We live in a world where polarization is a strategy. Social media thrives on polarization. Its easier to serve you content if I know what tickles your feathers. And the best way to find that out is to try things that are naturally polarizing and see which side you choose. And serve you more of that. However, this polarization has recently entered a concerning area, that of sex (or gender, whichever way you choose to look at it). And its causing some really concerning things to come up. Sit down with any group, and the talk about what it means to be a man or woman today will come up. More often than not, women will complain that there are no men anymore. That men have forgotten to be men. And in the same vein, men will complain that women are different, no longer like our mothers, whatever that means. Given that I am male, it raises the question. What does it mean to be a man?
The Modern Woman
Something fascinating has happened over the past 20-30 years. Women have been greatly empowered. There are more women getting educated, graduating from universities, getting employed and climbing the career ladder among other things. Some numbers show that the numbers now exceed that of men in some areas. I won’t touch on stuff like the pay gap. That’s too touchy of an issue (i.e. I don’t want to get cancelled!). But this has created a socioeconomic status that women, in general, haven’t ever experienced before. Go back one generation - to our mothers - and the story’s a whole lot different. Women (generalizing here) have more money than before. They have more stable careers than before (holding the misogyny they experience in the workplace constant - for now).
My money is mine, and your money is ours. This is a saying that permeates all the discussions on the role of the man in a relationship. Just listen to Classic in the morning and you’ll hear cases of the wife having a stash of cash while the kid is home due to a lack of school fees. But its the guy’s job to pay for fees. In a world where the woman is a lot more capable, her role stays the same. And yours as a man, stays the same. Its like nothing has changed. No progress has been made. Even as I know that she could very easily take care of a problem for me, I’m not supposed to ask. I’m not supposed to ‘show weakness.’
Cognitive Dissonance
As women have become more empowered, some have taken some additional responsibility in step with their additional ability/power. Women are now more likely to pay for dates than before. They are more likely to raise kids by themselves than before. They will do more things that were traditionally male just a generation ago. Work, hustle, buy themselves nice things, party, travel. You get the point. They don’t need men to do these things for them anymore, at least not as much as before. On top of this is the - in my opinion - toxic feminism that’s creeping in some female conversations where the general theme is that men are not needed anymore. This creates two problems. One is cognitive dissonance. Tell anyone something that goes against their beliefs and what happens? They deny it, they try to prove you wrong, and finally, when they find that they can’t, they completely ignore it. Its like its inconsequential. And that’s what’s happening with men today.
What happens when the man, who expects to take you out, to take you on trips, sees you providing them for yourself? What happens when a man, who expect to be the head of the family, the final say, finds out he’s not? What happens when a man realizes that he isn’t as powerful as he thought he was? Well, first he’s going to deny it. ‘Ain’t no way a woman can have all those things,’ he’ll say. ‘Even if she does, women are naturally weak, and need a man’s guidance,’ he’ll say. When that doesn’t work, he’ll try to prove himself right. He’ll forcefully subjugate his wife. He’ll beat her, mistreat her, cheat on her. All ways to forcefully create dominance (or an illusion of it), and remind her that she ain’t shit. And finally, he might completely ignore it, assume your non-importance, and treat you as such.
The Manosphere
As I said above, polarization is the way of the world today. With the toxic feminism talk going around for the past few years, there’s naturally been a rise in an opposite and equally shocking discussion on the male side. As a whole, its called the Manosphere. This includes names such as Andrew Kibe, Kevin Samuels and Andrew Tate. The same way guys can’t sit down and listen to some feminists talk, is the same way women can’t listen to guys like Andrew Kibe talk. But here’s the thing we need to be worried about. As much as we want to say that these guys are toxic, and should be cancelled, and worse, these guys have a massive audience. Massive. Guys you wouldn’t think would ever care for such sentiments - sweet guys, good guys - are finding themselves drawn to what these ‘toxic’ men are saying. And it is with good reason.
As bad as this sounds, I’m going to say it. Men no longer have monopoly and control over things that they have traditionally had control over. Society today tells men that they aren’t as important. It doesn’t communicate this overtly. It does so subtly. And that is causing men to ask themselves a fundamental question. ‘If I’m not needed here, then what the fuck am I doing here?’ We don’t know what we’re supposed to do. And women aren’t telling us what we’re supposed to be doing. They are busy trying to figure this shit out themselves. And so men are trying to find ways to re-assert their dominance, because they are told that they are supposed to be dominant. But how do you do that in a world where the woman you actually want - ‘actually’ being the key word - is just as dominant as you are. In comes the manosphere, where you can find all kinds answers to your questions about the nature of women. But are there any universal answers?
And So…
What’s currently happening is that the lines are being redrawn. We’ve just had a paradigm shift, and we still haven’t fully adopted to it. We still haven’t figured out that the traditional man the traditional woman are dead. We’re figuring it out as we go, fumbling in the dark for anything solid to lean on. And until this process is done, there’s going to be chaos. Single parent families, infidelity, cases of extreme violence, and many worse things. This is not an attack on any group of people. Rarely are people entirely right or entirely wrong. I’m just calling out what I see. But until we regress back to the mean, there’s one thing I’m sure of. We will get what we want, and we will fucking hate it.