Victims of Status - What I Don't Get about The Manosphere

Out of my many sins neither playing the victim nor blaming others for my lack of success can be counted. Blaming myself, punishing myself for my errors were to the point of encouraging self destruction. 

So I read things like Mitch Brown's Angry and lonely after my marriage ended, I came dangerously close to embracing the manosphere (The Guardian) to understand what is not part of me.

The feeling of abandonment is my strongest memory from that time. My world became tiny and that’s where my dependence on the online world grew. None of the content I was consuming was overtly harmful; I wasn’t looking for dating advice or tips for the gym. I understand now that it was the subtle thread of misogyny that wove its way through the content fed to me by the algorithm. I watched videos of people criticising feminist voices like Abbie Chatfield and found myself agreeing with them. My political beliefs started to change. When things fell apart at work, I blamed everyone but myself. It felt like the world was out to get me, that I was being punished for being a man. I was angry, lonely and stuck in a cycle of victimhood. The content told me someone else was to blame and I believed it. 

Misogyny affected me in high school. Girls did not like me, and I had a bad habit of falling in love. But I finally got lucky, I found someone loved or close enough to salve my heart. The old bluesmen were right: the ain't nothing like a woman. 

That I would later attract crazy women, maybe always did according to my father, was not always a bad thing. 

 Crazy is not always a perjorative.

I see the danger of these online voices for young men and I understand the lure of victimhood, the attraction of blaming external forces for your own suffering. But it’s not real. There is a quote attributed to film producer Franklin Leonard: “When you are accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression. It’s not.” I understand that for a lot of men, who perhaps don’t feel particularly privileged beyond the fact of their gender, this can be a difficult idea to understand.

But rather than shaming these men, we need to sit alongside them, understand their pains and frustrations, and guide them to take accountability for their own lives, happiness and impact on others. I am lucky to have had two women who did this for me. It is so often women and gender-diverse people doing this work, the groups most likely to be harmed by men’s behaviour. As a man and a father, I believe it is now my responsibility to model this for the men and boys in my life. And that starts with these conversations, as shameful and uncomfortable as they can be, about how men can end up in these spaces in the first place and how they can get out.

What a would where such children masquerade as men. Where whiners hold high office.

 

I was taught the world owed me nothing, you 've got to make your own way. What has changed?
 

Find the worth in yourself, not in something stupid like status. This is a democracy, not an aristocracy. Doing gets you further than being.

Brush your teeth, learn to make women laugh, do not think you deserve a damn thing from them, and then you might just get lucky. 

 sch 6/27