worn, tired, bored, and the women, every single one you "caught" don't like you. You will have no friends. Nobody enjoys your company for who you are, but for a formula sold to you as a male peak. The pinnacle of self realisation and real relationships can only come with being you, including flaws and therefore accentuating your strengths. Real strengths. Strength that is effortless. The real peak is becoming more you, and severely fuck the rest. The girls (but this also holds for all relationships, however their attachment model may not be ready yet) that like what you are, no matter anything else in the universe, will love you for it almost no matter what, because you didn't sell a lie to them. This wonderfully includes people that aren't attracted or even those that don't enjoy the things you do.

And this means; be vulnerable. That is why all grifters focus on stigmatizing and burying any vulnerability in everyone around them, even belittling honesty. It's partially a defence mechanism for most, but a few actively protect the communities by making sure this is simultaneously frowned upon, but also met with respect, so that none of the initiates see through the lies in the surrogate father system and realise the complete farce that they are subjected to. For adults that have matured sufficiently (and therefore also most young women) these role models in incel, red pill and alpha cultures are instantly recognised as people with deep insecurities and ridiculed. That is an easily deflected commentary by appealing to jealousy. It comes naturally because jealousy is the hook for the entire grift and the irony in this case is almost guaranteed to fall on deaf ears. These role model grifters that are elevated in the social hierarchy of these communities are usually men that have elected to not mature past this barrier, mainly because of how painful it is, and can therefore sell this scam even for free and proliferation of these ideas strengthen the bond between those caught in the more specific mind traps that flourish in these spaces.

For the people that mature in the role, often they separate immediately, or become ostritized for their ideas. For the few but continuously revolving grifters themselves, if they don't leave at a big moment of realisation, it is certain to become very tiring to keep the mask on for work, and they are eventually exposed as betas or similar "them" keyword, and ejected for something they let slip or that was gleaned. Most of the communities are held up in a cycle of new initiates and old mentors, while a few grifters make their livelyhood on it. It has a high rate of rejects and new initiates that makes it a hydra for anyone looking to slay these ideas.

Once our society emerge with more accurate labels for these types of grifts (such as "red pill" "incel" and others), we coin vocabulary terms useful to more accurately describe and identify the phenomenon in conjunction with the concepts themselves and hopefully it leads to (as can be seen with the explosive growth and decline of "pick up artists") the concurrent amount of trapped boys decrease over time before we can see it settle as a sub community of less importance. In earnest I don't see it going away completely but linger and flare up periodically with new mutations of the same age old "pick up artist" young male loneliness appeal, since it is a inherent to teenage and young men loaded with testosterone and for many that also never found guidance even as adults. Yet it may with time get called out for what it is and met with compassion to finally remove it from main culture where I think many agree it have overstayed its welcome.

With education, it can be eradicated just like many many other forms of gifting. Social awareness on both general and individual levels should also be of deep benefit to the men that find themselves without belonging and holding very confusing and burdensome feelings and thoughts. If we can connect and empathise with them we can give them more genuine advice that stays with them their entire lives. The inherent tough nut with this type of rite of passage for young men is that compassion and forgiveness is both not appealing and also not exactly the first thing most feel when confronted with an insecure alpha male clocking their feathers. It becomes a self feeding loop as they are very similar to each other in this experience, especially for people that has lacking relationships with their male role models or with the other sex or peers.

It is identifiable by the traits that are the same with the mentor figures in red pill communities, acting tough, closing off relationships, hustling and adhering to early first century standards for social hierarchy. These traits are apparently for some reason inherently more attractive to adopt to a developing individual that has elevated testosterone, and when the individual choice is between asking for guidance and meet their pain and fear vs binging red pill content on YouTube and bonding with similarly outcast lost boys on discord.

The path of least resistance wins out when this category of developing man meets the need for belonging and thirst for relationship advice that resonates with their specific trials and questions which, at that point is honestly quite disturbing to most adults. I hope this message can find someone that needs it, hope you are doing great and looking forward to the future. Cheers

How do people learn how to parent teenagers these days?

Another possible reason may be online dating.

https://youtu.be/x3lypVnJ0HM

Most people use online dating. Average looking men have very low chances to get a match because of : The much lower number of women on these platforms compared to men; which leads to the logical consequence of men lowering standards to increase their chances of getting a match; which of course leads to women being more selective causing a feedback loop that compounds on itself. So only the highly attractive men get a lot of likes and this leads to them being promiscuous which makes women think all men are assholes. And because finding a date is easy for women it's also very easy to ghost men for the smallest things.

And this whole system is also propped up by the Match group which owns all major dating apps in order to squeeze out as much as they can out of desperate people, basically monetizing loneliness.

When you swipe and swipe for months and only get one date and get ghosted right after, you start to devalue yourself, what other explanation can there be except that as a man you are horrible. And you spiral into depression and blame yourself (when in fact the whole system is wrong and is bad for both men and women).

Then suddenly comes a macho man who tells you that women are the problem, that it's not you (and that they also have courses to sell that will make you finally get women), of course you're gonna believe him, finally a way out of depression. A wrong way, a shitty way, but a way nonetheless.

These people are hurt and are acting out in the wrong way, leading to more hurting. And people like Andrew Tate are getting rich off of it.

PS: A long time ago OkCupid had you answering between 20 and a few hundreds of questions, plus answers you'd expect from your potential partner, plus how important that question is for you; and then it would show you a list of matched in order of compatibility. It was amazing. (but it got bought out by Match and turned into a tinder clone).

Because it's all too easy to abdicate responsibility, let other people look after you and be a shit. If we empower any sort of crappy behaviour, that behaviour grows.

Some backward guys can't cope with women thinking for themselves, and long for the "good old times" when a wife 100% depended on her husband.

Any idiot promising to bring those "good old times" back will find interested listeners among this crowd.

If I were female, I would run for the hill if I noticed someone with interest in Tate's fairy tales.

I think the answer is obvious: Tate tells them "you're awesome". No one else is doing that. People seek validation.

A lot of young men frustrated with the lack of community, the fleeting chance of making good money, buying a home, etc. are looking for something/someone to blame. Misogyny and xenophobia are easy escape hatches for difficult times.

Part of it is that women have achieved an educational level as a group that allows them to make better choices. They no longer have to choose which is the nicer wife beater in their town.

The incels seem to have a problem with this. The idea of having to compete based upon personality, likability and in general the ability to treat another person as a human being bothers them.

Young men are struggling badly, and almost no one seems to take it seriously. A lot of them want to man up - but the message they get from much of the media is to man down. I saw a Reddit thread asking who young boys could look up to as a role model, and the top answer was Aragorn. You literally have to turn to fictional characters to find someone broadly seen as decent.

They gravitate toward people like Andrew Tate (and Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, Jocko Willink, David Goggins, etc.) because those are some of the only public voices telling them it’s okay to be a man - and to embrace masculine traits - without apology.

Young men have problems in their lives, like everyone else does, maybe less, maybe more than other groups in society but that does not matter because for them it's the most vivid problems. He talks to specifically them and their problems.

I don't know how the media in your country sounds*, but here every time there is an issue discussed it tends to be: women, minorites, whatever have a problem, men are the problem.

If the mainstream does not talk about young men's issues, you will hand over the attention of young men to someone who does.

*In a news article, or a political speech try switching the word man/woman black/white immigrant etc for their opposite. Some of them sound absolutely absurd when you do.

I feel like there's always been a culture of boys and young men who didn't respect women, there's just never been podcasters actively promoting it.

The internet allows idiots to broadcast their message worldwide and social media promotes the most controversial stuff in order to drive engagement and, more recently, to promote a culture war that keeps the populus divided.

From around 2022 until just recently YouTube Shorts was heavily pushing Tate on me (an almost 50 year old man).

No matter how many times I disliked and/or blocked the poster, the YouTube algorithm just kept throwing more Tate at me. I don't know what I did to make YouTube think I'd be interested in that clown.

On the plus side, it made me a lot more aware of what's going on, hence my efforts to get Google out of my life. I can spot someone trying to manipulate me, but I have young sons who might not.

It used to be that women couldn't open their own bank accounts. Depending on how far back you go, they couldn't even own property. In this context, women really needed to get married if they wanted to do anything. For this and many other reasons, the bar was lower, men could get married with less effort. Nowadays women can do anything and the only reason for them to want a man is if they want to, so you actually have to put in effort now.

Also, gender roles are changing and there's no clarity as to what being a man is supposed to mean in 2025. If it's not protecting and providing, if it's not dying in war, then the purpose of men is undefined as of now, and there's a tendency to want to return to the older gender roles.

And late capitalism is stressful, and men aren't going to college as much these days. There's lots of reasons but this is what i can remember in five minutes

Further listening material

I feel like there is also a pathologization of being single. I was a teenager in the late 90s/early 2000s, so before most of social media. I'm also from a village where most people knew each other.

There were a couple of nerdy, shy guys who never had a girlfriend by the time of graduation. I only had one boyfriend at 16 for 2 month before his friend told me he was only dating me as a dare. I was "ugly" and "not a real girl" because I didn't wear makeup and mostly wore jeans and Tshirts. Stupid village kids.

Anyway, similar things happened to the nerdy guys. But no one started crying about all men/women being awful and no one became an incel. Several girls and boys in my class never dated by the time we graduated and that just wasn't a big deal. Nowadays everybody's being told there's something wrong with them if they've never had a partner by age 17.