My anecdotal experience and observations suggest that men are desperately searching for something good within this condition they did not choose. They are craving something innately valuable in their manhood. They, or more to the point, I, have a fear that there is something intrinsic to my masculine nature — the strength it gives me, the drives it bestows on me — that is fundamentally evil. But I don’t want to be evil. I want to be good, and I want to be good as I am, as a man, not as something else. But how can I be good when I am capable of so much harm? I can’t ignore the realities of my male body and mind — realities that make me stronger, faster, more aggressive, and more prone to competition. To be good as something else would be a lie.

via: https://nottoby.substack.com/p/truck-nutz-for-democrats

As above, so below: If you’re afraid of who you are or of criticism, you can end up doing some really stupid stuff to try to prove you’re something you aren’t and don’t need to be. That’s especially true if you start being dishonest with yourself about who you are, and miss information that is really important to avoiding real regrets down the road. This is not easy for the kinds of people who get obsessed with politics to understand, because they are often neurotic control freaks, but people will actually respond more positively to you just being your sometimes off-putting self if you’re willing to work with them—and that’s easier to do when you’re not twisted in pretzels about gender discourse.

I really don’t get politics. For that matter, I’m starting to think no one in my party does.

Kay S. Hymowitz argues that too many men in their 20s are living in a new kind of extended adolescence.

So much amatonormativity, gender essentialism, and “old man yells at cloud.”

Like, there’s definitely a disapproving tone in some parts of this article, but I can’t help but nod and agree.

This analysis applies neatly to the daily lives of secular monks. A feeling of “mundanity” and “diurnality” pervades their existence: The practical conduct of everyday life defines the scope of human existence, with daily affairs, tasks, and projects all shaped by habits. There is no world but this one, no day but today, no self but the one knitted together in this perishable mind-body composite.

Each Calvinist is ascetic inasmuch as he exerts rational, “constant self-control” over himself, so that by means of active supervision, “constant thought,” he can direct his will. His object is the calling, a “mundane occupation” through which he can exercise his will for the sake of God’s glory. He produces fruits, and those fruits might be a sign of God’s favor.

via: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/02/american-loneliness-personality-politics/681091/

I’ve been vaguely aware of femicide for a while, but I did not realize it was this bad. Jesus Christ.

In which I opine on the origins and nature of the growing gender polarisation and sketch a vision of a very grim future, one in which we’ll have to choose between The Longhouse and The Gooncave

via: https://www.writingruxandrabio.com/p/female-neediness-is-real-but-its

In which I discuss the greater female need for commitment, the absurdity of anti-freedom “solutions” to it (coming from reactionary feminists)

Life sucks, I guess. Yet more evidence I’m glad I’m aromantic.

Hooking up: sexual liberation or unethical exploitation? With the rise of dating apps, sexual gratification seems like a few taps (or swipes) away at any given moment. What implications does this have for sexual ethics around consent, fantasy, and using other people merely for pleasure? In this episode, Ellie and David dive into the history, theory, and criticisms of hookup culture. Is there a way to hook up ethically? Some argue that the power imbalances fundamental to hooking up prevent it from ever being on equal grounds, yet others claim that the shift to hooking up generates potential for queer exploration and for sexual discretion in ways that were previously unavailable. Let’s find out!

Nine thousand, five hundred and seventy-six pages of everyday sexism.

NetEase went whole hog with Cap’s new Marvel Rivals swimsuit skin.

EQUALITY!!!

This essay argues that feminism is impossible. After examining a recent #MeToo episode—a bad sexual encounter between actor Aziz Ansari and a woman named Grace—as a case study in feminist disappointment, the essay turns to several key seventies feminist texts to reconstruct their theories of bad sex. By taking bad sex as the model for women’s oppression, seventies feminists crafted a culturalist theory of patriarchy logically culminating in lesbian separatism. This theory, while containing the essence of all feminisms, proved unactionable: feminism could not outlaw women’s stubborn desires for men. Hence, by the eighties, some feminists had reframed bad sex as rape, calling upon the state to police sex in lieu of changing women’s minds.

Friggin’ awesome piece.

via: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmutjUfrpQQ

Are the straights okay? In episode 44 of Overthink, Ellie and David dive into “heteropessimism,” the sense of disillusionment or even shame associated with heterosexuality. From viral TikTok videos to studies showing that women are less dissatisfied than men in heterosexual relationships, post #metoo society is reckoning with the everyday sexism of many relationships. Ellie and David explore the reasons for heteropessimism, consider alternatives such as political lesbianism and boys’ education, and ask: how can we be attracted to things that are bad for us, and how can we break out of a heteropessimistic approach to love?

In this episode of Overthink, Ellie and David conclude their four-part series on intimate relationships with a discussion of polyamory. Many argue that polyamory has liberatory potential as a radical form of relating to others. Some say that polyamory is natural for humans–is this story from evolutionary biology true, and does it matter? Ellie and David discuss these issues and also explain how polyamory encourages us to rethink jealousy through the concept of compersion. The two also touch on the relation between polyamory and colonialism, and gender and racial dynamics in understanding poly identities!

previous: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tsaa821kWQ8

One that actually brings men and women together.

Featuring Louise Perry.

I was surprised to find myself nodding along with pretty much everything the host and guest said. They were both cooking. So many good quotes to chew on in here.

One criticism I have of the more individualistic feminist position is that if you think that rape is a product of propaganda, shall we say, consent workshops are no match for pornography. Just think of the hundreds of hours that a typical teenage boy might be exposed to pornography, compared with 30 minutes of a consent workshop. I mean, there’s no match. / Just on that basis, we’re at a disadvantage, and Dworkin and MacKinnon’s position on banning pornography makes a lot more sense.

It’s perfectly normal and natural for people to have mostly homosocial kinds of friendships and to say vulgar or unkind things in private. But now, of course, the internet blasts this out into the public domain. I think that is part of the problem.

Hannah Montana? Capitalism? Video Essay?

Sometimes, you watch a video and really do end up asking yourself: “is there more to life?”

The dynamics of this are straightforward: when a man is not ravenous for female approval, he relaxes and stops contorting himself into shapes designed for the approval of others (which girls hate, ironically), and a natural consequence is a significant step-change in attractiveness. “Confidence” is the casual shorthand for this phenomenon.

People seem to be more willing to listen to advice if it’s provided with a bit of gender flavor. It’s easier to buy that what you’re doing doesn’t work if you can attribute your failure to the Fundamentally Alien And Incomprehensible Nature Of Men/Women. But that doesn’t mean that men and women are fundamentally different—even if the advice works. Sometimes all of you guys are neurotic.

Many people will tell you this, about being queer, but you will fuck up your own life until you believe it, so here’s one more repetition: Believing the meanest thing about yourself also requires you to believe the meanest possible thing about the people who love you. You cannot be good for even one other queer person if you are still doing hate crimes to yourself.

But there is another man in that scene, and he is also losing something — not by choice, not for the sake of some grand principle, but because his boyfriend cares less about his feelings than he does about some abstract idea of Righteousness. Being kind to the people who love you is also righteous, and William is resolutely failing to do it. He’s so steeped in his particular suffering that he can’t see the pain he’ll cause.

Regarding the feminist concept of sexual objectification, Bauer explains that it was coined as part of a feminist shift in how to understand the world and one’s experience in it. According to the shift in question, in a context in which women experience widespread, systematic, diachronic, and structural disadvantages, certain ways of perceiving and representing women tend to cause them material and psychological harm. Bauer argues that once someone participates in this shift, the term ‘sexual objectification’ will ‘light up’ the relevant phenomena, and the person in question will see objectification everywhere she looks in contemporary culture. This is the case even if she is not in a position to specify exactly its marks and features.

Finally, I have read my first SEP entry in full. This reading has definitely strengthened my understanding of common positions, but no real illumination was had with respect to what to do about this whole thing. Sigh.