“The Normalized Misandry”: 63 Men Reveal How The Manosphere Seduced Them, And Others Weigh In

I'm not in either of these groups but best I can tell any kind of male empowerment is frowned upon by the mainstream left. Men are oppressors, patriarchy, etc. They are pushing people into the arms of right wing commentators willing to give young men advice and tell them they aren't all terrible monsters.

Honest answer: I consider the "manosphere" real losers stuff, but if I have to choose between that and the nasty misandry...call me a real loser.

The realities of dating traditional women made me realize that the redpill relationship standards fit my needs better than the delusional takes on women that many on the left have.

Honestly, I was sick and tired of always being blamed for Women's problems.

I used to work for the federal government in Canada and the amount of anti-male propaganda officially sanctioned by my government is staggering.

Take any of the policies I speak of and simply swap the genders around and it would be seen as systemic oppression.

Canada is a joke. We've had full *legal* equality for over 25 years.

So I left when I retired. I live in a place where my pension allows me to live like a king and all I need is starlink.

The hypocrisy and double standards I witnessed on the left. It turned me into a cynic.

My first girlfriend at 16 would repeatedly put our relationship on hold, and verbally let me know it’s so she can go try other guys, and I’d take her back after because obviously stupid 16 year old and I had been under the assumption women can’t really do anything wrong. Ended up doing a ton of damage to my self esteem and mental health.

So naturally when the MGTOW guys started popping up around 2016-2017… I was an easy mark. Even wrote a college paper all about MGTOW my freshmen year because I thought it’d piss off my colored hair professor. She gave me a 90 plus score and ended up being one of my favorite professors lmao. Either way it took me years after to snap out of all the [nonsense].

Conservatism: The Democrat party was the one that pushed me out. I was a long time Democrat supporter, but I am also the type of person who likes asking questions when something doesn’t make sense to me and refuse to jump on board if I don’t get an answer or not a good enough one. That attitude put me at odds with the Democrat Party despite it being applauded when it was aimed at Republican beliefs. I consider myself an independent or nonpartisan instead of choosing a party nowadays. 

The difference between the two is the type of feedback I get regarding the disagreements. I can have a friendly conversation and debate with most Republican supporters despite disagreeing with most of their beliefs while the opposite can be said about Democrat supporters despite me agreeing with more of their beliefs compared to Republicans. As I grew into my 30’s, my beliefs have gotten more and more conservative because some of my long standing economic and social beliefs became more unaccepted by Democrats while accepted by conservatives. 

Manosphere: I started off liking it because they pointed out a lot of ignored issues dealing with male emotional struggles, the affects of anti male movements, and unrealistic expectations in dating. Eventually, it started to turn me away when they started putting women down the same way the feminist movement put down men. Although, I still feel man-hating feminist are still more extreme considering some of them went on a mission to destroy male only spaces while they get to keep and grow their feminist spaces and entertainment through the support of the Democrat party.

Boys and young men are more affected by this. For example: 

Boy Scouts of America changed their name to ‘Scouting America’ to show they are now including girls while Girl Scouts of America remained a girls only program that made it clear they are only for a single sex (female). Boys do not have an equivalent of that anymore (youth sports program has a different purpose).

Male targeted entertainment has also been on the chopping block while feminist targeted entertainment forced its way into those very spaces with its own version. So I completely understand why the manosphere exist and not going to say everything they talk about in an invalid. Just wish those with caveman opinions would not associate themselves with it because they are louder than the more valid issues.

Feminism has become a hate movement. Why would I choose a side that hates me?

I do sympathise with those like Andrew Tate but my situation is different from them. I admit I’m ugly (3/10 looks) and have the personality of drying paint (I’m autistic and Chinese) but I don’t blame women for my virginity.

I know I could spend a lot of time, effort and money improving myself to make me more attractive to women.

Because I am quite nerdy, introverted and shy I don’t get the opportunity to interact with women that much. Also I went to an all boys school which didn’t help. I also admit I’m quite insecure in myself.

Because of my disability the majority of women avoid me like the plague. But I habour no hard feelings towards them as that’s just the way it is.

Even though most women treat me like they’ve stepped in dog [feces] I don’t want to hurt them nor treat them the same way as they treat me. Women don’t owe me anything even though I’ve never kissed a girl.

A lot of topics that men discuss are ones women think are plain stupid.

Also something changed with the way women act. I say this as a gay guy, who got tired of being picked at for my personality, hobbies/habits, and having some women show their open disgust at my gay behavior. Straight men somehow started off as my bullies in high school, and then in my 30s are the easiest relationships for me to have outside of other gay guys. So I just appreciate being in male exclusive spaces because I can just exist. No anxiety, gossiping, or stirring the pot.

What does feminism offer men?

At once you want quotas and organizations tasked with insuring women succeed and you want men to support that too even though it guarantees as many men fail.

If women succeed do they raise men up? Nope. Those men are losers and targets of discrimination from women.

And what is feminism really? You aren't strong and independent. You are as dependent as ever. You whine and complain and blame and accuse until you get what you want. And what you always want is for MEN to make a place for you, make things safer for you, lower standards for you, provide you resources and do it at OUR own expense.

Feminism is just a new kind of patriarchal system that allows women to lobby the government directly for more privilege. Equality is just a word women use to get what they want. You don't treat men with equality in your personal lives. 

It has been wonderful for feminists feeding on taxpayer money with their "woman's group". It has been disastrous for the world, but as always, the problems of the world are all men's fault and therefore our job to fix.

I am neither a conservative or of the manosphere. I hail from an older discipline—2000s era pick-up artist, so maybe you can find perspective in my journey because I believe my motivations stems from the same frustrations found in the modern manosphere movement today.

I was introduced to the concept of the Game by Neil Strauss and went down the early internet pipeline and learned from the breadth of knowledge from that era, even got really good at it. (mystery method, RSD, Jlaix etc.)

The idea that was most seductive to me came from the inefficacy of doing it the “right way”. Asking women what they want and trying to deliver on what they explicitly said, what main stream society told me to do, what Disney and Hollywood movies romanticized as the right way to do things. At the end of the day:

IT. DID. NOT. WORK.

Lonely and frustrated from following the script and getting no results forced me to look elsewhere for something that ACTUALLY worked.

Pick-up artists promised field-tested repeatable results using something akin to the scientific method to separate good advice from [nonsense].

Men would share techniques and other men would go out and to test the methods and in the field using the data to separate the keyboard jockey advice from the stuff that actually worked. The old saying was: “Field test everything. The field is king.”

I tried the PUA methods and after enough practice and study I saw tangible results. Really internalized not listening to what women say, but what they actually responded to. Using what worked and discarding everything else.

This was very difficult for me because I WANTED deeply for the romanticized blue pill ways to work. I was a hopeless romantic like that, but it got me nowhere.

However, using the techniques learned from PUA, I saw an un-paralleled amount of access to [intimacy] and female companionship of my choosing and everyone had a good time, myself and them. A mutual win-win. I learned abundance. I learned how to withstand social pressure. Taught how to be ethical in my seduction and always tried to leave them better than I found them.

The skills I learned from PUA paid incredible dividends, not only in my social life, but in my professional career. Allowing me to navigate that social strata to a succesful executive level career.

Today I am a retired PUA. Married, kids, fulfilling career. No desire to step out on my wife or have a midlife crisis because my 20s and early 30s was an all I could [sleep with] buffet with hundred of lays under my belt and more amazing stories that I couldn’t possibly remember them all.

I will always be grateful to the PUA community for the skills they taught me and the immense amount of value I got from learning those skills.

The red pill manosphere movement of today is derivative of the old PUA except most of the redpill guys are frauds. They don’t go out and practice the skills, they spout the maxims without any of the field experience to back it up.

Back in the day we exposed those folks as keyboard jockeys. Talking a big game about going out and scoring but when you tried to repeat their experiences (which were shared in play-by-play field reports), the results weren’t there and if you went out to sarge (old school term for practicing your skills at a club) with them, they often could not back up the bravado they fronted with.

Hope that perspective answers your question.

I'm an Orthodox Christian because it's demonstrably sustainable in a world of a thousand rising and falling, in and out of vogue moral and ethical norms.

People believed what I believe 100 years ago. People will believe what I believe in 100 years from now.

I can't say the same for other popular beliefs in modern society.

For all the liberation that's come in the last 60 years, marriage and fertility rates are plummeting and are projected to continue to do so. I understand many think that's no big deal, but the thing is these problems are mostly effecting secular society, with religious communities remaining relatively insulated.

Why is that important?

Well, I may have a great many ideas modern wider society may consider immoral or oppressive. But the reality is no-one will care how backwards people think my views are when secular people's children or children's children don't exist to enforce the modern norms they think are important.

And ultimately, what good is a belief system which inevitably [ruins] itself through the freedom it brings?

I started turning conservative around 2015/2016, right around 18 years old. I would say I leaned more liberal up until that point, but I was also just a kid that didn't think about politics much until then.

What turned me that direction is I felt the liberal side became filled with anti man and anti white rhetoric - their general brand of identity politics was just very off-putting to me, a white man. I associated stuff like the "me too" and "believe victims" with the liberal crowd because most of the support seemed to come from the left, and I thought it was crazy to support men being burned at the stake based on accusation alone.

Back then it felt like everyone was walking on egg shells to not say the wrong thing and I absolutely hated what the culture was pivoting towards. Then the president of USA came around and gave a middle finger to all of it, pissed off the crowd that I was upset with, and young me saw that and admired it and thus a Republican was born.

My beliefs started to shift slightly when I had children. My wife and I both worked. We are both college educated. We were struggling financially and our kids were basically being raised by other people. When I was doing the majority of child/house tasks, I found that my kids seemed to need a nurturing side that I wasn’t providing the way my wife did when she was doing those things. Don’t get me wrong, I think kids need masculine and feminine influences in their lives, just at different times/situations. Both of our careers were OK, but neither thriving. My wife had no desire to achieve at work and I was exhausted and putting in little effort at work.

After discussing it, she wanted to stay home with the kids. I was all for it too. My career took off as I had more energy to put into it. While our income was less, we became better off financially with less taxes and no daycare. She is happier. I am happier. The kids are doing better.

I do jot agree with extreme beliefs in the manosphere, but I have shifted more that direction. I’m all for feminism in terms of a person doing what is right for them. For me, I just don’t like the narrative that work outside the home is better than work inside the home. My wife works much harder than many that work outside the home and is more fulfilled/happy. She has talked about going back to work when the kids move out. If she does, I’ll support that. If she doesn’t, I’ll support that. I’m guessing it will depend on the grandkid situation when we get there.

I also get tired of all the equality talk about men and women. Women are much better at some things than men. Men are much better at some things than women. It is OK to acknowledge that. It doesn’t make one less than the other.

The Answer is pretty simple, men as a whole are shifting backwards, they watched being good get them continually treated like the bad guy, especially the white dudes, most of us just learned to keep our head down and avoid women at work for the most part. Men used to have lots of spaces they didn't need to worry about being pc or offending someone, so they could vent.

They stopped venting because it was toxic, they stopped joking about those inside thoughts. Slowly they stopped talking at all. I used to believe well this is just it, then I left the United states for 8 years and figured it out. Its specifically American Women driving this, This is the reaction to their actions and them remember a time when these things didn't happen, they hear about it from their fathers and grandfathers.

Now they are all keeping to themselves, waiting for someone with a like mind for a partner. God I got lucky and met a wonderful woman, or odds are I would be right there with those [people], I had given up on dating it was terrible, every date felt like a job interview. So what started driving men there, There in that space they are celebrated for simply being or trying to be a good man, Others spaces are hostile. Which would you pick?

The feminist narrative became irrational and has frankly overstepped.

I was raised in a religiously conservative household, and I chose to keep those beliefs. I'm aware of the manosphere and viewed some of their content, but it seems to be just a mirror image of what I dislike about feminism. Conservativism and the manosphere are not the same, and I don't even know if they're compatible since it seems like the outcome the manosphere wants (especially MGTOW — Men Going Their Own Way) is something we haven't ever had historically and something that isn't realistically sustainable for society of the species (again, just a mirror image of the 4B movement). The only reason I think the Manosphere is currently aligned with the right in the USA's politics is because the winner-take-all election cycle makes for strange alliances that are more about having a common enemy than any actual kinship.

With respect to gender relations, I consider myself an egalitarian: I want equal rights for both genders and think the issues of both genders ought to be addressed together, especially as they are often intertwined. I know that puts me at odds with some conservatives, and I know that some feminists would consider this the feminist position. But that has not been my experience with feminism. My first exposure to feminism was in middle school when a teacher invited the class to debate on whether boys were better than girls, or girls were better than boys, or if both alike were equal. All of the self-proclaimed feminists in the class argued openly, passionately, and very loudly for female supremacy, and not one joined me in arguing for equality. While its true that first impressions can be deceptive and that children can hardly be expected to fully understand the ideology they claim to uphold, in my case, I've found the impression was fairly accurate. With few exceptions, I've found that most feminists I've interacted with are among the most hateful and sexist people I've ever met. I grew up among conservatives, and the first person I met who ever openly denigrated entire groups of people based on race and gender was a feminist I met in college. I also had a feminist professor at the time, whose field of study was in diversity and sensitivity toward minority groups. She handed out a reading assignment whose main point was to teach that all men everywhere without exception (even the virgins) were incurably evil rapists. When I challenged this conclusion, she and the other feminists in the class reaffirmed that it was true. I have seen more hate put out by feminists than by almost any other group, with the manosphere being a close second and espousing rhetoric that is essentially just toxic feminism with a gender flip.

My rejection of the feminist label isn't purely emotional or experiential, though. While there are some feminists who seem truly egalitarian and with whom I completely agree, they seem to be the outliers who are often rejected by their own movement. The majority philosophy seems to be one of gender-based Marxism: crafting a conspiracy theory wherein all of history can be summed up as a conflict between an evil oppressor class and a virtuous oppressed class, where true understanding and dialogue between them is impossible, and the only solution is the eventual subjugation or elimination of the oppressed class. In particular, it is a system where only the oppressed class can truly have problems, where the oppressors can only suffer if it is self-inflicted through their own oppression, or else a just result of an uprising of the oppressed—a system where the very notion of taking the suffering and problems of both groups equally is unthinkable and traitorous. This line of thinking has not worked out well and has caused considerable harm in economics, and I don't see it working out any better when the bourgeoise are replaced with men and the proletariat is replaced with women. Actual history and real social problems are considerably more complex and require much more nuanced, collaborative, and humane responses than "destroy the patriarchy" and "kill all men." Most feminists don't seem to agree with that, in my experience, and those that I've found who do seem to be targeted as traitors by other feminists, so I don't consider myself a feminist.

I am old (Xennial) but had kind of an early preview of what boys are going through now; grew up in a very feminist environment (big blue city, private school, then college and grad school) and basically figured there was no way to express interest in a woman that didn’t constitute harassment. So I didn’t.

Then I finally started dating (in my late twenties!) and found, after reading a few redpill blogs, that what I had to do was all the old male stuff I had been brought up to regard as sexist. Make the first move, plan the date, lean in for the kiss. Or they tell you there’s no chemistry.

It’s very hard to argue with empirical (lived) experience.

Some time after that MeToo hit, and after that I realized I would always be the enemy to feminists.

Because those are the only communities that even pretend to care about men's problems.

Everywhere else it's either complete disinterest or active hostility when men try to bring up their problems.