When Feminism meets the Algorithm

Munchausen by patriarchy, part 3

Introduction

Let's recap where we are so far:

1. In part one of the series, I pointed out that feminists live under the delusion that berating and shaming men is a winning strategy for getting men to vote for their interests. 

2. In part two, I break down some of the common terms feminists like to use in conversation, and how these words repulse men — words like toxic masculinity, patriarchy, as well as the shifting definition of feminism itself.

In this post, I will elaborate on the subcultures that emerge when feminism meets the modern online landscape, and the problems that arise from these subcultures.

Let's break these problems down.

The Tumblr Feminist Problem

To frame up this particular issue, I'll start off with a seemingly unrelated anecdote. 

When the internet was just getting up and running, there was an online movement called “New Atheism”. The people in this group were largely nerdy academics. They systematically went through religious texts, pointed out the contradictions, and believed that facts and logic would inevitably make people realize that they didn't need religion in order to be a good person.

It was the early days of the internet, and people genuinely believed that rational argumentation and logic would prevail, and that everything could be solved by civil discourse.

Oh, how naïve they were.

As the internet began to mature, however, these academic atheists were eventually overthrown by the “Reddit Athiest.” 

This was a different species of atheist. They consisted of edgy college freshmen who felt innately superior to everyone else because they didn't need religion. These were people who insulted you if you said “bless you”  when you sneezed, and referred to God as “Sky Daddy”.

The atheist movement eventually was overtaken these people, and they were insufferable. Think of a coked up version of the Rick and Morty fanbase.

The example of the Reddit atheist makes for good framing because, even if you agree with a lot of what they say, you don't want to be associated with the group. 

The feminist equivalent of the “Reddit atheist” is the Tumblr Feminist™ – although this also includes those on Instagram and tiktok.

Tumblr Feminists™ are not really feminists. They haven't read any feminist literature, because they don't have the attention spans to read a book from cover to cover. Their contributions to the feminist project comprises exclusively of wearing t-shirts that say “The future is female” and purchasing cups that say “Male Tears”.

Their entire personality revolves around shitposting “Man or Bear” memes – and more recently, having full-scale meltdowns in front of a camera in protest to the election results.

Many of them have begun adopting the “4B Movement”. As far as I can tell, this is just the female equivalent of acting like an incel.

Tumblr Feminists™ are ironic; if you copied their attitudes and beliefs about the opposite sex, and pasted them into a man's body, they would be the very sort of men they hate – patronizing, dismissive, rude, and all around unpleasant to be around.

To be clear, I don't consider these people to be any sort of representation of actual feminism –  they are problem, however, because any true feminist will occasionally have to do the work of denouncing these people. 

It's only fair; the same way a Men's Rights Advocate needs to disavow con artists like Andrew Tate, those who are committed to a more gender equal society need to realize that these reactionary movements are not going to forward their cause.

Which brings us to the next problem. 

The Partisan Feminist problem

Philosopher David Benatar has a book called The Second Sexism, in which he makes a useful distinction between:

1. Egalitarian feminism – those who want to see fairness between the sexes

2. Partisan feminism – those who simply wish to promote women’s issues, regardless of whether it actually makes sense, or whether it is fair. 

I personally believe that most men would happily sign on to the ideas of egalitarian feminism. Yet, it becomes difficult to tell them apart from their partisan counterparts. 

Sometimes they make it easy for you and straight up tell you, such as this article.

It's about reducing unjust prejudice *for women* and improving gender relations *for women*

Another way to check to see how they react to men's issues.

For example, in this article, Richard Reeves points out that suicide is almost always portrayed as a women’s issue, even though men vastly surpass women in the number of suicides all across the world. In my experience, a lot of partisan feminists refuse to acknowledge this point, instead resorting to whataboutism  – “Well, actually, women commit more suicide attempts.” 

We can also see partisan feminism at work in the hypocrisy around body image; while they regularly decry unrealistic body standards for women, they have no problem calling men fat, short, balding, or “limp dick”.

In fact, this double standard is baked into the algorithm. Right now you can Google “fat person” versus “plus size person” and see the different results.

But oftentimes, the partisanship is more subtle. Take this article for example – called Ghosting the Patriarchy: Female Empowerment and the Crisis of Masculinity.

On the face of it, it reads like a well reasoned post, showing how women are increasingly flourishing while men are floundering. 

The comment section quickly makes it clear how her arguments fall apart upon scrutiny. The author fails to acknowledge how deindustrialization and other broad scale economic factors have changed the composition of jobs.

And yet, I’ve yet to see anybody make the most obvious point about that post. Almost all of the evidence she provides in the post don’t constitute “ghosting the patriarchy” — rather, women are simply doing patriarchy better than a lot of men.

This is the crux of partisan feminism. They have no intention of dismantling the system. They just want greater dividends.

Feminist scholar bell hooks eloquently summarizes the issue in chapter 2 of her book The Will To Change:

We need to highlight the role women play in perpetuating and sustaining patriarchal culture so that we will recognize patriarchy as a system women and men support equally, even if men receive more rewards from that system.

Later on in the chapter: 

By placing the blame for the perpetuation of sexism solely on men, [Partisan feminists] could maintain their own allegiance to patriarchy, their own lust for power. They masked their longing to be dominators by taking on the mantle of victimhood.

To be clear, there some Egalitarian Feminists, who have taken the time to understand what patriarchy actually means, and how it impacts both women and men. This article is a good example, as well as this one.

But the simple fact of the matter is — a fact that many feminists cannot seem to appreciate, because they do not have the lived experience of it — is that there are a lot of women who resent men for being men.

Celeste Davis wrote this article: The men who like women and the men who don't. Yes we can tell.

The article works in reverse as well: Men can tell when women don’t like them back. 

This is why women complain that there are so few “high-quality” these days. If they are high-quality, that means they have emotional intelligence, and want to be in relationships with women who like them. This filters out a disparagingly large number of women.

But of course, the nuances around these sorts of issues tend to be lost, especially because of…

The Exodia Problem

It’s acceptable to talk about men’s issues if you are:

1. A woman who dates both men and women

2. A Trans Man: 

3. One of the “approved” men — men who have spent many years espousing their liberal ideas, essentially telling women that they are “one of the good ones.” Certified democrats like Richard Reeves or Scott Galloway.

But otherwise, if you criticize the feminist project in all the ways that they are failing to attract men, you quickly come across the Exodia problem, otherwise known as the Golden Snitch problem.

It’s a move that immediately ends the game, and makes all further conversation impossible. It goes something like this:

Incel is a word that’s increasingly losing its meaning with every passing day — it’s quickly becoming the new version this meme.

Feminists resort to stock phrases to get them out of any sort of reasonable debate:

1. “You’re just mansplaining.”

2. “You’re just showing your privilege.”

3. “You’re a pickme.” –  if you're a woman

4. “You’re a misogynist.”

5. “You’re a gooner.” 

To repeat my main message in part 1, shaming and berating men using this language is a losing strategy. Eventually, these women will have to start grappling with the failures of their ideology.

Looking around on substack, it's clear that their current strategy is not really working out. Women are writing about: 

1. How they’ve been abandoned. 

2. How they can’t find anybody on the dating apps: 

3. How they wish they could go back to… early 2000s pick up artistry?

   1. I don't think this person understands what they're asking for. You have to be delusional to want to return to a time of Neil Strauss and Mystery.

This problem, what I've called the Exodia problem, is part of a much larger problem which we see both online and in regular life.

The Hypocrisy Problem 

There is a lot of misogynistic content online right now – guys like Fresh & Fit, Kevin Samuels, and basically 75% of guys who unironically call themselves “Alpha Males.”

In addition to being misogynists, these men are hypocrites. On the one hand, they criticize women who sleep around before getting married; on the other, they try to sleep around with as many women as possible without marrying them. They create the very sort of women they supposedly detest.

In the online landscape, the reverse problem is true as well, as there are many writers who actively antagonize men, or otherwise use sloppy language and generalizations.

Let's take this post, entitled: “The male mind cannot comprehend the allure of Tony Soprano”

It is truly incredible that she decided to post this online. Quite literally every man on the East Coast can understand the allure of Tony Soprano. He's rich, he loves his family — and he's the head of the fucking mafia. 

This is like saying the male mind doesn’t understand the allure of Tommy Shelby from Peaky Blinders because Cillian Murphy is only 5 foot 7.

In reality, the post should have been entitled “There was this one guy who disagreed with me when I told him that I prefer someone like Tony Soprano over a typical meathead.” 

This sort of feminism is Shadow Boxing with an opposition that doesn't exist. It’s dunking on one particular person in your friend group, and pretending that it applies to society at large. 

There was an article elucidated the phenomenon quite nicely, although they seemed to delete it while I was making this post. The post was entitled “Misandry as Cope” – and in it she said the quiet part out loud.

Many women find it therapeutic to degrade all men based on the behaviors of a specific man in their lives.

But these people would never talk about black men, or gay men, or men with disabilities like this. But when it comes to “men” — a group of people where the denominator is literally 4 billion — it becomes OK to use imprecise and sloppy language. 

Again, go ahead, have your little catharsis. But don't pretend that this is some valiant representation of feminism. And you also can't get mad if you continually lose elections.

Touching Grass

I come from a culture where women have to ask permission to get a driver's license. I know women who would have made for brilliant scientists and engineers — only to spend their days in the kitchen making food.

I know women who have been physically and emotionally abused, and when they finally decided to stand up for themselves they were ostracized from their own families.

That's why I'm so monumentally disappointed with the majority of feminist writing online. The vast majority of it is drivel from upper middle class white women who don't really need to grapple with the realities of what working-class men and women face in their lives. 

They are what happens when you take a swiftie and put them through 4 years of useless sociology classes. When they come out the other side, they realize they don't have the intellect to become a physicist, nor the courage to stand in the trenches. What they do have is the ability to use really fancy words, and so they berate you with these words, in the hopes you will submit to their dogma.

But I will repeat it over and over again – this has not worked, it does not work now, and it will continue to not work.

As I mentioned in part one of the series, feminism has not made any meaningful progress in decades. This is because it systematically repulses men. If these people actually want to make progress for the first time in the their lives, they need disavow the Tumblr Feminists™, as well as their partisan counterparts, and they need to start engaging in reasonable discourse once more.

Stay tuned for part 4