we’re talking about the manosphere the wrong way

The manosphere isn't just one of the election's biggest trending topics, it's also one of the biggest outputters of internet main characters -- so why have most of the conversations around it been so unproductive? In our first part of our series on the manosphere, Jamie interrogates the flawed ways in which media is talking about this space, and traces its origins from the 1970s all the way to Gamergate and the Isla Vista shootings. Then, she speaks with researcher Becca Lewis about where we go from here.

Follow Becca Lewis's work here: https://bsky.app/profile/beccalew.bsky.social 

Men Who Hate Women by Laura Bates: https://bookshop.org/p/books/men-who-hate-women-from-incels-to-pickup-artists-the-truth-about-extreme-misogyny-and-how-it-affects-us-all-laura-bates/19662669 

Backlash by Susan Faludi: https://bookshop.org/p/books/backlash-the-undeclared-war-against-american-women-susan-faludi/8728966?ean=9780307345424

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Colson Media.

Speaker 2 (00:08):
I'm not stop, surn up, starts going, club, moment times start, stay, get.

Speaker 3 (00:18):
The excuse me mom.

Speaker 1 (00:24):
Siste six.

Speaker 4 (00:31):
Six character.

Speaker 1 (00:59):
Welcome to sixteenth Minute, the podcast where, for most episodes
we talk to a main character of the Internet and
talk to them about how their moment affected them and
what it says about us and the Internet. I am
your host, Jamie Loftus and feminism is a part of
my whole thing, like it or not, which is why
for the next three weeks we are going to be

(01:19):
taking a look at one of the greatest churners of
main characters in the Internet's history. Bear with me. The Manisphere,
I know, and I'm not sure what troubles me more
the fact that some people listening like me have known
this term for years, or that people remain blissfully unaware

(01:41):
have to know what it is now. The manisphere, in short,
is a loosely connected media environment that consists of podcasts,
YouTube channels, TikTok accounts, and a shitload of intersection therein
that promote at bare minimum misogynistic but often transphobic, homophobic,
and racist ideals as well. It's white supremacy leading with misogyny,

(02:06):
but it's not that simple. Many of the shows and
personalities we'll be talking about in this series began that way,
and others became that way, And even so this is
to varying degrees. There are believe it or not podcasts
very successfully marketed to young men that will casually drop
that women shouldn't be able to vote. This is a

(02:27):
tweet from the Fresh and Fit podcast.

Speaker 3 (02:29):
A woman's vote should be fifty percent of a man's vote.
Women aren't in selective service and don't work in infrastructure
by choice, so they shouldn't have as much of a
say in the elective process.

Speaker 1 (02:41):
Sure thing fellas they are should not. But then there
are personalities that have been getting a lot of airtime
since the election, like Joe Rogan and Theo Vaughn, who
weren't necessarily always so outwardly open to promote a fascist
that they would be considered a part of the manisphere,
but they are very open to platforming any number of misogynist,
white supremacist, boldly fascistic people on their platforms. Joe Rogan,

(03:06):
as many have pointed out, hosted and endorsed My boy
Bernard Sanders back in twenty twenty, but just a few
weeks ago, he was shouted out by the founder of
UFC Ultimate Fighting Championship, Dana White, during a Trump acceptance speech.

Speaker 5 (03:22):
I want to thank some people real quick. I want
to thank the No Boys, Aiden Ross, Theo, Vaughan Bosto
with the Boys, and last but not least, the mighty
and powerful Joe Rogan.

Speaker 1 (03:35):
So everyone Dana White is mentioning. Here are Manisphere influencers
who hosted Trump or explicitly endorsed him in the weeks
leading up to the election, and they are all very
successful among young men and have garnered millions upon millions
of impressions on Trump's behalf in the weeks leading up
to the election. It's not the reason he won. I

(03:58):
really don't believe that. To say that is to miss
the force for the trees, but it certainly seems to
have helped. Podcasts are a very parasocial medium where it's
easy to sell people ideology over time, after establishing a
trusted relationship with your listeners. Please buy my book Raw Dog.
The conversation here is not a simple one, and I

(04:20):
am probably not going to get everything right because this
requires taking a look at the history of American misogynist spaces,
and while women and transfolks have never reached parody, this
is sliding backwards significantly even in the last few years.
In the month since the twenty twenty four election, young
women on college campuses are already reporting higher rates of

(04:42):
emboldened comments from men their age, inspired by comments like
Nick fuent as, is your body my choice? In the
same token, I don't want to participate in a moral
panic by implying that all young men are under this umbrella.
That's not true. But the fact that you young men
are feeling more comfortable and are being more actively encouraged

(05:04):
to be openly misogynistic is pretty undeniable. But recently I
have seen overwhelmingly unproductive conversations that scapegoat this space as
the problem and not what it is, in my opinion,
which is a symptom of a larger issue. So in
our first installment, I'm going to give you a short

(05:25):
overview of what we're even talking about when we say
man is is fear mainly because my mom listens to
this show and she drives to work, and I'm aiming
to have her and you have a better understanding of it.
It's vast. It's hard to categorize. It's overrun with deflective,
ironic humor that distances the salesman of this ideology from
what they're actually saying. And today I'll tell you a

(05:47):
little about it and speak to a journalist who's been
studying it much longer than I have. But before we start,
I want to share where I am feeling at the
top of this series, because I think that a lot
of what is lacking from what I've seen in these conversations,
mostly those led by men, is a lack of personal experience.

(06:10):
And I'll cite my sources here. I get why the
manisphere is a simple target here, but I want to
start by saying that understanding and if possible, working to
dismantle this space would not solve the larger issue. It's
not a bad instinct, and I don't want anyone to
feel silly, because I get why the question is asked.
But if there's anything I've learned from having participated in

(06:33):
and carefully observed the last decade of feminist action, identifying
the problem and pushing people out of our spaces is
a step in a much larger, more complicated process. If
you want to get to the meat of this episode,
skip ahead about ten minutes, but I want to start
by kind of couching how I'm going to approach this

(06:53):
topic using my own experience first, So if you'd like
to stay, be warned that I will brief discussing sexual
abuse here. Three two be in play, A little fart
noise one great where postfart. It's the trigger zone as
it pertains to the manisphere. The more I dug into

(07:16):
this world and its increasing influence, the more I genuinely
fear that, on top of the policies that this space encourages,
rolling back already insufficient and hateful policies towards trans people,
fucking row being gone. The list goes on, I worry
about how these conversations are still centering on men. So

(07:37):
the first thing is I worry about the targets of
these men, once again not being asked to interrogate the
way that they're perceived and treated, because that was my experience.
I was in college in the early twenty tens when
I was repeatedly sexually assaulted, and while that was a
million years ago in internet terms, it is quite historically recent.

(08:00):
And I do think that with the sheer density of
the last decade and the discombobulation of COVID lockdown era.
A lot of us sometimes failed to see how much
has changed in Western culture in the last decade, which
is why it sometimes confuses people when I tell them
that when a partner repeatedly assaulted me just a little

(08:20):
over a decade ago, I didn't have the tools to
understand what was happening and internalized all of it as
my fault. Tale as old as time, and the reasons
why are more complicated than I realized at the time.
Keeping as simple, the city I grew up in did
not have a lot of sex education, basically none. In
my case. It wasn't because the state I lived in

(08:42):
was draconian about abstinence only education. I'm from a firmly
blue state, but rather because where I'm from was lower
middle class to poor and was generally underfunded, whose status
as a majority non white city in the Great State
of mack Wahlberg often led to to our schools getting
fucked over big time. When I got to my fancy

(09:04):
little arts college, I knew very little about sex and
specifically consent. Really just my own experience and what I'd
learned from watching TV and movies I'd been with my
high school boyfriend for years who was very respectful and loving,
and part way through college, I joined a comedy group.
I had pretty intense social anxiety then and now and

(09:25):
didn't want to go to the welcome party for the
group when I got in, but a guy in the
group told me that I had to in order to join,
so I went. I was one of three girls in
a group of around twelve. I didn't make my drinks
that whole night, and then hours later I woke up
on a couch being assaulted by whoever was behind me.

(09:49):
I didn't even know who I was scared. I had
just woken up, and I just let it happen, because
once I realized I was being violated, my first thought
was how could I let this happen? And as it
was happening, I tried to focus and think of one
of four men that it could have been behind me

(10:12):
and what to do when I turned around and saw
who it was, and I clearly remember thinking who would
I be least upset to learn was doing this to me?
And I feel comfortable sharing that I have a therapist.
The point is this was twenty twelve, and I did
not know that this was assault. I spent that whole

(10:33):
weekend placating my assaulter once I learned who it was,
thinking I was this horrible slut who had cheated on
my high school boyfriend, and I ended the relationship of
over three years out of shame. And to his credit,
he was the only person in my life to tell
me that he didn't think that I had done anything wrong,
but I was so convinced that I had. I had

(10:56):
no anecdotal proof that I hadn't, including conversations with friends
and family. So when my assaulter got in touch and
asked if I wanted to start dating him, I thought
I had to because I had made this horrific transgression
and I had to make it right. And I was
afraid that if I didn't agree to date him, I

(11:17):
would be sort of ostracized within this comedy group, something
I had worked to be a part of for years,
and I really didn't want to lose that. So hopefully
this dynamic sounds fucking nuts now, but I want to
repeat at this time, I had a support system. I
had peers and adults I could and did go to

(11:39):
about this issue, most of whom were other women. And
what was scary was that most of them, particularly older
figures at the school and in my family, also did
not understand that this was assault and that I hadn't
done anything wrong. And to this day I don't know
to what degree my assaulter had been educated or conditioned

(12:02):
to blow past a no, whether it was a case
of he knew better and didn't care, or that he
was operating on what he had seen and observed in media,
I might never know. So again, this is in the
twenty tens, and I would end up in this relationship
that had begun with sexual assault for about three years.
You will probably not be surprised to hear this was

(12:24):
not the last assault that took place, and that the
instance of assault that finally made me realize what was
happening would come months later and was far more straightforward.
I said no, and it happened anyways. And while it
took a long time to extract myself from this relationship fully,
hopefully you know it often takes people in abusive relationships
a lot of time to leave for all these different reasons.

(12:47):
I can tell you the exact moment I began to
realize that what was happening to me wasn't right. This
was within a few months of my first assault, when
a fellow student at my college, which began to speak
out against the school's failure to address her own campus's assault.
The mid twenty tens had become this inflection point for

(13:08):
discussing the widespread rape culture on college campuses. Big examples
were a Yale fraternity that both George Bush's had previously
been members of, was suspended for five years because of
the rampant allegations of rape, and the brock Turner case
caused a lot of debate and clarification that campus rape
was not less of an offense than any other. And

(13:31):
even today it still feels a little embarrassing to admit.
But it wasn't until I read stories and accounts that
were similar to mine that it was a wake up
call that this had happened to me too. I didn't
think of myself as someone who had experienced assault because
I hadn't seen anything that had happened to me characterized

(13:52):
as that. My understanding of rape was that it couldn't
happen by someone you knew, and that it couldn't happen
while you were drunk. I really just did not know
and not to be callous, but I couldn't have been
assaulted at a more annoying time. I think twenty thirteen
was a year that people were really waking up to
this issue, specifically with college students, and you know, if

(14:16):
this guy had waited another year to do one of
the worst things that's ever happened to me, I think
that the conversation and my experience might be a little different.
But he didn't, so it wasn't. I went to a
school counselor at Emerson College and they said, sorry, if
it happn'ed off campus, they can't help me. And besides,
I had been drinking at this party. I went to

(14:36):
people in our comedy group, people my age, and everyone,
including other young women, nodded and said they were sorry,
but either no one believed me or no one knew
what to do. And so by the end of that year,
I wasn't just feeling out of my fucking mind and
self harming, but I felt like, oh, I guess I
was wrong and I need to stay with this person

(14:58):
and make things okay. This is just my experience, but like,
being assaulted was horrible, but being surrounded by people I
trusted who felt the same way my assaulter did was
more painful than anything in retrospect, I don't really know
who in my life felt that this was a problem

(15:19):
that was worth taking seriously. And while I held anger
about it, particularly towards other women, for a long time,
I don't know that any of them knew any more
than I did about consent or assault, or what we
should expect in terms of autonomy and respect. And if
I hadn't encountered stories like that other student on my

(15:40):
campus and later seeing Amma sulkowit this mattress performance in
twenty fourteen, where they carried the mattress they'd been assaulted
on to protest Columbia University's unwillingness to address the assault.
I genuinely don't know how long it would have taken
me to understand that I wasn't crazy and that what
happened wasn't okay. But again, I was coming from a

(16:01):
pretty privileged place, and I still had no information, And
the less information you have, the more danger there is
in a culture where discussion around rape culture and gender
discrimination and subjugating other people's bodies is run by men.
I say all this because while I think centering the

(16:21):
manisphere as the problem is a mistake. I know that
it is a problem. My big fear here is that
while the progress feminists have made in the last decade
is characteristically flawed in intersectionality, as it always is, that
there could be a teenager right now or in the
near future who does not have the information to understand

(16:43):
that they have been violated and will internalize it as
a personal failure. I worry about seeing the progress I
have seen be replaced with Manisphere grifters who will always
get algorithmic preference and be far better funded than their opposition.
As things are now, it feels like twenty thirteen all

(17:03):
over again, but worse because back then my assault could
at least claim to not understand how consent worked and
never be educated on it. But now there's people saying,
your body, my choice. They understand consent, they just don't
care about it. And I want to do everything in

(17:23):
my power to prevent anyone from going through what I did,
or even less. What the manisphere in its current state
is is a lot of highly monetized, regressive rhetoric that
is aiming for young people specifically. I believe that then
and now it's the people who have suffered tremendously under

(17:46):
patriarchy and white supremacy who are always asked to do
the most difficult work in deradicalizing and preventing its spread.
There's many other reasons I want to discuss the manispherer
but I share this example to make two points. Points
first and foremost that what happened to me was a
pretty decisive systemic failure. Neither me nor most of my

(18:07):
support system were equipped with information, and every institution from
the college to the Boston fucking Police did nothing. However,
the manisphere does come in here and amplified the problem
because in the middle of this relationship came gamer Gate,
a targeted harassment campaign of women in gaming that the

(18:29):
men I was surrounded by, including my assaulter, were decidedly
on the wrong side of, and came up a lot.
The way that the manisphere affects people and exacerbates existing
problems has only gotten worse in the last decade, and
I do feel a certain amount of responsibility to try
and have a coherent conversation about it. Because, to get

(18:51):
back to the point of this, show boy has this
space generated a lot of main character misogynists. And here
we are in a space where our technology increasingly makes
it difficult not just to understand where the people who
hate us are coming from, but what they're even fucking seeing.
So if you're in a similar headspace right now and

(19:11):
not sure how to have these conversations, or if you're
shaking out of a manisphere fog, that's where I am
coming from. That is why I would like to interrogate
and understand these spaces. I do believe that it's important
to understand a space in order to protect yourself from it. Okay,

(19:32):
so to my listeners who are not men, I can
only speak for myself, but I have found it unbelievably
frustrating to hear centrist men behind laptops pontificating about actually
we had a Joe Rogan on the left, it was
Joe Rogan and then call it a day, right. It's
so obnoxious, and the churn of like I get it

(19:53):
content just feels like clocking in. My feeling is that
men will encourage the target of this abuse, to show
these young men bending towards fascism, empathy and grace in
order to deradicalize them. And while I do think that
would help. It makes me fucking furious. So let's get

(20:13):
into how and why the Manisphere exists as it does
a little history lesson when we come back. Welcome back

(20:36):
to sixteenth minute. You thought I was over sharing when
my dad died, baby, And without further ado, here is
a brief history of the Manisphere, sort of. And I'll
make a quick note here. So much of how this
space is written and talked about is in very gender
binary language, so I'm going to do my best to

(20:59):
keep the language inclusive, but note that this is often
a feature of this line of study. I've asked everyone
I've interviewed so far what they consider to be the
origins of this space, and I tend to get one
of three answers. Was it backlash to the Me Too
movement in twenty seventeen, was it gamer Gate in twenty thirteen,

(21:22):
or was it all the way back in the nineteen
seventies before the Internet even existed. Sorry with regret, the
Manisphere as we know it today, which ranges from the
podcast that Dana White shouted out the night of the
election all the way up to really extremist content that
says women belong in the home and should no Longer

(21:43):
be Allowed to Vote can be traced all the way
back to the nineteen seventies, during the second wave feminist
movement in the US. I've actually covered this period of
history pretty extensively in a past podcast series of mine
called act Cast, where I took a look at how
Kathy Guy Swyd's Kathy Comics commented on second and third

(22:03):
wave feminist movements through the lens of a middle class,
chocolate loving, working white woman. The second wave feminism ran
approximately from the sixties during the Civil rights boom until
the early nineteen eighties, when Ronald Reagan halted all social
progress and replaced it with wham singles. This period of
feminist action was very flawed, but did accomplish quite a bit.

(22:26):
While first wave feminism's big win was suffrage, second wave
feminism focused on reproductive rights and equity in the workplace,
a time that encouraged women to push back on the
domestic goddess image of the post war era and to
begin their own careers. The Equal Pay Act was introduced
in nineteen sixty three.

Speaker 2 (22:44):
Roe v.

Speaker 1 (22:45):
Wade was passed in nineteen seventy two, giving anyone with
a uterus the right to a safe abortion, rape crisis
centers were opened, the Feminine Mystique was published I Am
Aware it is flawed, and a number of specific organizations
pushed back on specific issues. The National Organization for Women
and Eramerica focused on passing the Equal Rights Amendment, which

(23:08):
we were never able to do, by the way, and
the National Women's Political Caucus, whose ranks included Shirley Chisholm,
focused on getting pro women candidates in office across political parties.
And wouldn't you know it, there were a number of
men marching alongside second wave feminists or men's rights. Stay
with me, this was actually a pretty good thing at

(23:30):
the time. The original men's liberation movement was not a
crusade against women, but rather a challenge of what the
expectations of masculinity under capitalism were. They argued something that
is categorically true that men suffer under patriarchy, and that
with the shifting politics of the time, a hyper masculine

(23:51):
John Wayne persona wasn't a realistic expectation of a man,
not that it ever was. If women were being confined
to the home, they argued, than men were being exiled
from the home, and this movement had these same intersectional
failings as the feminist movement, but were positioned alongside them,
not in opposition to them, as we think of the

(24:12):
term men's rights now. Something called the California Men's Gathering
began in nineteen seventy eight where men could convene and
discuss how patriarchy affected them. And these continue to this day.
And I know it sounds weird, but the men's liberation
movement was embraced by feminists of the time. By nineteen
ninety two, there was an entire book on the subject that,

(24:35):
while critical, was generally supportive, called Women Respond to the
Men's Movement, a feminist collection. It featured a foreword from
Glorious steynem and featured writing from Bell Hooks and Ursula
Kay Legwin S.

Speaker 4 (24:48):
Dynam writes, make no mistake about it, women want a
men's movement. We're literally dying for it. If you doubt that,
just listen to women's desperate testimonies of hope that the
men in our lives will be more nurturing toward children,
more about to talk about emotions, less hooked on a
spectrum of control that extends from not listening through to violences,
and less oppressive of their own human qualities that are

(25:11):
called feminine and thus suppressed by cultures which men dominate.

Speaker 1 (25:16):
And if you know anything about what the men's rights
movement looks like now, this is obviously not the movement
that Steinem is describing here. And that's because by the
mid seventies a schism had formed within this men's movement
between pro feminist and anti feminist men, and by the
end of the decade the two were distinctly different groups.

(25:39):
And guess which group was better at accruing power and attention.
And from here on out, with all due respect, I'm
going to leave the pro feminist men in the rare view,
although I love you guys, and I would love to
cover the California Men's gathering fellows, please hit me up.
The anti feminist men's movement built power throughout the seventies

(26:00):
into the early eighties, citing texts like the Inevitability of Patriarchy,
Why the biological difference between men and women always produces
male domination by writer Stephen Goldberg sounds like a page turner.
And while the anti feminist movement was growing, the feminist
movement itself was experiencing setbacks. There is a whole terrific

(26:24):
book about the pattern of progressive feminist movements being pushed
back in the decade following gains, called Backlash, originally published
in nineteen ninety one by Susan Foludi, which illustrates how
the first, second, and third waves of feminism were all
followed by legislative and cultural backlash. Sound familiar, because that's

(26:46):
what's happening to fourth wave feminism right now. Throughout the eighties,
the anti feminist men's movement was empowered by the notion
that the cause of men's oppression was not patriarchy but feminism,
or to their discontent, was not redefining what masculinity looked like,
but rolling back progress to ostensibly put women back in

(27:08):
their places again. Most writing about this defines quote unquote
a woman's place as a middle class, straight, white woman's place,
but it's important to note that men's rights movements have
been popular across racial and economic lines for decades. This
mentality was expanded on by characterizing women as entitled, castrating liars,

(27:30):
citing figures like Glorius Dynam, Lorena Bobbitt, and Anita Hill
as women who wanted nothing more than to destroy and
oppress men without any acknowledgment of their oppression. Here we
see the start of a repeating pattern. Instead of men's
oppression stemming from the same systems that oppress everyone, we
actually live in a matriarchy where women seek attention and

(27:53):
power by punishing men, acting as nature programmed them. What
becomes clear in the Men's Right space is that there's
no way that women can win with their ideology. If
women return to the home as suggested, they are freeloaders,
ripping off their husbands, wasting money shopping and going out.

(28:13):
If women go to work, they're taking jobs from men
and are outside of their own lane. It's impossible to
be the right kind of woman for a men's rights activist,
it appears, without not just being subservient, but to openly
and actively agree with these misogynist views. There is no
call to action other than to roll back progress. To

(28:34):
quote a twenty thirteen dissertation from Bethany Coston and Michael
Kimmel called white men as the new victims.

Speaker 3 (28:41):
The real trouble is that men's rights guys don't know
if they want to be restored patriarchs or liberated men.
That is, they don't know if they would prefer to
live in nineteen fifty or twenty fifty. As a result,
men's rights websites and pamphlets are clogged with howls of anguish, confusion,

(29:03):
and pain. And this anguish, confusion and pain, we believe
is real and well grounded. Real here is not to
be confused with true. These men do feel a lot,
but their analysis of the cause of those feelings is
decidedly off, especially when we see that the howls of
pain have been transformed into rage, and the men's rights

(29:27):
movement has become a movement of reappropriating power at all costs,
no matter who gets in the way.

Speaker 1 (29:33):
This paper goes on to trace a handful of cases
that seek to illustrate that point. How the solution to
this is that women are bitches and therefore should not
be allowed to divorce me in the first place. Is
anyone's guests. By the time the Internet comes into the picture,
though the men's rights communities went along with it. No
coincidence that white collar white men are still most likely

(29:56):
to have Internet access, and once men's rite activists hit
the Internet, they splinter over time into a number of
different factions. These spaces are covered extensively in Laura Bates's
twenty twenty book Men Who Hate Women, a difficult but
worthy read, and she identifies the following groups as prominent
and empowered throughout the twenty tens, particularly during Trump's first administration.

(30:22):
So we're not quite at the heyday of Joe Rogan
that is making the rounds in the media outlets right now.
This is more of the online forum era. These groups
were not small, but they also weren't really talked about
in a mainstream way until closer to the mid twenty tens.
In Cells Involuntary Celibates, this is a community that believes

(30:46):
that women's rights have rendered them virgins and also a
place where pill ideology comes from. Taking the red pill
means that seeing feminism has taken everything from you, which
either leads to looksmaxing, which is a subt community where
men try to make themselves look like a chad or
traditionally desirable man, or the other direction, which is more

(31:07):
common is black pilling, which is essentially a death cult
that states that women will never like or be attracted
to you, and therefore your life should be dedicated to
bitterness and vengeance. More in them next week pickup artists.
Oh boy, these guys pre date the Internet significantly, but
we're certainly very empowered by it. The vibe is very

(31:30):
milady with an undertone of violence. These are the oft
dunked on men in Fedoras, sure, but they do more
than advise nagging women or insulting them to make them
feel insecure and quote unquote more likely to sleep with you,
although that's never been my experience. However, on the more
extreme end, pickup artists also have a history of explicitly

(31:54):
advocating for and perpetuating sexual violence in or one of
the many Manisphere groups that are pretty obsessed with how
fake they think the rate of sexual assault against women is,
framing it more as a way for women to exert
power over and punish men with these accusations with PUA's

(32:16):
no means yes is the norm. Plow through resistance is
a common phrase that was used in these forums, and,
as with most of these groups, the way they talk
about women also leans heavily into cruel, racial and cultural stereotypes.
Their seminal texts include the TV show The Pickup Artist,
starring now prolifically accused of user Mystery and his protege

(32:40):
Neil Strauss, who published the very successful book The Game,
claiming to be a journalist who had infiltrated the space
while he had demonstrably been a part of it for
some time. Because all pickup artists they're cowards, he backpedaled
on this ideology over time after profiting from it to
the tune of millions of dollars. The Neil Straus journey

(33:01):
is a deeply frustrating one. I'm talking about starting here.
This is a clip where he's attempting to seduce Jessica
Alba on Jimmy Kimmel.

Speaker 6 (33:09):
The whole that's awesome and the whole thing about that,
and those are great qualities. The whole thing is guys
are always trying to sell themselves to women. They're always
trying to say brag about themselves and say what they
do for a living. And instead you kind of got
to flip the script and make someone that's absolutely no
interest in you start selling himself to you.

Speaker 7 (33:23):
And that's like one of the pieces.

Speaker 6 (33:24):
Wow, and thanks for playing well wow, Yeah that you
feel like that was effective?

Speaker 1 (33:30):
And I felt like.

Speaker 8 (33:30):
That's just what intelligent people that I don't know that
talk to me do. They don't care so much about
the physical and they do actually look for more than that,
and so well they tell you.

Speaker 7 (33:45):
To here.

Speaker 1 (33:46):
Just a few years later, I learned from the Big
Bang Theory.

Speaker 9 (33:49):
May have learned a few tricks from author Neil Strauss.
He taught what he calls average frustrated chumps to manipulate
the women they want, and he is controversial bestseller The Game.
Rause infiltrated a group of pickup artists revealing the secrets
of seduction. One technique is called neegging. He writes, quote,
the purpose of a nig is to lower a woman's
self esteem while actively displaying a lack of interest in her,

(34:13):
by telling her she has lipstick on her teeth, for example,
or offering her a piece of gum after she speaks.
Ten years later, Strauss is out with the Truth and
Uncomfortable book about relationships. He opens up about cheating Monogaby
and how he changed. Good morning, Neil Strauss.

Speaker 10 (34:28):
And he's speaking of Uncomfortable after that.

Speaker 9 (34:32):
But you've done basically a complete reversal in this book.

Speaker 10 (34:35):
Yes and The Game, I was reporting on a culture
that was there and not kind of coining these techniques
that already existed and not kind of popularized ideas. Though
it's kind of sad that your contribution to the culture
is people wearing ridiculous clothes.

Speaker 9 (34:48):
So you've had a change of heart.

Speaker 10 (34:49):
I'm bigger than that, a complete transformation as to kind
of who I was and what I thought was important.

Speaker 1 (34:55):
And the pickup artists they pretend this didn't happen, or
that Strauss was corrupted by women. Then there's men going
their own way or Migtao. These guys are qualified by
the Southern Poverty Law Center as a male supremacist heat
group who frequently align with racist and homophobic alright sentiments

(35:17):
and ultimately want men to separate themselves from society and
women altogether. Migtao also subscribes to their own pill ideology,
ranging from rejecting long term relationships with women to dropping
out of society altogether. At their most extreme, their community
is driven by a fear of women, often being convinced

(35:39):
that women are hoping and trying to accuse you of
rape in order to ruin your life. This group actually
can be traced back to the eighties, with their predecessors
primarily identifying as the Deep Masculine movement. Sounds pretty straight
to me. And finally there's MRAs men's rights advocates, And

(36:02):
in the ultimate example of taking a real life problem
that deserves examination and turning it into a campaign against women,
there is a faction of men's rights activists that call
themselves Father's rights activists, another community that predates the Internet
that calls attention to the systemic tendency to give mother's
custody of children over fathers, regardless of if it's in

(36:25):
the children's best interest, which is a valid concern, but
this group believes this can only be addressed by removing
the rights of mothers, and that these tendencies are proof
positive that we live in a matriarchy, and MRAs have
generally had the best luck breaking through to the mainstream

(36:46):
because of their ostensibly more political mission, But make no mistake,
the underlying beliefs are the same, be serious, and there
are more subcommunities where that came from. As this continued
to grow online, we get a whole crop of media influencers,
either appearing organically or pivoting from other areas like academia

(37:09):
and right wing radio to create subcommunities like sigmas, and
we'll be talking about them in the next episode. But
as far as the first run of Online Misogynists, these
were your guys Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, Julian Blanc, who
gave way to today's Andrew Tates, and the Fresh and
Fit podcast hosts. The tricky thing here is that within

(37:32):
these communities there isn't much unity, in spite of the
fact that they have a common interest in taking women
down a peg. Pickup artists aim to have transactional sex
with women and find in cells pathetic black pilled guys,
resent hypersexual men and looks maaxers, particularly if they have
had sex with women before. I'm not encouraging these communities

(37:54):
to unionize. I fear the power they could accrue. But
as a passive observer, it's pretty fucking reds to watch
all these men who agree on one scary thing continued
to bully each other in order to define a sense
of community. And for a long time these communities were
considered to be a niche until they weren't. I and

(38:16):
a lot of people first became aware of this space
around twenty fourteen. This is around the time of My
personal Ordeal, the stretch of years that brought in an
intense culture war over campus assault, the brock Turner case,
the Amisolkowitz performance, and on and on. The first reason
for this, as I mentioned earlier, was gamer Gate, the

(38:38):
biggest public feminist backlash in years, which grew to a
year long fear mongering and harassment campaign that targeted women
in the gaming community of how women were presented in games,
which was and is a very male dominated space. The
primary targets of this hate were women who developed video
games or prominent feminist media critic and past guest of

(39:00):
my other show, The Bechel Cast, that same creator who
my college boyfriend so despised, Anita Sarkisian. During these campaigns,
anonymous users organized on right wing sites like four chan
and Reddit, before these spaces were more carefully regulated. The
second example that empowered and made these communities more well

(39:20):
known was the mass murder at Ala Vista by twenty
two year old Elliott Roger in twenty fourteen. You probably
know this story, at least in the abstract. Roger murdered
six people and injured fourteen, including two young women, at
a sorority house. But as Laura Bates points out in
Men Who Hate Women, while Roger's crime was widely reported,

(39:44):
it mainly accomplished, starting yet another mental illness discourse, largely
ignoring the misogynist manifesto that Roger left behind, leaving it
as a footnote. The media didn't seem to know what
to do with it, and certainly did and seemed to
understand who he had left this manifesto behind. For Roger

(40:05):
was an active member of in cell groups he'd left
it behind. For Inceelts, what Roger's manifesto, which would be
cited by many other mass shooters in the years to come,
should have been treated as was a harbinger that misogynists
online spaces had become quite literally lethal. But if you
recall this time, that conversation didn't really happen in spite

(40:28):
of a trending Twitter hashtag hashtag yes all women and
a few articles. We are socially trained and the media
reflects more empathy for white and white passing men, and
so the conversation shifted to this young man needed mental
health care as opposed to focusing on why he had
committed the crime in the first place. Again, we are

(40:50):
always centering white men in these conversations, bringing my blood
pressure down. Laura Bay's tracks Roger's legacy carefully in her book,
noting that at every turn mainstream media outlets would mention
the misogynist's creed that Roger had left behind, but never
went so far as to prescribe it as a problem
that extended beyond one mentally ill young man. It was

(41:13):
treated as an isolated incident, a bad apple, certainly not
the kind of thing that would inspire future crimes. As
we now know, this was not true and was a
call to action for many, while not acknowledged in most
media outlets, to take a closer look at what spaces
Roger's violent, hateful beliefs had calcified inside of. And all

(41:35):
this happened over ten years ago. Now, there's a lot
to talk about in terms of how this space has
developed in the last decade. First, I wanted to talk
to a woman. Please let me talk to a woman.
When we come back, I speak with an expert on
the ever expanding manisphere, researcher Becca Lewis. Welcome back to

(42:10):
sixteenth Minute. My blood pressure is skyrocketing, and my first
interview in this series comes to me by way of
fellow Cool Zone media host Molly Konger of Weird Little Guys.
Becca Lewis is a Stanford postdoc who researches the politics
of Silicon Valley and the tech world, and she's been
looking at the development of the manisphere for nearly a decade.

(42:31):
So as a point of entry, I think it's important
to not just here an expert on the subject, but
you know, not a guy. Here's our talk.

Speaker 7 (42:40):
I'm Becca Lewis.

Speaker 2 (42:41):
I'm an academic researcher at Stanford University and I study
far right movements and how they use digital media.

Speaker 1 (42:49):
What a You'll never be out of a job again.
I don't think.

Speaker 2 (42:53):
The goal is to eventually make the job irrelevant, but
you're telling that seems far away.

Speaker 1 (42:59):
We're recording the three days after the election, and it's
unavoidable any Internet space right now to see the manosphere
brought up by people I would not even have guessed
would know what this is in this moment because you're
an expert. Does it feel kojent the way people are
talking about it. Does it feel like the threat is

(43:22):
being under or overstated?

Speaker 2 (43:24):
Yeah, it's a little bit surreal, and in some ways
it's reminding me of the follow up to the twenty
sixteen election, where you know, people are searching for answers,
and at the time in twenty sixteen, the first answer
that came up was fake news, and that was a
really big thing, and that kind of spawned a whole
like sub field of journalism and academics and everything around

(43:47):
disinformation and fake news and all of that. And now,
I you know, it seems clear that the manosphere and
podcasts in particular are going to.

Speaker 7 (43:58):
Be one of the big areas of focus.

Speaker 2 (44:01):
And I think that, you know, as with fake news,
there's some truth to it, there's some oversimplification, and I
think there's a lot of like decontextualization. Because the manisphere
has been around, podcasts have been around, and so you know,
why is our attention turning.

Speaker 8 (44:19):
To it now?

Speaker 2 (44:20):
I think is worth exploring. And also like what we
think of as the manisphere has changed too. I think
that that people are pointing to this series of podcasts
that Donald Trump went on in recent weeks, but that's
actually kind of different than what the manisphere has been
over the years. So there's a lot of searching for
explanations and maybe not quite understanding the dynamics behind it yet.

Speaker 1 (44:41):
Something that I've seen a wide birth of opinions on
so I want to know what you think. Where does
the story of the manisphere start?

Speaker 2 (44:49):
In my opinion, it did start in the seventies as
a direct maybe not the Manosphere, but the men's rights
movement as a reaction against minism certainly started in the seventies.

Speaker 1 (45:02):
How did you fall into this line of work? It's
very specific and very important.

Speaker 2 (45:06):
I actually was one of the people that got drawn
into it following the twenty sixteen election. But I've been
researching the Internet and politics for a long time and
have always been interested in digital media and you know,
the political impacts of digital media. And then after the
twenty sixteen election, I joined a think tank called Data

(45:28):
and Society that was specifically bringing together this project to
look at media manipulation.

Speaker 7 (45:34):
They called it. So the ways that you know, the
alt right.

Speaker 2 (45:37):
At the time and the Manosphere and other groups were
becoming really effective at manipulating mainstream media outlets into accidentally
publishing disinformation or amplifying some of their.

Speaker 7 (45:51):
Talking points without even realizing it.

Speaker 2 (45:54):
You know, someone like Richard Spencer was so good for
a while at like getting people to give him softball interviews.
We were looking at all of that, and then it
kind of lit a fire, you know in me, and
I haven't looked back. I have an academic mentor who
says people are either drawn to their research subjects out
of an abiding law or an abiding hate.

Speaker 7 (46:12):
And I learned that I'm a hater.

Speaker 1 (46:14):
I guess you are academically a hater. And when you
started doing this research towards the beginning of the first
trend presidency into now, what are some of the bigger
changes you've seen in this space in the last eight years.

Speaker 2 (46:30):
It was already there to an extent, but I think
we have seen, like any illusions that this is somehow a.

Speaker 7 (46:36):
Fringe phenomenon have kind of fully broken down.

Speaker 2 (46:39):
If you look at the top ten podcasters, solid third
two half of them are people that you know, could
reasonably be understood as somehow being in the manisphere or
somehow devoting a lot of their energies to countering what
they see as the ills of feminism and social justice.
You know, that was the case to a certain extent
even when I started looking at this. I mean, in

(47:01):
the late twenty tens, Paudiepie was like the biggest YouTuber
and there were all of these things about it, I mean,
particularly with race and anti semitism, but with gender too.
I don't want to suggest like it was completely fringe before,
but I think as you've had kind of like the
influencer ification of everything, that you really have had this

(47:25):
particular style of misogyny and antifeminism just becoming ubiquitous. I've
been thinking a lot about Gamergaate because it was ten
years ago this August, I think is when it started.
It was, I think, like such a breakthrough moment when
online misogyny did kind of, you know, spill through into YouTube,

(47:46):
into all of these different spaces and gained legitimacy and
popularity and visibility in ways it didn't have before. You know,
it's very strange to me that for the longest time,
when I would talk to like very online young people,
gamer Gate would be like the reference point, and now
when I bring it up to my students, they've never
heard of it.

Speaker 7 (48:08):
In history.

Speaker 1 (48:08):
Yeah, what are the patterns of how young people and
specifically young men are kind of drawn into this space
and have those tactics changed at all over time?

Speaker 7 (48:20):
Yes?

Speaker 8 (48:20):
And no.

Speaker 2 (48:22):
I mean if we think back to like the general
contours of gamer Gate, it was a lot of video
game players who started to feel like this was first
of all, that this was their outlet of like space
where they didn't have to think about politics or you know,
from for them, it seemed free from politics. And then
also it was a lot of men or you know,

(48:43):
teenage boys who didn't feel like they fit into normative
like concepts of masculinity. They weren't the alpha men, and
so they already had this sense of like aggrievement that
they weren't getting like the respect around masculinity that maybe
they deserved. And so then to have these feminist commentators

(49:03):
come in and start to critique the politics the gender
politics of their video games, that kind.

Speaker 7 (49:10):
Of set off this fuse.

Speaker 2 (49:12):
And I think you still see that being this fuse
so much that you know they there is this sense,
you know, whether it's by not being a brownie guy
or for any number of reasons, guys who feel aggrieved
for some reason, or it can be a genuine reason.
It could be that you know, they're struggling financially or
any of these other things. But it's really easy then

(49:36):
to point the finger at feminists as here's why you
are facing these problems, and you know, here's an explanation
for what you're experiencing. And then in terms of the tactics,
I mean a lot of it is just like good
old fashioned social networking that you know, gamer Gate started

(49:58):
as the gamer driven thing, but then you had these
these men's rights activists who were ideologues. They were explicitly
in communities devoted to countering feminism and you know, trying
to change legal structures and stuff. And they swept in
and saw this as an opportunity to spread their ideas

(50:20):
and so they began doing social networking with gamers and
so you had these kind of loose alliances getting formed.

Speaker 7 (50:26):
And you still see a lot of that too. At
the same time, a lot of the format has changed.

Speaker 2 (50:31):
You know, now we're in like much more algorithmic driven systems,
and you know, the platforms have changed and some of
the issues have changed, but some of those core things
have stayed the same.

Speaker 1 (50:42):
Has this space grown? Can you sort of take me
through this going from ten years ago as a fringe
thing into now, you know, you have five podcasters shouted
out during a presidential victory speech, like.

Speaker 7 (50:57):
Take right there. There's a few different things.

Speaker 2 (51:02):
You know, when you had these groups form, they they
were pretty fringe, you know, they started to build up
some political capital, but for the most part they were
pretty fringe, and they went online and they would operate
in forums, but they would kind of stay in their
own space.

Speaker 7 (51:20):
As you have more and more.

Speaker 2 (51:22):
Systems, you know, YouTube, Reddit, different platforms that are specifically
designed to bring people together, you start to have these
groups getting access to and networking with other people.

Speaker 7 (51:37):
So that's what you had with gamer Gate, right as.

Speaker 2 (51:39):
They saw this kind of like misogynist like bark of
a fire, and they leapt in and started building these alliances.

Speaker 7 (51:46):
So that's a piece of it.

Speaker 2 (51:48):
You also have, like all throughout all of this, the
collapse of traditional news and information sources. Yes, and so
when you think about Silicon Valley building platforms like YouTube
and Twitter and so on, a lot of it was

(52:10):
specifically kind of targeting traditional news sources, and news sources
were struggling to go online. They were also struggling because
they were getting like bought up by major conglomerates and gutted.

Speaker 3 (52:21):
More and more.

Speaker 2 (52:22):
You start to have traditional news struggling, and you have
a lot of different people from a lot of different
political viewpoints pointing to the news media and saying, look,
you can't trust them anymore. And there were a lot
of valid reasons to say that, and a lot of
things that I think are less valid. And one of
the less valid claims was, well, it's all just a

(52:43):
bunch of political correctness, you know, as they called it
then in the news media.

Speaker 7 (52:48):
So as you have that getting attacked.

Speaker 2 (52:51):
You have kind of this whole new information ecosystem getting
built online, like both attacking the media and attempting to
take its place. And then I think you can't discount
the role of Donald Trump in all of this, even
back in twenty sixteen, that he became a major force
in terms of like taking things that were on like
fringe forums and then tweeting them out and suddenly they

(53:14):
became national news stories. And so you can see the
role of like influence and fame also playing a role,
because instantly certain things with skyrocket to visibility that just
wouldn't have before. You have all of these different genres
of online content, you know, gaming, comedy, any number of things,

(53:34):
and these are genres where it's like politics isn't necessarily
the first and foremost thing that people are focused on, but.

Speaker 7 (53:41):
It seeps in in all of these ways. And so
if you have a space where there's kind of like
some latent misogyny.

Speaker 2 (53:48):
Then one thing that a lot of the manosphere has
done is it like it gives you certain like facts
and figures that become instantly available that you can draw in, right,
like maybe talking points like claiming to debunk certain feminist ideas,
and so suddenly if you like already have some of
those latent tendencies, then you can start to feel like

(54:09):
bolstered and say like, oh no, actually this is justified,
and it can become actually a bigger and more legitimized
piece of what you're doing.

Speaker 7 (54:17):
And again this goes back to the seventies too, which
like not coincidentally.

Speaker 2 (54:21):
At a moment when way more women and people of
color and like generally marginalized groups started to enter into
universities at higher levels, the workforce at higher levels, the
public sphere at higher levels, then you had at the
same time this like attack on traditional forms of expertise
and saying, actually, no, we should be turning to entrepreneurs,

(54:45):
stand up comedians, celebrities, all of these different things that
surprise suppritoriously.

Speaker 1 (54:51):
Strong people like famously the ass people. Has there been
an increase in saying the quiet, heart loud. Has that
always been a facet of this space? Does it vary?

Speaker 7 (55:03):
It ebbs and flows?

Speaker 2 (55:04):
And I do think a lot of that comes from
like how well Trump is doing at any moment right,
And you know, he very much helps legitimize saying the
quiet parts out loud. So you know, last time around,
around the twenty sixteen election, this was a big question
within the manisphere and the alt right of kind of

(55:25):
how overt how open can you be with your politics.
And there were a lot of YouTubers who were like
open white and male supremacists at the time, and then
there were a lot of people who would collaborate with
them and who would dabble in those ideas, but they
would never outright align themselves that way. And ultimately that

(55:46):
proved to be the smarter strategy because the open white
supremacists and male supremacists mostly got kicked off of the platform.

Speaker 7 (55:54):
Someone like you know, I spent many years watching the
content of a creator named Tim Poole, who.

Speaker 1 (56:01):
Yes, who's now a proven up is that yes, that's right.

Speaker 7 (56:05):
He was always so strategic.

Speaker 2 (56:07):
He would ask questions, he would maybe drop a suggestion
or a hint that something was happening. But then he
would say, I don't know, I don't know, and he
would never claim to be a white supremacist or a
white nationalist, or a male supremacist any of these things.

Speaker 7 (56:23):
And I think that from the perspective of staying.

Speaker 2 (56:26):
On platforms, people have gotten really savvy about where to
draw a line. And I guess it doesn't hurt that
now on Twitter or x you know, Elon Musk is
in their corner. Anyways, they know where the winds are blowing,
and they're you know, people will dip a toe in
and see how open they can be.

Speaker 7 (56:41):
And see, you know, what the reaction is like.

Speaker 2 (56:43):
And if they're getting a positive reaction, they'll they'll maybe
you know, dip another toe in and go on from there.

Speaker 7 (56:50):
But one thing I've found in my research is that
these figures are like very very very conscious of audience.

Speaker 2 (56:57):
Response, and in fact, some of them will get pushed
to you know, there's all this discourse about like influencers
are radicalizing audiences, but a lot of times the audiences
will kind of demand more extreme content from creators, and
so creators will just kind of be kind of responding
to what their audience wants. When you look at our

(57:17):
current media ecosystem, like the boundaries between these things have
kind of collapse, but it becomes this easy way to
kind of not think about potential harms that happen. And
you know, like, at what point are you interrogating someone's views?
At what points are you just giving a megaphone for them?
You know, draw the boundaries between that, and that I
think is not something that Rogan or some of the

(57:40):
other guys like him have any incentive to think about.

Speaker 1 (57:45):
I'm curious for you, how Slash when algorithms became an
important part of building and preserving this space, how does
that factor in?

Speaker 2 (57:57):
Yeah, so I think it was really throughout the twenty
tens that like we went from social networking sites to
these algorithmically driven media spaces. It has certainly complicated and
changed dynamic. As a researcher, it has frustrated me a
bit because I think it's really easy as researchers and
journalists and people working in the space for us to

(58:19):
just kind of point the finger at like this technology
and say like it is the fault of the algorithm.

Speaker 7 (58:26):
And you know, that's partly why I like.

Speaker 2 (58:28):
To stress that these things have been going on since
the seventies, because I think it can give us false
hope in some ways that like, oh, if we tweak
the YouTube algorithm in just the right way, these problems
are going to go away. Like I do think that
that's one thing that's maybe like when we look at
the reaction to the election and everyone being like, oh

(58:48):
my god, there's this whole world of podcasts, Like I
do think that might be part of the reason there's
this sense of like donning horror around it because podcasts
are not always driven by algorithm. For a really long time,
there was this sense of like, the algorithms are the problem.
They are radicalizing young men on YouTube in particular, and

(59:10):
they are drawing them down into rabbit holes of far
right content.

Speaker 7 (59:14):
And the thing that.

Speaker 2 (59:15):
Always frustrated me about that was I was seeing how much,
you know, influencer culture and dynamics we're playing a role
in this. So it's like, you know, if you start
to listen to Joe Rogan and become a fan of his,
you don't need an algorithm to recommend new.

Speaker 7 (59:29):
Content of his right.

Speaker 2 (59:31):
I mean, you may still defer to it in terms
of like what you choose to watch next, but you're
watching it next because you've already watched a piece of
content from him and enjoyed it.

Speaker 7 (59:40):
So there's that piece of it.

Speaker 2 (59:41):
And then I do think also like this whole idea
of getting drawn down into like the deep dark corners
and the rabbit holes and stuff does give this false
sense of it being you know, staying fringe content, when
in fact we were seeing that this massive ecosystem of
some of the most popular creators was.

Speaker 1 (01:00:00):
Have been thinking this since you mentioned you know how
you know, the people saying the quiet power part loud
from the beginning, you know, they tended to get deplatformed.
I feel like that's part of why podcasts have been
so successful. It's like that's where you go when you're
kicked out of somewhere.

Speaker 2 (01:00:18):
Else totally that it's it's a way of creating the
you know, digital media brands and producing content that where
you're not dependent on a single platform.

Speaker 7 (01:00:28):
Cool.

Speaker 1 (01:00:28):
Okay, So I want to go back to there not
being a lot of incentive for these manisphere podcasts slash
just influencers in general. What do you mean when you
say that, I know it's related to I mean, this
seems like a tremendously profitable space.

Speaker 7 (01:00:44):
It certainly has gotten way more profit driven over time.

Speaker 2 (01:00:47):
I mean, this is why it's easy to go back
and look at early YouTube and get really nostalgic, even
though there were you know, awful things going on then,
sure of harassment and stuff, but like, I think the
beauty of something like early YouTube was that people weren't
making careers off of it yet for the most part,
that people were just kind of like making weird things

(01:01:09):
and posting them online and some of them would go viral.
You know, that very quickly changed. But what we think
of now is this like influencer economy. You know, that's
been like the past fifteen years. It has grown from
essentially nothing into like this massive, massive entertainment ecosystem, and
so the profit incentive is there. There's a certain genre

(01:01:33):
of creator who has marketed themselves as like a provocateur,
and so for them, certainly like saying the quiet part
out loud is the whole shtick and kind of like
I will go there when other people won't. You know,
I would say that that's like Andrew Tait, right, Like
he he thrives on open misogyny and like saying the

(01:01:53):
things that are like as shocking as possible, and he
has made a massive career out of that.

Speaker 7 (01:02:00):
That's a big piece of it. There are other people
who have found like other niches.

Speaker 2 (01:02:03):
I mean, I would say that not to keep going
back to Rogan, but he's just such a bmth in
this space. He's very much the like, I'm just asking
questions guy, right, So he's not out there looking to shock.
You end up hearing similarly misogynist ideas on his platform
because he invites on misogynists and asks them questions.

Speaker 1 (01:02:22):
I don't know, yeah, totally, he just walked in the room.

Speaker 7 (01:02:25):
Let's think, like when it was like just radio and television,
broadcasters had to make.

Speaker 2 (01:02:31):
Sure that they were inviting on like multiple different perspectives
and points of view around controversial issues. Not to say
that that was necessarily a great system, I mean there
were a lot of issues with that too, but people
legally had to do that, and they legally had to
ensure that they were somehow providing content that like was
beneficial to the public interest aka like for creating an

(01:02:54):
informed citizenry.

Speaker 1 (01:02:55):
So another media narrative I've been seeing a lot in
the last several days that has given me pause. Specifically,
the focus around, Oh my gosh, gen z men are
becoming increasingly misogynist. What do you make of that?

Speaker 7 (01:03:11):
Yeah, I also have a lot of issues with it.

Speaker 2 (01:03:14):
I mean, you know, I don't firsthand research like the
media consumers. I look at the producers, so I don't
know precisely how these things are are impacting gen z men.
But I think there is a strange fixation on youth
and the Internet, and like, yes, that the internet is
destroying our youth, that is very pervasive. I've been doing

(01:03:35):
a lot of research looking at the nineteen nineties recently.

Speaker 7 (01:03:38):
And like everyone was freaking out about cyber porn at
the time. That was like the big thing, and it.

Speaker 2 (01:03:46):
Was like cyberporn is going to ruin our youth. And
it feels like every few years there's a new panic,
and like, obviously we want to be critical of what
media is getting consumed. First of all, it can end
up making it seem like somehow older generations have not
also been dealing with misogyny, right, And then also I think, yeah,

(01:04:11):
it can really create these kind of moral panics that
ironically end up reinforcing certain like conservative ideals of like
we must keep the children safe and the way that
you do that is kind of by like reinscribing traditional
family norms and.

Speaker 1 (01:04:25):
Stuff, things like algorithmic bubbles, things like infinite content that
will you know, sort of reinforce your your worst instincts.
Like that certainly plays a big role in it, But
I worry that it just feels like another sort of
churning on a generation in a way that is ultimately
like really unproductive, and if it's perpetuated enough, could really

(01:04:50):
you know, cause people like cause young people to double
down on it. But it's also like you're saying everyone
got more conservative? Why are we? I mean, and I
think it is alarming us when it's young people, because
you're like, is this going to be forever? But everybody
got more conservative? And specifically white people got more conservative.

Speaker 2 (01:05:09):
I was like, and yeah, I think it also is
like once you're pointing the blame at like an algorithm
or like a few specific podcasters. Again not to not
to say that these these forces are like not worthy
of critique. They absolutely are. And it's a lot of
what I do, but these these are all downstream of
other like systematic failures, you know, Like I I do

(01:05:32):
point a lot to this fact of like local there
has been a massive collapse of local news. Local news
used to be one of the primary sources that people
got like information for their voting habits, like their vivic needs,
all of these things. And you know, within the past
couple of decades you have had these massive conglomerates coming

(01:05:53):
in buying up local news, gutting the newsrooms and selling
them off. When you don't have those actual kind of
public interest informed news sources, people I think very reasonably
start to distrust a media that's focused on kind of
horse race celebrity based coverage that often is driven by sensationalism.

Speaker 7 (01:06:14):
All of these things.

Speaker 2 (01:06:15):
People are hungry, People are hungry for answers, and so
you then have this new ecosystem of people cropping up
that provides that echoes your concerns with the mainstream media
and provides an alternative set of answers. And so there
would be no Joe Rogan without some of these other factors.

Speaker 1 (01:06:33):
You know, do you think that this space is going
to change again because of sort of this newfound attention?
Where do you see it going.

Speaker 2 (01:06:43):
It's important to tweak algorithms, It's important to you know,
understand individual creators these issues are also not going to
get solved by by just doing that.

Speaker 7 (01:06:53):
And as you mentioned earlier, you know.

Speaker 2 (01:06:56):
By trying to create a left wing Joe Rogan like
that is not going to succeed or solve anything. I
think there is this misconception that, like, if you simply
present people with the correct facts, they will come to
the logical conclusion that what they believe is wrong. And

(01:07:16):
in fact, what so much of this is about is identity,
sense of belonging, you know, ideas about how the world
should work and who should be in power, and the
facts are kind of downstream from that. Like I've seen
I've seen a genre of like tweet a response in
the later weeks of this election of like, well, we

(01:07:36):
really have to be paying more attention to men and
the male loneliness epidemic and all these things, and it
can be easy for it to like fall into like
we need to be coddling men more. Essentially, this isn't
going to be solved just by taking like individual action
against like bad eggs or whatever. Like, we need to

(01:07:58):
think about what are like how do you institutions or
like education systems or information systems start to create this
set like belief that men can and should be doing
this in the first place.

Speaker 1 (01:08:10):
Thanks so much to Becca for lending her time and expertise,
and you can follow more of her work on Twitter
at Becca lou lw Okay. I release you for the week,
but we have a lot more ground to cover, first
by those who study this space, and then by those
who have experienced it. Next week we take a look

(01:08:31):
at the expansion of the Manisphere, growing from the seeds
of public recognition and gamer Gate and expanding now into
the highest levels of American government. And for your moment
of fun, here's pickup artists. Cringe all right, see you
next week.

Speaker 4 (01:08:47):
Every heart girl that you see at some point was
a little baby wearing diapers.

Speaker 7 (01:08:53):
And at some point will be an elder woman. Our
assignment is to shift our mindset when right here, right now.

Speaker 1 (01:09:06):
Sixteenth Minute is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio.
It is written, posted, and produced by me Jamie Loftus.
Our executive producers are Sophie Liick Derman and Robert Evans.
Amazing Ian Johnson is our supervising producer and our editor.
Our theme song is by Sad thirteen. Voice acting is
from Grant Crater and Pet shout outs to our dog

(01:09:29):
producer Anderson my Katz, Flee and Casper, and by pet Rockberg,
who will outlive us all Bye.