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Jamie Loftus
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That's mydonorconnection.com surrogate call zone media like all the time, take it too far. Give me one moment. 16 minutes 16 minutes welcome to 16th Minute, the podcast where most weeks we take a look at the Internet's main characters and see how their moment affected them and what that says about us and the Internet. But not this week queens. Not this week. This week we are entering part two of our into the Manosphere series, taking a look at how this space has both continued to grow in influence and in our inability to talk about it. Last week in Part one, we took a look at the history of manosphere spaces all the way back to the 1970s and a little bit about how it's been covered in the month following the election. And spoilers? Not particularly well. I personally feel that the people best covering the manosphere have already been doing it for years. But first I just wanted to do a little housekeeping at the top. Thank you so much to everyone who has reached out to me after last week's episode. It means a lot. As much as I hate hearing how many of my listeners have had assault experiences similar to mine and that they were also encouraged, do not think of it as assault at the time. If you have experienced something similar, be be gentle with yourself. And thank you for for listening, but I really do appreciate your listening. I I firmly believe that we need each other to be able to survive times like this because the systems are obviously still not acknowledging it. I heard accounts that came nearly a full decade after my own, which is honestly frightening. Domestic violence exists at rates that should qualify it as domestic terrorism, but that's just not how we've been taught to see this kind of violence. And more than anything, as I was preparing for this second part, as I was taking a look at the different areas of the manosphere over time, it became very clear to me that for the most extreme areas, misogyny is usually step one, sort of the bait because it's so normalized and we hear it so often that most people may not fly flinch if they hear something casually misogynist. And some might even feel validated by it. And if they're into that and decide to watch some manosphere shows will slowly turn up the ante. How about some transphobia with that? How about some racially charged comments about this type of woman? And not every listener is going to be receptive to it. Not all men, but let's be honest, many are. And the nature of these shows can sort of function as a frog sitting in a pot full of lukewarm water, not realizing that it's coming to a boil. And again, I will place some content warnings here. There's a lot of information in this episode and some of it is pretty heavy. So if it's not a good time for you for this kind of thing today, I really enjoyed Wicked Part 1. Check it out. I also really quickly just wanted to issue one correction from last week's episode where I failed to be clear enough. I characterized custody statistics that men's right activists cite as their reason for pushing back against mothers and women's rights and characterizing them as vindictive, when I should have said that this is the idea that motivates them, not that it's actually based on historically true data. In reality, while mothers are more likely to be granted custody, that's in large part because fathers request custody far less frequently than mothers do. So I apologize for making that sound as if it was a fact. It is very much a strawman argument, and that is certainly an important distinction in spaces like the manosphere, where so much is strawman arguments. So this week I want to break down the manosphere, starting from when many consider for it to have crossed into the mainstream and from where it started to affect me. Specifically, Gamergate, a 2014 harassment campaign where men's forums previously thought to be niche targeted women working or commenting on the gaming industry, particularly those who had explicitly criticized games for misogyny, anywhere from explicitly critiquing the industry to simply speaking out against an intimate partner who had literally posted revenge porn of them. Violent depictions of women being beaten, raped and run over by cars. It's not the movies, it's video games. And now the women calling for change in this multi billion dollar virtual industry are facing a very real backlash, including death threats. And as we discussed, the second event of 2014 that brought the manosphere into the mainstream was the Isla Vista Massacre perpetrated by Elliot Roger, who went on to become and still is a figurehead of the INCEL movement, who is considered a martyr to the cause of fighting back against matriarchy. However, his misogynist manifesto, which was deeply connected and posted to INCEL forums, was only mentioned in passing in many mainstream media outlets the same outlets who are 350% more likely to bring up mental health as the central issue of these killings, as they would for a Muslim shooter. Here's a Barbara Walters broadcast from the time. I'll tell you the story, Barbara. Chilling details you've never heard until now about a loner obsessed with finding a girlfriend. In the next 10 years, it became lethally clear that this loner angle hugely underplayed where Roger was getting positive reinforcement for this violence. Make no mistake, Roger was pushing this parting message to the incel boards. Not only did it reference black pill ideology, the death cult mentality that indicated that women would never like him and made him a martyr, the incels were inspired by this. And just so you know, I will not be including quotes from any of these guys manifestos. There are spaces where that's not unproductive, but this is my show and no manifestos here. And finally to the guy last week in my comments who was like, interesting. You didn't talk to many men. Yeah, if it was my goal to platform men, I would own a house. So come with me if you dare, to. The spring of 2014, during the fallout of the Isla Vista murders which claimed six lives, mainstream media was still trying to figure out how to cover the story, while the incel communities that Roger spent so much time in were celebrating. The Incel rebellion has already begun. We will overthrow all the Chads and Staceys. All hail the Supreme Gentleman, Elliot Rodger. However, there is an ongoing argument amongst analysts of incel and manosphere spaces as to whether these forums can be singled out as the sole cause of Roger's violence, arguing that much of his own misogyny was already reinforced by the culture that existed outside the Internet. Again, it's this systemic versus is it these boards, Specifically, Michael Kimmel, whose thesis on the manosphere I cited in last week's episode, argued this. In 2014, it would be facile to argue the manosphere urged Roger to do this. I think those places are a kind of solace. They provide a kind of locker room, a place where guys can gripe about all the bad things that are being done to them by women. I don't fully agree with this, and I think it fails to acknowledge a certain amount of gray area. On one hand, I think Kimmel is right to emphasize that manosphere message boards are places where men can take the society mightily, encourage disrespect of women, and validate each other's prejudices. But to suggest that these places don't amplify the violence of those actions is not true in my opinion, and this is what we're going to bump up against over and over. More than one thing is going to be true in some of these cases, and as it pertains to this show, more than one thing being true tends to be bad for social media engagement. But still, Kimmel is, I think, right to say that Roger didn't have to do a 180 ideologically to arrive at INCEL logic. The way that western media conditions men to see themselves in terms of virility, in appearance and in entitlement had already gotten him pretty far along. And while we can't know what motivated Roger definitively, there is no doubt that he turned to these spaces as a way of validating his low opinion of both women and himself, frequently posting front facing YouTube videos of him jeering at couples in the street and monologuing pretty point for point incel rhetoric using black pill logic that he will never be the object of anyone's affection and might as well die instead of, you know, not being openly hostile to every woman he ever came in contact with. In the days leading up to the Isla Vista shootings where Roger also took his own life, he began to refer to this premeditated plan as the Day of Retribution and a method of punishing the women that he felt rejected by. And Roger's influence is clearly held in these spaces to this day, with a number of subsequent killings citing his manifesto or shouting him out by name. Look no further than the Umpqua Community College shootings the next year, the Christchurch mosque shooter in 2019, or the 2018 Toronto van attack that claimed 15 lives. The killer in Toronto said specifically, I was thinking that I would inspire future masses to join me in my uprising as well. And for more on this case specifically and its relationship to the manosphere, I would recommend the CBC podcast Boys Like Me from a few years back. But in addition to claiming to be in contact with Elliot Rodgers shortly before his death, the Toronto shooter told authorities that he had been radicalized on INCEL forums shortly after the Isla Vista killings and referred to his attack as another day of retribution. And of course, most people in the manosphere aren't extremist killers, but that doesn't mean that they are not encouraged to cheer on those who are. That was a fixture of spaces like 4chan 8chan and earlier Reddit. Robert Evans tracked this explicitly in the case of the Christchurch mosque shootings, which claimed 51 lives where fellow manosphere adjacent racists watch the murder on a livestreamed video. And that's not the only killing of that kind, because as it probably goes without saying, very few manosphere denizens are just misogynists. These communities very often intersect with racism, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, and on and on. These communities are locked into a view of women that is entrenched in all this jargon, but it boils down to this binary chestnut. Women are defined by their ability to provide sex and children for men and should be subservient as well, as men must make themselves high value. And what determines high value is entirely decided by capitalism. It requires monetary and career success in addition to appearance, and can rely just as much on men's self hatred as it does on their hatred of anyone who isn't a man. But that doesn't mean that people locked into the manosphere aren't from a diverse array of backgrounds. I was actually pretty surprised at how diverse this space is. Around this same time the mid 2010s the black manosphere began to grow, led by influencers like Kevin Samuels, who started a YouTube channel in 2013 spewing like this. Are you even willing to put a possible time frame on it? Oh, so we need a time frame, you think? Well, no, we need it. We need a cooperative woman. Oh, we need a woman that understands what men want and understand that, yes, this is going to be a part of it. And I've asked you the question how many times? So what do you want me to tell you? If you're not willing to answer a question, it's not a trick to it. You're a grown woman. Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, I'm learning, still learning about different personalities. It's not different personalities. It's that a lot of you ladies tend to want men to do all the work. Samuels took on a similar but a little bit harsher Persona to Jordan Peterson, presenting himself as a fatherly professional who is just helping men and women understand the world and improve their confidence while slowly but surely escalating into full male supremacist logic that encourage men to be cruel and dismissive to the women around them. The difference is that Samuels, a black man himself, focused on talking to black men in particular. And while he passed in 2022 rather suddenly, his channel continues to post until this day and his influence is certainly still felt. Dr. Umar Johnson is another big black manosphere public figure who at this point has basically given up on distancing himself from his overt homophobia and misogyny, saying back in 2014 that Planned Parenthood was using homosexuality as a population control strategy in the black community. And as this misogyny is being pushed toward black viewers specifically, it tends to be extremely vitriolic toward black women in particular. And unfortunately, the most harsh version of this is also the most popular feature of the black manosphere right now. The ultra popular podcast Fresh and Fit, whose hosts are particularly cruel to black women on their show. Because remember, no matter who's talking about manosphere shit, they are operating on a fundamentally white supremacist logic. First time donating. Just say Myron is a real one. Don't change for nobody. Yeah, out of here, bro. We don't change. I don't even know who she is, so I don't care. That's girl. Like, you know who Queen Von is. No, I know who King Von is, but, I mean, you should know who his girl is. I don't know who his girl is. It's King Von. Because. Hold on. The fact you said it's King Von's girl instead of it was her. Yeah, that tells you right there. And let it be known, that is the least convincing reading of I Don't care that I've heard in my entire life. Similar spaces existed for Asian men interested in manosphere content. I mean, don't worry, fellas. Everyone can hate women in the manosphere. And boy, do they. These influencers delight in broadcasting themselves, making women uncomfortable, and sharing the content as if they're owning them. And you might remember this if you were on YouTube around this time, there was a notorious style of video that had titles like this. Jordan Peterson repeatedly owns. Australian feminist Ben Shapiro dismantles third wave feminism. Kevin Samuels knows ladies hate when the roles are reversed. Patriarchy, which is a system of male dominance of society. Yeah, but that's not my sense of the patriarchy. So what's yours? Well, in what sense is our society male dominated? The fact that the vast majority of wealth is owned by men, the vast majority of capital is owned by men. Women do more unpaid labor. Very tiny proportion of men and a huge proportion of people who are seriously disaffected are men. Most people in prison are men. Most people who are on the street are men. Most victims of violent crime are men. Most people who commit suicide are men. Most men. Most people who die in wars are men. People who do worse in school are men. It's like, where's the dominance here? Precisely. And these kinds of videos would have millions of views. And Peterson there is virtually giving a list of classic men's rights talking points, that is listing out statistics about how patriarchy negatively affects men, then presenting it as an argument against feminism for some reason. And while it's perhaps the most obvious point on the fucking planet, no conversation about the strengthening and empowerment of the manosphere would be complete without the 2016 election of Donald Trump. There is ample proof that manosphere groups embraced Trump and loved his proclivity for saying the quiet part loud. Laura Bates, author of Men who Hate Women, traced back the history of these groups and found that with the exception of men's rights activists hyper fixating on custody courts, these manosphere groups were not particularly political pre Trump. But when he enters the sphere, they actually organize on his behalf, and the groups steadily become more politicized. And that's not a mistake. Former Trump chief strategist and current disgusting goblin Steve Bannon admitted to courting incels specifically during the 2016 election cycle. He said this it was very much in the margins and in the fringes of society to bring and recruit people who would otherwise not necessarily engage in conventional politics, but would engage with particular kinds of ideas that Cambridge Analytica promoted online that can make an impact. If you get an extra 1%, an extra 2% in that swing state, and you win that swing state, that might mean you win the presidency. And of course, Trump continued to deliver on both rhetorical misogyny that was reflected in his policy and extended to a hatred of immigrants and trans people who he has repeatedly targeted in the years since. So to be clear, I'm not saying that the manosphere elected Trump. They're not quite that prominent. But Bannon and Trump were successful in getting men who were otherwise ambivalent towards electoral politics to become engaged because of him. The misogynist rhetoric, the whole and when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything, whatever you want. Grab him by the can do anything. God, I can't believe that's the second time I've had to play the grab him by the pussy clip on this show. Unfair. What's also worth mentioning here, and why I think there's such a high barrier to entry for people to understand these communities, is that there is a full and infuriating multiverse of vocabulary, of specific memes and of deflective ironic humor that can make these manosphere boards pretty hard to understand when it comes to irony pilled humor that was already tied into comedy that was popular in the early to mid 2000s, the same time that comedy was becoming increasingly influenced by the Internet and in general pretty heavily reliant on shock. This was the era of ableist Helen Keller jokes, of dead baby jokes, casual or overt racism and stuff that mainstream culture thankfully sort of moved on from after the peak of Judd Apatow bromance movies. But the manosphere never really moves on from this edgelord humor, and you'll find time and time again that very often after saying something completely horrific about a marginalized group, a member of the manosphere will say what? I was joking. You took me out of context. A likely story A great example of this is Famous misogynist pickup artist influencer Julian Blanc was under fire back in 2014 for advocating that rape should be legal if one commits that rape on their own property. Hilarious, right? And his response to the understandable backlash to this was going on to CNN and claiming that people misunderstood his hilarious joke. You intended every part of this. True intentions were never bad. I agree it was a horrible attempt at humor and unfortunately a lot of it also got just put out of context. And you probably will not be surprised to hear that shortly after this he returned to preaching the same stuff for years after the controversy and all but admitted in a blog post that this apology was insincere. As for vocabulary terms that began in the manosphere that have since gone mainstream include obviously red and black, pilling and misandry, or a hatred of men, which started in MRA forums. There's femoids gross. And there's Red Pill Wives, which is a particularly disturbing subgroup that consists of women who are frequently characterized as just wanting to remain in the home. Which would be fine if true, but what Red Pill Wives actually depend on is thriving on their own self hatred and projecting the same misogyny at other women using red pill logic. There's alpha and beta and sigma men. The list goes on. And then there's the memes. Much of the reporting around incels and eventually QAnon was how frequently memes spread racist and misogynist jokes that set the tone for the community while also making it a safe space to say the most fucked up thing possible. In the mid to late 2010s, this meant stuff like the tremendously successful co opting of Pepe the Frog, a creation of comic artist Matt Fury who had nothing politically in common with the people, turning his cartoon into a horrific sign of the alt right. I would recommend checking out the documentary Feels Good man for more of that, but memes let these communities say the quiet part loud while maintaining the illusion of it's just a joke you guys though, why a Pepe the frog in a KKK robe is funny remains. I mean, it's just hate speech, right? Looking for excitement? Jumba Casino is here. Play anytime. Play anywhere. Play on the train. Play at the store. Play at home. Play when you're bored. Play today for your chance to win and get daily bonuses when you log in. So what are you waiting for? Don't delay. Chumba Casino is free to play. Experience social gameplay like never before. Go to Chumba Casino right now to play hundreds of games, including online slots, bingo, Slingo and more. Live the chumba life@chumbacasino.com VGW Group no purchase necessary, void or prohibited by law. Seek terms and conditions. The following ad is sponsored by Pets Best Insurance Services. Your pet is your bestie, your therapist, your preferred match. 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Make some noise BD track some mud on Carpet A complete unknown now playing only in theaters. Rated R Under 1790 Middle Without Parrot Fast forward to 2017. Trump is inaugurated and both the Muslim ban protests and the Women's March take place early this year. By this time I had moved to California to live with my rapist, who thankfully never picked me up at the airport, and so I proceeded to become a successful comedian. At the time, though, I was working part time and doing freelance writing, much of which centered around the MeToo movement, which began in late 2017 after a year where misogyny was more in mainstream discourse than ever. And in case you don't remember, there were a few moments early in the MeToo moment that made huge waves in Western culture while also indicating this movement's shortcomings. From the jump Now. The hashtag itself was created by Tarana Burke, a black survivor of sexual assault on MySpace all the way back in 2006. But the hashtag didn't really take off in the mainstream until late 2017. The big story was Harvey Weinstein, as prominent actresses were finally comfortable enough to come forward and say that he had raped or assaulted them, thankfully leading to his likelihood of dying in prison. What I think the major accomplishment of this movement was was making it socially permissible to talk about experiences of assault, harassment or gender discrimination of any kind. And given that the women's march Pink Pussy Hat, remember that? Had taken place in early 2017. MeToo at the time felt like an opportunity to at least keep the conversation moving. And I was all about MeToo in its early days. It was during this time that I remember first hearing a swath of feminists rightfully argue for rehabilitation and de radicalization of the men who were perpetuating these abuses, specifically where I work in comedy, but at the time still being pretty fresh out of this abusive relationship and working a day job at fucking Playboy magazine. I don't want to talk about it. My response was just like, rehabilitation. Fuck you. Just get these men out of here. Make them leave. Because this was the first moment in my adult life that that seemed even remotely possible. So in a freelance column for pace magazine in December 2017, I wrote that the piece was literally called Make Them Leave. I began with the example of trying to bargain with male comedy bookers to stop giving known abusers time on their shows and expanded my frustrations into these talks of rehabilitation in a moment where I felt like our frustration was only beginning to be addressed. Here's a passage from that. I was driving from one gig to another with a friend this past fall when she mentioned needing to rehabilitate our communities as it pertained to men assaulting female comedians and the involuntary wave of anger it sent through my body. Rehabilitate. Make them leave. That's the least we can do. It's not my responsibility to explain to someone why they can't touch me, berate me, or rape me. Make them leave. I didn't say anything for the rest of the night. I also don't think she was wrong to bring the idea of rehabilitation into the conversation. It's a complicated issue that I think we will have to grapple with in the coming years with predators who are finally being held accountable today. Right now, I think we should make them fucking leave. It's weird to read this now because I don't even disagree with what I'm saying here. I'm 24 and in a lot of pain and also kind of naively optimistic that writing this is going to liberate me and all of the women around me. And I do believe that white women specifically owe it to others to do some of this deradicalization and rehabilitation work. But in the moment, I was so angry that mere weeks after women being able to speak freely about this, the conversation went back to, what do we do about the men? I don't care. At the time, I was so angry and so convinced that Getting these abusive men out of my sight would mean that either they would have to learn or disappear. And some of them learned, but many of them didn't, and none of them disappeared. And of course the far reaches of the manosphere fucking hated the MeToo movement. Here are some comments from forums around the time. The main reason is that real victims don't get heard because hundreds of women tell us that someone accidentally touched their ass once on the bus 10 years ago. It belittles women who have actually been subjected to rape or gross sexual harassment. I also wonder why women repeatedly end up alone in parks, take black taxis, etc. Why did you ride an elevator alone with a strange man? Would a better option have been to wait for the next elevator? And this is way mild in comparison to some other stuff I saw. In retrospect, I think MeToo was actually an excellent recruiting opportunity for the manosphere because for a moment it was socially permissible for women to speak out. And the manosphere could pitch this as a moment that proved their point. Look at these women. They want you to lose your job. You can't say anything anymore. You can't do anything anymore. They're trying to ruin our lives. Now I want to say MeToo is a rightfully criticized movement because as with virtually every other American feminist movement before it, its interests disproportionately prioritize the wealthy, CIS and white. This is a pretty popular point of view at this point, and while the Weinstein story initially felt like the beginning of something that could cut across class and race boundaries, that's not really what happened. So like every feminist movement that came before it, MeToo during 2017 into 2018 failed to get meaningful results anywhere other than with the financially privileged and mostly white at the time. It was such a cathartic moment for speaking out about misogyny being publicly acceptable for the first time in a generation. It improved some media representation and allowed people to feel safe sharing their experiences. But the lack of an end game led the movement to get tangled and sort of fizzle out in this whiff of pink pussy hat performativity. A few abusers being ejected from Hollywood is great, but to treat that as sufficient while women in the working class's struggles remained unchanged and largely unacknowledged means that enough wasn't done. Not to mention that when it came to intersectionality with trans women, this era was bad. So while it was deeply imperfect, MeToo's prominence in the media gave certain manosphere influencers the opportunity to double and triple down from soft Misogynists who serve as an entry point for many. The previous generation had Rash, Limbaugh, we had Ben Shapiro, and yeah, we got there guys like Joe Rogan. Is there a photo of this flat earth? No, I don't. Like I just said again, there's, there's no, there's no photo of, of the flat earth from space. There's no photo of the round earth from space. That's not true. And it's around this time that Rogan becomes extremely popular. He'd been around for a long time and the podcast had been around in some form since all the way back in 2009. But before that, he'd been a stand up, an actor, a UFC announcer. Yes, that is how he met Dana White. And my personal favorite, a guy who makes people eat bugs on tv. Fear Factor has been known for dreaming up some of the most outrageous and insane stunts you could possibly imagine. Over the past three seasons, contests have been confronted with over 165 stunts. Tonight, we're going to count down the 15 most outrageous moments on Fear Factor. Buckle up, because it's not going to be pretty. And from the beginning, Mr. Joe presented himself as not an outright bigot, but usually a guy who would talk to anybody. I talked about this a little bit in my interview with Becca Lewis last week, but I would classify Rogan as an I'm just asking questions guy who would have people on the show that were likely to get the show a lot of attention. He does push back on guests he doesn't agree with from time to time. But the question I wish more of his fans asked themselves is if Rogen knows who these people are in advance, and probably the points they'll argue, why air something he disagrees with so thoroughly? You're not dumb. You know why. And it wasn't and still isn't a fully political show, which I think is actually part of its appeal. It's always been very masculine. Their own website admits that 90% of guests are men. And the show's early recurring guests were male standups of Rogen's generation, guys who aren't afraid to drop a slur or a light misogyny every few sentences. But he'd also host athletes, musicians. It was a general interest show that kind of became a lifestyle marker for its longtime listeners. But occasionally, and often successfully, Rogan would platform just a full blown supremacist, male supremacist, white supremacist, and heavy hitters at that. Stephane Molyneux, Candace Owens, Gavin McInnes, Milo Yiannopoulos, Jordan Peterson, Alex fucking Jones, dude, more than once now. When you fight the system, you automatically know what to do. Like when you talk about something, the president, word for word, repeats me. Trump is what freaks him out, word for word. A whole speech is like whole things. And I'm on a power trip. That's what they flipped out about at the CIA and everywhere else. And they're like, well, Jones is like connected to Trump and I think Trump's like an idiot savant. What does that have to do with the speech and to get ahead of it? Yes, Rogan has also had his fair share of leftists on your Bernie Sanders, your Edward Snowdens, and a lot of people like to cite the fact that Rogan supported Sanders in 2020. But the fact remains, Rogan has said on many occasions that he books these guests himself. And so the repeated visits of white supremacists on the show is not an accident. It's been happening for over 10 years. I could trace it back to 2013. And while he still hasn't been a proper guest on the show, someone who comes up a lot on the Joe Rogan Experience is one Andrew Tate. And we'll come back to Rogan and the podcasts inspired by him in a little bit, but we're going to take a detour to Andrew Tate, a male supremacist currently under house arrest in Romania. So if you had the pleasure of not being aware of this guy until this moment, you might be like, what's happening in Romania? And the answer is worse than you could possibly imagine. No conversation about contemporary manosphere influencers would be complete without discussing Andrew Tate. Next to Jordan Peterson and the Fresh and Fit podcast. This is the name that's come up in most of my interviews about significant manosphere influencers among young people. Specifically, I talked to a middle school teacher who is beside themselves about how frequently they'd find their students engaging with his content. The content is like this. Life for a man is harder than life for a woman. We need to have a lot of shit to be an important man. To be a woman, you need makeup. If you're truly beautiful, you don't need anything else. I've been on boats in Dubai with 19 year old Moldovan girls. The guy who got that boat needed $100 million that make up. Never say going to bed. Going to bed is emasculate. Cowards need sleep. Oh, I'm texting you, you beautiful girl, but I'm tired, I'm going to bed. You know, I like to say at quarter past one in the morning, I'm going to work, work at this time? Money never sleeps, baby. Then I go to bed. The most beautiful girls in the world are not walking around shopping centers in England or fucking Nebraska or Idaho or wherever you dorks do your day game. So people go, I picked up a nine at the mall. There's no nines in that mall. You. I could sit outside that mall for a month and analyze every single chick who walks in there and not see a single nine. And you're telling me every weekend you go find the only nine in the mall? Do you fuck? She's a five and you're desperate. Yeah. Tate, as you can hear, is pretty high on the extremist scale, joining the cadre of manosphere influencers who explicitly advocate for assault and rolling back women's rights. Beginning as a kickboxer and Big Brother contestant, Tate's popularity steeply increased throughout the 2010s through overtly misogynist ventures like Hustlers University and the Pill, Thinking driven the real world. And to get back to Romania this past summer, he was arrested there for charges of rape, human trafficking, and forming an organized crime group to traffic women, and the investigation has since been expanded to include charges of trafficking, minors and money laundering. He is literally under house arrest for rape right now, and his content is still very popular among children. And the Tates of the world definitely need the Joe Rogans of the world to survive. Because yes, seeing this unhinged man could be appealing to a kid on its own, but to see that same unhinged man being validated as worth talking about with a prominent, well recognized figure is a legitimizing move. And again, to draw the line. That's what the I'm just asking questions corner of the manosphere really offers. It's easier for them to remain mainstream while not getting arrested, but they are open to these ideas. Okay, we're in 2018. At this time, other already existent corners of the manosphere continued to pull in new recruits. And as I'll discuss, the manosphere expanded in every sub community incels men's rights activists, pickup artists, men going their own way, and even subgroups among these categories. And what I find particularly dangerous is that both these creators and social media algorithms became very good at finding young people who fit the bill as being susceptible to this content. Young people who are insecure in their bodies or lacking in real life spaces and support systems to turn their head another way. And remember, this is an issue that's just as much driven by social issues as it is by alcohol algorithms. Algorithms are powerful tools, but the ideology is the real weapon here. Economic Disparity Fuels the Manosphere Like I mentioned earlier, most manosphere participants are encouraged to see themselves in relation to their value and success. And in an increasingly difficult economy where men are trained to project and blame this economic insecurity on women, well, you can see how it can get bad pretty quickly. And so for young men who felt socially awkward or sometimes were neurodivergent, these spaces could become tremendously appealing. And that's not even to mention how young people are targeted at in the era of the iPad kid, we see algorithms and influencers target kids as young as 10 years old, according to Manosphere influencer Andrew Englund in a leaked best social media practices document in the early 2000 and twenties. And this is an extremist group that is targeting children. So why can't we call this what it is? Extreme misogynist groups were very slow to be classified overtly as hate groups, and their crimes were almost never called out for what the killers like Elliot Roger were explicitly telling us that they were. The Southern Poverty Law center was the first to add male supremacy onto their registry of hate groups, and that wasn't until 2018. And while this was a step forward, it's a bit concerning that it took that long, given that the SPLC had been well aware of these spaces since 2012, but resisted classifying them as hate groups for half a decade. According to SPLC's Arthur Goldwag in 2012, it should be mentioned that the SPLC did not label MRAs as members of a hate movement, nor did our article claim that the grievances they air on their websites false rape accusations, ruinous divorce settlements, and the like are all without merit. But we did call out specific examples of misogyny and the threat, overt or implicit, of violence. 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They're the number one online retailer of custom window coverings in the world. Oh blinds.com is the goat the goat shop. Up to 45% off select styles plus a free professional measured and a 100% satisfaction guarantee during the blinds.com year end blowout. Up to 45% off now@blinds.com blinds.com rules and restrictions may apply following the 2016 election and the MeToo movement, there was a series of online creators and thinkers who were beginning to see the manosphere for what it was, increasing in both toxicity and size in a space that needed to be de radicalized if there was any chance of decreasing its influence. There were many people doing this work at the time, but I'm going to hone in on the YouTuber who I've heard most commonly cited by young men who were de radicalized around this time and in the years since Contrapoints a very talented creator who is no stranger to being a main character herself. I watched these videos at the time they were released too, and they're extremely good. Natalie Wynn, the channel's auteur and researcher, brought the perspective of a trans woman to the conversation and acknowledged that when she was living and being socially conditioned as a man that she found the incel and other irony pillp hate forums appealing because of the validation it gave her of her discomfort in her own body and an answer for why she was so frustrated. Of course, this answer was not true. Once Natalie began to explore her gender identify as non binary and eventually came out as a trans woman, she was worlds happier than she was living as a man who hated women. Using this experience, in addition to incredible research, talent delivery and oh my God aesthetics, Natalie was able to bring personal experience and an impressive amount of thoughtfulness regarding these groups. And critically, she knew how to speak their language. To give you an idea of how these videos were structured, here's a clip From Incels, a 2018 video that has 6 million views at the time of this writing. The word incel refers to a more specific community of mostly heterosexual men centered around forums like Incel, Me, and R. Braincells. This group has recently gotten a lot of bad press because for the last few years they've been churning out mass murderers faster than Marvel can make Avengers movies. But most incels aren't violent killers, they're just men who've formed an identity around not getting laid in this video. I don't want to mock Incels or lecture them or even sympathize with them. I just want to understand who they are and why they're like this Natalie Wynn's strategy was extremely successful at the time because unlike so many media outlets that were ignoring or miscovering the issue, she understood that to reach disaffected incels, it was ultimately an algorithmic game. So in order to get her videos seen, she was using the same hashtags, the same aesthetics, the same language that extremis INCEL videos were. And she had a lot of success in covertly infiltrating the YouTube algorithms of the incel curious and effectively showing them some empathy and encouraging them to know themselves better versus, you know, signing a Sea Org style infinity contract to hate women forever. And this turned into a series of videos that got the Contrapoints channel a lot of attention, but became too large of a burden for one person. And so eventually she moved on to other topics. And besides, her algorithmic strategy only worked as long as that was the way that the algorithm was. As we've talked about countless times on this show, the YouTube algorithm was all but unmonitored in the mid to late 2010s and was very difficult to do well consistently. Within Natalie's successful algorithm, Infiltration validates a consistent truth in the manosphere. YouTube is an integral part of it. After all, YouTube is now more popular than standard television among young men, and as of the early 2000s was the most used site in the world. I don't think the fact that Rogan began his podcast on YouTube all the way back in 2009 is any coincidence. Maybe a lucky mistake, but what his ideology became makes it clear that the YouTube algorithm that favors his guest with extreme or weird views has worked consistently. And make no mistake, YouTube's algorithm was also a part of why manosphere spaces were so successful at bringing new people in at higher rates in the mid to late 2010s. And I want to be careful here and not blame this growth of the manosphere on the algorithm wholesale. In our interview last week, Becca Lewis emphasized that this spirit of misogyny was already very much normalized. But what algorithms can do by serving users the same shit over and over and over is make a user's worst instinct seem like a far more mainstream opinion than it actually is. If your algorithm is flooded with manosphere content and you don't fully understand how that algorithm works, it's easy to envision a world where a kid can think, oh, everyone must feel this way. Studies now indicate that changes to the YouTube algorithm made in 2019 have pretty effectively slowed the unhinged radicalization phase we heard talked about so much during the 2016 election cycle and beyond. But it won't surprise you to hear that this happened, let's say, about half a decade too late. It's great that the algorithm is no longer directly targeting people to be radicalized, but once someone is radicalized, as Contrapoints discusses in her videos, it takes a lot of time and effort to undo that. And it's no surprise that in those years of algorithmic infinite growth from the Highest up at YouTube, the value of their platform skyrocketed, going from a valuation of 1.7 billion in 2012 to 15 billion in 2019, and its value has only continued to rise from there. Fixing and tweaking the algorithm is good, but let's not give them a shred of credit. YouTube waited until bad PR via lawsuits and public pressure made it advantageous to change their algorithm, certainly not when they first became aware of it. And remember, as Andrew England said, people in the manosphere were targeting young men specifically, and men ages 18 to 49 watch more YouTube than they do anything else. I regret to inform you that we are still in 2018 because another inflection point in the US for the manosphere was the Brett Kavanaugh hearings. I, and probably you, remember these vividly. I was sitting next to producer of this show Sophie Lichterman at work during these hearings as a woman named Christine Blasey Ford came forward to accuse Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. I believed he was going to rape me. I tried to yell for help. When I did, Brett put his hand over my mouth to stop me from yelling. This is what terrified me the most and has had the most lasting impact on my life. It was hard for me to Breathe. And I thought that Brett was accidentally going to kill me. And like many aspects of the MeToo movement, most manosphere forum spaces met this moment with unbelievable cruelty. But others, the just asking questions guys, took a slightly softer approach. Sure, it's possible that Brett Kavanaugh is a rapist, but what if there's some ulterior motive as to why Ford came forward? Here's Rogan around this time. Like, I'm fascinated by these Kavanaugh hearings. Like, I watched little clips of it before. I just have to tune out and talk about fuckery. Talk about. I mean, I don't know what that dude did or what he didn't do, but I think what's happening is more than that. Again, there's no one way that these spaces approach big cultural moments like this. Everyone in the media had something to say about the Kavanaugh hearings, and it remains a cultural touchpoint to the extent that a secretly Republican spinning instructor in Maine jumpscared my entire class last summer when she began to play a Kavanaugh testimony house music remix. I'm serious. By the way, spinning is that sexy, weirdly Christian stationary bike thing, which I gladly do and which I fully embrace. Working out automatic, whacking out automatic. Catholic all girls schools automatic still is. I will never understand. In any case, the manosphere mocked, harassed and doxed Christine Blasey Ford, lamenting that this moment was yet another example of what feminists were trying to take from them. Which is interesting, because Brett Kavanaugh was sworn in and has gone on to vote in such horrific legislation, such as overturning Roe v. Wade, voting yes on Grants Pass, a recent Supreme Court decision that makes being unhoused an arrestable offense, and of course, the presidential immunity that I'm sure will not at all benefit his homie Donald Trump in his upcoming eternity term. And this testimony came less than a year after the MeToo movement began. So consider how quickly the public tone changed. The questions that Christine Blasey Ford endured from an all male Republican committee pretty closely reflected that of Anita Hill's experience all the way back in 1991, after Hill had leveraged allegations of assault and harassment against Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. And I'm resisting getting into how mad these decisions make me. But the point is, the institution won here. Yes, it was challenged, and Ford received a lot of support. But Kavanaugh was sworn in and went on to enforce all the far right policies that antagonize anyone less marginalized than himself. As intended. But the manosphere continues to cite this hearing as a public humiliation, that is a problem. So why are they doing that? I'm not saying anything new here, but I firmly believe it's because being called out for their abuse of women is embarrassing for men. The aggressor is afraid of being made to feel small, and the person who is an object to them is afraid of being killed. And the more marginalized they are, this risk increases. But by this time, the Overton window for the American public had clearly shifted, right? American men polled before and after the Ford testimony generally said that women were more likely to scapegoat and harm the lives of the careers of men than they had been before. You didn't need to be an active part of the manosphere to be profoundly affected by it. And there's more to the manosphere historically that we could get into. We could talk about the right leaning or far right communities that have significant overlap with the manosphere. Flat earthers. QAnon. I could keep going, but we'd be here for six hours and I promised this series would be the Basics. So let's get back to Joe Rogan. In 2020, Rogan's show was popular enough to pull the biggest podcast deal in history, a $200 million exclusivity deal with Spotify that quite literally changed the medium forever. Thanks for fucking nothing. But he was just that big. At the time, he averaged around 11 million listeners an episode across platforms, while welcoming guests like Ben Shapiro and Dan Crenshaw and Tony Hawk. That's nice, but it's no coincidence that Rogen never had to pivot to video the way that many podcasts are struggling to now. Rogen was pulling more from the traditional radio setups that had launched early manosphere figures like Rush Limbaugh and seamlessly made it work for a new technological landscape. Another great example of this is Charlemagne, the Gods blockbuster radio show, the Breakfast Club, which began as a radio show around the same time that Rogan premiered in 2010 and then became a nationally syndicated show in 2013 and expanded to the Internet with a lot of success. And yes, Charlemagne platforms. A lot of the same misogynist and particularly homophobic and transphobic messaging that's characteristic across the manosphere. One of our interns here, she said that you make music for gays. I do. I'm not the intern. She looked at me like, what's wrong with that? Nothing at all. Nothing's wrong with it. So no, I'm saying, I mean, it's not specifically for that audience. You just make music. Right. I guess that was Azealia Banks we don't have time. And there were plenty of imitators pulling from the Rogan Charlemagne playbook, including Theo Vaughn, another standup who hosted a string of podcasts over the course of a decade before he started his own I'm Just a Guy Asking Questions video podcast to tremendous success. And so by the time Donald Trump is doing this speedrun of I'm Just Asking Question manosphere podcasters in 2024, UFC founder Dana White gives a specific list of people to thank in this space during Trump's acceptance event. I want to thank some people real quick. I want to thank the Nelpoys, Aiden Ross, Theo Vaughn, Busting with the Boys, and last but not least, the mighty and powerful Joe Rogan. And this is fascinating because based on what I have learned and talked to other people about, these shows don't represent the manosphere as it's existed in the last 10 years, but rather expands the definition of the manosphere to include male dominated misogyny fueled media spaces that have explicitly endorsed or share the values of Donald Trump. Trump is now inextricable from this space, and that would be an inconceivable way to describe the manosphere a decade ago, but I think that but that's probably how we'll hear it referred to moving forward. And all of these men have experience gaming the algorithm online. The Nelk Boys began as highly successful prank vloggers, much like fellow Trump supporters Jake and Logan Paul. Aiden Ross is a 20 something edgelord gaming streamer who got booted off Twitch for saying slurs, hosted White supremacist Nick Fuentes on his streams, and is a close personal friend of Andrew Tate himself. Trump's appearances ranged from the guys asking questions like Rogan and Theo Vaughn to the full blown extremists like Adin Ross. And while it's fully possible that a handful of these guys might be deplatformed someday, if there's anything that this space has demonstrated to me is that when one manosphere influencers fall, three pop out of nowhere to take this fallen figure's place. And when people talk about building their own Joe Rogan or whatever, the fuck, that's not possible for so many reasons, the primary of which is that the left just does not have the money that the far right does. Taylor Lorenz made this point explicit in an election postmortem in User Mag. The conservative media landscape in the United States is exceptionally well funded, meticulously constructed and highly coordinated. Wealthy donors, PACs and corporations with a vested interest in preserving or expanding conservative policies strategically invest in right wing media channels and up and coming content creators. This creates a well oiled pipeline for conservative influencers. Young TikTokers, YouTubers, live streamers or podcasters are discovered, developed and pushed to larger platforms, often with the financial backing of conservative billionaires or organizations on the right who have long recognized the content creator industry as a valuable means of shaping public opinion and policy. Look, I didn't say it was encouraging news. YouTube remains the most popular place for this, but as streaming platforms continue to become more successful, so do the extremists that populate them. Look no further than the top 10 streamers on Twitch the night of the election, with only one left leaning creator, Hasan Piker obviously getting meaningful numbers while the rest were right wing streams. And if you get deplatformed from Twitch, no problem. There's a right wing alternative in the form of Kick where Adin Ross had to switch to after his third Twitch ban. So I know that this was a lot of information, but how I see this space moving forward. This new manosphere is going to exist with a gradient. At its most extreme, its full on take the women's right to vote and get them back in the home style male supremacy. And at its most mild, it's taking those same people and saying, I don't know, let's hear what he has to say. Misogyny will remain the bait because a dismissal of women has always been generally socially acceptable. And so many creators, along with the algorithms who push them, will essentially test the waters of someone's ideology by introducing misogyny. Oh, you watched a full video about how the MeToo movement went too far. Maybe you'll watch this video. Maybe you'll join this community and it's not said enough. Most won't, but some will. And the more this content is pushed, the more likely it is that young men will give it a try. So is there any fucking hope of navigating out of this? On Thursday, I will talk to two experts who have spent years asking that same question. My conversations with FD Signifier and Robert Evans. Up next on into the manosphere. 16th Minute is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio. It is written, hosted and produced by me, Jamie Loftus. Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans. The Amazing Ian Johnson is our supervising producer and our editor. Our theme song is by Sad13. Voice acting is from Grant Crater and Pet Shout Outs to our dog producer Anderson, My cats Flea and Casper and my pet rock Bird who will outlive us all byee with Kroger brand products. You can get all of your favorite things this holiday season. Because our proven quality products come at exceptionally low prices and with a money back quality guarantee, every dish is sure to be a favorite. 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