How is that different than pervasive pornography though? Many young boys now think it’s normal to ask girls for sexual acts before having ever kissed a girl.
It is, as pornography is about sexual acts, while the manosphere is discussing the role they believe men and women should play in all aspects of life, not just sex and romance. They believe and teach that women shouldn't be managers, knowledge workers, professors, politicians, shouldn't have a right to vote (at least not differently from the man who essentially owns them) etc.
Pornography may give some people some wrong ideas about sex and romantic relationships, might even instill some level of implicit misoginy in certain straight men, but I'm pretty sure you won't get the idea that women should be allowed in Parliament from watching too much porn.
> Many young boys now think it’s normal to ask girls for sexual acts before having ever kissed a girl.
This is a common media talking point, but are there any hard figures for this 'many'? The type you're describing existed when I was young, long before the internet. My impression of boys and young men today is that they are generally just as decent, cautious, respectful and idealistic as they ever were - but that a small crude and unpleasant minority taints the reputation of the whole generation.
I don't think it's a "reputation" issue, more of a what they're being exposed to and what it's normalizing. From studies I've seen it's a significant percentage (from a random Google search [1]):
The review talked to young people aged 13 to 19 and surveyed 1,000 young people aged 16 to 21. Over 6 in 10 (64%) said they had seen online pornography. Of these:
1 in 10 (10%) of nine-year-olds had seen pornography
3 in 10 (27%) of children had seen pornography by age 11
Half (50%) of children had seen it by age 13
4 in 5 (79%) had seen violent pornography before the age of 18, with the report stating “young people are frequently exposed to violent pornography, depicting coercive, degrading or pain-inducing sex acts”.
It definitely is a reputation issue: unless I'm misunderstanding something, you are using this data to suggest a greater incidence of violent sexual behavior among young men as a result to their exposure to ugly types of pornography.
You don't seem to have any data putting your figures into any context over time: run the same study in the 80s and I would wager you'd see similar even worse results. Wank mags and grainy VHS were passed around schools from the moment they appeared, including BDSM and torture porn - often in the form of sleazy B-movies. Sure, pornography is far easier to access today. But the material is the same, and this notion that somehow, today's boys and young men are worse for this exposure than their predecessors is insidious and deeply ignorant.
It is significantly more difficult to find young men today who think it's acceptable for husbands to beat their wives - or that rape is never rape in marriage. Or who think they can get a woman drunk to seduce her. Campaigners had to work damn hard to raise public consciousness out of the traditionalist inertia around these blights. Frankly, to anyone like me, old enough to compare several different eras and their male representatives, comments like yours and the inferences you'd have people draw from them, are utterly ridiculous - and yes, hugely unjust to the overwhelming majority of young men who flinch from the idea of hurting a woman in bed or out of it, regardless of what type of pornography they've been exposed to.
> But the material is the same, and this notion that somehow, today's boys and young men are worse for this exposure than their predecessors is insidious and deeply ignorant.
No what's ignorant is ignoring the prevalence and nature of modern online pornography. Hopefully you realize that having the worst of what previous generations might've been exposed occassionally to by copying grainy VHS videos is literally a few clicks away now.
Much like social media it's pushed constantly onto them (well all us men). It's a giant predatory industry with a very addictive product.
It's not a reputation thing because it's about how destructive it is to society as a whole to both men and women. It's a very different sort of destructive behavior than previous generations might've had.
> hugely unjust to the overwhelming majority of young men who flinch from the idea of hurting a woman in bed or out of it
There's lots of great young guys out there. How about we not regress due by allowing new rampant destructive influences. That's my perspective.
We're seeing huge upticks in "incels" and "red-pilled" young men now. IMHO that's largely influenced by pervasive (mysoginist) pornography.
Even then, apparently young women don't agree with you as recent polls show young women don't view men favorably anymore [1]. So apparently something, or many things, are going wrong.
Practically speaking there's not much difference since there's a large amount of violent or extreme pornography which also teaches boys that directly or indirectly. It also teaches girls that it's "ok" cause they see it online.
There's many studies and organizations who publish warnings about violent pornography and young adults:
Dr Ruth Weir of City St George's, University of London, said extreme porn had been "normalised online" and was now "playing out in young people's relationships". [1]
Unless I'm missing somethiny, that article has no data that backs up Dr. Ruth Weir's claim.
It first posits that adult content has been normalized online, then cites unrelated statistics about abuse victims who had watched adult content. There's nothing that convincingly links that that first statement to the latter data.
A literature review of 19 academic papers, drawing on multiple methodologies since 2005, conducted
by the Government Equalities Office (GEO) to assess the relationship between pornography exposure
and negative behaviours towards women and girls found that pornography use had a statistically
significant association with attitudes supporting violence against women (with violent pornography
showing an even stronger association). [44] A meta-analysis of 9 studies found a significant association
between pornography use among adult men and attitudes supporting violence against women, such
as ‘rape myth acceptance’. [45] The association was found to be significantly stronger for violent
pornography than non-violent pornography. Other studies involving young adults, including Peter and
Valkenburg (2009) [46] and Hald et al. (2013), [47] have found that past pornography exposure among young
males is significantly associated with less egalitarian and more aggressive attitudes towards women.
This is particularly worrying when young people are being exposed to pornography.
The Manosphere is going to convince the impressionable young boys and men they are entitled to be treated in the same way as the men in the porn videos, consent be dammed. This is the main problem.
The point is that virgin men or single men get called "Incel", because of how it stings as an insult, not because they are part of a subculture or have the mindset of that subculture.
Imagine being lumped in with crystal meth addicts because your friend gave you a cigarette once.
I want to be excruciatingly clear: Andrew Tate is a sex trafficker that tells millions of impressionable boys they are owed sex and that women should not be permitted to vote or hold positions of influence, and that they cannot have platonic relationships with women.
The word incel, on the other hand, describes men who are disgustingly behaved and as a result are unable to have romantic relationships.
These are not, in any way, the same thing. This is NOT an example of horseshoe theory.
Maybe? "Identity-based activist communities" are incredibly toxic as a rule.
Maybe there's lasting harm from engaging in them early. Or maybe it's better to get exposed to them early in your life, so that you have time to figure out why you don't want anything to do with them.
Either way, it seems pretty clear that preventing children and teens from engaging them is a nonstarter. You can't get anywhere close to consensus on "this is harmful and should be banned" because, guess what, someone's entire identity is going to be built around such communities.
I would say what sets it apart is the undercurrent of anger and grievance combined with the self destructive beliefs that are prevalent in the community. It's men and boys who struggle to find acceptance and belonging, maybe even for reasons that are initially sympathetic. But instead of healthy self-reflection and feedback, they find a distorted understanding of themselves and masculinity that only reinforces their isolation.
This is just a caricature. It's like saying all women's spaces are bad because some female influencers tell their massive followings that men should pay for expensive shopping trips on the first date. This mischaracterisation through cherry picking is destructive.
Well, I suppose in this context the "manosphere" is a name given to a lot of men's spaces on the internet, and so is immediately reviled. And in general any men's space in real life is criticised for not letting women in. The reverse is not true for women's spaces.
The "man-o-sphere" is pornographic. Look at the porn-brained Tate brothers for an example. That is their whole ethos and their souls are rotted out by it. Both are based in dehumanization and contempt for women and draws from the well of insecurity, viciousness, and psychological disorder. Both entrench and deepen psychological disorder and immorality.
I think the basic error is that we're making a concession to obscene content and the sophists in our midst who have spent decades deploying the garbage of moral relativism and fallacious appeals to "freedom" to defend evil. The argument for age verification here is weakened if, instead, the production and distribution of pornography is outlawed.
That you cannot perfectly enforce the law doesn't mean the law has no value or function. The purpose of the law is not undermined by imperfect enforcement, and it isn't exhausted by enforceability. Law is a teacher. Anti-porn laws would still carry psychological and social weight. They are a declaration of what is not tolerated and what is not good and contributes to the stigmatization of bad things. That creates a higher hurdle in people's minds to seek out and engage in such activity and creates shame around such activities that itself dissuades.
I would also add that pornography and drugs have a history of being used in psychological warfare. Oligarchs ruining society? Allow pornography and it will absorb people's attention and cripple them emotionally and rationally to neutralize them. Or consider the recent loosening of drug laws or debate about loosing them - which I do not accept is coincidental - to give people another dulling and numbing agent and an escape. It is in the corrupt interests of an oligarchic elite to corral the herd. The police baton is painful and creates a dangerous indignation and resentment, but pornography and drugs do not.
Manosphere content is toxic and harmful but the hyperviolence and desensitisation of the former should not be downplayed. That's where the mass shooters evidently come from.
> That's where the mass shooters evidently come from.
Bollocks. European teenagers watch just as much porn and play GTA at age 10 and yet we don't end up having 12 children a day die from gun violence [1].
Note, I'm not an anti-gun nut, I think German and British anti-gun laws are ridiculously strict. But the American way of dealing with guns is equally bad.
> we don't end up having 12 children a day die from gun violence
Note that this definition of "children" includes ages up 24 years old. Not that the US doesn't have a gun violence problem, but pretending 24 year olds are "children" in order to gain a better sound bite doesn't help anybody.
Given how large it is, I don't think it's a high stat. Especially compared with other subcultures. And we don't blame feminism for every instance where a man is killed by a man hating woman.
> And we don't blame feminism for every instance where a man is killed by a man hating woman.
The fact that this is basically unheard of, while incels shooting up schools is somewhat common, may explain why blame is often thrown at one movement and not the other.
So can you give an example of a crazed man-hating feminist woman engaging in a mass shooting? Or just of a woman engaging in a mass shooting (alone, not with a man) in the last, say, 10 years? 20 years? 50 years?
Because I can definitely give you examples of incels doing this. Not a huge amount, mind you, but at least some.
The asymmetry is striking: when feminists talk about incels, it’s about how to improve their lives and help them out of the cognitive trap they’ve fallen or been lured into. I’ve never seen the equivalent of the pervasive casual, often gleeful, calls for violence and degradation which characterize the “manosphere”.
OK, the a female serial killer, killing the men she hates the most, one after the other.
Or do you just mean that some women kill a man because they hate that particular man? Because that's not what "man-hating" means. I might hate Adolf Hitler, who was a man, but that doesn't make me "a man hating man".
I wouldn't equate incel with manosphere. Manosphere is often hypersexual and about greed/consumption and being insecure and getting scammed, whereas inceldom is more hate-based.
