Every time I see a clip from the podcast whatever I feel like I’m gazing into Hell — a world of joyless spite and attention-seeking. The premise — which I admit was cleverly geared towards online virality — is that a bunch of “red-pilled” male podcasters “debate” a bunch of hopeful young female would-be social media influencers.
I'm happily married. I'm not an incel. I have plenty of female friends at work, I don't hate the gender as a whole.
But I know EXACTLY why there's a growing hatred of women on the right, and I think articles like this are deeply ingenuous. A highly combative, deeply toxic brand of modern progressive feminism Is jammed down our throats on every campus, in every HR department, in every press room, in every classroom, on every tech platform, in every government bill. We can't watch a TV show or a movie without a strong, perfect girl boss ruining yet another IP we used to love. We are not allowed to question its tenets or debate its merits. Masculinity is toxic. The patriarchy is everywhere. Gender is a construct. Women were better hunters than men. They're better scientists than men. They're definitely just as strong as men. They're just BETTER than men, and the sooner men get with the programming that the future is female and step aside, the better.
When I hear fellow conservatives complain about women, they're not complaining about ALL women. They're not complaining about women who won't sleep with them -- they're complaining about AWFLs, the ones that keep showing up in poll after poll as being the most ideologically intolerant, the most inflexible, the most combative. They value safetyism over freedom, they trust experts over their own instincts. They're a specific breed of upper middle class midwit white liberal woman who gained way too many footholds over covid, and has taken over middle management, the HR department, colleges, big tech, all journalism, and the halls of government. She runs everything, she HATES white conservative males, and the feeling is mutual.
RW podcasts should focus on history, philosophy, literature, and above all humor. The moralizing and in-fighting will drive away any and all normal people.
Was bracing for impact on the headline, but yeah, think you're over the target here.
"The irony of the nü-misogynists is that they exhibit the worst traits of a female caricature — being loud, whiny, histrionic and obsessed with surface-level status symbols."
Yeah, exactly. The cringe is real. Frustrated young men deserve less effeminate role models.
On a tangent....I think something that goes a long way towards explaining (No not excusing) the bitterness on both sides of the aisle (radical feminism on the one side and the 'manosphere' on the other) is the huge difference between the sexual fortunes of The More Desired and The Less Desired. This fundamental substratum gets very little attention in journalist discourses on the battle of the sexes.... which are usually framed in crude terms of 'Men' do this and 'Women' do that. I explored this neglected theme in this piece: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/the-less-desired
I’m always struck by how they use the language of business and economics. Men and women alike are either “high value” or “low value”. They compete in a “sexual marketplace”. The goal is to find someone who “adds value to you”, by projecting or selling yourself as high value. The “sexual market” metaphor implies everyone is simultaneously a consumer of others and a producer of oneself as a product on the market. It’s all rubbish of course - dating isn’t a market, there’s no price mechanism, and relationships are not an “exchange”. But I think there’s an interesting story to tell about why so many people (mostly men but by no means exclusively) have started to see relationships through the vocabulary of LinkedIn.
To be right wing is (at least in part) to acknowledge that men and women are fundamentally different. What I think happens is that once you find out this forbidden knowledge, and how hard people (especially left-leaning women) will fight to hide this from the world, you hyper-focus on these differences as a bad thing. I was able to avoid this phase by simply accepting that women are different and for all the ways that this can be frustrating or bad, there are just as many ways in which it's wonderful and good
It’s not necessarily wrong that they shame those women for being superficial and only going after high-status men. But they should also shame those same men for being obsessed with status.
The ultimate problem is the internet feeds on negative affect, and the internet is also where we conduct most of our politics. So by virtue of representing the masculine, negativity gets focused on the feminine in right wing circles. I’m not sure what the solution is.
"But if a feminist claimed to love 6’4” bodybuilders with enormous genitals and a tremendous love for reading Simone de Beauvoir and doing the dishes...."
Feminists only exist because of the state, which is a bunch of 6'4" bodybuildings in costumes with guns and a monopoly on the legal right to use them to transfer wealth from mostly male taxpayers to feminist women. Also feminism was only possible because of mechanical dishwashers (and other mod cons) manufactured by men. Also feminist ideology has always been funded by industrialist men (Rockerfellers etc). Feminism is literally a product of all the things you just listed.
"The nü-misogynists aren’t wrong about the sad state of modern relationships, of course — the dramatic levels of divorce, single parenthood, loneliness et cetera. Their problem is putting all of the responsibility for this onto women."
The men on the show are encouraging female agency and self actualisation, over female self objectification and dependency, which (in our hyper progressive culture) FEELS like placing the burden of responsibility onto women (and it literally is because with agency, comes responsibility). But you are implying this as a negative thing, which implies you think women should remain objectified and dependent on others.
You are essentially accusing them of treating the women as adults, which you call nü-misogyny. When teenagers are treated like adults the extra responsibility that comes with that status also feels like a kind of oppression or hateful act. It's much 'kinder' and 'nicer' to treat teenagers (or women) like children. But this does not allow for self actualisation. If you want these women to experience agency and self actualisation WITHOUT any burden of responsibility you have drifted into the realm of magical thinking and white knighting.
I agree the show (I'd never choose to watch it) is kind of cheesy, cringey and sensationalist (like most forms of entertainment), but the truth is the men are taking on the role that grandmothers (and mothers) used to occupy before society became fractured and woke.
Traditionally it was the 'female elders' (as well as folk tales) who would give young women incredibly stern advice and admonitions to not squander their youth and looks (their high sexual market value) on frivolous relationships (let alone prostitution) because female looks fade fast and it's easy to end up hitting the wall with no prospects and no hope of finding a decent husband to raise a family with. Cue 40+ years alone with bitter regret.
The advice of 'female elders' was always brutally frank, because the 'drug' of being a young hottie is so intoxicating. By contrast the men on Whatever are incredibly mild and forgiving. If they seem harsh (or misogynistic???) it's only because they are men and because you are not used to seeing anyone ever be straight and honest to young attractive women.
"But no one drags men to their computers by their ears and forces them, on the pain of death, to send money to naked women on the Internet. "
100 years of feminism has made it so perilous for men to engage with the opposite sex that many are driven to porn, or online simping, because they literally don't feel safe entering the dating game IRL. One night of drunken regretful sex can so easily lead to a rape accusation and their life is destroyed.
"Yet red-pilled content creators....."
What we call 'red pill' today used to be called 'common sense' or 'wisdom from granny' just a few short generations ago. These guys are not being edgy (the fact that they often present themselves that way just makes them cringey). The advice they give used to be said to young women on the bus, by old ladies in headscarves and sensible shoes.
"But for the most part this is a sad revenge fantasy — an attempt by lonely and embittered people to imagine that the women who reject them will get their comeuppance."
It's a 'revenge fanstasy' which BENEFITS young women who hear the story, understand the moral message, and make sure not to repeat the same story in their own lives. Again, look into the past and you will find most popular stories and fairy tales were about some idiot doing something idiotic and suffering the consequences. These tales were INSTRUCTION MANUALS on how to not fuck up in life.
These tales have have only become absent from society over the last 50 - 100 years and as a result we are suffering an epidemic of single motherhood, broken homes, childless women frantic to get pregnant from a pipette and women hitting the wall and spending a fortune on disguises to try and secure a husband before the window of fertility closes like a stone door in an Indiana Jones movie.
"What these fellows (and, occasionally, females) love to do is find some of the most debauched or manipulative examples of womanhood and imply if not assert that this is a reflection of the whole sex."
Yes. And such frank and self effacing talk is the only way to defeat the ego and the idiot in all of us, and stop us making catastrophic life choices. This is how it's been done for thousands of years. You expose all the glorious faults of men or women, all the patterns of behaviour, all the temptations while sitting around the camp fire. .... so that in real life these things won't be hidden and we can all be better placed to repeating the same mistakes as the people who fucked up before us.
There's no harm caused by highlighting all the games that women play to exploit their looks and manipulate men in the short term, for materialistic gain, ego boost and social status. But there is harm in NOT talking about these things and then letting another generation of young women fall into all those traps and fuck up their lives.
"But the nü-misogynists essentially invert it — we’re not the problem, you’re the problem."
By highlighting all the ways women make problems for themselves (ego, vanity, narcissism, hypergamy, sexual manipulation etc) they are giving women problems that they can solve. That is a fist. That is empowerment.
By contrast take a movement like feminism. Feminists tells women that all their problems are caused by men, which means all the problems are out of women's hands to solve, leaving women feeling utterly powerless and demoralised.
"The pathologies of the modern world afflict men and women, and to portray either sex as exceptionally problematic is to confuse the issue."
There are other shows out there that give men 'red pill' advice and berate men for falling prey to all of their male-specific flaws, foibles and weaknesses. In fact there are far more shows giving that kind of advice to men than to women.
'Whatever' is kind of unique. It only works because it is so mild and because they have a lot of female guests at the table which makes it feel less intimidating. People DO get offended by harsh criticism or hard truths ..... but shielding people from harsh criticism or hard truths will result in DESTROYED LIVES.
What you call nü-misogyny (previously known as 'advice from a grandmother') is by far the lesser of two evils.
I think content like this is an inevitable counter-reaction to all of the man-hating that has become ascendant in the past few years. You can see a similar effect with race, I think a lot of bile expressed towards black people online is specifically driven by the fact that blacks are worshiped with pseudo-religious reverence everywhere else in life. People resent being force-fed lies.
That doesn't mean the content is good or that I approve of it. I don't watch this garbage. But when you combine social media which optimizes for clickbait/shock value with the resentment I described above, this is a predictable result. Hopefully people work it out of their system and then move on. As long as shitlib feminism is ascendant in public life though, this type of stuff is still going to be really popular online.
There are those who wish people of different ethnicities within a country to be divided. This is well-understood by most. Less well-understood is that people seek to divide men and women, too - it's part of creating a eunuch society.
This is not a deliberate conspiracy, but as George Carlin said, you don't need a conspiracy where interests converge. Lonely people who hate everyone are easier for governments to control, easier for corporations to sell useless junk to, easier for ideologues to persuade to their insane ideologies, and so on.
Of course we all have problems but I can personally resonate with the frustration of feeling like ~literally everyone wants to deny that women are particularly prone to manipulation tactics and get away with these tendencies without even a touch of persecution. Such a state almost demands hyper-fixation as your inner world never receives it's affirmation (outside of the dome of those with equally extreme views.) What I enjoy most about these men (and Pearl) is that they make no attempt to hide the pretence that so many of us continue to pretend is irrelevant to the point of non-existence. The answer, from my perspective, is to be more open about our faults rather than shielding them beneath the understanding that we all have issues. Should we (women) ever venture into that level of understanding, the type of man who supports these influencers will find better ways to spend their time. Until such moment, I applaud them for platforming the obvious.
I'm happily married. I'm not an incel. I have plenty of female friends at work, I don't hate the gender as a whole.
But I know EXACTLY why there's a growing hatred of women on the right, and I think articles like this are deeply ingenuous. A highly combative, deeply toxic brand of modern progressive feminism Is jammed down our throats on every campus, in every HR department, in every press room, in every classroom, on every tech platform, in every government bill. We can't watch a TV show or a movie without a strong, perfect girl boss ruining yet another IP we used to love. We are not allowed to question its tenets or debate its merits. Masculinity is toxic. The patriarchy is everywhere. Gender is a construct. Women were better hunters than men. They're better scientists than men. They're definitely just as strong as men. They're just BETTER than men, and the sooner men get with the programming that the future is female and step aside, the better.
When I hear fellow conservatives complain about women, they're not complaining about ALL women. They're not complaining about women who won't sleep with them -- they're complaining about AWFLs, the ones that keep showing up in poll after poll as being the most ideologically intolerant, the most inflexible, the most combative. They value safetyism over freedom, they trust experts over their own instincts. They're a specific breed of upper middle class midwit white liberal woman who gained way too many footholds over covid, and has taken over middle management, the HR department, colleges, big tech, all journalism, and the halls of government. She runs everything, she HATES white conservative males, and the feeling is mutual.
RW podcasts should focus on history, philosophy, literature, and above all humor. The moralizing and in-fighting will drive away any and all normal people.
Was bracing for impact on the headline, but yeah, think you're over the target here.
"The irony of the nü-misogynists is that they exhibit the worst traits of a female caricature — being loud, whiny, histrionic and obsessed with surface-level status symbols."
Yeah, exactly. The cringe is real. Frustrated young men deserve less effeminate role models.
WOULD
" 6’4” bodybuilders with enormous genitals and a tremendous love for reading Simone de Beauvoir and doing the dishes"
On a tangent....I think something that goes a long way towards explaining (No not excusing) the bitterness on both sides of the aisle (radical feminism on the one side and the 'manosphere' on the other) is the huge difference between the sexual fortunes of The More Desired and The Less Desired. This fundamental substratum gets very little attention in journalist discourses on the battle of the sexes.... which are usually framed in crude terms of 'Men' do this and 'Women' do that. I explored this neglected theme in this piece: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/the-less-desired
I’m always struck by how they use the language of business and economics. Men and women alike are either “high value” or “low value”. They compete in a “sexual marketplace”. The goal is to find someone who “adds value to you”, by projecting or selling yourself as high value. The “sexual market” metaphor implies everyone is simultaneously a consumer of others and a producer of oneself as a product on the market. It’s all rubbish of course - dating isn’t a market, there’s no price mechanism, and relationships are not an “exchange”. But I think there’s an interesting story to tell about why so many people (mostly men but by no means exclusively) have started to see relationships through the vocabulary of LinkedIn.
To be right wing is (at least in part) to acknowledge that men and women are fundamentally different. What I think happens is that once you find out this forbidden knowledge, and how hard people (especially left-leaning women) will fight to hide this from the world, you hyper-focus on these differences as a bad thing. I was able to avoid this phase by simply accepting that women are different and for all the ways that this can be frustrating or bad, there are just as many ways in which it's wonderful and good
It’s not necessarily wrong that they shame those women for being superficial and only going after high-status men. But they should also shame those same men for being obsessed with status.
I think what's really weird in their philosophy is the total lack of self reflection. The implicit endorsement of Chad reveals so much.
The ultimate problem is the internet feeds on negative affect, and the internet is also where we conduct most of our politics. So by virtue of representing the masculine, negativity gets focused on the feminine in right wing circles. I’m not sure what the solution is.
"But if a feminist claimed to love 6’4” bodybuilders with enormous genitals and a tremendous love for reading Simone de Beauvoir and doing the dishes...."
Feminists only exist because of the state, which is a bunch of 6'4" bodybuildings in costumes with guns and a monopoly on the legal right to use them to transfer wealth from mostly male taxpayers to feminist women. Also feminism was only possible because of mechanical dishwashers (and other mod cons) manufactured by men. Also feminist ideology has always been funded by industrialist men (Rockerfellers etc). Feminism is literally a product of all the things you just listed.
"The nü-misogynists aren’t wrong about the sad state of modern relationships, of course — the dramatic levels of divorce, single parenthood, loneliness et cetera. Their problem is putting all of the responsibility for this onto women."
The men on the show are encouraging female agency and self actualisation, over female self objectification and dependency, which (in our hyper progressive culture) FEELS like placing the burden of responsibility onto women (and it literally is because with agency, comes responsibility). But you are implying this as a negative thing, which implies you think women should remain objectified and dependent on others.
You are essentially accusing them of treating the women as adults, which you call nü-misogyny. When teenagers are treated like adults the extra responsibility that comes with that status also feels like a kind of oppression or hateful act. It's much 'kinder' and 'nicer' to treat teenagers (or women) like children. But this does not allow for self actualisation. If you want these women to experience agency and self actualisation WITHOUT any burden of responsibility you have drifted into the realm of magical thinking and white knighting.
I agree the show (I'd never choose to watch it) is kind of cheesy, cringey and sensationalist (like most forms of entertainment), but the truth is the men are taking on the role that grandmothers (and mothers) used to occupy before society became fractured and woke.
Traditionally it was the 'female elders' (as well as folk tales) who would give young women incredibly stern advice and admonitions to not squander their youth and looks (their high sexual market value) on frivolous relationships (let alone prostitution) because female looks fade fast and it's easy to end up hitting the wall with no prospects and no hope of finding a decent husband to raise a family with. Cue 40+ years alone with bitter regret.
The advice of 'female elders' was always brutally frank, because the 'drug' of being a young hottie is so intoxicating. By contrast the men on Whatever are incredibly mild and forgiving. If they seem harsh (or misogynistic???) it's only because they are men and because you are not used to seeing anyone ever be straight and honest to young attractive women.
"But no one drags men to their computers by their ears and forces them, on the pain of death, to send money to naked women on the Internet. "
100 years of feminism has made it so perilous for men to engage with the opposite sex that many are driven to porn, or online simping, because they literally don't feel safe entering the dating game IRL. One night of drunken regretful sex can so easily lead to a rape accusation and their life is destroyed.
"Yet red-pilled content creators....."
What we call 'red pill' today used to be called 'common sense' or 'wisdom from granny' just a few short generations ago. These guys are not being edgy (the fact that they often present themselves that way just makes them cringey). The advice they give used to be said to young women on the bus, by old ladies in headscarves and sensible shoes.
"But for the most part this is a sad revenge fantasy — an attempt by lonely and embittered people to imagine that the women who reject them will get their comeuppance."
It's a 'revenge fanstasy' which BENEFITS young women who hear the story, understand the moral message, and make sure not to repeat the same story in their own lives. Again, look into the past and you will find most popular stories and fairy tales were about some idiot doing something idiotic and suffering the consequences. These tales were INSTRUCTION MANUALS on how to not fuck up in life.
These tales have have only become absent from society over the last 50 - 100 years and as a result we are suffering an epidemic of single motherhood, broken homes, childless women frantic to get pregnant from a pipette and women hitting the wall and spending a fortune on disguises to try and secure a husband before the window of fertility closes like a stone door in an Indiana Jones movie.
"What these fellows (and, occasionally, females) love to do is find some of the most debauched or manipulative examples of womanhood and imply if not assert that this is a reflection of the whole sex."
Yes. And such frank and self effacing talk is the only way to defeat the ego and the idiot in all of us, and stop us making catastrophic life choices. This is how it's been done for thousands of years. You expose all the glorious faults of men or women, all the patterns of behaviour, all the temptations while sitting around the camp fire. .... so that in real life these things won't be hidden and we can all be better placed to repeating the same mistakes as the people who fucked up before us.
There's no harm caused by highlighting all the games that women play to exploit their looks and manipulate men in the short term, for materialistic gain, ego boost and social status. But there is harm in NOT talking about these things and then letting another generation of young women fall into all those traps and fuck up their lives.
"But the nü-misogynists essentially invert it — we’re not the problem, you’re the problem."
By highlighting all the ways women make problems for themselves (ego, vanity, narcissism, hypergamy, sexual manipulation etc) they are giving women problems that they can solve. That is a fist. That is empowerment.
By contrast take a movement like feminism. Feminists tells women that all their problems are caused by men, which means all the problems are out of women's hands to solve, leaving women feeling utterly powerless and demoralised.
"The pathologies of the modern world afflict men and women, and to portray either sex as exceptionally problematic is to confuse the issue."
There are other shows out there that give men 'red pill' advice and berate men for falling prey to all of their male-specific flaws, foibles and weaknesses. In fact there are far more shows giving that kind of advice to men than to women.
'Whatever' is kind of unique. It only works because it is so mild and because they have a lot of female guests at the table which makes it feel less intimidating. People DO get offended by harsh criticism or hard truths ..... but shielding people from harsh criticism or hard truths will result in DESTROYED LIVES.
What you call nü-misogyny (previously known as 'advice from a grandmother') is by far the lesser of two evils.
I've been banging on about this crowd for years. The right-wing woman haters are as insufferable as the left-wing man haters. https://www.evanmarckatz.com/blog/understanding-men/thoughts-on-mras-mgtow-and-the-manosphere
I think content like this is an inevitable counter-reaction to all of the man-hating that has become ascendant in the past few years. You can see a similar effect with race, I think a lot of bile expressed towards black people online is specifically driven by the fact that blacks are worshiped with pseudo-religious reverence everywhere else in life. People resent being force-fed lies.
That doesn't mean the content is good or that I approve of it. I don't watch this garbage. But when you combine social media which optimizes for clickbait/shock value with the resentment I described above, this is a predictable result. Hopefully people work it out of their system and then move on. As long as shitlib feminism is ascendant in public life though, this type of stuff is still going to be really popular online.
Splitting people like hairs makes them easier to bend.
There are those who wish people of different ethnicities within a country to be divided. This is well-understood by most. Less well-understood is that people seek to divide men and women, too - it's part of creating a eunuch society.
This is not a deliberate conspiracy, but as George Carlin said, you don't need a conspiracy where interests converge. Lonely people who hate everyone are easier for governments to control, easier for corporations to sell useless junk to, easier for ideologues to persuade to their insane ideologies, and so on.
Of course we all have problems but I can personally resonate with the frustration of feeling like ~literally everyone wants to deny that women are particularly prone to manipulation tactics and get away with these tendencies without even a touch of persecution. Such a state almost demands hyper-fixation as your inner world never receives it's affirmation (outside of the dome of those with equally extreme views.) What I enjoy most about these men (and Pearl) is that they make no attempt to hide the pretence that so many of us continue to pretend is irrelevant to the point of non-existence. The answer, from my perspective, is to be more open about our faults rather than shielding them beneath the understanding that we all have issues. Should we (women) ever venture into that level of understanding, the type of man who supports these influencers will find better ways to spend their time. Until such moment, I applaud them for platforming the obvious.