On Medium: Nature’s Monstrousness and the Manosphere

Read on about whether conservative men scapegoat women for being more “natural.”

On Medium: Why Liberal Men and Women Resent Each Other

Read on about the battle between the sexes, and how feminism is humanism that entails transhumanism.

On Medium: No One Likes Talking About Men

Here's an article about the strange disparity between between stories about maleness and femaleness on Medium.

On Medium: Femininity and the Humanist Restoration of Goddess Culture

Here's an article about the search for women’s authentic self-expression, a search that would bypass the patriarchal conceptions of womanliness.

On Medium: Who has the Best Takedown of Toxic “Wokeness”?

Here's a dialogue on the best grounds for criticizing some social justice advocates’ tribal distortion of liberalism: Christianity or secular humanism.

On Medium: Is “Wokeness” a “Protected Category” on Medium?

Read on about the pejorative sense of "wokeness" and the danger of overprotecting some ideologues with a double standard of censorship.

On Medium: Shakespeare Foreshadowed Alt-Right Sexism

Read on about how feminists should answer the conservative's appeal to the natural differences between men and women, an appeal that's meant to justify sexist policies.

On Medium: “Barbie” Should Have Been More Existential

Read on for a review of the movie "Barbie," to see why, based on evolutionary psychology and contrary to kneejerk feminism, it's “literally impossible” to be a man too.

On Medium: Shouldn’t Incels and Femcels Cancel Each Other Out?

Read on about involuntary celibacy, the black pill, and how incels are toxically masculine even as their critique of mainstream society isn't preposterous.

On Medium: Is Hollywood’s Identity Politics “Humanistic”?

Here's an article about how religious and secular humanisms nullify the American culture war, and how to emphasize our personal and social differences for a humanistic purpose.

On Medium: Foucault and the Bogus War for Social Justice

Here's an article on modernity and the phony wisdom of wokeness, comparing the two types of alleged enlightenment.

On Medium: American Paranoia and the Modern Legacy of Nihilism

Read on about Machiavellian centrism, the secret weariness of progressives and Trumpian conservatives, and how American politics is nihilistic despite all the hot air.

On Medium: There Was No Poem At Biden’s Inauguration

An article about how prose is passed off as poetry in an infantilized society.

On Medium: The Firing of a Sex Fiend Philosophy Professor

A satirical article based on a true story of so-called depravity and justice.

On Medium: American Malady and the Closeness of Biden’s Victory Over Trump

This article explores how Republican radicalism, the cult of Trump, and Democratic femininity explain the narrowness of Biden's defeat of Trump.

On Medium: Woke Culture and Toxic Femininity

This article is about the less familiar type of personal toxicity, the feminine kind: how it evolved, the values that emerge from it, and how both male psychopathy and toxic femininity might be surpassed by hyperrational existentialism.

On Medium: Woke Propaganda and the Fear of Art

This article is about how identity politics ruins the art of storytelling and why those who grow up with social media and the internet prefer propaganda and fear art.

On Medium: Masculinity and Outsider Virtues

This article is about masculinity and its so-called toxic variety, the latter being just the primitive alphaness that eventually shows through, thanks to how the concentration of social power in a leader's hands tends to corrupt the leader. The article thus asks whether we should prefer to follow masculine dominators or alienated losers.

The Brawl of Masculinities

The stirring of a men’s movement on the intellectual dark web, the vengeance of the #MeToo backlash, the lame posturing of the Gillette ad, and the American Psychological Association’s warning that toxic masculinity is bad for mental health—these have all raised the question of the nature of masculinity. Is there an ideal way to be a man? Is that question politically loaded or otherwise socially constructed? Or is there a more philosophical perspective that enables us to see through the political games and illuminate the larger problem?

Conservative and Liberal Masculinities

George Monbiot takes up the question of toxic masculinity in a Guardian article, arguing against the conventional wisdom on the right that ‘a “grown man” requires “oppressive” discipline, aggression and risk-taking.’ On the contrary, writes Monbiot, “growing up—whether as a man or a woman— means abandoning anger, aggression and the need to dominate. It means learning to talk about fear, loss, joy and love. It means learning both to listen and to share, to name your troubles and engage with other people’s.” Far from being tougher than the average liberal softy, the macho right-winger is especially vulnerable, says Monbiot, because he often hides some unresolved emotional trauma that threatens to undo his accomplishments. “What sort of a man are you if you have to go to such lengths to prove your masculinity? The confident construction of identity does not require crude cultural markers, but emotional literacy and honest self-appraisal. The more we proclaim our strength and dominance, the weaker we reveal ourselves to be.”

The problem with these discussions is that there’s no such thing as men, psychologically speaking. Most men have the same biological traits, but in large societies men organize themselves into hierarchies, and men at the top are mentally unlike men at the bottom. Our social position impacts our personality, so the differences aren’t subjective. Broadly speaking, men fall into three groups: leaders, followers, and outsiders. The first two groups are part of a larger group which is opposed to outsiders, so that there’s an even broader distinction between winners and losers. The former three categories correspond to the ethological terms, “alpha,” “beta,” and “omega,” although that terminology is tainted by its association with the alt right. In any case, just as there are classes of men with distinct ideals befitting their social station, there are masculinities rather than an overarching value system that ought self-evidently to be adopted by all men.

Male leaders idolize the psychopath, because what distinguishes these men is the social power that naturally corrupts their character, sapping them of their capacities for empathy, compassion and humour. The set of psychopathic traits that characterizes the action movie star, for example, is the traditional kind of masculinity favoured by “conservatives,” since the tradition they wish to conserve or reestablish is monarchism, slavery to the ultra-ruler or tyrant. Conservatism is thus a social movement that prizes bullying, at a minimum, if not a totalitarian dictatorship, and so conservatives seek to preserve the social systems that enable bullies to emerge and prosper. A bully is just a leader whose dominance is recognized by his followers, because the leader has demonstrated his greater share of social power by conspicuous acts of belittling others in the group. The bully’s psychopathic traits, in turn, evolved out of desperation when long ago hunters needed to psych themselves up to bring down big game. Psyching themselves up to stalk dangerous prey or to guard the tribe against fellow predators meant turning themselves at least temporarily into psychos, that is, into fearless, amoral killers. Once our kind succeeded in lording it over the animal kingdoms, our “leaders” trained their psychopathic traits onto the rest of us, and so they became hunters of men and women—not of their fellow humans, mind you, but of subordinate ranks of human creatures that only outwardly resemble them.

Incels and the Call for Omega Enlightenment

On April 23, 2018, 25-year old Alek Minassian attacked bystanders by hitting them with a rented van, killing 10 and injuring 16. The attack happened in northern Toronto, ten minutes from where I live. Minassian was apprehended and a bystander recorded his showdown with the police. Perhaps because of Canada’s strict gun laws, Minassian was reduced to attempting to provoke the policeman into shooting him, by pointing his cellphone at him as though it were a gun, because apparently Minassian had no gun.

As to the attack’s motive, the general suspicion is that Minassian identifies as a militant incel, an involuntary celibate who sought revenge against the sexually active for having humiliated him by rejecting him. Shortly before the attack, Minassian posted this message on Facebook: “Private (Recruit) Minassian Infantry 00010, wishing to speak to Sgt 4chan please. C23249161. The Incel Rebellion has already begun! We will overthrow all the Chads and Stacys! All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!” Minassian had enrolled in the Canadian Armed Forces, but dropped out after 16 days of training. “Chads and Stacys” is incel code for popular, physically attractive and altogether successful, sexually active men and women. Elliot Rodger is a 22-year old incel who in 2014 killed 6 and injured 14 fellow students in Isla Vista, California, by shooting them and hitting them with his car. In the middle of the attack, he uploaded a video to YouTube called “Elliot Rodger’s Retribution,” in which he explained that he wanted to punish women for rejecting him, and punish men for making him envy them. He also uploaded his manifesto, which reads more like an autobiography. After the attack, he killed himself.

The Cult of Involuntary Celibacy

Incel cultists describe themselves as going their own way and as having downed “the black pill,” which alludes to The Matrix movie but more specifically to the “red pill” of pickup culture. That culture combs through evolutionary psychology for techniques to exploit women’s biological weaknesses, effectively hoping to con them into having sex with them. But when the techniques fail and the would-be seducer is revealed as “having no game,” he may opt to swallow the black pill, as it were, meaning that he exchanges evolutionary psychology for a more pessimistic worldview. Wikipedia notes that “A 2001 Georgia State University study found that people who self-identified as incels tended to feel frustrated, depressed, and angry regardless of why they felt they were involuntarily celibate. These researchers found that involuntary celibacy was often correlated with depression, neuroticism, anxiety, and autistic disorders.”

Another researcher, Debrah Soh, argues that the militant incels who advocate or fantasize about raping or murdering sexually-satisfied people suffer from more than just toxic masculinity, the latter being a set of repressed masculine traits that eventually explode in disastrous ways, as in Fight Club. Instead, she writes, “these crimes are instances of antisociality manifesting as hatred toward women.” In other words, Rodger, Minassian, and the worst of the goons on 4Chan or incel discussion boards are sociopaths who happen to be involuntarily celibate. The key point is that “Even if those in the incel community were sexually active, they would still harbour resentment toward women.” Moreover, ‘Most men do not behave like this, including men who are sexually frustrated. Those blaming “toxic masculinity” and “rape culture” are missing the mark—this isn’t an issue about gender and it shouldn’t be made into one.’