Reject the Nü-Misogynists

Every time I see a clip from the podcast whatever I feel like I’m gazing into Hell — a world of joyless spite and attention-seeking. The premise — which I admit was cleverly geared towards online virality — is that a bunch of “red-pilled” male podcasters “debate” a bunch of hopeful young female would-be social media influencers.

A cheap premise at the best of times. What makes it even worse is that the young women routinely embarrass the men. Here, for example, some ageing sadsack attempts to catch a girl out with a popular hypothetical: how would you feel if you hadn’t eaten breakfast this morning? (He says “didn’t” but never mind.) The response he wants to get is “but I did”, which would illustrate her failure to think in abstract terms. Entertainingly, though, she hadn’t eaten breakfast that morning — meaning that the “hypothetical” was not abstract at all. But this middle-aged man couldn’t seem to comprehend that this was an entirely fair response — raising his eyebrows as if was a teacher confronted with a student who had claimed that one plus one equals three.

I’ve made a few scattered critiques of what I’m going to call “nü-misogyny” before but it’s time to get all my annoyance out of my system. The nü-misogynists are an absolute cancer for the right — making us dumber and less likeable with every podcast they produce.

Picture credit: whatever

Of course, if their major figures listed their opinions I would agree with a lot of them. There are significant physical and psychological differences, in average terms, between men and women. Family formation — if you have the choice — tends to be more valuable than the alternative. Porn is bad. I could go on. If you think I’m writing about you because you believe in any or all of these things, I’m probably not.

But these opinions are submerged in a vat of bitterness, self-righteousness and narcissism when it comes to the nü-misogynists — the whatevers, the Tates, the Fit and Freshes, the Pearl Davises, the “Taking Ls” accounts et cetera ad nauseam. You might not know their names but you have probably seen them. Their content has spread across the face of social media like knotweed across a garden.

I’m sure they would reject being called woman haters. Certainly, one should be careful with emotion-heavy terms. But I think that it applies here. Granted, they adore the thin, large-breasted tradwife with six kids and an uncanny knack for baking that exists in their imagination. But if a feminist claimed to love 6’4” bodybuilders with enormous genitals and a tremendous love for reading Simone de Beauvoir and doing the dishes I don’t think our red-pilled friends would have any issue with seeing the problem.

The nü-misogynists aren’t wrong about the sad state of modern relationships, of course — the dramatic levels of divorce, single parenthood, loneliness et cetera. Their problem is putting all of the responsibility for this onto women.

For example, they love the point that most divorces are initiated by the wife. But does that mean the end of the marriage was the wife’s fault? I’m sure it often does. That there are a lot of silly, cruel and unfaithful women is beyond doubt. But there are a lot of silly, cruel and unfaithful men as well — and a lot of men and women who aren’t all that silly, cruel and unfaithful yet don’t fit together well. That women are likelier to initiate separation and divorce, I suspect, has a lot to do with their being more comfortable talking about their problems. Men don’t like going to doctors never mind divorce lawyers.

Porn is another great example — one where male responsibility is hidden underneath a pile of dirty tissues. Don’t get me wrong: I disapprove of people having OnlyFans accounts. (Granted, I’m sure most OnlyFans performers disapprove of right-leaning opinion columnists.) But no one drags men to their computers by their ears and forces them, on the pain of death, to send money to naked women on the Internet. There is responsibility to go around here.

Yet red-pilled content creators and pornographers exist in a symbiotic relationship — the former providing shame-ridden consumers of the latter’s output with rationalisations for their behaviour. Once, women-bashing Twitter accounts were community noted for doing advertisements for OnlyFans creators under the guise of complaining about their degeneracy.

Still, the nü-misogynists are nothing if not hyper-moralistic. For them, single mothers or unhappily childless thirty-somethings must be wholly responsible for their circumstances. They consciously planned to have short-term relationships while they were young and beautiful and then faced the sudden consequences of “hitting the wall”. Hey, I’m not saying that it never happens. People do a lot of strange things in life. But for the most part this is a sad revenge fantasy — an attempt by lonely and embittered people to imagine that the women who reject them will get their comeuppance. In truth, as Ellen Pasternack wrote in her piece on declining birth rates for The Critic, people in unhappy circumstances tend to get there as a result of accumulated micro-choices rather than clear planning.

What these fellows (and, occasionally, females) love to do is find some of the most debauched or manipulative examples of womanhood and imply if not assert that this is a reflection of the whole sex. Of course, debauched and manipulative women exist. I’m not trying to mount my steed and white knight for all women here. But it does not seem to occur to them that women can and do engage in the same opportunistic strategy — finding, of course, a hell of a lot of murderers and rapists to reference.

There is a particular and peculiar focus on Western women among these lads (and, occasionally, lasses). I’ve joked before that the “red-pilled” phenomenon might be a means of undermining national feeling on the right by injecting a peculiar form of oikophobia into its young men’s blood. Perhaps there’s some truth to it. This spiteful obsession depends on purblind fantasies about the behaviour of foreign women. I’ve seen, for example, young Britons and Americans fantasising that Slavic ladies are “submissive”, which would make a lot of Slavic men spit out their vodka. No doubt such morbid rhetoric does at least something to drive Western women even further to the left.

The irony of the nü-misogynists is that they exhibit the worst traits of a female caricature — being loud, whiny, histrionic and obsessed with surface-level status symbols. I think most fair-minded men and women would agree that women are on average more vulnerable than men towards inter-personal conflict. The nü-misogynists can’t breathe and not “call out” this or that person and kick off another round of “drama”. There are 45-year-old alcoholic divorceés working in the theatre who are less catty.

Beyond this, they are completely, morbidly obsessed with women. I don’t think about women half as much as these guys, and I tend to like them. It is obsessive attraction curdling into obsessive spite (with, when it comes to the actual content creators, an unhealthy dose of financial opportunism).

In case anyone has reading comprehension issues, I shall state that this is not a call for girlbosses to smash the boys’ club. Of course, the success of this phenomenon has roots in its ideological opposite — the attempt to problematise maleness. I’ve written a lot about this obnoxious phenomenon before. There is no denying that this is a problem — and a more fashionable one. But the nü-misogynists essentially invert it — we’re not the problem, you’re the problem.

Perhaps we all have problems? The pathologies of the modern world afflict men and women, and to portray either sex as exceptionally problematic is to confuse the issue. Moreover, it is to write off at least 50% of the potential joy in social existence. Even if you don’t care about other people, don’t do that to yourself.