Chapter 2 is where the interesting stuff is, they assessed people for misogynistic attitudes, and also political ones they deem extreme. They classify left wing extremism as indicated by:
The rich will not give up their wealth easily. Organised violence, including against people, is the only way to make things fair for everyone.
Capitalism is ruining the world and should be resisted with violence
Without getting distracted by a discussion of the um curious decision to classify that in the same way as beliefs like murdering people who wont fuck me is a cool and good I think it’s an interesting result.
Misogyny in left-wing spaces is real, and this survey indicates it’s not automatically less prevalent than in right wing spaces (although particular attitudes may differ). Despite shit like patriarchy and control of women being recognised as a problematic root of oppression by many prominent theorists (e.g. engles on the origin of class relations).
Something I think we should all think about.
Also at least Aussie gen z’ers seem a bit fucking cooked here, how do boomers have better attitudes about forcing sex on your wife than gen z women? wat is going on? I wonder if some of this can be explained through inexperience, but there is a stark difference between older and younger people. Also much less than between men and women than I would have expected.
Why are we failing to reach kids compared to the right wing here?
We don’t reach kids because there is an entire system dedicated to making sure people develop reactionary beliefs
Every time people on the Left try to gain a popular front, the system is immediately used against us
Even someone like Hasan, who is not even close to being Marxist, is immediately targeted and slammed with the force of a tsunami
Even someone who is just doing their job to protect capitalism is targeted, it is quite an irrational system. Politicians like Roosevelt were almost couped, Mehdi Hasan was fired for doing his job as the fourth branch of the liberal govt, these people save capitalism by being beast tamers and leasing this monster again but capitalism being the monster it is, tries to eat its saviours.
I was hoping to find fuller crosstabs in the study. Maybe they’re around somewhere, but from what I’ve read so far I haven’t found quite what I’m looking for: comparisons on agreements with the different categories of violent extremism. In particular, the first “extreme left” belief:
The rich will not give up their wealth easily. Organised violence, including against people, is the only way to make things fair for everyone.
This has proven, IMO, to be a broadly popular belief. The clearest example to point to doesn’t meet their “organised” criteria, but I would guess most respondents didn’t actually make that distinction. Example: Luigi, who is not a leftist and saw extremely broad support across the political spectrum.
Including the second belief:
Capitalism is ruining the world and should be resisted with violence
Might cut things down a bit, but it’s easy enough for capitalists to insert an unstated “crony” ahead of it, and suddenly you can have a large number of violent “leftists” who are also deeply misogynistic. With a breakdown of how many people also agreed with, say, the right wing beliefs, it would be easier to see how well their questions actually identify leftists.
That said, misogyny is clearly a problem in leftists spaces. Hexbear is proof.
I can’t find where the full data are published, potentially you need to contact the author.
Given some of the tabulated data differences though, they clearly are capturing distinct groups, the categories don’t look like ridiculous p-hacking, and in general the broader trend is that attitudes towards the legitimacy of violence in political struggle are strong indicators of misogynistic attitudes.
This study makes me think we need to be more militant about rejecting misogyny as it is likely that many people will carry horrible beliefs.
That said, misogyny is clearly a problem in leftists spaces. Hexbear is proof.
I may have ulterior motives for posting it on this instance.
I may have ulterior motives for posting it on this instance.
Only the best ulterior motives
Why are we failing to reach kids compared to the right wing here?
Because the manosphere teaches the easy way out, it gives tutorials on how to conform to patriarchy in a transactional way that promises a material return of investment for your obedience to its norms. The stuff that clavicular promotes is in the long term extremely harmful to neurodivergent people (he can himself only bear the insane amount of forcing himself into high-masking situations by constant substance abuse), and all manosphere stuff renders you incapable of leading a healthy long term relationship, and it’s even worse for women who will ruin their entire life permanently when they become tradwifes, but on the pure surface level this shit turns helpless outcast kids into successful adults. A success that is constant suffering that can only be ended by your husband getting kirked because otherwise you are stuck with his kids and none of his money and a 20 year gap in your employment history and probably no college degree because you dropped out to marry that fashy piece of shit, but people who go down that pipeline do not notice that until it’s too late.
And the PUA shit does get incels laid. It’s one big psychological abuse tutorial and requires that for each phone number you get you make 3 dozen women feel extremely grossed out and uncomfortable and it systematically teaches its adherents to treat a lack of consent as a challenge to be overcome, but it produces results for people who would struggle to get them otherwise, because the manipulative abuse techniques it teaches can be used by everybody and with enough targets being harassed you will end up finding a vulnerable mark eventually. And dating strategies that are healthy are never this universal, because what can make somebody attractive isn’t universal and you can’t go through 100 tries of hitting on somebody in one evening when you do not act like a total piece of shit to women.
Also, success will not come quickly and with the PUA stuff it does. It will never last, you can manipulate somebody into dating you but you can’t manipulate them into actually loving you, only into being dependent on you in a shitty and toxic way. And that will make every relationship built on this hell in the long run. But you can’t know that when you’re 16 years old.
When people say “the left needs to give lonely young men good dating advice and instead we scold them for being men”, they are obviously arguing in bad faith or are just genuinely misogynist and do not get what they are saying. But good leftist dating advice will by its very nature be at a short term disadvantage and “just be yourself and find people like you and communicate honestly and openly and most importantly realize that women are human beings and treat them as such” sounds boring and trite even though it’s 100% true and the only actual way forward.
for a very long time mainstream (i.e. liberal, white) feminists only came with a list of what not to do and that is incomplete and unhelpful unless your vision of protecting young straight women from their peers is to paralyze the reachable cohort and do nothing at all to reach or change the young men who only hear from PUA/manosphere chuds.
excusing zero of his faults, dan savage actually kinda met the moment 20+ years ago but i can’t in good conscience recommend him to a nephew or younger cousin anymore and that’s been the case for a while.
At the risk of being snarky, i could swear even liberal, white feminists have told men what they expect them to do, back in the day even they had demands like “spend more time with your kids” or “don’t always let your wife do the dishes” or “equal pay for equal work.” Granted, i have to guess what you mean with your complaint about feminism being “incomplete and unhelpful”, so maybe you expect women to write a complete protocol for men on how to flirt without being sex pests or something like that.
It is … interesting that it’s the task of feminists to single-handedly define for men how they are supposed to be men the correct way. I would have thought that such relatively central parts of one’s gender performance are something people of that gender should figure out on their own. I would say men could be expected to do some reflection when we make really simple demands like “establish consent before you do something” or “accept ‘no’ for an answer and assume that uncertainty also means no and instead ask your partner what they would like you to do when that happens” and btw, these are actually very clear instructions on what to do and absolutely commonplace in feminist discourse about this stuff even if it’s the white, liberal one. I seriously do not know how much more you want to ask of women.
But i forgot that patriarchy is an extractive system that unloads unprofitable labor on women so we do it for free. So of course it is up to us to reinvent masculinity. Maybe women do not want that. Maybe establishing what men shouldn’t do is more important to me because it directly relates to my security and sexual autonomy and i gotta be honest with you here, i do not give a flying fuck if my safety inconveniences somebody. I know way too many women who were put into really threatening situations they could have gotten out of easier and with less trauma if they would not have felt the pressure to be polite, do you have any idea how many people pleaser type girls out there get hurt because they struggle with being rude enough that manipulative creeps actually fuck off when they are not wanted? That should not happen, and it’s the fault of these creeps and not of these girls, yet of fuckig course the conversation is once more about the poor socially awkward basement boy who is really scared by girls and really harmed by the Male Lonelyness Epidemic that btw is not actually a male lonelyness epidemic, but hey, it’s like this every single time, isn’t it?
I can’t tell you how men should flirt with straight women, i never was a man and was never good at flirting with straight women before my transition. I do have found that lesbians and bisexuals have different and better ways to handle this whole dating stuff, but that would probably not work for everybody, especially not because all the women i hook up with are autistic and do not do the counterintuitive ambiguity dance-around that is neurotypical flirting behavior.
I can safely say that it is much easier to clearly establish consent and avoid hitting on somebody who does not want that when you date like an autistic lesbian, but once more, from my experience with straight women i have found they kind of don’t know how to handle it when somebody approaches them and outright asks “hey, is it ok when i flirt with you?” Many find that funny and for some it even works as a pick-up line, and it means you do not spend much time chatting somebody up who does not want that, so it’s absolutely worth a try. But queer people are in my experience so much better at just talking openly about hooking up, sex and relationships than cishets, even cishet women, that it isn’t even funny. So idk, i can just say the straights are not ok, i cannot provide a step-by-step recipe for how to fix that because i’m not the right person for that task.
At the risk of being snarky, i could swear even liberal, white feminists have told men what they expect them to do, back in the day even they had demands like “spend more time with your kids” or “don’t always let your wife do the dishes” or “equal pay for equal work.” Granted, i have to guess what you mean with your complaint about feminism being “incomplete and unhelpful”, so maybe you expect women to write a complete protocol for men on how to flirt without being sex pests or something like that.
i was speaking to dating advice for like 14-early 20s year olds, which those three do not apply very much now do they?
It is … interesting that it’s the task of feminists to single-handedly define fo
are you on some “there are no male feminists” thing? that’s fine but i would include somebody like PZ Myers in the “only don’ts” crowd. Fred Rogers wasn’t talking to teens. If any of the alleged non-toxic masculinity role models had anything to say on the subject it wasn’t getting any reach in the era before we stopped calling it a “weblog” instead of a blog.
But i forgot that patriarchy is an extractive system that unloads unprofitable labor on women so we do it for free. So of course it is up to us to reinvent masculinity.
damn you just medaled in the olympic long jump.
Maybe establishing what men shouldn’t do is more important to me because it directly relates to my security and sexual autonomy
no argument here, i’ve said before that it’s understandable why that was the predominant discourse and it’s absolutely right to have that priority. but once someone has mastered the do nots, they’re left not knowing what to do and that leaves the vacuum.
part of the problem is that these guys are asking an impossible question, but we need to offer an alternative otherwise there’s no defense against the andrews taint.
part of the problem is that these guys are asking an impossible question, but we need to offer an alternative otherwise there’s no defense against the andrews taint.
Yeah i agree on both counts.
At least when i look around on hexbear, i have a hunch that a lot of the really intimidated guys who are outright terrified of doing something wrong are already struggling with social interaction in general, and while i do not want to remote diagnose anybody, i have a hunch that this may very often be due to autism. And i think the most important advice for autistic boys is to at least focus a bit more on dating autistic girls, especially if these boys so far lack relationship experience. Honestly, a lot of the dating advice out there just forces autistic people to mask super hard and that’s draining, stressful, leads to burnout and is a fucking shitty foundation for having a nice date, let alone a healthy relationship.
Apart from that, i think this stuff is mostly a conversation about consent as far as women are involved. The whole “patriarchy harms men emotionally” thing is absolutely correct, but i see that very often, this is unloaded on women. I see lots of writing about the “male lonelyness epidemic” (that is not a specifically male lonelyness epidemic, but affects all genders) hones in on … well, women supporting men more. That’s so often presented as the fix. Even bell hooks spends so much of The Will to Change on how women should look after the emotional needs of their sons and that mothers should admire their son’s penis more (i am seriously not making this up, that’s literally in there i shit you not). Which is why i blasted out that line about patriarchy being “an extractive system that unloads unprofitable labor on women so we do it for free” - we are talking about emotional labor and care labor here and in our society, it is women that are supposed to handle that.
And i think this is something that can’t work. I think men need to learn to be homosocial in similar ways to how women can be homosocial with each other. To have friendships were they are emotionally available, do not constantly hide behind banter and can show when they hurt without making a toughness performance out of it. I’ve seen after transitioning how much it helps to learn that and build a friend group that is an emotional support structure. Men need that, and men are not allowed to have that because it’s seen as “gay” or whatever. As long as men can’t cuddle to comfort each other when they’re hurting, they will not have undone this issue.
yeah, a lot of that is easier said than done. Narrowing your pool to a tiny subgroup isn’t a good way to meet more people, my hard line now is masking in indoor places and it’s been years since i’ve even laid eyes on someone of any gender, let alone any preferences or propriety like not hitting on people at their job.
tbh lasting friendships are probably harder than romance. you spend so much more time with a partner and on three chat messages once a month you’ll die of old age before building anything.
Narrowing your pool to a tiny subgroup isn’t a good way to meet more people
I’ve observed the exact opposite. My “dating pool” (it feels gross and dehumanizing to even write these words tbh) is nowadays more than a hundred times smaller than it used to be if i’m just going by demographics because i exclusively date neurodivergent, poly and sapphic trans women and transfem nonbinary beings and a few TME people also falling into the neurodivergent, poly sapphic group. That’s really tiny compared to “women in general”. People assume that just wrecks my dating options, but i still hooked up with more people in the first three years of my transition than in several decades before that combined.
tbh lasting friendships are probably harder than romance
I’m too demi to get that. I just can’t build a romantic relationship with somebody i’m not even friends with. I know most people actually do, but i gotta be honest that seems both completely impossible and undesirable to me. If i’m not friends with somebody already, i can’t even feel genuine sexual attraction towards them, let alone anything romantic. I can reliably guess if they’re hot, but i do not want to do anything with them if we haven’t clicked, and that requires that i know and like them. I’ve lost my ability to fuck strangers. And once more you’d think that makes it harder for me to hook up, but actually it does the opposite, because i no longer force myself into situations i am fundamentally not built to handle.
i really did mean romance, not hookup. if you’re upfront about things being a date even if you’re not trying to fuck after the first one, it still comes with the implication that you’re (potentially, anyway) much more invested in maintaining a relationship. Compare that to the friends i’ve seen once or twice a week for several years and then disappear forever when somebody moves or loses interest in the common hobby.
or if you want to say those weren’t friends, then i’ve literally never had a friend who wasn’t also a partner and i’d stand by my musing.
excusing zero of his faults, dan savage actually kinda met the moment 20+ years ago but i can’t in good conscience recommend him to a nephew or younger cousin anymore and that’s been the case for a while.
OOTL, what happened with Dan Savage to make him problematic?
i don’t think there was a specific scandal but he falls short on a bunch of stuff and he was going on bill maher’s show a lot. there’s some tumblr that was obsessively keeping track of every slight but i don’t have time for that shit.
Also at least Aussie gen z’ers seem a bit fucking cooked here, how do boomers have better attitudes about forcing sex on your wife than gen z women? wat is going on? I wonder if some of this can be explained through inexperience, but there is a stark difference between older and younger people.
I think with Gen Z, we’re seeing a reversal of the old “you start out leftist, but then you get to the real world and get more conservative” trope. The prevalence of the manosphere for young men and trad wife grifters for young women creates this romanticized, unrealistic view of traditional gender roles. It’s not until they get to the “real world” and reality smacks them in the face that no one is impressed by “alpha” male showboating, and that “traditional” men are narcissistic users and not benevolent father figures, respectively.
EDIT: I noticed that when it came to respondents agreeing with the violent extremist statements, they let them pick multiple, and the totals given was way over 100% which means there had to have been a lot that agreed with multiple violent extremist statements. I’d be very curious to see with the ones who agreed with misogynistic statements and multiple violent extremist statements including the left wing option, which other extremist statements they agreed with.
The report certainly fingers manosphere stuff and yet there’s always been a market for propaganda for men and women.
They don’t explain how it’s different, and I’m not sure anyone has a satisfactory explanation for why it’s supposed to be so much radicalising than shitty magazines/books/tv shows/gentlemen’s clubs etc used to be.
Also regular exposure to manosphere stuff as self reported is lower than misogyny, and what about left wingers? How many left wingers are watching Tate etc?
They don’t explain how it’s different, and I’m not sure anyone has a satisfactory explanation for why it’s supposed to be so much radicalising than shitty magazines/books/tv shows/gentlemen’s clubs etc used to be.
I think the traditional modes for those sort of misogynistic messages became dated and stale. Like, the big voice for that in the 90’s and early aughts was Rush Limbaugh, talk radio. The youth are not going to be reached by talk radio. So once guys like Bannon figured out there was this youth demo they could reach, they started using more modern methods. Particularly, the parasocial nature of a lot of the platforms the manosphere is on creates the feeling in these young men that they’re getting advice from an older, more experienced friend rather than getting a corporate media message.
Also regular exposure to manosphere stuff as self reported is lower than misogyny
That’s the tricky thing about the manosphere, the line between the “hit the gym, read a book” messaging and the red/blackpill stuff is hazy. So you get men who engage with it but never filter down to the ugly level, or just willfully ignore it when an influencer does it.
Oh, and another one because i think it makes more sense to discuss it in a seperate thread becaue this is where the really painful stuff is at.
Misogyny in left-wing spaces is real, and this survey indicates it’s not automatically less prevalent than in right wing spaces
Yes, because left wing men benefit from patriarchy materially. They usually do not realize this, especially when they’re single, they see Epstein and think patriarchy only works for 0,0001% of all men and yeah it only works for these 0,0001% completely. Obviously almost any man under capitalist patriarchy gets shat on because of his place in the social hierarchy capitalist patriarchy creates. I’m not gonna argue with that. I know how pyramid schemes work.
What i will argue is that all men derive benefits from patriarchy regardless. One may - correctly! - point out that the price for these privileges is adherence to gender norms that make men self destructive, use them up mentally and physically, ruin them emotionally etc. etc., in short: that not only make men feel miserable but outright get men killed, and that is all true. But that does not change that this damage is caused for a reason: to make men agents of violence and keep them functional in that role by a constant practice and performance of emotional callousness, social dominance and a cult of physical optimization that is becoming ingrained deeper and deeper with every gigachad meme. We did not have these when i was a kid. Yes, there was Schwarzenegger, there was Stallone, there was He-Man, but they were kind of laughed at, their physicality seemed ridiculous and exaggerated.
Nowadays that’s different. Every leftist man thinks that he has to be like Hasan. You are all buying into the reactionary idea that this is physical perfection and that “twink” is something you can use to ridicule effeminate dudes now that you are not allowed to say the f slur any longer.
And the reason you want that warrior body from an ancient temple in the eastern mediterranean is that you want to use it to kill (if your actual motivator is lots of gay sex, that’s based, but please read on regardless). Now don’t get me wrong, i agree that the haute bourgeoisie will not part voluntarily with their wealth, that their end would cause less suffering than their continued existence, that our system is much more violent than liberals want to admit and that overcoming this violence will not be done peacefully. The thing is, i often wonder how many of us are aware how fucking horrifying that realization actually is. I grew up in a violent place. As a girl who had femininity literally beaten out of her, i’ve been in a fair share of fights. And i hated every single one of them, no matter if i “won” or not. Few things feel more disgusting than when the adrenaline wears off and you’re still pumped full of cortisol and you feel the blood dripping and the red mist around you recedes again. That violence is necessary in some situations does not change it is horrible.
There is a difference between accepting violence as a necessary evil and yearning for an excuse to be a mass murderer. That line can get real blurry when you’re radicalizing. It gets especially blurry when you live under conditions that actively want you to be an unflinching chauvinist that sees violence as the highest form of entertainment like some jaded Roman fuck yeering and gloating at the blood sport spectacle in the Colosseum. Why do you think the era of prestige TV elevated torture porn like The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad to such artistic heights? Imperialism needs killers. Even outside of imperialist propaganda, it needs to desensitize you. It needs you to accept that murder is fun. It wants you to be a good little kitten that enjoys the mouse more when its flesh tastes like purest panic. You couldn’t be a soldier otherwise.
And this enjoyment of murder is intertwined deeply with how we construct masculinity. And we all take this with us even when we move into leftist spaces. And when it backfires, we all act surprised. But it will backfire. Tolerating misogyny in your org will harm your org. You probably have heard about Antifa Ost. Your president is not a fan of them, my chancelor is not a fan of them either. In the show trials against them, the main witness Johann Domhöfer was a former member who got run out of the scene way too late after it could no longer be ignored that he was a raging misogynist who had SAd at least one of his comrades. And then he stabbed them all in the back and made a deal with the cops, that snitch. He’s the kind of guy we call an Antifa Macker over here, a dudebro who seeks out direct action mainly as a way to prove his manlyness and act on his violent impulses. Bear with me here, i’m the last person to say “do not punch nazis”, nazis need to be punched. But what i am saying is, watch out why people want to do that. Be extremely vary when the violence is the main draw and not something you sometimes can’t get around. If for nothing else, then because you can’t ever trust a guy like Johann.
Everything you wrote is great. I appreciate you putting words to this as it is something that I have struggled with more generally, especially being in this community that is paying on various levels of irony over the years.
i often wonder how many of us are aware how fucking horrifying that realization actually is. I grew up in a violent place. As a girl who had femininity literally beaten out of her, i’ve been in a fair share of fights. And i hated every single one of them, no matter if i “won” or not. Few things feel more disgusting than when the adrenaline wears off and you’re still pumped full of cortisol and you feel the blood dripping and the red mist around you recedes again. That violence is necessary in some situations does not change it is horrible.
There is a difference between accepting violence as a necessary evil and yearning for an excuse to be a mass murderer. That line can get real blurry when you’re radicalizing.
💯
I had a rough childhood and while I wouldn’t wish it on anyone I do wonder if some exposure to what it actually feels like to be jolting in and out of consciousness while a group of people kick you might make people a little more cautious about increasing the amount of pain and suffering in the world.
This is a Zionist Liberal Centrist study
Yeah ofc they don’t talk about the pervasive and completely normalized violence of capitalism, zionism, patriarchy, etc.
Maybe people are misogynist because that’s completely normal and acceptable in their society?
also peep the sections on “anti-semitism” in the “extreme left”
it’s just more free palestine = anti-semitism slop for the zionists. If that’s how loose their definitions are, they probably rank disliking Hillary or Kamala as misogynist
Another case of the environment normalising certain actions regardless of peoples true beliefs. We live in a patriarchal society where violence against socially acceptable targets is the norm.
Never underestimate how much the fear of not being normal hijacks logic and how much that dog eat dog mindset is subconsciously drummed into us. Most people don’t even think about why they do it, they just smell the opportunity to punch down and bite in like an animal acting on instinct.
Also in my opinion we are failing to reach as many people now because the same algorithms and propaganda techniques that used to only target people that consumed legacy news, Youtube and Facebook is now the entire media landscape. Everywhere people get information from has regressed back to a completely controlled media landscape. Everyone is now your racist grandpa that only watches Fox News because every media space pushes thay style of slop. Gen Z aren’t kids anymore and I don’t take much stock in generational statistics that profile age groups, but if I were to stereotype, I would say that being the first generation to grow up being constantly watched has possibly made them more susceptible to enforcing social norms, so under our fucked up society that would include violent patriarchal ones. The younger you are, the more likely you are to be afraid of being an outcast. But honestly this is a problem hitting every generation and every creed because we are all susceptible to propaganda.
Sorry at work so oneliner. Because the ruling ideology is the rulers ideology.
There is an untapped market in just mocking misogynists as being Neanderthals.
“Ooga booga. Grug bigger than grugella, Grug smash puny grugella. So grug better than grugella in every way! Grugella worship Grug or Grug smash you to forever sleep!”
