Incels Make the World Go Round.

why are wom being so [ __ ] difficult I was told to be a nice guy I was told to be a gentleman I did everything right why did she still leave me and we all start to figure out who everything I was told was a lie y'all are watching me right now because everything you were told was a lie imagine one day you're sitting in Paris you're sitting there having a [ __ ] coffee and ter roll through with AKs and the person next to you has their brains blown out you're going to stand there be like waiting to die like [ __ ] I'm going to be like bang oh seen that before okay boom duck and Diving take one terrorist out next get the AK go Rambo take out all the [ __ ] pack of they're reviewing a 180 page Manifesto reportedly written by the shooter where he describes his perceptions about the dwindling size of the white population so if you guys decided that you weren't going to sleep with a bunch of Chads who were going to use you there wouldn't be Chads that were using you guys you know what I mean but the problem is is that women want to sleep with Chads who end up using [Music] them on May 27th 2022 I posted a video called dissecting the manosphere it was 90 minutes long and believe it or not it was supposed to be longer but the deadlines and technical difficulties that I had at the time forced me to bring it out in Parts because I had to separate time in between each video each video got longer until at the end of the whole project I had 6 hours worth of talking about the manosphere my Graduate Studies had engaged with the manosphere red pill incel world and I felt like I had some pretty good and unique things to share on the topic and I still kind of didn't want to do it despite that I had a ton of people s then reach out to tell me that these videos help them and change the way they looked at the world of themselves and it's amazing to hear that and to know that I could make something that helps people and affects the world in a positive way also that first video has made me about $10,000 as of time of writing now I would make videos for free if I had to I literally did for about a year and a half and I have been helping young boys and men since I was a young men myself as a mentor a teacher a social worker two professions that are not known for paying well so it's never been about the money when it comes to stuff like this the second video connecting the Manis feere has also made me a little over $10,000 since 2022 the third video understanding the black man isphere has only made me about $5,000 because it got demonetized after a few months I believe because I called Kevin Samuels A which he is he was a secret chunk voter go watch the video for details so aside from all the help that those videos provided for a lot of people people it also definitely helped me and you know kind of revealed a pattern that I think was interesting to engage with but more than that I'm not the only person to make Manis related content or make money off of it in fact the most profitable creator of manist content probably in the last couple of years is one Andrew Tate between 2022 and 2023 Andrew Tate emerged as the Undisputed King of the manosphere ironically while never actually being in charge of a single social media platform for the most part instead through a pretty ingenious scheme Tate created an online course called husters University and through this course thousands of other channels on YouTube Tik Tok Instagram and Twitter began to share any content he was connected to all he had to do was go on the countless red pill podcast and do interviews and let his army of bots literal and figuratively speaking do the work for him via the subscriptions to hustle University take was said to be making millions of dollars a month though it's hard to pin down actual numbers and all this money was coming from Mostly young men and boys drawn in by his lavish lifestyle charismatic personality and willingness to take advantage of their insecurities with the promise of helping them become financially independent oddly despite what I just described to you this is probably the most honest thing that Tate has done to make money since he was a kickboxer it's fun and good to [ __ ] on Andrew Tate but I've been thinking a lot about his role and my role in this whole content creation equation in many ways we have the same job description well I of course have very different goals in mind and very different content overall at the end of the day my target audience and the strategies I use to reach it are the same as Tates our product is different but the genre is the same this occurred to me after watching a video from the editor of this video zatman zatman a smaller creator with a genuine interest in the manosphere and related self-help content had this Epiphany that regardless of his role in debunking manosphere content he was still a part of a larger apparatus that didn't seem to have a beginning or an end and even as he was doing good work and making good content it was still serving that bigger function at the end of the day and worked against his intentions and goals and just desire to be creative a little bit of an element of you know futility of it because I mean we live in an age where everyone has access to a smartphone and the internet and everybody can post their opinions everywhere at any time about everything it's a little bit frustrating at times when you see the kinds of things that get popular and like well I can understand and emphasize why those things become popular at the same time pardon me is just like okay people are ridiculous and like it feels like you're fighting this endless fight against like human ignorance and stupidity you know I value like good gen genuine criticism like good analysis and good critique as like art generally helps you understand yourself how you relate to the world but with this manere content I was just like there's not that much to really glean from it once you understand sort of like the basic principles and like how to interact socially how to car yourself simple basic dating advice it doesn't matter if if it's through an app or in person etc etc like the the general principles stay relative the same there's an information threshold to this and it feels like you're in a hot tub and you're just like in the hot tub like with all the fluids and everything it's just like constantly like mishing and mashing like over and over again and eventually just you prune up and you're like okay I gotta get out of the hot tub I think that's a good analogy that's an excellent analogy that's an excellent analogy that bit is definitely getting in the video this is an interesting and not overly discussed part of the whole manosphere discourse I don't think enough people have stopped to ask how and why the manosphere red pill mcow incel and whatever communities work not just as social groups and social problems to be addressed but also as a valuable economic engine for Content creation and the ramifications of what that means there's always talk about combating the manosphere and if I'm honest I've never felt like framing it as a battle between two groups in online cont creation made much sense instead we're going to look at the manosphere as a manifestation of bigger forces than anything we do here on YouTube or any other social media platform and we're going to look at those forces in this bigger system and critique how all of us function in that system in order to find more efficient Solutions or at least something new and interesting to say about this problem so yeah there won't be a whole lot of dunks and debunks in this one but it's still going to be a fun informative ride it's also going to go a lot of lot of lot of places it's likely that if you're watching this that you've already watched my other anti- manosphere content but I still want to review some of those core themes and add to them because even after 6 hours worth of talking about this subject there's still plenty of stuff that got left out so in this section I want to fix that for instance so many people see the manosphere as a modern phenomenon when really the only modern aspect of the manosphere is social media the ideals and themes and Aesthetics that we see in the manosphere today are not new 15 or so years ago you had Tucker Max books mystery the pickup artist The Man Show and those are just the ubiquitous elements that broke into the mainstream these shows and books were anti-feminist and misogynistic but a bit less overtly hateful toward women compar compared to their modern counterparts but the framework and the ideology is still there it's probably hard to imagine but manosphere pran rhetoric doesn't always start with misogyny and women hating but it does inevitably end with that unfortunately since the 1970s there have been various consortiums and coalitions of men coming together to uplift men the mythopoetic men's movement of the 1990s is where we get the concept of toxic masculinity for example we often see that term as something that came from feminist movements but it was actually men who recognized the problems of compulsory and traditional male gender roles and combined it with some understanding of feminist Theory to come up with something to explain that problem one of the earliest modern bastions of a manosphere comes in the form of the men's Liberation movement and for a time it was a very Progressive almost feminist entity with an ideology that sounds more like soy boy stuff that me and foreign men and Noah Samson talk about today men's Liberation discourse walked a tight RPP from the very beginning first movement leaders acknowledged that sexism had been a problem for women and that feminism was a necessary social movement to address gender inequities but they also stressed the equal importance of the high costs of the male sex role to men's health emotional lives and relationships in short they attempted to attract men to feminism by constructing a discourse that stressed how the male role was impoverished unhealthy and even lethal for men but there was eventually a Schism among this group and various others resulting basically in a split between the pro feminist men's movement and the anti-feminist men's movement and at the core of this split is basically what the modern manosphere is today both groups agree that traditional male roles in the reality of men is a problem the pro feminist group sees that as an issue of patriarchy and capitalism and things that if you understand real sociological phenomenon make a lot of sense men cannot play traditional roles because the tools to play those roles are denied to them by various systems such as capitalism Etc the anti-feminist group however sees the blame for this problem as a result of women and feminist movements throwing off the natural way of things and this argument is obviously one that is often repeated today by right-wing and reactionary voices and of course this isn't true when you hear people complain about how a man could get a job and take care of a family by himself 50 years ago they always make the ridiculous leap to say it's a woman's fault as if women are now working in those factory jobs in the 70s instead of men or instead of recognizing that those factory jobs just don't exist in America today because of capitalism the corporations move those jobs overseas however for men who still believe and identify with that traditional image of masculinity as a provider the removal of their ability to provide creates a pretty big problem from which most of the manness spere nonsense stems from but this is not to undermine the fact that masculinity has always been a space of conflict for men as long as inequality has been a thing one of the best examples of this is how the argument of what's happened to the real men has been recurring over and over for like the last 100 years there's a great Twitter thread from Paul frier a newspaper researcher from Calgary where he Maps out this angst about men becoming less manly all the way to the late 1800s they're saying the exact same thing we're saying now now which begs the question at what point has real manhood existed and the real answer to that is kind of never masculinity has always been in a state of conflict and i' argue that this conflict is a byproduct of capitalism and the competition that capitalism requires from Men In order to compete for a limited amount of resources and a system that is designed to ensure that a certain amount of men will always fail and it's no wonder that we see a spike in manosphere activity coming out of C Co so many men were further faced with The Morbid reality of this competition and let alone the overwhelming loneliness that social distancing caus for everyone and the manosphere offered them simple but false answers all of this history is important because the modern image of the manosphere kind of hides the reality of what the manosphere is and does and how it functions most of the manosphere is just really really weird guys Andor really really awful guys doing weird and awful things but beyond them the Mana reports to be addressing real issues that men are facing issues that men have been facing and while they do a very poor job of it overall it shouldn't be missed that on multiple levels many men find themselves in the manosphere for understandable and predictable reasons where men have limited economic opportunities and where there are too many men right you'll see more incels because first off if there's too many men then it's musical chairs The Mating Market most people mate monogamously and so most people aren't sharing and so most people um are going to be taken off the market as soon as they choose someone and so that means that if there's too many men there are going to be more men even if all of them are perfectly marriageable let's say and that's not necessarily going to be true then you're gonna have more men excluded from The Mating market and this is going to get more intense if income inequality is super high right if if if scarcity is abundant at the lower end because frankly it's very hard to compete on the mating Market as a male if some men are millionaires and some men are broke now we don't just compete financially men also compete uh in terms of their looks uh they compete in terms of their personalities as well that's not often talked about but frankly some men make great boyfriends and are super fun to be around and super positive and good company and some are you know intolerable and abusive I think the problem is is that we like completely conflate like the worst aspect of the ideology with everybody who has any vulnerability that might make them susceptible to that ideology and we're throwing it all into one big bucket you have the same set of problems or the same set of initial issues wage stagnation social isolation urban sprawl lack of livable cities blah blah blah patriarchal expectations on men that have remained despite the fact that we've kind of moved forward in society past that men in general I would say are in a position where they've not been given the socialization or the tools to move into the future of the world as it is becoming they're still tied to a world where getting a wife or a partner is tied to a level of economic coercion over women that doesn't exist anymore in the midst of what Society has become they are rallying against the future right like they are they are explicitly they are explicitly saying and electing to make a choice that like I want life to be this way I want to live in this patriarchal reality I want to call the shots I want to I want a woman that does XYZ in in the vein of this 1950s era kind of [ __ ] and if you look at the study on it a lot of it is like men are making less money than they used to and women are making more money than they used to I promise you that if you back off that [ __ ] women were more than will more than meet you halfway in regards to economic situations here's another aspect of the Manis feere that is often overlooked you ever noticed that many of the most visible actors in The broader manosphere tend to be men of color Andrew Tate is half black sneaker is Haitian and South Asian fresh and fit are North African and afrocaribe respectively Kevin Samuels is obviously black Hamza is Pakistani and even going back to earlier eras you have guys like rou V and Tariq Ned this is an interesting thing to notice that often is glossed over the manosphere is greatly a white phenomenon but that's mostly just by the sheer numbers of white men on the internet the visible most popular parts of the manosphere have always been men of color I believe because white men had to maintain a pristine image of moral virtuousness and progressiveness that they cannot be as openly anti-feminist and misogynistic something like the manosphere that builds itself on this regressive misogynistic patriarchal imagery just can't effectively tie itself to White masculinity cuz that would conflict directly with the way racism and white supremacy works you can't have the image of misogyny and patriarchy be white men even as the predominantly white male ramp Republican party and Supreme Court seek to undermine and gut women's rights at every turn even the white men that populate the greater manosphere take on more intellectual veneers or maintain a ninin while their bipo peers tend to be more flamboyant and bombastic and thus they thrive in the attention economy so there's some weirdness going on there but it shouldn't betray the fact that the maner as a whole is genuinely racially diverse I've spoken at length about the black manosphere but there's also the phenomenon of Asian-American participation as well I going to go into it more I'll leave some further reading in the description but the point of bringing this up is to show that the manosphere is diverse because the hegemonic ideal of what masculinity is or needs to be centers around explicit traditional ideals of what a good man is or what a good life for a man should be and these traditional ideals almost always center around conservative stoic images of masculinity sexuality and gender so all of these men are chasing the same overall goals and Aesthetics and the manuscrip tells them that they know how to help them get there or in the case of red pills black pills incels Etc it tells them who to blame for them not being able to get there and that belies one of the core problems that the manosphere is telling boys and men how to be a thing that doesn't exist it it just genuinely doesn't exist for most men out there in the world and my perception is that that's what often brings about the most toxic Behavior because imagine chasing something that you're you're constantly being told is real and you're being told that you can get it if only this thing happens if only you buy this course or if only these women or queer people or whatever stop doing insert X thing this creates a paradox which brings us frustration bitterness and dysfunction and all of that is not new but today it is more volatile more organized more toxic and more widespread men have always had these same problems and many men have always blame women for these problems but we haven't always had the modern manosphere to collect and organize those individuals together and therein lies the key that I think is most interesting to talk about here we know a nice bit about why young boys and men come to the Manis spere but we don't know a lot about why they stay or why they leave and more importantly who benefits from their presence Within These online spaces and how all of that makes the entire situation much worse I'm kind of an expert on the manosphere at this point which probably isn't saying a lot there isn't a ton of research on the manosphere for various reasons one which I alluded to in my first manosphere video which is that there's an overall reticence to study men as a troubled population from an explicitly gendered standpoint or God forbid to study white men as an explicit population and not just as a default population to measure everyone else against I vividly remember being in grad School in like maybe 2014 telling one of my professors that I wanted to study gamergate and she was like what's that and as I explained it to her I saw her eyes roll in the back of her head she told me to consider finding something more significant to study a year later Elliot Roger would commit the first of several incel related shooting spre in the last decade thankfully today the topic is being taken more seriously but it takes a while for Academia to fully dig into a new topic so there just isn't a lot of res research on the manosphere hence there's a pretty low bar for being an expert on the manosphere but to remedy this I actually did a little bit of independent research and I'm going to talk about that research in the next section but I want to be clear this is not academic level research I actually have a real background in academic and professional research and design and this was not that there was no review board there was no oversight and development of these questions or appropriate ways to identify and collect the population sample or a cleaning of the data real academic surveys can take weeks months maybe even years to develop over time I literally made this in a day so as I talk about these findings understand that they rank low in the scale of empirical quantitative research all right unlike other times do not site me on this that said I found some interesting [ __ ] here so I posted this survey on men's live a Reddit board dedicated to healthier engagement with discussing masculinity and the problems of men I highly suggest for those of you looking for more productive healthy community of men to talk to while trying to figure [ __ ] out I also sent it to Red Pill exit and Insel exit two other redit boards with self-explanatory names and I posted it on my YouTube channel page and the goal is just to collect that info from as many places as possible not so much the manosphere itself but its former members before doing this research I had a few theories and typologies on what I expected to find my first St is that most men and boys in the manosphere spend a relatively short time there that guys may have a manosphere phase and then grow out of it which also makes me believe that the most active and Evangelical members of the manosphere are younger men or boys essentially who don't have a lot of real experience or perspective on what manhood and masculinity might look like so they might be more impressed by the bizarre behavior of an Andrew Tate or a freshen fit but overall I think older men tend to find the Antics and behavior of men in the manosphere to be ironically IMM masculine and undesirable get out get out I hate [ __ ] get out of here bro get the get the megaphone get the megaphone ugly you see I I just this is the worst further over time most men within a normal range of life and behavior will figure out that women are not as bad as the manosphere tries to present them and recognizes that the manosphere energy and rhetoric will always make the distance between them and women much further real man while still capable of misogyny and harm toward women by the type of rhetoric and behavior they see in the manosphere embarrassing to associate with a really good example of this can be found in the relationship between Andrew Schultz and fresh and fit Andrew Schultz is no Progressive you know leftist feminist figurehead he's a relatively like strong reflection of normal male attitudes towards social issues and when fresh and fit came on the flagrant 2 podcast him and his co-host mostly said you guys sound like idiots so whether you like it or not people are looking at you as a role model you guys have established yourselves as role models from simps to pimps which is another model I find kind of corny but I I looked into what you guys are about and a lot of the [ __ ] is just childish which is fine if you want to be funny we just talked about how doctors ain't [ __ ] for 45 minutes we are not in any way life coaching we are not in any way trying to help men outside of hey come have a laugh for a couple hours if you're going to paint yourself as life coaches and then say [ __ ] like yeah you know what I mean I just don't really [ __ ] with black girls like I guess and since then they've had an ongoing although minor feud between fresh and fit this loser Duo and Schultz and his partner on the flagrant 2 podcast who are much much bigger much much more popular you asked me if we watch their podcast I'm a 40-year-old man who's happy why would I watch that podcast I only watch it when I'm fighting with my wife I be like these guys get me these guys understand bro wom and when you go and you look at the comments from that video you kind of get an idea of how normal everyday guys think about the manosphere and their big- time avatars guys in the manosphere are of a unique breed most men in the manosphere spend only a limited time there somewhere between 6 months to a year I hypothesize to further explain this I break down the manosphere participants into three specific types first there's the users these young men and boys come for a specific purpose such as learning how to dress better or improving their conversational abilities you know social coaching Etc skills that once they Master they don't really have a reason to stick around much longer because they're looking for specific things they also don't participate as much in the larger broader Community they're much more likely to be connected to the more peripheral figures I mentioned earlier or spaces like nofap and pickup Artistry this also means they're not as Evangelical about the manosphere nor do they identify with it as much as a part of their identity they're just looking to find some things that might help them accomplish a goal they have in mind and this makes it easier for them to get out when the getting is good the issue is kind of what you were addressing which is the the real social world is scary I imagine that the vast majority of people who are incels are probably similar to me when they're they're just very risk averse when it comes to like approaching and talking to people they don't want some random guy walking up to them and bothering them and things like that my case is a little bit unique because I actually didn't care too much about rejection I know a lot of people do um but even still I'm going to have similar problems because I was not talking myself out of going up to these people and it just resulted in me not getting experience me not even trying and then in many of these cases I would later figure out these people wanted me to talk to them these people wanted me to do these things I have my own struggles with like understanding relationships and and closing and and stuff like that with girls but I I I just kind of power through it but I still I remember the first time I tried [ __ ] I learned from like the game at like a nightclub you know what I'm saying and it and it worked right like it it worked it got I got numbers from that night I remember that yeah see it's basically like a lot of those people would just like tell you like you know go out socialize meet people which is again like good like healthy thing back to my mind it felt like a little bit weird and almost predatory in a sense cuz you're supposed to be focusing on like meeting women and like you know quote unquote hitting on women but part of my mind was just like well if I was like really a sociable person like I would interact with like anybody I'd just be out with some buddies having a good time and like you mingle and like that's how people normally meet people and like really like when you're out in a social environment you can literally talk to anybody it's just about having sort of like a social awareness or acuteness and like knowing how to interact and you know deal with inevitable rejection point I was getting to earlier it's like I was talking to one of the coaches and basically he says like 90% of the people who get into sort of like seduction or Pua get out of it like there's a big turnover it's like 90% get out of it in a year because they either they meet somebody or they learn how to you know get good with women and like they they learn like how to you know properly socialize Zas and irrelevant who I to for this video might be examples of people that you might consider users although I don't think either was necessarily a member of the Manis sphere both dealt with challenges socializing dealt with challenges in their romantic experiences and found the world of men's self-help as a recourse I even have admitted to reading the game back in the early 2000s after a bad breakup we often stereotype and malign men self-help and rightfully so there are numerous pitfalls to where this stuff leads we also stereotype the type of men who struggle socially or with intimacy as overweight basement dwellers with poor hygiene but this just isn't accurate if you go peruse any incel or manac related Message Board where guys want you to rate them you'll see a lot of guys that aren't so bad looking at least to the point where their looks are the key problem that they're facing in improving their dating life but it's hard to get them to see that which usually puts them in our second category the second category is what I call the truthers they come to the manosphere with less explicit goals sometimes they just wander into it from other anti-feminist anti-sjw spaces or content creators sometimes they start out with they goal the same as a user might but end up sticking around possibly because they can't find or activate on the resources that they might find in that earlier self-help section which forces them to dive in deeper to explain what they're dealing with this has the byproduct of making them build a stronger Affinity toward the rhetoric and the community they engage with Community is a highly underrated aspect of the manosphere that I'll talk about a bit later but these guys stay a little longer which means it often takes a whole lot more effort to change and pull them out positive development such as a new romantic success or a new community or a new friend group or some type of other intervention might pull them out also over time they might recognize that the toxic raage cycle that the manisi pulls them into is probably not good for them they get disillusioned with the variety of internal inconsistencies and the constant inire and the public derision for associating with such a toxic group and leave out of boredom or shame this is the group that might even be reachable through a YouTube video or even a debate that exposes them to better ways of thinking about their issues and hopefully better ways of dealing with them this group is probably the largest or maybe the most visible part of this community and probably spends up to a year or more in the community and then lastly and most concerningly is the lifers this is basically the previous group except much much worse worse their vulnerability to manister rhetoric is stronger or enhanced by other factors such as their appearance difficulties improving their economic or social standing and possibly even genuine Behavioral or mental disabilities along with the absence of forces and resources that will get them out they don't have a strong support system that can see what they're going through and figure out a way to get them to the other side they're mostly just stuck in whatever environment they're in for these folks they begin to really identify with the rhetoric and accept it as their truth and move with it in perpetuity attaching themselves to the community because that Community might be the only one that they actually have access to considering that the modern manosphere is only 10 to 15 years old it's hard to say just how long life or stay in the manosphere there's a prominent member of the black manosphere who's in his 70s Rola tamasi and Coach Greg Adams and others are men who are clearly in their 50s and they have fans that have been with them since day one way back in the mid 2000s so who knows how long lifers actually stick around round so this typology is something that I had mostly figured out before doing my little survey based off my academic research and my experience observing this community so how did these hypotheses line up with my bootleg research though my servey had nearly 2,000 responses which is a really good sample regardless of the quality of the questions my first question was what age did you first encounter the manosphere to which the vast majority over 40% of the respondents said that it was in their teenage years between 13 and 17 with the next largest group being 18 to 23 those groups together made up 70% of the respondents and of course this should have been expected considering the population that has access to YouTube and Reddit to begin with again not a perfect survey most respondents spent one to two years consuming manage for your content and around 70% of the respondents spent two years or less consuming the content meaning that as I predicted most people don't actually spend a lot of time in the Manis sphere which makes a lot of sense when you think about the way that manosphere content works and how it often Works in Cycles the manosphere big figures of 10 years ago are not big figures today and the ones that are big figures today won't be big figures 10 years from now according to my survey less than 10% of manosphere consumers spend more than five years consuming this content and participating in manosphere spaces so far my prior research and this survey kind of line up in fact most of this survey validated what I assumed up until this point I had questions about why you came and it showed that it was about you know improving masculinity and learning how to attract women the most popular space that the respondents participated in was red pill spaces there were a lot of responses connected to negative views about women again this survey isn't up to academic standards but I'm confident that any of you enterprising gender studies folks watching if you wanted to do something like this for a master's thesis you probably find similar results that said the survey revealed something that I wasn't n expecting that I didn't really think about about that population of truthers or maybe lifers that if in any way accurate is really horrifying in his ramifications what I found in my data is that the manosphere seems to have the strongest most lasting hold on boys who encounter it at a younger age in analyzing the study there's a clear pattern that shows that the older an individual was when they first encountered the manosphere the shorter their length of participation is and again this corresponds with earlier argument but that also has a really scary Counterpoint which is that as the age of the first encounter with the Manis feere goes down the amount of time they spend associating and consuming this content goes up when I isolate for those who encounter the manosphere at 12 years or younger the amount of respondents that spend 5 years or more consuming manosphere content triples which means that there are young men in this survey that went through most of puberty and are entering into young adulthood whose entire understanding of masculinity and manhood is informed by the manosphere they have no experience of being even just pubescent boys without having Andrew Tate type [ __ ] in the back of their head more disturbingly though slightly less significant in the data is that participation in those more concerning and toxic areas of the manister such as incel and black pill spaces also has a small but noticeable increase the younger the person was when they first encountered the mosphere so there are young young men identifying with incel and black pill ideology that literally haven't had time to even try to date I've been racking my brain to try to make sense of this and to be clear there's some reasonable explanations for one this is a small part of the sample size only like I think 200 respondents encountered the manosphere before the age of 12 and that always res skew the way data looks and this question in of itself might have had the unintended effect of identifying the most extreme cases still even if these these are outlier cases they still exist and extrapolated to the greater population we're talking about a lot of young boys being targeted and harmed by the manosphere at a very early age and harmed in profound ways that we really don't even understand yet when you think about how YouTube and social media works this is how it always works it makes sense that there would be a very young population encountering this content because this content is mostly there for them I think sometimes we overplay how widespread and dangerous the manosphere itself is although it's pretty damn awful so much of it is you know [ __ ] weird guys insular communities and maybe a handful of insecure dudes that are just trying to figure out how to talk to girls better it's not ideal but considering the grand scope of things those elements are not going to have such an awful impact on society as a whole or those particular individuals but if you're encountering this stuff at 12 13 14 years old why your literal brain chemistry is still developing and you're seemingly more likely to involve yourself in spaces with more extreme and dire rhetoric that's scary that should really bother us all that's an awful thing happening to young boys right now that there's no protection from let alone the rest of the people specifically young girls and eventually older women that are going to be in contact with these boys and the thing I really want to hone in on from this is that all of these manosphere red pill channels know that their biggest and most reliable consumers are children little boys who don't know any better they can see it in their metrics we can see it from how their followers behave the things they find funny and so many of the interactions they have with their fans it's always little ass boys that they're drowning with this misogynistic rhetoric now I'm extrapolating this from my own imperfect survey but I also found one paper that discussed narratives from incel Red Pill exit and this study discussed numerous responders who were in their early teens when they began consuming content a survey from the Anti-Defamation League on incels showed that 8% of the respondents were under the age of 18 but this is their age at the time of the survey not the age in which they were actually consuming the content which probably could tell you that they were probably consuming it much earlier but even just the common sense to know that YouTube and Tik Tok definitely have incredibly large audiences of teens and younger children and we know that this is where much of this content lives and spreads and when I think about that we actually have to start taking it out of the manosphere content creator economy and take it to the actual platforms that they're creating this stuff on YouTube Tik Tok Instagram Etc all control what is on their platform they know who's watching what and they know the type of content that is spreading on their sites it's ironic that the rightwing has this groomer Panic that they're using all the time about transvisibility and rainbow flags and School classrooms yet in those same classrooms there are young people watching Andrew tape videos on Tik Tok and nobody say saying a damn thing the biggest groomers and dangers to our children and their well-being are giant tech companies and the proprietary and secretive algorithms that they use to Target capture and hold young boys in content bubbles that literally feed off their negative emotions all the way to the bank one of the negative parts of it for me kind of comes from the left less so from the people but from the psychological effect of like creating content that's critical of the manosphere as a man in a way that's kind of it follows the general trend of commentary YouTube where you're just making fun of some weird [ __ ] you found I think it can be counterintuitive for the men watching but also for just playing the hits to an audience like there's there's a incentive where if I go to make a video I am way more tempted to joke about something to be like what the [ __ ] is that guy saying that engagement I it's incentivized and I don't like regret it at all but over time I've been like yeah this the way this industry works very much skewed towards Capital production over genuine art or Genuine engagement with these ideas in a political context on August 11th and 12th 2017 an estimated 600 white men collected in Charlottesville Virginia for the unite the right rally the rally was an openly white supremacist event organized by ious white supremacist groups coming to protest the removal of a Confederate statue it was met by counter-protesters and quickly spilled into violence with multiple people being assaulted as well as one white supremacist driving his car into a crowd severely injuring several people and killing Heather hire a 32-year-old activist this event shocked the nation somehow mind you only 6 months prior a president who openly courted the favor of white supremacist took office so I don't know who would have thought I'll avoid harping too long on how surprising white supremacist activity seems to be with white people and focus on the fact that in the aftermath a lot of fingers began pointing directly at YouTube at this time YouTube was a focal space for what came to be known as the Ain or alternative influence Network which was basically a loose network of alt-right and anti-sjw creators who often funnel their viewers and supporters into more radical and extreme belief syst systems such as white supremacy creating fertile ground for the growth of the alt-right which had been in effect for years prior some would say since gamergate but I actually argue that the first evidence of the internet's ability to Galvanize toxic and extreme behavior from disaffected groups of men started with the hate campaign against Anita sarkeesian in 2011 so for at least 6 Years YouTube had allowed the growth and festering of various reactionary communities on their website with minimal push back with this revelation YouTube faced a ton of scrutiny for their LAX policies and it resulted in what was called the ad apocalypse which was essentially a lot of advertisers announcing that they would leave the platform if YouTube didn't clean things up which resulted in YouTube changing their policies on hate speech and information along with a variety of other things which resulted in a lot of YouTubers losing a lot of money very suddenly now most of those YouTubers eventually recovered but the core change was the fact that tons of your favorite anti-sjw creators saw their views drastically drop and many of them greatly disappeared and those who didn't disappear greatly altered their content some even reporting to have somewhat switched sides in the aftermath either way it's important to understand that UK's policies did not suddenly bar the presence of hate speech it just required it to be heavily censored more like euphemize in order to maintain its presence and made it harder for anything within that realm well some things within that realm to get picked up by the algorithm still the harmful rhetoric has always remained and has always been there it's just more intellectualized maybe a little bit more polite or polished but it still serves the same purpose so why hasn't YouTube done anything about this the answer is pretty simple cuz they haven't felt the need to to be fair to them to YouTube where I do get my checks how you guys doing uh they are much better than what's happening on Facebook and Twitter Facebook I mean they got pulled into a federal hearing for a reason and Twitter is basically world star hipop at this point like never did I see fight in Faces of Death videos on Twitter until Elon took it over that said YouTube and Tik Tok and Instagram is where the manosphere tends to live and YouTube is taking the same passive approach to the problem of the manosphere that they did to the AI in for five years ago creators like sneak on fresh and fit were removed or demonetized on YouTube but it's it's hard to imagine that it was for their misogyny because their misogyny had been going on for months or years before they were being punished my theory is that sneaker was actually deplatformed because of his covid denial and fresh and fit were demonetized because they were putting in false takedown flags on other creators I don't think that either of them were punished for magey because that would mean that so many other creators would be punished for the same thing and both of them were making big banks for themselves up until those points and conversely for YouTube up until those points so so the obvious answer to why YouTube and other social media platforms allow this toxic content is money while not as big as huge creators like Mr Beast and his many clones or your popular kids channels unboxing gaming channels Etc the manosphere and related content is still big business for these social media platforms and these social media platforms understand that allowing themselves to be user-driven builds in an advantage to cultivate audiences in every possible niche of content to make sure that they get a piece of everything so there's not just a left tube and a manosphere there's also Sports Talk and book talk and barbecue talk and makeup tutorial YouTube and martial arts YouTube there's tutorial videos on YouTube with hundreds of thousands of views just for making really clear ice to put in alcoholic beverages these companies leave no stone unturned because each one of these niches corresponds with a specific Advertiser who will come there to spend literally billions of dollars a year to put their products in front of certain eyeballs and traditionally no set of eyeballs is more valuable and Elusive than the eyes of boys and young men the types of folks who do watch Manis feere content but it's even deeper than that because I would argue that unlike a guy who just say wants to figure out a new recipe for really clear ice for his vodka hobby the bisphere truthers and lifers that I described in the last section spend tons of time engaged with this type of content and not only do they spend a lot of time being engaged but they're also very predictable in that engagement can you kind of introduce your your a lot of your pertinent expertise to the topic yeah um so hi I'm Jordan Herod I'm a PhD student at mat and Harvard and I make content around Ai and society and the existential crisis that we're all kind of having about it at the moment um and my PhD research also uh delves into AI for clinical applications there's a lot of a lot of different things tied up in how people come across this content some of which is is algorithmic some of which is political in a lot of ways some of which is just like the nature of the internet and the kind of content bubles that people can very easily end up with even without systems like the YouTube algorithm because if you grow up in a Suburban town or like any sort of town like chances are just the number of people who are espousing these kinds of ideas publicly is going to be low and so um there's only so large of a group assuming that you even find these people in the first place you can really create around that the the impact that that would have um on on kind of larger society in a lot of ways is just not that big but now there's the internet so you and 100,000 of your best friends with problematic views can all get together places and end up you know reinforcing ideas and themes that are not very healthy as well as almost delving further into to you know conspiracy thinking around why you might have trouble talking to girls going back to my bootleg survey if this were more developed or if I were ever to try to do it again I'll probably add more responses to discuss and get at how much these people hate women because in one section where I gave the option for a direct individual response I got a nice amount of responses that implied that hatred for women was a driving factor for consuming manosphere content and when you look at manosphere and manosphere adjacent content there's a persistent Trend with presenting women's centered rage bait for those who don't know rage bait is basically all this content that is made to make you angry it's showing a person usually a woman or maybe even a kid doing something they're not supposed to do and the best rage baate content shows them getting what they deserve I have a whole video on it on the bsid check that out look at how bad this is look at but simply put when you look at a lot of manosphere content it's usually feminist gets owned by facts and Logic for not knowing her place or some [ __ ] like that it's lowest common denominator content that is only built upon the worst inclinations that some men have but the red pill manag type guys eat this [ __ ] up because one of their main things is this Crusade against the inherent evilness of women and they will go to their channels like clock work to consume that content cuz it gives them that emotion engagement um and and how platforms Define engagement has changed over the years I think largely for the better you do still end up with this problem of like well if we're looking at optimizing engagement we're often looking at amplifying strong emotions and uh disincentivizing Nuance you know if you were already on that kind of slippery slap so to speak I think you're a lot more likely to kind of fall down that whereas especially if you have a a friend groups or or familiar groups or or otherwise um interpersonal social support systems outside of that you might come across that like kind of intellectual dark web but not quite like super far right e video and listen to what they're saying and kind of be like I don't this this doesn't like align with like the actual conversations and people that I know in my real life so I'm going to like move away from this um there's person like this is exactly what I was looking for engagement is driven by making the viewer feel strong emotions and one of the easiest and most reliable emotions to build engagement around is anger and disgust these young men and boys have so much anger and disgust towards women most of them will tell you outright they'll be in this comment section watch and if they don't then we still know they're lying because of what their content shows us and the scariest thing is that these strong emotions are predictable because they're addictive again you will find some poor honest and they will tell you that they themselves know that they're in a negative feedback loop with Manis content they know that they're not helping themselves or improving any of their masculinity or dating options by consuming this content on a regular basis that this content is making them more angry and miserable but they're addicted to it they're so wrapped up in it that they kind of can't stop without some type of intervention and this is also a response I saw on the survey but it's not just my bootleg survey we saw this with Facebook and qanon we see this with flat earthers all of these alternative spaces in the way that social media drives those spaces kind of builds upon the same mechanisms that I don't know they've hacked within the human brain knowing that we will keep coming back to certain things if they make us feel a specific emotion but that's from the consumption side cuz if we're going to be honest this content is also addictive as a Creator every video we upload is is especially for for me like trauma so like I mean like I talk about black incels I talk about anti fatness I talk about um you know domestics abuse and stuff like that the things that we talk about especially when you bring in the racial component racism gaming the racism in the Indian Community what I talked about it it's always things that are going to be so incendiary so polemic that you know you will piss off someone if not everyone the commodification of this and the commodification of our grief and how we have there's a mlin quote that basically says media is the children and we are children of the media so you make what you want to make supply and demand type of thing we make Manos Fair videos because we know they work and because they work people continue to make them which is an oversaturation of demand for manosphere anti manosphere stuff which will in turn dictate the limitations and the the um perimeter around what we will be able to make successfully sometimes manister content is a reliable money maker and that's because not only will these guys watch rage bait maneral content to get their jollies off by hating on women and complaining about feminism they'll also come and watch anti- manosphere content too they're so addicted and tied to this manosphere rhetoric and so protective of it as a community that they feel driven to consume it and defend it on all fronts if you look at the comment section of any anti-man video you will see them here arguing and trolling and being hateful in the comment section you barely ever see the opposite and this only makes any video you make about the manosphere have a reliable floor of viewership and high metrics in your engagement I guarantee that this video will probably hit a million views in a month or so I'd be shocked if it didn't if I don't [ __ ] up the thumbnail and the title or it get AG restricted give me maybe 40 50 days from this release and I guarantee it'll hit a million why because the manister dudes will be here in my comment section to argue about what I'm saying I've heard people that actually watched my content say I don't know why YouTube algorithm keeps on suggesting to me manosphere content and that's because the algorithm doesn't have any actual like Insight on the individual it just knows how patterns work and since genuine manosphere consumers will watch manosphere content to get their jollies off and then hate watch anti- manosphere content the algorithm just knows hey there's a connection there and so it keeps on trying to play our content against each other there is genuinely no more valuable and predictable audience to cultivate at least on YouTube and I would argue still on Tik Tok and Instagram and on Twitter than manere people because they are the most online they're the most reliable and they're the most easy to manipulate it's the truth who are already entrenched in the manosphere side are probably more likely to kind of watch both in the sense that both of them kind of get them riled up with like negative emotions whereas I feel like people on the anti manosphere side fine watching that kind of content um stressing almost as a a pressure valve well not the meph watching light yeah the St yes that makes sense I think it ends up being a pressure Bell for people to like release some frustration about it but it isn't something that you know you come away from it being like I am now more upset than I was before and like have this righteous anger and in in the same way I think that if they were to go over to the manosphere side they like clicked in and then within 5 Seconds they're like oh no like this is not what what I come to content for it's yeah I still get messages to this day from like mostly from men telling me that like you they they'd seen their friend like start to go down the rabbit hole and they'd sent them my video and that had like taken them out of that rabbit hole and I've had like yeah loads of lovely DMS obviously I've had the negative stuff as well I had know a lot of comments from people from the manosphere especially when it first came out as well people were trying to sort of debug me but not really doing much of a good job in the comments but I find that what people mostly say is you haven't done your research when like clearly I've looked up quite a lot of studies for this video the main people that I was um talking about in the video was his name r tamasi he did a he did a live stream not lot longer after I put my video out and um he did a live stream where he was reacting to my video on his channel and then that brought a lot of obviously a lot of traffic over to my video when he did that but yeah I mean what you going to do I I don't really mind but it's not just us there's also tons of mainstream media looking at the world of incels and the manosphere I think there was just a big expose on visce or one of these other media conglomerates that followed around a bunch of incels from the UK because humans we have just this desire to peer into the world of people we think are odd all that said don't get me wrong though this [ __ ] gets tiresome at least for us on the opposite end because it becomes tedious and at least for me feels kind of exploitative at times this is why I only dabble in the subject every few videos same with foreign men Noah has tapered off on his weird Guy Quest as well moon is the best of us she made one video and said all right that's it I'm out on you [ __ ] this was what zatman was struggling with himself zatman could very easily if he wanted to keep making those types of videos and get a larger following because even if he's not saying anything new it would still boost him up a little bit to give him more options as to what he could make in the future but if you go back and watch that video zman's talking about not wanting to be this Crusader but wanting to be a creative but as I mentioned at the beginning of the video this [ __ ] literally pays the bills but before you judge me or anyone else let's think about the actual promanage of content which is even more embarrassing cuz you know many of them don't actually even believe in what they're saying and making but they keep saying get to keep feeding Their audience the same rage bait it does not take much to notice that just pearly things just says things that she knows will get her more clicks and clout and that nothing of what she said is of any actual value to her personal views or character as long as it keeps feeding her clout I mean people they lie all the time but saying things that uh for their own lives aren't true but I mean ultimately it comes down to to algorithmic incentivization which is a thing we're all subject to but like you said it's um there's a different tone when there's that that sort of backing which I I definitely agree there's a so I think I agree with you too uh a little bit Noah because there's like I think there's like um early things who clearly is just saying the thing oh yeah like 100% it's really amusing Shameless Shameless Shameless and she's with Paris Morgan so low effort as well it's that's what the most annoying thing the the effort that she puts in to make the money that she's probably making is insan thing she'll sit there scrolling through her phone on a video doesn't even bother Ed editing it out but people would sit there ruling because she's saying grip because what that's the thirst of this of this community but yeah like it speaks to like so it's really low effort she's been debunked and owned and drugs so many times yet she persists and she doesn't persist based on Talent effort like I give Andrew Tate a lot of credit for being talented he could have picked almost anything to do as a public fure it doesn't speak highly of the audience when his successor was pearly things it clearly that wasn't the key ingredient to his success former clown Prince of the manosphere sneer has said on several occasions that he rolled the manosphere red pill wave these last few years cuz it was hot and blew him up but despite all this the addicts in the manosphere do not care they will fall for the same exact trick within a week with the next guy that pops up the only silver lining for that Community is that every once in a while one of them or one individual maybe starting upon that Journey sees what's happening and says you know what this is weird and I don't want to do this and you know shout out to those guys but the truly depraved individuals like your Andrew Tate or your devout truther weirdos like a Jordan Peterson never waver in this rhetoric and continue to return to this cash cow I will again remind you to all the Jordan Peterson fans shout out to Jordan Peterson's prior psychology career I understand that it was beneficial to a lot of people but most people who know who Jordan Peterson is now would not have known who he was had he not became this Manis feere Messianic figure period argue with your mama look at the research and the data and the timeline that is facts the Manis feere is a giant engine that keeps the machine running and everyone gets to eat off the people who consume this content and most of them don't get [ __ ] and there's like a cynical part of me that doesn't [ __ ] care and wants to make the full-on Andrew tape video once every two months it would be so easy cuz I know we'll do numbers and I will use that money to take my wife on vacation and take a picture of us on the beach and tag your favorite Manis Creator who hasn't been kissed in the last six years and say you made this possible but there's also a bigger part of me that actually cares about the men and boys targeted and harmed by this content especially now realizing how young they are and how much worse this content affects those young people and that's a thing that I think still isn't talked about enough that despite the amount of harm being done by this population this is a population that at its core is being exploited and they're being exploited based on real areas of vulnerability that are at least from my perspective hard to talk about cuz someone can be both victim and perpetrator and that makes it difficult to fully engage with the totality of the subject because you want to leave room for the victimhood in play but not so much room that any type of change or accountability for that behavior is pushed to the side I have tremendous sympathy for people who are victims of incel violence absolutely horrible I have tremendous sympathy for people who are who are subject to incel vitriol I mean I'm I'm someone who's received death threats from incels we talk about the manosphere and we can talk about it as one chunk but in terms of my feelings about them right I have much less sympathy for you know the redpilled Playboy who's using and abusing women deliberately through a bad divorce or have gotten their heartbroken once and or twice and instead of handling it productively they went off the rails very different from an incel who is fundamentally in many cases just going to be a lonely man with a personality [Music] disorder as I said earlier my Mana video series is something that I'm greatly known for really proud of but there is one glaring analytical flaw a flaw that I knew was there but I didn't want to address cuz I didn't know if I could address it appropriately and that flaw was that I did not touch on the difficult to engage with relationship between these toxic communities and the population specifically the fact that a lot of this population is disproportionately neurodivergent I knew going in from my own research that there was a clear relationship between the manosphere and autism spectrum disorder but I didn't know how or where to fit that in and I didn't feel like I'd be able to talk about it properly and that I might end up doing far more harm than good in the process so I left it out but not long after that video went viral I got a response video from a Creator named first as tragedy and he kind of took me to task on this glaring go Mission from my video that manosphere pool it wasn't necessarily my audience and then from here on out I was like to get that same pool to get that same content creation I can't do my normal ableism disability analysis my real Niche like I do like a video on like speech disorders um and kind of eism with speech disorders I can't you know that's not going to pull you know the same mosphere on crowd for me IA speaks an issue in the broader political left of how disability is approached um and then I get big on a manosphere video but I don't think people came there for the disability angle they came there for the manosphere stuff you know first this tragedy correctly points out all of the things I mentioned as risk factors for falling into the manosphere poor social efficacy extensive engagement in online communities internet consumption higher risks for childhood trauma and abuse all of these things are things that people on the autism spectrum are more likely to experience and again this is something I knew but was afraid to get into and the reason I was afraid should be pretty obvious I didn't like the ramifications of implying that being autistic made you more prone to falling into the Manis spere or more prone for any particular harmful behavior and I want to be clear that is still true despite where some of the data tends to take us autism or any other form of Behavioral disorder is not an excuse for a toxic or harmful Behavior it might help better understand it and better figure out ways to address it but no one should get a pass on the type of harm that people in the manosphere participate in just because there's a high propensity for certain marginalized neurot types to follow this ideology tons of people are autistic and don't become misogynists in fact the vast majority of autistic people do not lean into misogyny as an identity further research tells us that people with behavioral and mental disorders are far more likely to be victims of violence than to commit violence we also know that the vast majority of violence is committed by neurotypical normal people so let's keep that in mind also it's important to recognize how this particular data point serves as an ableist talking point used both to Shield manosphere content and the people behind it from criticism for what they're actually doing but also to promote ideas around the need to further control and ostracize autistic people because of their strange ways and unpredictable and potentially dangerous behavior these arguments cannot be taken seriously we cannot handwave the men spewing violent rhetoric online just to say we need to control the neurodiverse population consuming it instead this type of ideology infantilizes people on the Spectrum while at the same time absolving the bigger forces from their responsibility in the harm that's being done here so please recognize that the goal is not to vilify neurodiverse people as uniquely dangerous but to force us to consider the totality of what's Happening Here disabled and Nar diversion individuals if they're if something doesn't happen they're led to desire narat typicality or able-bodiedness and I think that that leads them into issues to where there's this kind of conflict between their own disability and then the desire is Place upon them by all the systems to then lead them into Desiring um normally ativity and then that leads them into like when you think about manosphere content I when you comes to neurodiversity and the autistic Community I specifically think about pickup Artistry um which when I was younger I don't know about today but when I was younger that was very very prevalent to where it would be recommended by the algorithm it it was mainstream when I was uh in my 20s like that was on TV was in books so a lot of times autistic people don't necessarily have access to romance we get into the whole male stuff here I forget the statistics but like male loneliness is Raising and that's always getting the focus but also female loneliness is also um rais as well under statistic for the autistic Community it is a thing of having access to intimacy it isn't always there and what Aven are you kind of drawn to that said there's a lot of emerging research that indicates that the manosphere particularly in cells are more likely to be neurodiverse along with suffering from other major Behavioral or mental disorders a study from 2022 in the Journal of Behavioral Sciences on terrorism political aggression found large disparities for depression anxiety and autism for incels in comparison to the prevalence of this in the average male population as reported from the World Health Organization which finds the prevalence of autism in less than 1% of the male population while the sample from the study found that it was nearly 20% of their population this is a near 2,000% increase as reported by this study but this isn't the only study another study from 2022 postulated that the formal diagnosis for autism the United States adults was 7% and found in their sample of V cells a formal diagnosis rate of 18% but they went further compared rates of informal or self- diagnosis and their sound reporting a rate of 74% of in cels compared to just 5% in the normal US population as of time of writing these studies are less than 2 years old and academic research on the topic of the manosphere in these communities is very very new and understudied and if you know anything about Academia you know that it takes a good five six years for people to get working theories on how certain data presents phenomenon so feel free if you're seeing this in 2025 or 2026 to say yeah he was off base on that because the research is showing otherwise that's fine in reality I kind of doubt that future findings will contradict these early findings because if you consider what we know about autism and other behavioral and mental disorders and how Society treats people with those challenges you can see how the engagement in toxic online spaces is very much a risk factor in something that is going to happen more commonly for those individuals first this tragedy illustrates in his response video that people with Autism are more likely to have difficulty socializing will spend more time online and will have poor educational economic outcomes and thus poor romantic options and we'll see the appeal of a guy like Andrew Tate telling you that he can train you to be normal as very desirable you have to recognize that these creators are purposefully targeting vulnerable groups whether Autistic or night and exploiting their pain and struggle in life to do further harm and exploit them and when you see the rhetoric used in the manosphere the constant hurling of ableist slurs the coded language around consumers of manosphere content it indicates that they know exactly who they're talking to and why they're talking to them that way not only what you mentioned but also that the man of spere and right political right-wing content creation is leading them to a solution that lands them within bounds of normativity which is the same lesson that he got from the the nuclear family which often times tried to make them normal through um ABA apply behavioral analysis the same lesson they got in special education the same lesson they got in labor if they're unemployed or underemployed and you know this overall cultural apparatus so I think another appeal of this kind of manosphere thing is this idea of finally achieving the desire of of achieving normativity in a sort of lonian sense making Dad happy making the teacher happy making your literal you know parents happy by finally achieving that normativity the manosphere offers the promise of better performance of masculinity which to boys on the spectrum is the promise of being normal but conversely these boys are put in a negative feedback loop and really hooked on their own brain chemistry to an extent in this cycle of Hope and then anger and then rage and then shame and then maybe back to Hope and then be rated for how their difficulties make it impossible for them to do better and then maybe even encouraged to ostracize and Target others within or outside of their groups as low cows worthy of targeting and derision if not just to take the heat off of themselves the whole thing is as depressingly awful as anything I've talked about on this channel and it's hard because you have to remember that these are the same people with anime avatars in the comment section or on Twitter being the absolute worst to everyone else like I am not losing track of that Paradox it's a delicate balance between trying to emphasize with the types of people who find themselves in the manosphere but also recognizing that Community Connection affection these are genuine human needs that we often underplay how bad it is to not have them and how many of us may not be any better in a different circumstance does not having those things excuse the behavior from these folks of course not but engaging with that part of the discourse should make us think more critically about how we respond to this phenomenon or how quickly we are to engage with L cow activity for some of these guys really it's weird that like the kind of feels like look looking back out it's Prime like incel like category but I never went into it like I watched like YouTube and just never kind of went down that road okay I promise this is not a inself point moment but I mean I think there's a real thing here of the need for intimacy and need for physical close and physical touch for me like being incredibly like 100 110% like vulnerable like no yeah like fact that I've never been you know like held or never been physically intimate with a woman like that sucks I think there is a thing of like wanting that physical intimacy and touch really to get R to touch deprivation it's the emotional mental effects of not having access to um physical intimacy access to it is kind of something that very much impacts my kind of self-esteem and impacts my um the way I view myself I mean so I've been like dealing with this recently to like where like you know I that's been in romatic relationship through 24 years of age like at some point because I look at yourself like [ __ ] what's wrong with me you know I'm not like say like like like oh [ __ ] am am I unlovable or something like um so like again it starts to kind of border on kind of I don't think it's inel because there's no like real no that's violence but like there's a real I think human need for intimacy in one autistic people don't have access to that and if the reaction to the expression of I don't have access to physical intimacy or romantic relationships this [ __ ] sucks is but often so we're really doing a bad job here I think a lot of the people who are gravitating towards this toxic misogynistic hate filled ideology are doing so in part because the building blocks of like being disenfranchised are there to begin with and a lot lot of times we're not even bothering to address that and some of the people are like technically an incel but they're not buying into incel ideology yet part of what I'm getting at is like being sexless is terrible like I feel like there's this like back and forth where we're like oh well it's not that bad or like we try and moralize it and I know we've going back and forth but but my stance is that is an essential part of a happy human like if you want it like obviously there's people who are a romantic as seexual Etc but with it but outside of that context getting to have the kinds of relationships that you want in your life is part of being a thriving human being full stop but I'm still not done because we still have to return to what makes it possible for these manosphere figures to do this gross grift upon this population and that lays at the feet of YouTube and other big te companies for radicalizing young men however emerging Research indicates that people aren't really radicalized by extreme content they encounter online what seems to be more accurate is that people tend to have a preset ideological disposition and a limit and will seek out content that reinforces those preset values so more extreme content mostly just serves as a beacon for more extreme individuals to collect together and deepen their level of radicalization our results show that a community of users who predominately consumed content produced by far-right channels does exist and while larger than the corresponding our left Community it is small compared with Centrist left leaning or right leaning communities and is not increasing in size over the time period of our study moreover we find that on platform consumption of far-right content correlates highly with off-platform consumption of similar content that users are roughly twice as likely to arrive at a farri video from some Source other than a previous YouTube video search an external website the homepage and that farri videos are no more likely to be viewed towards the end of sessions or in longer sessions while none of this evidence can rule out the recommendation system as a cause of traffic to farri content it is more consistent with users Simply Having a preference for the content they consume Facebook can both track what you're doing on platform but they can also kind of get a sense of like well you know where do you spend your money what other types of social media platforms do you like to go on what other types of websites do you enjoy what kind of other content do you like what age demographic do we think that you are even if you know on Facebook you're not looking at manosphere content or something like that it may end up being recommended to you based on what you do on other parts of the internet um and so I think that that contributes to to these things more than people realize it also influences you know recommendation systems and the kind of content that you know you you are preferentially shown by different platforms um which can also certainly contribute to the not necessarily the the development of these bubbles but um feeding people into it more efficiently because the content that you engage with on a day-to-day level on say Reddit which does a lot more recommend or recommended content these days now may not be political or mosphere or whatever but you might do that on other platforms and so now Reddit is starting to recommend that you go in that direction because they have this much more comprehensive picture of how you engage online than um you realize that at the time individuals with more extreme beliefs find that community connect to it and the social support they find online catalyzes them to adopt even more extreme views but it's not taking you know normal run-of-the-mill centered people and tur them into Ultra right-wing people and some people aren't going to like to hear this uh a lot of these people were shitty before they found Andrew Tate they were looking for Content that reinforces and celebrates their shitty views and behavior and those who were more moderate might dabble in that shitty content but typically won't dive deeper into said content now there's an argument to be made at where the lines are drawn between extreme content and normal content because from what I can gleam from the way the social media companies function most of what we consider the manosphere is normal to them but this still draws into question a few things for one it kind of undermines the whole idea of there being a battle for the future of boys Happening Here on YouTube and across social media I think that the nature of being an influencer or a content creator often inflates our audien's image of how powerful and important many of us are even your most popular YouTubers are a drop in the bucket in terms of real Global influence or specifically political and influence upon structures of power a while back sneo who I mentioned earlier had this embarrassing viral moment where he ran into some of his average fans and they reflected to him the exact type of energy that he had been given off in his content much to his embarrassment after the fact sneo got a lot of criticism for this and he defended himself by essentially pointing out the truth that little boys like this have always existed and their behavior isn't his fault initially people wanted to reject this but after think about it for a moment he's right it's the ugly truth but it's the truth this doesn't absolve him for his behavior and contribution to the problem but the lesson to get here is these boys shouldn't have been watching sneako in the first place is a phrase that I never thought I'd say where the [ __ ] were their parents at why are these parents allowing 10 11 year old boys to watch sneo sneo the reason for that is the way boys are socialized and I often say groomed into misogynistic and shitty behavior that starts locally the fact that so many people still think boys will be boys is a like solid plan for raising your children so when those boys make it online the type type of environment and energy and ideology that has been taught to them at home manifests well before they get on YouTube YouTube just recommends them exactly what they were already going to find in the first place so instead of looking at it as if Andrew Tate is corrupting America's youth we have to face the fact that so much of our modern culture is already corrupting America's Youth and as a byproduct of this they find Andrew Tate if the online and offline domains are ontologically inseparable then online radicalization becomes a redundant concept as Gillan colleagues argue we should not fixate on a simple location of radicalization but instead need to understand the drives needs and forms of behavior that led to the radicalization and attack planning and why offenders chose that environment rather than purely looking at the affordances that the environment produced the frame of a binary dichotomy tends to result in the internet being given radicalizing agency which overlooks other important factors such as vulnerabilities stressors or how online and offline factors combine manosphere has a disproportionate amount of autistic boys and men who follow it the manosphere clearly targets and captures these boys and the neurotypical boys who are less developed in their understanding of masculinity and exploits their insecurities capturing them in a negative feedback loop social media websites are not doing enough to address this or protect people from the behavior that happens in these spaces but we have to also be clear that the core problem here is the way these boys are being raised apart from their online environment what we're seeing right now with the manosphere is just another example of social dysfunction which is emblematic of how boys are required to be socialized in a society designed for most people to fail where the fear of not being on top isn't just a matter of ego and accolades or impressing all the girls but literal life and death in her book The Bully Society sociologist Jesse kleene has a chapter discussing the socioeconomic underpinnings of school shootings and explicitly ties into the difficulties of Performing normative masculinity under capitalism the School shooters for the most part grew up in the 1980s or later the rise in school shootings roughly coincides with the riged administration's restructuring of the American economic political and cultural landscape a period that glorified unrestrained capitalism and reemphasized an up Byer straps ethos Reagan promised an America rich with freedom individualism and financial reward for those who skillfully met the standard coupled with a lower degree of support for those who did not increasingly success was defined in terms of power economic attainment and social status the same barometers increasingly used at the high school level to assess masculinity later in this same chapter she circles back to the manufactured drive for status among young men and the corporations that take advantage of it the message adults receive as they battle through the status Wars are trans transmitted wholesale to children and teens as a part of their strategy to boost sales and profits corporations have increasingly directed their efforts towards the youth Market in her book no logo Naomi Klein discusses the rise of branding in which companies seek to sell not just products but also the illusion of status identity and lifestyle that go along with them although the power of the brand now extends to all age groups it is most prevalent among teenagers the companies believed rightfully as it turned out that youth with their fragile identities and susceptibil ility to peer pressure would do anything to possess the right Brands and yeah this is where the real power of the manosphere exists it's not in their rhetoric or ideas it doesn't take much to look at manosphere content and see that the vast majority of them aren't even talented the manosphere and reactionary thought in general has a built-in Advantage based solely on the way Society functions when those 12-year-old boys first Google how to talk to girls everything about the world as they've understood it to that point is grooming them for an Andrew Tate it's not grooming them for me Andrew Tate is closer to the image of masculinity that is championed in our culture it's not hard for him to amass followers me I got to make 2hour Long YouTube videos slowly breaking down piece by piece why that [ __ ] is wrong just to say maybe you shouldn't hate women and say they're not able to vote and that will help you improve your desirability that's how hard it is to do this [ __ ] but if I collected a bunch of only fans models and got up here yelling and shouting ridiculous inflammatory things yeah that would suck in 12y olds and that's why this content is designed the way it's designed that's why sneako fans are 11 years old and not 30 and that's why YouTube and Tik Tok and Twitter all but openly courau this type of content and turn a blind eye to the problem of what's happening and even the hand ringing about those Duro atypical boys being caught up in the manosphere is a red herring once you take this into consideration it's not the neuroatypical that they deal with it's the mag Manic Drive that they have to imagine themselves as normal alpha males that pulls them in they have that insecurity and then here's the manister guy with their online course about being financially independent or learning about Bitcoin or the artist seduction and maybe at best the diet and workout plan but that's not something that starts on your foru page that's something that literally starts in the home and the way we raise and socialized boys so what can be done about this first and foremost stop passively raising your sons stop telling your sons not to cry stop ignoring their emotional needs and development Stop Believing boys will be boys have complex challenging conversations with them about what they watch and the media they consume invest in their emotional development treat them like humans instead of future soldiers or Breadwinners like if you raise boys and you're around other people who raise boys there's this hegemonically driven thing where you can tell everyone's fear is raising a weak man and while I empathize with that because that's still a fear I have I feel like a lot of people haven't deconstructed how that actually works and what weak men really look like hint hint it's sneo h i don't know if people get that if I think if people understood what weakness really looked like in men oh man things would be so much [ __ ] better who you think going to win in the fight between sneo and for man who has more discipline who has a wife and a kid not I'm not going to put four men out there to challenge sneo to a fight it's more work to raise a little boy to be shitty than to raise a little boy to be a nice kid like most children come out wanting to be nice little kids babies toddlers most of them are really [ __ ] nice you have to train boys to be shitty and most people are training boys to be shitty because that's what they think real manhood looks like that is literally how Andrew Tate's father raised him beyond that though for other parts of this machine we also need to start putting more pressure on these social media companies they will change if it starts affecting their bottom line I know multiple female creators who have had protracted harassment campaigns by anti-sjw manister creators in the same way that women were having 10 years ago and if YouTube is smart enough they won't wait for another tragedy to happen happen before they make changes quick editor's note here to introduce the fact that Jordan is going to bring up something called section 30 which explains a significant reason why YouTube and other social media platforms do not do heavier moderation of the type of content that's on their platform section 230 um essentially makes platforms not responsible for the content that they host because Facebook has R to this issue a million times when you start making quote unquote editorial decisions about the the content that appears on your platform you start to become responsible or you can um become responsible this is typically illegal thing so like someone would have to like sue you for it and they would have to be deemed in court that you are but you can become responsible for all of the content on your platform um which like no social media platform wants because it would be the death n of that platform so yeah this kind of shows us you know why it's going to be down to putting the pressure on the companies from a monetary standpoint the apocalypse happened because the overall attitudes towards YouTube had gotten really negative and people that were spending money one is certain quality insurances and sadly that is kind of what will need to happen in order to fix the problem of this type of content that said the sad reality again is that YouTube is already a thousand times better than Tik Tok Facebook and Twitter so they need to feel the pressure too I predicted months ago that when Suburban moms found out about Andrew Tate that this would lead to action and not long after I said that it happened and then suddenly he was the platform I don't know which one of y'all has access to all the white moms in the suburbs I know a few of you do y'all need to go ahead and activate that population or whatever population you can to get some things going get can we get Nancy Reagan back in the streets just for a second throw goat Nancy Reagan let's go if you have little brothers nephews cousins make sure their parents are aware of this stuff early like not 12 13 when they're going through puberty as they're 78 and N please inform the parents of your nephews and cousins what's happening in our online media so that they start addressing it now and this is also why I don't think people like myself should stop making this type of anti- manister content despite any criticism that I may have voiced to here because for one we're kind of the canaries in the coal mine we know what's happening well before it starts reaching out into the greater society and we can set up case studies and information on what the problem is to point people to when they're actually ready to address it also let's be real one we're [ __ ] entertaining we're good at what we do but two the audience watches us because it's useful to them to get that release valve to get that reminder that not everyone is on this [ __ ] especially for other men like myself who fit the description of manosphere Guy online but are obviously saying something very different it's valuable and important for them to hear and perceive opposing voices it's a lot of pressure and you all shouldn't hold us up on a pedestal for pointing this stuff out but it's still a valuable role to be fulfilled so let's please continue to go at their heads and collect your coins in the process lastly I do still want to offer something for those being milked in this equation the actual manosphere consumers and those of you who are actually just trying to figure some things out as young men I will try to do better than in my last video where I basically just said be yourself although that's still really good [ __ ] advice first off again I want to remind you that if you're watching manosphere content its goal is to trap you in a negative feedback loop as soon as you start seeing woman gets owned videos coming out of your favorite Creator understand that is exactly what they're doing it recognizes your insecurities and vulnerabilities and fees into it but I also understand that it's not just about breaking the loop what we're also talking about is breaking with the community that's something that you know if I do a future video I'll deal with more that needs to be more studied because the reality is that the manosphere has its message boards and followings because that's where these people who have been disaffected by Society collect together and connect with each other and a lot of them the key thing that keeps them in is the fear of being disconnected if there's one thing that I do think the love could do better on it's in this regard that if we're serious about trying to address these issues we probably need to support the creation of more spaces for some of these folks looking to retreat away from it now the challenge is you can't go from your white supremacist inel Message Board into the bread tube Reddit like that's that should not happen you will end up not having a good time and the people that receive you there will not appreciate it you're probably radioactive and you're going to risk ret traumatizing and triggering other people and much like radio activity it may take a bit for certain bad habits and ideologies to go away so there needs to be more in between spaces that's something that inuendo studio said in the early manuser video that I don't know if I cut if I didn't cut it it'll go right here but basically he was like we need to create like a mid point between here we've arrived at good politics which also isn't true but whatever and the government should assign every virgin a girlfriend that's not allowed to vote you shouldn't really be jumping like that's a big gap to F being a community ities both on and offline but definitely offline allows for more opportunities to fight off loneliness and develop meaningful bonds and build confidence and if you're lucky there may be women in the community and if you act like you have some sense there may even be romantic opportunity that shouldn't be why you go consider that like bonus DLC right is that is that what the kids say bonus points if you find things offline to do like one last piece of data I found is that one of the least likely places for people to encounter the manosphere is from an actual person in real life like a peer or friend or family member this stuff doesn't really exist outside of online spaces so you can find space for yourself offline which I know isn't easy and not possible for everyone but if you can you're probably going to be more likely to make progress so that's my loving and gentle parenting type advice and now here's Mack and Murphy with like some really explicit specific stuff that's driven by research and data that you know should be helpful as well so I was going to to have mac and Murphy give us some you know strong tips on improving your romantic Outlook but uh he dropped too many bars he he had way too much good stuff that I didn't want to kind of cut short here in this video so you can find the interview that I have with him on a signified podcast which is a separate Channel that I made a little while ago only have three episodes of the podcast out this will be the fourth or fifth depending on when this comes out and yeah you can get a lot of that stuff plus a lot more from that conversation from there you should also follow Mack and Murphy on Tik Tok and wherever else he is I think he does a really solid job of getting into this topic if you are not interested in the politics if you just want to find out real research around dating and romance and intimacy I uh highly advise checking him out all this said I also want to be honest what I am presenting here is a formality it's for those in the comment section that say why don't you present your Sol Solutions this is not secret information that will perfectly fix the problems in your personal life that is the difference the real difference between the left not having anything to offer men we just don't want to [ __ ] lie to y'all right the reality is that nothing that I've said is a Surefire solution to the challenges that you feel like you're facing in fact it's more likely that as you try whatever I've just said or wherever someone else you pull from this video says that you will fail multiple times and have to try over and over and over again and even then you're not guaranteed anything better that's reality but understand that's always been reality for everyone even with every tool you think you need or are missing to access your goals you will always be facing that uncertainty the only thing I can say with certainty is that the situation you may currently find yourself in that has you consuming this type of content definitely will not help you it is a death cult it is only going to make things worse and that's the funny thing about the whole the left doesn't have anything to offer men because it insinuates that the manosphere does mind you again [ __ ] over here are married and having relationships like we are not falling in the manosphere we don't need that [ __ ] right meanwhile half the people on that side of the equation don't have the things they tell you they'll help you get and that's because that's not how those things work I said this in some video but it's not like leveling up right you're not going to kill enough slimes and get enough XP points to level up to be viable to have a relationship and a girlfriend you cannot do it it's a random encounter right right right but even then this isn't really where the left should be coming in for you if you are looking to improve your life and finding ways to better perform traditional masculinity there are actually really good other types of content that don't have as much of a political slant that you could be looking for but you probably haven't found because you're kind of shitty but you know I'm not going to argue with you about here I've mentioned before guys like Jason Wilson and there's like the art of maning this podcast shout out to the waving red flag guys for a smaller podcast that I featured in this video and I've talked a couple of times there's plenty of stuff there for you but you have to have the discernment to recognize the difference between people actually concerned with improving the challenge and needs of men and those looking to exploit You by getting you into raid Cycles aimed at women understand that the algorithm is aware of which thing you are more inclined to do are you trying to upgrade your masculinity or are you pissed that a girl called you ugly whichever thing is most prominent in your psyche the algorithm will figure it out and treat you accordingly so before you start searching for anything you might want to start doing some self-searching away from the internet but that's way above my pay grade even though the management content will get me paid speaking of which let's also talk about today's spot so this video was one of my heavier undertakings I started working on it probably last fall setting up interviews a lot of research writing and rewriting all while still writing filming and collaborating with editors on other main Channel FD signifier content plus two or three videos a month on the signify bsize commentary Channel and most recently a signify podcast so this video was a labor of love but very very much a labor however I'm confident that it's going to be successful and in the off chance that it flops despite all of my efforts that will be okay cuz I have the support of the folks at nebula nebula is an independent streaming service created by YouTubers like myself where we can have a place for creators to work the way we want to work and make the types of content we want to make without the persistent pressures that YouTube puts upon us as I speak to in this video YouTube and other social media platforms work off computer algorithms and machine learning driven recommendation systems and there are so many ways that these automated systems put a ton of pressure on creators to make the right type of content as opposed to the type of content we may really be interested and passionate about further because of these systems you as the viewer are less in control of your content consumption than you think but nebula is different nebula is not algorithmically or Aid driven it's driven by you as the user when you log into nebula you have the entirety of the site at your fingertips and you tell the site what it is you're looking for as opposed to the site attempting to hack your interest and feed you a diet of content that keeps you engaged so on nebula you're going to get all of the content from some of YouTube's best creators in the realm of Science Tech culture history gaming but also you're going to get content that's exclusive to nebula such as real life lore series of videos on war conflicts in the Middle East short videos I did about Tupac and The Boondocks maybe you're one of those people that says you miss Lindsay Ellis well she's not gone she's just been making content exclusively for nebula for the last year but for me the main thing is that nebula as a company has been a key ingredient to how I've grown as a Creator from 2020 to 2024 and hopefully Beyond and that's because as a smaller independent company instead of relying on corporate dollars nebula is funded entirely by viewers and because of that there can be so much more than the corrupt bloated corporate entertainment industry that we have now and make fascinating content including independent movies plays and shows that will never get made elsewhere so if you want to be a part of creating the most interesting video platform on the internet you can sign up for nebula or check out all of our exclusive content including my link for 40% off or just $30 a year $2.50 a month or if you're feeling really generous you can even get a 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Channel: F.D Signifier

Views: 458,783

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Id: 1QNjwM2a87g

Length: 101min 51sec (6111 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 23 2024