I helped build the manosphere — then it destroyed me
Now this is an interesting article.
The internet “loved the idea of this blonde Nazi chick”, she told The Times in her first mainstream media interview since the release of her book This is Not Real Life. “I was basically the hardest drug you could get at that time. But it wasn’t real.”
Southern was 19 in 2015 when she rose to notoriety as a telegenic YouTuber promoting hateful opinions on immigration, feminism and the “Islamisation of the West”. At the time, Donald Trump was entering the political scene and these ideas were beginning to gain traction.
She befriended the far-right extremist Tommy Robinson, known for stirring anti-Muslim feeling, and became a female face for the manosphere, producing the viral hit video “Why I Am Not a Feminist”. In early 2018, Southern distributed flyers in Robinson’s hometown of Luton calling Allah “gay”, as part of what she said was a social experiment. That earned her a ban from the UK on the grounds that her presence in the country was not “conducive to the public good”.
Southern continued to fall into a dark online world, exploiting it before it eventually began exploiting her. She wrote her book last summer expressing regret for the role she had played, but only now feels ready to talk about it. “I had no understanding of the world or how it worked,” Southern said over Zoom from her living room, still sporting the trademark red lipstick and dark mascara on which she built her brand. “There was no notion that I would ever become famous or even travel or anything like that.”
Basically, Southern claims to have became one of the faces of the “manosphere,” yet only encountered some version of the extremist alt-right portion.
She was allegedly raped by Andrew Tate in 2018, and then became a “Christian tradwife” in 2020.
She posted “A New Chapter” on her website about her decision to take some time out and focus on her “soul”. She had fallen in love and married an Australian man she had been dating, who she has never publicly identified. The couple had a son in 2020.
But her hiatus didn’t last long.
The same year her son was born, she reinvented herself as a “trad wife”, which she suspects played into a Christian need for redemption. She posted photos of a curated life that showed her exercising and baking at the couple’s home in Australia. “I figured if I just follow the manual of ‘look pretty, quit my job, have babies, serve my husband’ then I would be able to have this happy family life that so many people crave,” she said.
But Southern claimed her husband became controlling when she tried to assert any amount of independence. She alleges that he would lock her out of the house, calling her a “worthless dead weight”. Southern said her husband left her and their son after she went against his wishes by visiting her family in Canada. She filed a protective order and the couple would end up officially separating — a cardinal sin in the traditionalist movement. The backlash was swift. Commentators called her a “whore” and wished her damnation. Her estranged husband was unreachable for comment.
In any case, you can’t make this stuff up. Not surprising that if you grift too hard you can get exploited back.
But I think it’s sad she thought she was building up the manosphere at all when there are multiple divisions of it doing their own thing. Even most of the men who cling onto the women grifters hyping them up as women to look up to aren’t exactly the men you want to marry either. Guess she learned the hard way.
I Lived The Feminist Dream. I Want My Money Back.
To be honest, this one reeks of a man impersonating a woman in how articulate and self aware the writing is.
Either that or a woman found a bunch of manosphere-related articles and then had AI draft an essay for them and then added some cherries on top for engagement farming.
The marketplace is made up only of your options. It’s a comparison, like grading on a curve. Just twenty years ago, your options (the market) was limited to those in your geographic vicinity, plus the occasional setup from a relative or camp friend. Now, the options have widened considerably due to dating apps and we’re competing across hundreds, even thousands of options. On top of that, Instagram has widened the option pool even further, even though none of the men around me could realistically date any of these women, they exist constantly in their field of view, and thus are part of the sample size. Now stack on top of that that we’re no longer competing within our age group; it has widened to include girls 10-20 years younger than us—and this is where feminism really screwed us.
We were sold the lie to go after our careers, make money, and make our mark on the world first, and then go find a partner once we’ve accomplished A through C. We used to have a backstop against some of this—our biological clock ticking louder around our mid-thirties—but we did an end run around that too, with egg freezing. And the worst part of it is that we, women, did this to ourselves. Not a single man told us to do any of this. In fact, historically, they’ve been pretty petulant about the whole thing, but we pushed right through that sentiment by calling them all “toxic” and threatening them with cancellation if they didn’t comply. We are our own worst enemy, and the architects of our own demise.
While we were busy climbing the corporate ladder, raising unheard of amounts of money, and optimizing ourselves in every possible way, the men in our cohort weren’t just waiting around for us to feel “ready” to settle down. They were dating, and as we aged up, still too busy self-actualizing for them, they continued to date twenty-year-olds (women in their fertile prime, because that’s what men are biologically programmed to find attractive). So we freeze our eggs, maybe buying us some additional time. Ten years go by. Surely, the men left in their forties are still single because they’re looking for something real, something mature; a woman of substance. Wrong. They’re still dating twenty-year-olds, just now with a hair transplant and an eye-rolling age gap. And it’s not really their fault; it’s mostly biology. Men have about the same fertility as they age until well into their sixties. Up until that point, they will be pursuing women in their fertile prime, as their biological directive is telling them to procreate, and with a mate with the highest likelihood of success to carry on the gene pool.
Feminism sold us the lie that being a well-rounded, articulate, and successful woman would up the value of our stock; the investment in ourselves was worth it. In reality, it does absolutely nothing to our market value and, actually in some cases, lowers it, as many men prefer to be more successful and smarter than their partners. Women date laterally and up, men date laterally (sometimes), but mostly down. Most men couldn’t care less if you’re successful or incredible intelligent, or have any amount of self-knowledge you might have gleaned on your therapy journey. Sure, those things are “nice-to-haves,” but often they don’t even come into their assessments until after you’ve already been dating for a while. They have the ability to make a marginal difference, at best. Men, even when they say they want someone they can ‘talk to on their level,’ are kind of kidding themselves—they look mostly for biological markers of fertility and high estrogen (waist-to-hip ratio, full lips, heart-shaped face), and as far as talking goes… they just want someone to listen. It’s women who want someone to talk to on their level—another gross mis-assessment of feminism.
This is only part of the article, but it pretty much hits all of the obvious talking points that men have discussed for the past two decades. Women also distinctly don’t use terms like marketplace and market value.
The article is actually pretty long and worth a read, but I don’t think a woman actually wrote it or if they did they used a significant amount of AI to make it happen. Very few women have that type of self awareness and then will write it out, using the terms that the manosphere has coined.
Marriage Got Better—So Why Is It Disappearing?
This one actually does use logic and was written by a man to connect the dots.
nitially, that might seem like a paradox. Individual marriages have become stronger, yet the institution of marriage as a whole has never been weaker. But there’s a simple explanation: Largely as a result of our rising level of wealth and stability, marriage isn’t dying, but it is stratifying. And a result, the people who could benefit most from marriage’s social and economic benefits are the least likely to have examples of strong marriages in their lives. This reality should force us to prioritize rebuilding a scaffolding of culture and policy changes that can help today’s young people grow into tomorrow’s adults capable of committing to marriage.
For many years, marriage provided an important economic function for women whose earning power was constrained by law and custom. Women’s rights, economic opportunities, and educational pathways have expanded, and our society has grown wealthier. Women looking at a male as a potential mate today expect more than their sisters of yesteryear. Desirable skills in a partner have less to do with earnings and wages and more to do with social and interpersonal skills. And men, particularly those who are on the bottom half of the income spectrum or without a college degree, are unable to adjust to the fact that the bar over which a man becomes “marriageable” continues to rise.
We might borrow a concept from economics to illustrate this a little more clearly. In labor markets, economists refer to a given worker’s “reservation wage”—the amount below which a certain job just isn’t worth it. If you have a degree in engineering and are looking for work, you might be able to get hired for a $12-an-hour gig making sandwiches, but you’re more likely to hold out until a better offer comes along. As societies get wealthier, a given worker’s reservation wage goes up—there’s a reason back-breaking, low-paying jobs tend to be filled by immigrants rather than native workers.
For most of American history, the bar for a “reservation boyfriend” was pretty low. The question was less whether to marry than who to marry, and the pool was, on the whole, fairly limited. Men and women met at church, or barn raisings, or high school. The plot of 1971’s The Last Picture Show, set in a small town in Texas 20 years earlier, revolves around the pairings-off of teenagers whose eligible partners are essentially the same couple dozen young people they’ve gone to high school with, and the annoyed familiarity that results. You can’t fully understand the “you can’t live with ‘em, you can’t live without ‘em” ethos from outside the context of early marriage and limited pathways to divorce.
Technology progressed, values changed, society liberalized. Marriage used to offer a “bundle” of goods—companionship, sex, old-age security, the ability to have children, some measure of social standing. Overt societal pressure to get married before having sex, living together, buying a house, or having a child is a thing of the past. In the words of Johns Hopkins sociologist Andrew Cherlin, marriage is a “capstone” to a successful young adulthood, rather than the “cornerstone” on which young couples once built a life together. For women, the average age at first marriage has risen from 22 to 28.5 over the past four decades.
I suppose the irony is that the conclusion is more reductionistic to mostly economic shift of marriage away from men and women. However, this is painted as a masculine issue later in the article where women depended on men economically and men haven’t pivoted well out of it going into ‘using weed, acting out violent scripts from pornography, or gambling their weekly paychecks.’
Can’t help but throw men under the bus while ignoring womens’ inflated expectations.
Men aren’t signing up to singles nights – I launched my own and found out why
There’s several variations of this going around, and I just chose this one.
The events have been full but I’ve still hit roadblocks with men dropping out at the last minute, despite having paid for tickets and made commitments to their female friends, leaving the women struggling to find replacements. This is small fry compared to what other singles nights organisers deal with. Very few companies sell tickets in pairs like me (though I’ve noticed a few introducing this since I started Red Lips), and so often this means it’s a case of selling tickets separately for single women and single men.
In these instances, tickets for single women sell out almost instantly, whereas those for men linger in a limbo of perennial availability. Some event organisers have told me they’ve ended up with rooms full of single women vying for the attention of just a handful of men, while others have resorted to bribing male friends to attend, and some are literally just going out onto the street and approaching any men who walk past.
Matters are worse overseas, it seems, with The New York Times recently sending one of its reporters to a wine mixer where tickets for women cost $100, while men could attend for free. “I think the truth is that there are a lot more women out there interested in showing up for these dating events, and it’s not as easy to get men to show up,” said Luke Vander Ploeg in an episode of The Daily, claiming there were 15 women in attendance and just five men. If even freebies aren’t enough to get men to these events, what is? After all, it’s not like they don’t want to meet women.
“The most obvious explanation is time pressure,” says one single friend in his 30s. “Any woman looking to start a family is facing constraints that men just don’t have. The result is they end up being more open-minded to alternative, unusual, and, let’s face it, less romantic ways of meeting people than men because they want to get there faster. It’s not that men are put off, it’s just that there is less of a push to meet someone, and because a singles night is a slightly forced interaction, it’s easy to persuade yourself it’s a bit lame and unnecessary.”
It’s a brutal reality, but clearly one that resonates. “I think men just have less desire for singles nights,” posits another single male in his thirties who came along to one of my events. “We get all we need from dating apps, and those of us who don’t probably won’t have the confidence to go to a singles night where there are things like speed dating.” Gender norms could play a role, too, at least in terms of how men want to interact with women they’re attracted to. “I think more traditional men feel like it’s on them to be charming, funny, and cool in a limited time, while it’s on the women to just be hot. So the pressure is higher for the men. Like, a super boring hot girl would probably do better at a speed dating event than a super boring hot boy.”
The funny thing is they still don’t really understand why it’s happening.
As the man says in the last paragraph unwittingly, you can get enough dates from apps (if you’re attractive) and there’s no need to go to a singles night.
If you aren’t getting enough dates as a man, it’s because you’re deemed unattractive. Why would an unattractive men want to go to a singles night even for free to waste his time talking to a lot of women just to get rejected more? And not just rejected online but in person as well where the stakes are clearly higher.
If you want singles to meet and date you have to address the overinflated expectations of women, and also get them to realize they’re not going to make the attractive man who is dating dozens of them commit to anything. But I don’t think many women are ready for that type of thing.