General Discussion

"As someone who has been studying these guys before we had a term for them. My primary thought was not these men hate women. My primary thought was: wow these men are not thinking about women at all. What I witnessed was something far more interesting than misogyny. Not gay panic. Just gay.
Let me explain.."

"Louis Theroux describes the manosphere as a group of almost exclusively male influencers providing content about fitness, business, and self-improvement. What he doesn’t quite say, though the camera absolutely shows it, is that the entire ecosystem is men performing for men, evaluated by men, validated by men, in pursuit of other men’s approval. Women are an abstraction. A plot device, really. The manosphere doc is a movie that is entirely about male longing."

"These influencers surround themselves with beautiful women not because they like women but because other men like women. The OnlyFans models, the entourages, the 'harems,' they’re not relationships, they’re set dressing, props if you will, in a show performed entirely for a male audience. The influencers admit themselves to not even liking the beautiful women they’re surrounded by. Nothing makes this clearer than one scene in the documentary where one manfluencer shows Theroux a video of himself receiving a blowjob. He filmed it during the act. He kept it. And then he played it for another man with the energy of someone showing off a new car. The woman is but a prop. The real intimacy in that moment is between him and Theroux. His blowjob was, functionally, for other men. I cannot make this any clearer. I’m not saying it’s gay. I’m saying it’s incredibly, fascinatingly, textbook gay. I mean I have truly met gay men who are not as gay as this."

"And it’s not just a fringe internet thing. It goes all the way to the top of the most aggressively heterosexual political movement in America right now. In February, the official Department of Health and Human Services account posted a video that opened with RFK Jr. and Kid Rock posing and flexing their muscles shirtless before launching into a gym workout montage, eventually moving into a sauna where they took turns on a stationary bike and doing push-ups. The strangest part came at the end when the two men sat together in an indoor hot tub, drinking glasses of milk as a graphic reading 'WHOLE MILK, was splashed across the screen. Two shirtless men. Whole milk. American flags. And women were, notably, conspicuously absent from the promotion entirely, perhaps because a woman would have disrupted something very delicate that was happening between those two shirtless men. Much like the women who are technically present in the manosphere doc, they’re never quite the point."

Mlre at link:

https://open.substack.com/pub/lizplank/p/sorry-but-the-manosphere-is-the-gayest?r=r38w4&utm_medium=ios