Couldn’t have said it better myself.
I am not defending the manosphere, and I think that the rampant misogyny you see in these online subcultures is downright alarming.
People aren’t born with misogynistic beliefs. They also aren’t taught them in school.
I’d say it gets passed around by word-of-mouth. A lot of the problematic stuff I was exposed to earlier in life definitely came from fellow pupils at school, who likely picked it up from their families. The rise of social media only makes it easier to find problematic stuff, especially since it’s proliferated so much on TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, etc.
Social media companies are to blame for getting people hooked on this crap, and we are to blame for happily lapping it up and preaching the words of people like Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, Sneako, etc like they’re gospel.
Tate is meant to be banned from mainstream social media, yet I see his videos all the freaking time on YouTube, Instagram, etc. And that’s because these media giants cannot be bothered to purge the thousands of affiliate accounts (linked to his MLM) that are regurgitating his content.
I’m not going to google search for you, but it’s pretty easy to see that wage stagnation affects men more because traditionally, men are expected to be the provider for the household and women have traditionally had the option of not starting a career and just finding a man instead. I’m not saying that women are not affected, but they have an economic “out” that men generally don’t have.
That, and women are generally treated more favourably in cases of family/divorce law, are able to far more easily go into modelling/adult entertainment, get far greater maternity leave rights (at least in the UK), etc.
Online dating (I am referring exclusively to the heterosexual experience and cannot speak for other experiences) is also a very good example of this. Men struggle to even get any matches or replies that aren’t from scammers, spam bots or people on the other side of the world unless they look like Ryan Gosling or Josh Hartnett, while women are inundated with matches and have to be far more selective.
Okcupid did a trend analysis of their user data and found that women rated 80% of men below-average in terms of attractiveness. This link is obviously archived, because after Okcupid got acquired by Match Group (same people who own Tinder, Match.com, Hinge, POF and a lot of other dating apps), they deleted the blog post because these kinds of statistics hurt their bottom-line.
Then again, I also subscribe to the theory that online dating is designed to be such a soul-crushing experience because how else are Match Group going to lull you into spending over triple the price of a WoW subscription on a premium account?
