Title: The Unberable Beta-ness of Internet Patriarchy Author: Marry Harrington Publication Date: Jun 12, 2024 ---- Mobile file: https://pilledtexts.com/m/marry-harrington/beta-internet-patriarchy.txt --- Scraped from: https://www.maryharrington.co.uk/p/the-unbearable-beta-ness-of-internet --- / \------------------------, \_,| | | PilledTexts.com | | ,---------------------- \_/_____________________/ Info: https://pilledtexts.com/info.txt --- ,▄▄▓█████████▓▄▄ ▄████████▀▀▀▀▀████████▄ ,▓███████▀ ╙████████ ▄███████▀ ╙███████▌ ▓███████▀ ████████ ╟████████ ╟███████µ ████████▌ ▐███████▌ ╟████████▌ ╟███████ █████████▌ ███████─ █████████▌ ███████ █████████▌ ,▄▄▄▄╓, ,█████▀─ █████████▌ ╫█████████████▄ █████████▌ ─╙╙╙╙╙╙└─└▀█████▓▄ █████████▌ ╙███████ █████████▌ ╙███████ █████████▌ ╟███████µ █████████▌ ████████ █████████▌ ████████▌ █████████▌ ████████▌ █████████▌ ████████▌ █████████▌ ▓████████ █████████▌ ▄████████⌐ ██████████ █████████` ███████████▄ ╓▓████████▀ ██████████████▄, ,╓▄█████████▀╙ █████████▌ '╙▀██████████████▀▀─ █████████▌ ─└╙╙╙└└─ █████████▌ █████████ ▐█████████ █████████▀ █████████▀ --- Defeating women is a losers dream I hope you can all forgive my slightly erratic posting frequency just lately: I’ve been working on several longer things including a new book proposal, on which more in due course. (I’m really excited about it!) This is just a short reflection, on a particular Internet Masculinity Influencer (no, not Tate, sorry, though I’ve written about him previously) and on Masculinity Influencers in general. I’m generally very pro masculinity, and broadly agree with the common modern complaint that the cluster of traits generally associated with manliness is routinely deprecated, marginalised, and scorned in contemporary culture. But - and this is important - internet masculinity influencers generally aren’t helping. It’s not usually my wont to dunk on particular individuals, but I’m making an exception for Will Knowland, a teacher who was fired from Eton College (for American readers: that’s a very expensive and storied English private school) purportedly for teaching manosphere talking-points. (Though who knows what other factors may have contributed to his being managed out). Knowland is now promoting an internet course that promises to teach men “How to DESTROY the unconscious effeminacy that is turning your wife off and regain POWER, PASSION and SEX in your marriage... before it's too late”. For all I know there really are men out there who sincerely believe that signing up to an online self-help course will help to “DESTROY” their “unconscious effeminacy”. Never mind that the online format itself is part of the feminising dynamic, much more than it’s a plausible solution. As I’ve argued before, inasmuch as the internet incentivises discourse and forecloses kinetic physical activity, it’s structurally feminine. And given this, I suspect that any retrieval of masculinity from the so-called “longhouse” must by definition take place IRL rather than online. In turn, this makes internet-based efforts at re-masculinisation at best an ironic contribution to contemporary conversations about manliness. But such girly things as McLuhan-esque reflections on the medium and its message are not for the likes of Knowland, who has gone all in on using the (structurally feminine) internet to promote Real Masculinity. Accordingly, the X account for his manliness course informs us that the least desirable traits in women are determination, focus, motivation, and a sense of humour. In his view, by contrast, what makes a woman irresistible are docility, fidelity, submission, and silence. Now, I’m going to do my best to be charitable here. Contra the assertions of many liberal feminists, there’s more than a grain of truth in the notion, now radioactive everywhere except the manosphere, that there may be, in many heterosexual relationships, a dynamic of male initiative and female deferral that at least for some is preferable to punctilious egalitarianism. More bluntly: lots of women value a partner who is willing to take the initiative, and are happy to defer to such a man, if he’s admirable and competent enough to make that seem appealing. It’s also true that in practice, in a long-term relationship, this is far from being a one-way dynamic. As Carl Benjamin (aka Sargon of Akkad) described in his video response to my recent interview with former alt-right firebrand Lauren Southern. In that conversation, she described internalising a reductive internet-based gender ideology, characterised by a dogmatic sex hierarchy and rigid sex role prescriptions none of which leave space for material reality, individual personality, or the vagaries of ordinary life. Southern embraced this ideology, made a sincere effort to live it in real life, and suffered several years of domestic abuse as a consequence. By contrast, as Benjamen sets out, properly understood a complementary marriage is less a strict hierarchy than a mutually respectful and affectionate division of labour, between distinct domains. The complexities of who really wields power in that context are ambiguous enough that there’s a host of old jokes about it, such as this one I remember my late dad telling: A man is telling his friend in the pub about how he’s the head of his household. “She’s in charge of the minor, everyday stuff”, he says, “like where we live, what we buy, what we eat, where the kids go to school, that kind of thing. I’m in charge of the big questions. You know, like: were the Americans right to go into Vietnam?” It’s unfashionable, in our dogmatically egalitarian age, to speak of asymmetric intimate power dynamics as anything other than a pernicious evil. (The popularity of BDSM among liberals suggests revealed preferences are more complicated than the dogma, but that’s perhaps for another post.) In any case, notwithstanding the dogma, the kind of relationship described in that joke, as the marriage in Benjamin’s video, leaves plenty of scope for both parties to exercise agency, while also making it clear that the nominally “subordinate” wife is in fact anything but. By contrast, Knowland’s contribution to this subtle dance is a note-perfect instance of the very modern phenomenon I explored in the Southern interview. That is, of course, not to say that complementarian relationships never work or are abusive by definition. Quite the contrary! Anecdotally, most of the marriages I know fall organically into a pattern of this kind, without ever needing to be theorised as such. But the kind of online Male Supremacy for Dummies ideology condensed enough to fit in a single X post has no room for what Illich called “ambiguous complementarity”, or even the grounded, sane, and obviously family-oriented reflections on offer in Benjamin’s account of his own home life. No: in the version of subtle interpersonal dance as promoted by Knowland, the kind of ordinary focus, motivation, competence and humour that make for a normally healthy, functioning, competent adult of either sex are merely turn-offs, in a woman. The desirable traits are reduced to docility (so she won’t even have her own views), fidelity (so she’ll never leave you, no matter how you treat her), silence (so she won’t even say anything) and submission (in case you didn’t already get the message). And from this we can make a few inferences about who this message is actually for. In a word: it’s not the kind of competent, confident man who values corresponding levels of competence and confidence in a life partner. Knowland is speaking to the kind of man a capable, motivated, spirited woman will never admire enough, in a million years, to defer to willingly. He’s telling them, probably accurately, that the best they can hope for is to find an apathetic partner with low self-esteem. Or, implicitly: if even that fails, a woman they can bully until she’s ground down enough to fit that description. And he’s framing that as the “patriarchy” that will save civilisation. He will save nothing. He is part of the problem. In case it’s not clear already, I’m all for polarity in relationships. But not when it’s a concerted campaign to unperson half the human species, in the interests of providing an emotional crutch for third-rate men. That’s not masculinity. It’s a losers’ charter, for men whose only hope of feeling like the Big I Am is to lord it over someone physically weaker and temperamentally more agreeable than themselves. Let’s be clear: there’s nothing “conservative” or “Christian” about this kind of grift. It’s nothing more than the shadow side of dogmatic egalitarianism: shitlibbery with extra steps. Entrepreneurs trying make a name for themselves off this garbage are moral bottom-feeders, who belong in the same gutter as pimps and pornographers. They should not be accorded a seat at any kind of conservative table.