The Manosphere Ate My Homework
After my last newsletter I resolved to put another one out within two weeks, and then get into a groove of writing a couple a month going forward. Grabbing a half hour here and there in the mornings before work, or an hour on a day off that wasn't occupied with administrative life tasks or pickleball, I was on track to finish writing a HILARIOUS piece about the Netflix show Adolescence, closed my laptop for the night, and when I opened it in the morning the draft editing page was simply blank! Every word gone-girled into the ether. For two weeks I sobbed to Ghost support, holding out hope that they'd summon some tech sorcery to resurrect the words that had poured out of my brain just how I wanted, but no dice. Luckily I'm still in the mood to write about one of the scariest, most depressing shows ever made, so let's see if I can't recapture the magic of my first pass! (Reader, I did not.)
If the word "manosphere" means nothing to you, then your experience is what's depicted in Adolescence and I recommend watching it. Yesterday I asked my dad if he was familiar and he thought I was saying "nanosphere" which is probably where my original draft went. HEYOOOOO! He didn't know what "incel" meant either so I had the joy of enlightening him. Addressing anything even loosely sex-adjacent with my parents makes me want to lose consciousness so when I recently posted a pic on Instagram of a 2017 protest sign that said "Steve Bannon is a chode" I was braced for a DM from my mom asking what chode means, that blessedly never came. Actually it's maybe more distressing to me if she didn't ask because she already knows.
Whether you're as blissfully unaware as my pop, or as Extremely Online as I am, you'd benefit enormously from listening to Jamie Loftus' four episodes of her podcast "Sixteenth Minute (of Fame)" that explain the absolute red string corkboard from hell that is the manosphere. Here's the first episode, but please listen to all four, I listened at 1.5x speed to urgently cram it all in my brain and swear it's worth it. Media Matters also recently did some phenomenal research proving that the far right dominates the media landscape to terrifyingly massive effect, with manosphere bros like Joe Rogan at the epicenter. This moronic bullshit is arguably why Donna Tramp, as a friend's little kid calls him, is president now and maybe forever.
Let me spoil Adolescence for you real quick: a thirteen-year-old boy murders a girl from his class after experiencing manosphere-informed bullying that exactly zero adults in his orbit have a clue about. The boy's parents, teachers and administrators at his school, and detectives working the case are all totally mystified until one kid takes pity on them and decodes the secret emoji language wielded on Instagram, which of course shouldn't be as consequential as it unfortunately is. Even I had to suppress a reflexive eye roll at the idea that emojis like 💯, 💊, and💥 could be so impactful IRL, and adding insult to injury apparently the kidney bean emoji is a big one for incels but my android phone doesn't have it. Maybe it means you can't be an incel if you have an android!? Lifehack! The closest I've got is 🥜 which I'm gonna say means "hey I've heard just about enough outa you!" I really should have been a guidance counselor.
It's hard to take emojis seriously, but we sort of have to. A pivotal concept Adolescence introduces is the "80/20 rule" often represented by 💯 which is a charming fave of rapist and sex trafficker Andrew Tate, teaching tender young minds that 80% of women are only attracted to 20% of men, and therefore the pathetic 80% will have to heed Tate's instructions on how to trick women into sleeping with them. And bless your heart if you think those instructions don't hinge on violent misogyny.
Meanwhile Wendy's been working on a gigantic painting she started after Roe was overturned, and to inform part of it she was researching violent crime stats on the FBI website. You know, for fun! I didn't know she was doing this until a few days after watching Adolescence when, over morning coffee, she started rattling off the FBI's numbers broken down by sex, and alarm bells blared in my brain as 80/20 sounded like it was the average split for violent crimes. As in, men represent 80% of the perps.
So get this: the Pareto Principle is an old economics adage that 80% of business comes from 20% of customers, or applied more broadly it implies that 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes. Wendy's been familiar with that principle throughout her career in real estate, and it's not inherently nefarious. But putting "80/20" in the context of this show it was really striking to me to learn that ~80% of rapes and homicides are committed by men (rape survivors are overwhelmingly women, but homicide victims are overwhelmingly men by the way, if we're talking about who is victimized by whom) which is a reality I think we all kind of just sense even without venturing onto the FBI website first thing in the morning. So then it's glaringly perverse how Andrew Tate flipped and reversed it, teaching his lil Tate-r Tots that they are in fact overwhelmingly the victims of women's unjust rejection, which is tantamount to violence and which therefore sometimes justifies and may even demand violent retaliation in order to rectify the (wrongly) perceived power imbalance. Like if you're a thirteen-year-old boy's soft-boiled brain absorbing this backward shit that actually sort of comports with your burgeoning understanding of grownup sex dynamics in society, I get the appeal. If a woman rejects a man it can only be because she's a frigid battle-axe and definitely not because he sucks and should improve his personality and/or be less mortally threatening.
Anyway watch the show and tell me what you think! The kid who plays the murderer is truly so adorable.
Hopefully see you here in a couple weeks with writing I didn't have to work through the trauma of devastating e-loss to produce!
Love, Caroline
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