December 17, 2024 • 58 mins
In part 2 of our manosphere series, Jamie takes a look at what the manosphere has become since it became a mainstream topic a decade ago. She traces its media and in-community responses from Gamergate and the Isla Vista killings, through the first Trump administration, into the #MeToo era, around the Kavanaugh hearings, and all the way to manosphere podcasts being name-checked at the second Trump acceptance speech. How has this space mutated to enter our governing -- or was it always that way? Part 3 releases this Thursday.
Listen to Boys Like Me (on the Toronto van attack): https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/boys-like-me/id1596370720?at=1l3vpUI&ct=LFV_4ba3316d6e3d7eb6707b80c71864cc16&itsct=catchall_podcast_show&itscg=30440&ls=1
Feels Good Man: https://www.feelsgoodmanfilm.com/
More on the Black manosphere: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4y0nR0E8pk4&list=PLCloiJ2glw55nFdhlvB0ojBYIWKzROjbv&index=4
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Al Zone Media Story.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
Times.
Speaker 3 (00:56):
Welcome to sixteenth Minute, the podcast where most weeks we
take a look at the Internet's main characters and see
how their moment affected them and what that says about
us and the Internet.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
But not this week, Queen's not this week. This week
we are entering parts who too of our into.
Speaker 3 (01:15):
The taking a look at how this space has both
continued to grow in influence and in our inability to
talk about it. Last week, in part one, we took
a look at the history of Manisphere spaces all the
way back to the nineteen seventies, and a little bit
about how it's been covered in the month following the
election and spoilers not particularly well. I personally feel that
(01:39):
the people best covering the Manisphere have already been doing
it for years, But first I just.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
Wanted to do a little housekeeping at the top.
Speaker 3 (01:48):
Thank you so much to everyone who has reached out
to me after last week's episode.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
It means a lot.
Speaker 3 (01:54):
As much as I hate hearing how many of my
listeners have had assault experiences similar to mine, and that
they were also encouraged to not think of.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
It as assault at the time.
Speaker 3 (02:03):
If you have experienced something similar, be gentle with yourself
and thank you for listening, But I really do appreciate
your listening.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
I firmly believe that we need.
Speaker 3 (02:15):
Each other to be able to survive times like this,
because the systems are obviously still not acknowledging it. I
heard accounts that came nearly a full decade after my own,
which is honestly frightening. Domestic violence exists at rates that
should qualify it as domestic terrorism, but that's just not
(02:36):
how we've been taught to see this kind of violence.
And more than anything, as I was preparing for this
second part, as I was taking a look at the
different areas of the Manisphere over time, it became very
clear to me that for the most extreme areas, misogyny
is usually step one sort of the bait, because it's
(02:57):
so normalized and we hear it so often that most
people may not flinch if they hear something casually misogynist,
and some might even feel validated by it. And if
they're into that and decide to watch some Manisphere shows
will slowly turn up the ante. How about some transphobia
with that? How about some racially charged comments about this
(03:19):
type of woman? And not every listener is going to
be receptive to it. Not all men, but let's be honest,
many are, and the nature of these shows can sort
of function as a frog sitting in a pot full
of lukewarm water not realizing that it's coming to a boil.
And again I will place some content warnings here. There's
(03:41):
a lot of information in this episode and some of
it is pretty heavy. So if it's not a good
time for you for this kind of thing today, I
really enjoyed Wicked Part one, check it out.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
I also really quickly just wanted to.
Speaker 3 (03:56):
Issue one correction from last week's episode where I failed
to be clear enough.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
I characterized custody.
Speaker 3 (04:02):
Statistics that Men's Right activist site as their reason for
pushing back against mothers and women's rights and characterizing them
as vindictive, when I should have said that this is
the idea that motivates them, not that it's actually based
on historically true data.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
In reality, while mothers are.
Speaker 3 (04:22):
More likely to be granted custody, that's in large part
because fathers request custody far less frequently than mothers do.
So I apologize for making that sound as if it
was a fact.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
It is very much a straw man argument.
Speaker 3 (04:36):
And that is certainly an important distinction in spaces like
the manisphere, where so much is straw man arguments. So
this week I want to break down the manisphere, starting
from when many consider for it to have crossed into
the mainstream and from where it started to affect me. Specifically,
gamer Gate, a twenty fourteen harassment campaign where men's forums
(04:59):
previously thought to be niche targeted women working or commenting
on the gaming industry, particularly those who had explicitly criticized
games for misogyny anywhere from explicitly critiquing the industry to
simply speaking out against an intimate partner who had literally
posted revenge porn of them.
Speaker 4 (05:18):
Violent depictions of women being beaten, raped, and run over
by cars. It's not the movies, it's video games. And
now the women calling for change in this multi billion
dollar virtual industry are facing a very real backlash, including
death threats.
Speaker 3 (05:33):
And as we discussed, the second event of twenty fourteen
that brought the manisphere into the mainstream was the Isla
Vista massacre perpetrated by Elliott Roger, who went on to
become and still is a figurehead of the in cell movement,
who is considered a martyr to the cause of fighting
back against matriarchy. However, his misogynist manifesto, which was deeply
(05:59):
connected and hosted to in cell forums, was only mentioned
in passing in many mainstream media outlets, the same outlets
who are three hundred and fifty percent more likely to
bring up mental health as the central issue of these
killings as they would for a Muslim shooter. Here's a
Barbara Walters broadcast from the time.
Speaker 5 (06:17):
I'll tell you the story of Bogra, chilling details you've
never heard until now about a loaner obsessed with finding
a girlfriend.
Speaker 2 (06:25):
In the next ten years.
Speaker 3 (06:26):
It became lethally clear that this loaner angle hugely underplayed
where Roger was getting positive reinforcement for this violence. Make
no mistake, Roger was pushing this parting message to the
in cell boards. Not only did it reference blackpill ideology,
the death cult mentality that indicated that women would never
(06:47):
like him and made him a martyr. The in cells
were inspired by this. And just so you know, I
will not be including quotes from any of these guys manifestos.
There our spaces where that's not unproductive, but this is
my show and no manifestos here.
Speaker 2 (07:05):
And finally to the guy last.
Speaker 3 (07:06):
Week in my comments who was like, interesting, you didn't
talk to many men. Yeah, if it was my goal
to platform men, I would own a house.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
So come with me if you dare to.
Speaker 3 (07:17):
The spring of twenty fourteen, during the fallout of the
Ala Vista murders, which claimed six lives, mainstream media was
still trying to figure out how to cover the story,
while the in cell communities that Roger spent so much
time in were celebrating.
Speaker 6 (07:33):
The in cell rebellion has already begun. We will overthrow
all the Chads and Stacy's all hail the Supreme Gentleman,
Elliott Roger.
Speaker 3 (07:45):
However, there is an ongoing argument amongst analysts of in
cell and manosphere spaces as to whether these forums can
be singled out as the sole cause of Roger's violence,
arguing that much of his own misogyny was already reinforced
by the culture that existed outside the Internet. Again, it's
this systemic versus is it these boards? Specifically, Michael Kimmel,
(08:07):
whose thesis on the Manisphere I cited in last week's episode,
argued this in twenty fourteen.
Speaker 6 (08:13):
It would be facile to argue the manosphere urged Roger
to do this. I think those places are a kind
of solace. They provide a kind of locker room, a
place where guys can gripe about all the bad things
that are being done to them by women.
Speaker 3 (08:29):
I don't fully agree with this, and I think it
fails to acknowledge a certain amount of gray area. On
one hand, I think Kimmel is right to emphasize that
manisphere message boards are places where men can take the
societally encouraged disrespective women and validate each other's prejudices. But
to suggest that these places don't amplify the violence of
(08:50):
those actions is not true in my opinion. And this
is what we're going to bump up against over and over.
More than one thing is going to be true in
some of these cases, and as it pertains to this show,
more than one thing being true tends to be bad
for social media engagement. But still, Kimmel is I think
(09:11):
right to say that Roger didn't have to do a
one point eighty ideologically to arrive at in cell logic,
the way that Western media conditions men to see themselves
in terms of virility, in appearance and in entitlement had
already gotten him pretty far along, and while we can't
know what motivated Roger definitively, there is no doubt that
(09:32):
he turned to these spaces as a way of validating
his low opinion of both women and himself, frequently posting
front facing YouTube videos of him jeering at couples in
the street and monologuing pretty point for point in cell
rhetoric using black pell logic that he will never be
the object of anyone's affection and might as well die
instead of, you know, not, being openly hostile to every
(09:55):
woman he ever came in contact with. In the days
leading up to the Elavista shootings, Roger also took his
own life. He began to refer to this premeditated plan
as the day of retribution and a method of punishing
the women that he felt rejected by, and Roger's influence
is clearly held in these spaces to this day, with
(10:16):
a number of subsequent killings citing his manifesto or shouting
him out by name. Look no further than the Umpqua
Community College shootings the next year, the christ Church mosque
shooter in twenty nineteen, or the twenty eighteen Toronto van
attack that claimed fifteen lives. The killer in Toronto said specifically.
Speaker 6 (10:37):
I was thinking that I would inspire future masses to
join me in my uprising as well, and.
Speaker 3 (10:42):
For more in this case specifically and its relationship to
the Manisphere, I would recommend the CBC podcast Boys Like
Me from a few years back. But in addition to
claiming to be in contact with Elliott Rodger, shortly before
his death, the Toronto shooter told authorities that he had
been radicalized on in cell forums shortly after the Ilavista
(11:03):
killings and referred to his attack as another day of retribution.
And of course, most people in the Manisphere aren't extremist killers,
but that doesn't mean that they are not encouraged to
cheer on those who are. That was a fixture of
spaces like four chan, eight chan, and earlier Reddit. Robert
(11:23):
Evans tracked this explicitly in the case of the christ
Church mosque shootings, which claimed fifty one lives, where fellow
manispheer adjacent racists watched the murder on a live streamed video.
Speaker 2 (11:35):
And that's not the only killing of that kind.
Speaker 3 (11:39):
Because, as it probably goes without saying, very few Manisphere
denizens are just misogynists. These communities very often intersect with racism, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia,
and on and on. These communities are locked into a
view of women that is entrenched in all this jargon,
but it boils down to this binary chestnut. Women are
(12:02):
defined by their ability to provide sex and children for men,
and should be subservient as well as men must make
themselves high value, and what determines high value is entirely
decided by capitalism.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
It requires monetary and.
Speaker 3 (12:17):
Career success in addition to appearance, and can rely just
as much on men's self hatred as it does on
their hatred of anyone who isn't a man. But that
doesn't mean that people locked into the manisphere aren't from
a diverse array of backgrounds. I was actually pretty surprised
at how diverse.
Speaker 2 (12:37):
This space is.
Speaker 3 (12:38):
Around the same time the mid twenty tens, the black
manisphere began to grow led by influencers like Kevin Samuels,
who started a YouTube channel in twenty thirteen.
Speaker 2 (12:48):
It is viewing shit like this, How are you even
willing to put a possible time frame only so we
need a time for anything, nobody.
Speaker 7 (12:56):
We need a cooperative woman. We need a woman that
understands what men want and understand that, yes, this is
going to be a part of it. And I've asked
you the question how many times? So what do you
let me tell you? If you're not willing to answer
the question. It's not a trick to it. You're a
grown woman.
Speaker 2 (13:13):
Yeah, that makes sense.
Speaker 3 (13:15):
I mean, I'm I'm learning, still learning about different personalities.
Speaker 7 (13:20):
It's not different personalities. It's a lot of you ladies
tend to want men to do all the work.
Speaker 3 (13:25):
Samuels took on a similar but a little bit harsher
persona to Jordan Peterson, presenting himself as a fatherly professional
who is just helping men and women understand the world
and improve their confidence, while slowly but surely escalating into
full male supremacist logic, then encourage men to be cruel
and dismissive to the women around them. The difference is
(13:48):
that Samuel's a black man himself focused on talking to
black men in particular, and while he passed in twenty
twenty two rather suddenly, his channel continues to post until
this day, and his influence.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
Is certainly still felt.
Speaker 3 (14:03):
Doctor Umar Johnson is another big black manisphere public figure
who at this point is basically given up on distancing
himself from his overt homophobia and misogyny, saying back in
twenty fourteen that planned parenthood quote was using homosexuality as
a population control strategy in the black community. And as
this misogyny is being pushed toward black viewers specifically, it
(14:25):
tends to be extremely vitriolic toward Black women in particular,
and unfortunately, the most harsh version of this is also
the most popular feature of the black manisphere right now,
the ultra popular podcast Fresh and Fit, whose hosts are
particularly cruel to Black women on their show, because remember,
no matter who's talking about manuspheer shit, they are operating
(14:49):
on a fundamentally white supremacist logic.
Speaker 2 (14:52):
First time, don'ating just say Maron is a real one.
Speaker 6 (14:54):
Don't change for nobody.
Speaker 2 (14:55):
Yeah, fuck out here, bro, we don't change. I don't
even know who she is, so don't care. That's King girl,
Like you don't know who Queen Vaughn is. No, I
know who King Vaughan is, but I mean.
Speaker 8 (15:08):
I don't.
Speaker 5 (15:11):
Oh the fact you said it's King Vaugh's girl instead
of it was heard yea, and.
Speaker 3 (15:17):
Let it be known That is the least convincing reading
of I Don't Care that I've heard in my entire life.
Similar spaces existed for Asian men interested in Manisphere content.
I mean, don't worry, fellas. Everyone can hate women in
the Manisphere.
Speaker 2 (15:34):
And boy do they.
Speaker 3 (15:36):
These influencers delight in broadcasting themselves, making women uncomfortable, and
sharing the content as if they're owning them.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
And you might.
Speaker 3 (15:44):
Remember this if you were on YouTube around this time.
There was a notorious style of video that had titles
like this.
Speaker 9 (15:52):
Jordan Peterson repeatedly owns Australian feminist Ben Shapiro Dismantle's third
wave feminism. Kevin Samuels knows ladies hate when the roles
are reversed.
Speaker 6 (16:04):
Patriarchy, which is a system of male dominance of society.
Speaker 10 (16:07):
Yeah, but that's not my sense of the patriarchy.
Speaker 2 (16:10):
What's yours?
Speaker 10 (16:10):
Well, in what senses are society male dominated?
Speaker 6 (16:15):
The fact that the vast majority of wealth is owned
by men, a vast majority of capital.
Speaker 2 (16:19):
And is owned by men. Women do more unpaid labor.
Speaker 10 (16:22):
Very tiny proportion of men, and a huge proportion of
people who are seriously disaffected or men. Most people in
prison are men. Most people who are on the street
are men. Most victims of violent crime are men. Most
people commit suicide or men. Most people who die in
wars are men. People who do worse in school are men.
(16:43):
It's like, where's the dominance here?
Speaker 3 (16:45):
Precisely, and these kinds of videos would have millions of views.
And Peterson there is virtually giving a list of classic
men's rights talking points, that is, listing out statistics about
how patriarchy negatively affects men and presenting it as an
argument against feminism for some reason, and while it's perhaps
(17:05):
the most obvious point on the fucking planet, no conversation
about the strengthening and empowerment of the manisphere would be
complete without the twenty sixteen election of Donald Trump. There
is ample proof that manisphere groups embraced Trump and loved
his proclivity for saying the quiet part loud. Laura Bates, author.
Speaker 2 (17:26):
Of Men Who Hate Women.
Speaker 3 (17:28):
Praised back the history of these groups and found that,
with the exception of men's rights activists hyper fixating on
custody courts, these Manisphere groups were not particularly political pre Trump,
but when he enters the sphere, they actually organized on
his behalf and the groups steadily become more politicized, and
(17:49):
that's not a mistake. Former Trump chief strategist and current
disgusting goblin Steve Bannon admitted to courting in cells, specifically
during the twenty sixteen election cycle.
Speaker 6 (18:00):
He said this, it was very much in the margins
and in the fringes of society to bring and recruit
people who would otherwise not necessarily engage in conventional politics,
but would engage with particular kinds of ideas that Cambridge
Analytica promoted online that can make an impact. If you
(18:22):
get an extra one percent, an extra two percent in
that swing state, and you win that swing state, that
might mean you win the presidency.
Speaker 3 (18:32):
And of course Trump continued to deliver on both rhetorical
misogyny that was reflected in his policy and extended to
a hatred of immigrants and trans people, who he has
repeatedly targeted in the years since. So to be clear,
I'm not saying that the manisphere elected Trump. They're not
(18:52):
quite that prominent. But Bannon and Trump were successful in
getting men who were otherwise ambivalent towards electoral politic to
become engaged because of him. The misogynist rhetoric, the whole.
Speaker 11 (19:06):
Hey, when you're a start, they let you do it.
Speaker 12 (19:08):
You can do anything whatever you want.
Speaker 5 (19:10):
Grab him by the.
Speaker 7 (19:12):
I can do any of that.
Speaker 3 (19:13):
God, I can't believe that's the second time I've had
to play the grab him by the pussy clip on
this show.
Speaker 2 (19:19):
Unfair.
Speaker 3 (19:21):
What's also worth mentioning here, and why I think there's
such a high barrier to entry for people to understand
these communities, is that there is a full and infuriating
multiverse of vocabulary, of specific memes, and of deflective ironic
humor that can make these Manisphere boards pretty hard to understand.
(19:43):
When it comes to irony pilled humor that was already
tied into comedy that was popular in the early to
mid two thousands, the same time that comedy was becoming
increasingly influenced by the Internet and in general pretty heavily
reliant on shock. This was the era of able list,
Helen Keller jokes, of dead baby jokes, casual or overt racism,
(20:05):
and stuff that mainstream culture thankfully sort of moved on
from after the peak of jud Appatau romance movies, But
the Manisphere never really moves on from this edge. Lord
humor and you'll find time and time again that very often,
after saying something completely horrific about a marginalized group, a
member of the manisphere will say, what I was joking,
(20:27):
you took me out of context A likely story. A
great example of this is famous misogynist pickup artist influencer
Julian Blanc was under fire back in twenty fourteen for
advocating that rape should be legal if one commits that
rape on their own property. Hilarious, right, and his response
(20:47):
to the understandable backlash to this was going on to
CNN and claiming that people misunderstood his hilarious joke.
Speaker 7 (20:54):
You intended every part of this.
Speaker 2 (20:56):
True intentions were never bad.
Speaker 13 (20:58):
I agree, it was a horrible at humor, and unfortunately
a lot of it also got just put out of context.
Speaker 3 (21:03):
And you probably will not be surprised to hear that.
Shortly after this, he returned to preaching the same stuff
for years after the controversy, and all but admitted in
a blog post that this apology was insincere. As for vocabulary,
terms that began in the Manisphere that have since gone
mainstream include obviously red and black pilling, and mis injury
(21:26):
or a hatred of men, which started in MRA forums.
There's femoids gross, and there's red pill wives, which is
a particularly disturbing subgroup that consists of women who are
frequently characterized as just wanting to remain in the home,
which would be fine if true, but what red pill
wives actually depend on is thriving on their own self
(21:49):
hatred and projecting this same misogyny at other women using
red pill logic. There's Alfa and Beta and Sigma men.
The list goes on, and then there's the memes. Much
of the reporting around in cells and eventually QAnon was
how frequently memes spread racist and misogynist jokes that set
(22:09):
the tone for the community while also making it a
safe space to say the most fucked up thing possible.
In the mid to late twenty tens, this meant stuff
like the tremendously successful co opting of Pepe the Frog,
a creation of comic artist Matt Fury who had nothing
politically in common with the people turning his cartoon into
(22:31):
a horrific sign of the alt right. I would recommend
checking out the documentary Feels good Man for more of that.
But memes let these communities say the quiet part loud
while maintaining the illusion of it's just a joke. You guys, though,
why a Pepe the frog in a KKK rope is
funny remains. I mean, it's just hate speech, right maybe.
(23:07):
Fast forward to twenty seventeen. Trump is inaugurated and both
the Muslim band protests and the Women's March take place
early this year. By this time, I had moved to
California to live with my rapists, who thankfully never picked
me up at the airport, and so I proceeded to
become a successful comedian. At the time, though, I was
(23:28):
working part time and doing freelance writing, much of which
centered around the Me Too movement, which began in late
twenty seventeen after a year where besogyny was more in
mainstream discourse than ever. And in case you don't remember,
there were a few moments early in the Me Too
moment that made huge waves in Western culture while also
(23:49):
indicating this movement's shortcomings from the jump now. The hashtag
itself was created by Tarana Burke, a black survivor of
sexual assault, on my Space all the way back in
two thousand and six, but the hashtag didn't really take
off in the mainstream until late twenty seventeen, the big
story was Harvey Weinstein, as prominent actresses were finally comfortable
(24:13):
enough to come forward and say that he had raped
or assaulted them, thankfully leading to his likelihood of dying
in prison. What I think the major accomplishment of this
movement was was making it socially permissible to talk about
experiences of assault, harassment, or gender discrimination of any kind.
And given that the women's March Think Pussy had remember
(24:36):
that had taken place in early twenty seventeen, Me too
at the time felt like an opportunity to at least
keep the conversation moving, and I was all about me
too in its early days. It was during this time
that I remember first hearing a swath of feminists rightfully
argue for rehabilitation and deradicalization of the men who were
(24:57):
perpetuating these abuses where I work in comedy, but at
the time still being pretty fresh out of this abusive
relationship and working a day job at fucking Playboy magazine,
I don't want to talk about it. My response was
just like rehabilitation, fuck, you, just get these men out
of here, make them leave. Because this was the first
(25:19):
moment in my adult life that that seemed even remotely possible.
So in a freelance column for Pace Magazine in December
twenty seventeen, I wrote that the piece was literally called
make them Leave. I began with the example of trying
to bargain with male comedy bookers to stop giving known
abusers time on their shows, and expanded my frustrations into
(25:41):
these talks of rehabilitation in a moment where I felt
like our frustration was only beginning to be addressed. Here's
a passage from that I was driving from one gig
to another with a friend. This passed fall when she
mentioned needing to quote rehabilitate our communities unquote as it
pertained to men assaulting female comedians. Voluntary wave of anger
(26:01):
it sent through my body. Rehabilitate, make them leave. That's
the least we can do. It's not my responsibility to
explain to someone why they can't touch me, berate me,
or rape me. Make them leave. I didn't say anything
for the rest of the night. I also don't think
she was wrong to bring the idea of rehabilitation into
the conversation. It's a complicated issue that I think we
(26:23):
will have to grapple with in the coming years, with
predators who are finally being held accountable. Today, right now,
I think we should make them fucking leave. It's weird
to read this now because I don't even disagree.
Speaker 2 (26:37):
With what I'm saying here.
Speaker 3 (26:38):
I'm twenty four and in a lot of pain, and
also kind of naively optimistic that writing this is going
to liberate me in all of the women around me,
and I do believe that white women specifically owe it
to others to do some of this deradicalization and rehabilitation work.
But in the moment, I was so angry that, weeks
(27:00):
after women being able to speak freely about this, the conversation.
Speaker 2 (27:04):
Went back to what do we do about the men?
I don't care.
Speaker 3 (27:10):
At the time, I was so angry and so convinced
that getting these abusive men out of my sight would
mean that either they would have to learn or disappear.
And some of them learned, but many of them didn't,
and none of them disappeared, And of course, the far
reaches of the manisphere fucking hated the me too movement.
(27:34):
Here are some comments from forums around the time.
Speaker 6 (27:37):
The main reason is that real victims don't get heard
because hundreds of women tell us that someone accidentally touched
their ass once on the bus ten years ago. It
belittles women who have actually been subjected to rape or
gross sexual harassment. I also wonder why women repeatedly end
up alone in parks take black taxis set. Why did
(28:01):
you ride an elevator alone with a strange man? Would
a better option have been to wait for the next elevator.
Speaker 3 (28:08):
And this is way mild in comparison to some other
stuff I saw in retrospect. I think Me Too was
actually an excellent recruiting opportunity for the manispheer because for
a moment, it was socially permissible for women to speak out,
and the manisphere could pitch this as a moment that
proved their point.
Speaker 2 (28:27):
Look at these women. They want you to lose your job.
Speaker 3 (28:30):
You can't say anything anymore, you can't do anything anymore.
They're trying to ruin our lives.
Speaker 2 (28:37):
Now, I want to say.
Speaker 3 (28:38):
Me Too is a rightfully criticized movement because, as with
virtually every other American feminist movement before it, its interests
disproportionately prioritize the wealthy, CIS and white. This is a
pretty popular point of view at this point, and while
the Weinstein story initially felt like the beginning of something
(28:59):
that could cut across class and race boundaries, that's not
really what happened. So, like every feminist movement that came
before it, me Too during twenty seventeen into twenty eighteen
failed to get meaningful results anywhere other than with the
financially privileged and mostly white. At the time, it was
such a cathartic moment for speaking out about misogyny being
(29:22):
publicly acceptable for the first time in a generation. It
improved some media representation and allowed people to feel safe
sharing their experiences, but the lack of an endgame led
the movement to get tangled and sort of fizzle out
in this whiff of pink pussy hat performativity. A few
abusers being ejected from Hollywood is great, but to treat
(29:43):
that as sufficient while women in the working class's struggles
remained unchanged and largely unacknowledged.
Speaker 2 (29:50):
Means that enough wasn't done.
Speaker 3 (29:52):
Not to mention that when it came to intersectionality with
trans women, this era was bad. So, while it was
deeply in perfect, me Too's prominence in the media gave
certain manisphere influencers the opportunity to double and triple down
from soft misogynists who serve as an entry point for many.
The previous generation had rash Limbaugh, we had Ben Shapiro
(30:15):
and yeah, we got there.
Speaker 2 (30:18):
Guys like Joe Rogan.
Speaker 11 (30:19):
Is there a photo of this flat Earth?
Speaker 2 (30:22):
No?
Speaker 6 (30:23):
Like I just said again, there's no photo of the
flat Earth from space. There's no photo of the round.
Speaker 11 (30:31):
Earth for a space that's not your true And.
Speaker 3 (30:34):
It's around this time that Rogan becomes extremely popular. He'd
been around for a long time, and the podcast had
been around in some form since all the way back
in two thousand and nine. But before that he'd been
a stand up an actor, a UFC announcer. Yes, that
is how he met Dana White, and my personal favorite,
(30:55):
a guy who makes people eat bugs on TV.
Speaker 2 (30:58):
Fair Fact that has known.
Speaker 9 (31:00):
For dreaming up some of the mouse outrageous and insane
stunts you could possibly imagine.
Speaker 4 (31:05):
Over the past three season, contests have been confronted with
over one hundred and sixty five stunts.
Speaker 5 (31:10):
Tonight, we're gonna count down the fifteen most outrageous moments
on fear Fact.
Speaker 2 (31:16):
Buckle up, because it's not.
Speaker 3 (31:18):
Gonna be pretty, and from the beginning, mister Joe presented
himself as not an outright bigot, but usually a guy
who would talk to anybody. I talked about this a
little bit in my interview with Becca Lewis last week,
but I would classify Rogan as an I'm just asking
questions guy who would have people on the show that
were likely to get the show a lot of attention.
(31:40):
He does push back on guests he doesn't agree with
from time to time, but the question I wish more
off his fans ask themselves is if Rogan knows who
these people are in advance and probably the points they'll argue,
why air something he disagrees with so thoroughly You're not dumb.
Speaker 2 (31:58):
You know why.
Speaker 3 (31:59):
It wasn't and still isn't a fully political show, which
I think is actually part of its appeal. It's always
been very masculine. Their own website admits that ninety percent
of guests are men, and the show's early recurring guests
were male stand ups of Rogan's generation, guys who aren't
afraid to drop us lur or a light misogyny every
few sentences. But he also hosts athletes, musicians. It was
(32:23):
a general interest show that kind of became a lifestyle
marker for its longtime listeners, but occasionally, and often successfully,
Rogan would platform just a full blown supremacist, male supremacist,
white supremacist and heavy hitters at that Stefan Molinu, Candace Owens,
Gavin McInnis, Milo Uanapolis, Jordan Peterson, Alex fucking Jones, dude,
(32:49):
more than once.
Speaker 11 (32:51):
Now you find the system, you automatically know what to do.
Like when you talk about something the president word for
Worden repeats me Trump as what freaks them out. Word
for word. The whole speech is like whole things and
I'm not on a power trip. That's what they flipped
out about at the CIA and everywhere else. And they're like, well,
Jones is connected to Trump, and I think Trump's like
an idiot savon what does.
Speaker 2 (33:10):
That have to do with this speech? And to get
ahead of it.
Speaker 3 (33:13):
Yes, Rogan has also had his fair share of leftists
on you're Bernie Sanders, you're Edward Snowden's and a lot
of people like to cite the fact that Rogan supported
Sanders in twenty twenty, but the fact remains. Rogan has
said on many occasions that he books these guests himself,
and so the repeated visits of white supremacists on the
(33:34):
show is not an accident. It's been happening for over
ten years. I could trace it back to twenty thirteen.
And while he still hasn't been a proper guest on
the show, someone who comes up a lot on the
Joe Rogan Experience is one Andrew Tait. And we'll come
back to Rogan and the podcast inspired by him in
(33:55):
a little bit, but we're going to take a detour
to Andrew Tait, a male suprema currently under house arrest
in Romania. So if you had the pleasure of not
being aware of this guy until this moment, you might
be like, what's happening in Romania? And the answer is
worse than you could possibly imagine. No conversation about contemporary
(34:15):
Manisphere influencers would be complete without discussing Andrew Tait. Next
to Jordan Peterson and the Fresh and Fit podcast. This
is the name that's come up in most of my
interviews about significant Manisphere influencers among young people.
Speaker 2 (34:30):
Specifically, I talked.
Speaker 3 (34:31):
To a middle school teacher who is beside themselves about
how frequently they'd find their students engaging with his content.
The content is like this.
Speaker 13 (34:41):
Life for a man is harder than life for a woman.
We need to have a lot of shit to be
an important man. To be a woman, you need makeup.
If you're truly beautiful, you don't need anything else. I've
been on boats in Dubai with nineteen year old Muldovan girls.
The guy who got that boat needed one hundred million dollars.
That bitch makeup.
Speaker 7 (34:59):
Never say you go in to bed.
Speaker 8 (35:00):
Going to bed is emasculine.
Speaker 2 (35:02):
Cowards need sleep.
Speaker 3 (35:04):
Well, I'm texting you, you beautiful girl, but I'm tired.
Speaker 12 (35:07):
I'm going to.
Speaker 2 (35:07):
Bed, you know.
Speaker 11 (35:08):
I like to say, at fucking court pass one in.
Speaker 13 (35:10):
The morning, I'm going to work, work at this time.
Speaker 2 (35:14):
Money never sleeps, baby.
Speaker 12 (35:15):
Then I go to bed, and.
Speaker 13 (35:16):
The most beautiful girls in the world are not walking
around shopping centers in England or fucking Nebraska or Idaho
or wherever you dorks do your day game.
Speaker 11 (35:24):
So I people go.
Speaker 2 (35:25):
I picked up a nine at the mall. There's no
nines in that mall, you fucking moro.
Speaker 13 (35:30):
I could sit outside that mall for a month and
analyze every single chicken walks in there. And I'll see
a single nine and you're telling me every weekend you
go find the only nine in the mall.
Speaker 14 (35:40):
Do you fuck she's a five and you're desperate.
Speaker 2 (35:44):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (35:46):
Tate, as you can hear, is pretty high on the
extremist scale, joining the cadre of Manosphere influencers who explicitly
advocate for assault and rolling back women's rights. Beginning as
a kickboxer and Big Brother contestant, and Tates' popularity steeply
increased throughout the twenty tens through overtly misogynist ventures like
(36:06):
Hustler's University and The Pillthinking driven the real world and
to get back to Romania. This past summer, he was
arrested there for charges of rape, human trafficking, and forming
an organized crime group to traffic women, and the investigation
has since been expanded to include charges of trafficking miners
(36:27):
and money laundering. He is literally under house arrest for
rape right now, and his content is still very popular
among children, and the Tates of the world definitely need
the Joe Rogans of the world to survive, because, yes,
seeing this unhinged man could be appealing to a kid
on its own, but to see that same unhinged man
(36:50):
being validated as worth talking about with a prominent, well
recognized figure is a legitimizing move. And again to draw
a line, and that's what the I'm just asking questions
corner of the manisphere really offers. It's easier for them
to remain mainstream while not getting arrested, but they are
(37:11):
open to these ideas. Okay, we're in twenty eighteen. At
this time, other already existent corners of the manispheer continued
to pull in new recruits, and as I'll discuss, the
manisphere expanded in every subcommunity in cells, men's rights activists,
pick up artists, men going their own way, and even
(37:32):
subgroups among these categories. And what I find particularly dangerous
is that both these creators and social media algorithms became
very good at finding young people who fit the bill
as being susceptible to this content, Young people who are
insecure in their bodies or lacking in real life spaces
(37:53):
and support systems to turn their head another way. And remember,
this is an issue that's just as much driven by
social issues as it is by algorithms. Algorithms are powerful tools,
but the ideology is the real weapon here. Economic disparity
fuels the manisphere. Like I mentioned earlier, most Manisphere participants
are encouraged to see themselves in relation to their quote
(38:16):
unquote value and success. And in an increasingly difficult economy
where men are trained to project and blame this economic
insecurity on women, well you can see how it can
get bad pretty quickly. And so for young men who
felt socially awkward or sometimes were neurodivergent, these spaces could
become tremendously appealing.
Speaker 2 (38:38):
And that's not even to mention how young.
Speaker 3 (38:41):
People are targeted at In the era of the iPad kid,
we see algorithms and influencers target kids as young as
ten years old, according to Manisphere influencer Andrew England in
a leaked Best Social Media Practices document in the early
twenty twenties.
Speaker 2 (38:58):
And this is extreamist group that is targeting children. So
why can't we call this what it is? Extreme?
Speaker 3 (39:06):
Misogynist groups were very slow to be classified overtly as
hate groups, and their crimes were almost never called out
for what the killers like Elliott Roger were explicitly telling
us that they were. The Southern Poverty Law Center was
the first to add male supremacy onto their registry of
Hate Groups, and that wasn't until twenty eighteen. And while
(39:28):
this was a step forward, it's a bit concerning that
it took that long, given that the SPLC had been
well aware of these spaces since twenty twelve, but resisted
classifying them as hate groups for half a decade. According
to SPLC's Arthur Goldwag in twenty.
Speaker 6 (39:44):
Twelve, it should be mentioned that the SPLC did not
label MRAs as members of a hate movement, nor did
our article claim that the grievances they air on their websites,
false rape accusations, ruinous divorce settlements and the like are
all without merit, but we did call out specific examples
(40:05):
of misogyny and the threat overt or implicit of violence.
Speaker 3 (40:10):
And while these institutions lagged to acknowledge what the Manisphere
had become, others took it upon themselves to try and
slow its spread. Following the twenty sixteen election and the
(40:35):
Me Too movement, there was a series of online creators
and thinkers who were beginning to see the Manisphere for
what it was, increasing in both toxicity and size, and
a space that needed to be deradicalized. If there was
any chance of decreasing its influence. There were many people
doing this work at the time, but I'm going to
hone in on the YouTuber who I've heard most commonly
(40:57):
cited by young men who were deradicalized around this time
and in the years since. Contra points a very talented
creator who is no stranger to being a main character herself.
I watched these videos at the time they were released, too,
and they're extremely good.
Speaker 2 (41:15):
Natalie, when the channel's ou.
Speaker 3 (41:17):
Tour and researcher, brought the perspective of a transwoman to
the conversation and acknowledged that when she was living and
being socially conditioned as a man, that she found the
in cell and other irony pill p hate forums appealing
because of the validation it gave her of her discomfort
in her own body and an answer for why she
was so frustrated. Of course, this answer was not true.
(41:41):
Once Natalie began to explore her gender, identify as non binary,
and eventually came out as a transwoman, she was world
happier than she was living as a man who hated women.
Using this experience, in addition to incredible research, talent delivery,
and oh my God aesthetics. Natalie was able to bring
personal experience in an impressive amount of thoughtfulness regarding these groups,
(42:06):
and critically, she knew how to speak their language. To
give you an idea of how these videos were structured,
here's a clip from in Cells, a twenty eighteen video
that has six million views at the time of this writing.
Speaker 12 (42:19):
The word in cell refers to a more specific community
of mostly heterosexual men centered around forums like incell, dot
me and r slash brain Cells. This group has recently
gotten a lot of bad press because for the last
few years they've been churning out mass murderers faster than
Marvel can make Avengers movies. But most in cells aren't
violent killers. They're just men who've formed an identity around
(42:41):
not getting laid. In this video, I don't want to
mock in cells, or lecture them, or even sympathize with them.
I just want to understand who they are and why
they're like this.
Speaker 3 (42:50):
Natalie Winn's strategy was extremely successful at the time because,
unlike so many media outlets that were ignoring or miscovering
the issue, she understood that to reach disaffected in cells
it was ultimately an algorithmic game. So in order to
get her videos seen, she was using the same hashtags,
the same aesthetics, the same language that extremist in cell
(43:13):
videos were, and she had a lot of success in
covertly infiltrating the YouTube algorithms of the insel curious and
effectively showing them some empathy and encouraging them to know
themselves better versus you know, signing a Sea Org style
infinity contract to hate women forever. And this turned into
a series of videos that got the ContraPoints channel a
(43:34):
lot of attention, but became too large of a burden
for one person, and so eventually she moved on to
other topics. And besides, her algorithmic strategy only worked as
long as.
Speaker 2 (43:44):
That was the way that the algorithm was.
Speaker 3 (43:47):
As we've talked about countless times on this show, the
YouTube algorithm was all but unmonitored in the mid to
late twenty tens and was very difficult to do well consistently.
Within Natalie successful algorithm infiltration and validates a consistent truth
in the manisphere. YouTube is an integral part of it.
After all, YouTube is now more popular than standard television
(44:11):
among young men, and as of the early twenty twenties
was the most used site in the world. I don't
think the fact that Rogan began his podcast on YouTube
all the way back in two thousand and nine is
any coincidence. Maybe a lucky mistake, but what his ideology
became makes it clear that the YouTube algorithm that favors
(44:31):
his guest with extreme or weird views has worked consistently.
Speaker 2 (44:35):
And make no mistake, YouTube's.
Speaker 3 (44:37):
Algorithm was also a part of why Manisphere spaces were
so successful at bringing new people in at higher rates
in the mid to late twenty tens, and I want
to be careful here and not blame this growth of
the Manisphere on the algorithm wholesale. In our interview last week,
Beccaluis emphasized that this spirit of misogyny was already very
(45:00):
much normalized. But what algorithms can do by serving users
the same shit over and over and over is make
a user's worst instinct seem like a far more mainstream
opinion than it actually is. If your algorithm is flooded
with Manisphere content and you don't fully understand how that
algorithm works, it's easy to envision a world where a
(45:23):
kid can think, oh, everyone must feel this way. Studies
now indicate that changes to the YouTube algorithm made in
twenty nineteen have pretty effectively slowed the unhinged radicalization phase
we heard talked about so much during the twenty sixteen
election cycle and beyond. But it won't surprise you to
hear that this happened, let's say, about half a decade
(45:45):
too late.
Speaker 2 (45:46):
It's great that.
Speaker 3 (45:47):
The algorithm is no longer directly targeting people to be radicalized,
but once someone is radicalized, as ContraPoints discusses in her videos,
it takes a lot of time and effort to undo that.
And it's no surprise that in those years of algorithmic
infinite growth from the highest up at YouTube, the value
of their platform skyrocketed, going from a valuation of one
(46:11):
point seven billion in twenty twelve two fifteen billion in
twenty nineteen, and its value has only continued to rise
from there. Fixing and tweaking the algorithm is good, but
let's not give them a shred of credits. YouTube waited
until bad pr via lawsuits and public pressure made it
(46:34):
advantageous to change their algorithm, certainly not when they first
became aware of it. And remember, as Andrew England said
people in the Manisphere were targeting young men specifically, and
men ages eighteen to forty nine want more YouTube than
they do anything else. I regret to inform you that
we are still in twenty eighteen because another inflection point
(46:55):
in the US for the Manisphere was the Brett Kavanaugh hearings.
I and probably you remember these vividly. I was sitting
next to producer of this show, Sophie Lichterman, at work
during these hearings, as a woman named Christine blasi Ford
came forward to accuse Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.
Speaker 8 (47:15):
I believed he was going to rape me. I tried
to yell for help. When I did, Brett put his
hand over my mouth to stop me from yelling. This
is what terrified me the most and has had the
most lasting impact on my life. It was hard for
me to breathe, and I thought that Brett was accidentally
(47:37):
going to kill me.
Speaker 3 (47:38):
Unlike many aspects of the Me Too movement, most manashre
forum spaces met this moment with unbelievable cruelty, but others,
the just asking questions guys took a slightly softer approach.
Sure it's possible that Brett Kavanaugh is a rapist, but
what if there's some ulterior motive as to why Ford
(47:59):
came forward. Here's Rogan around this time.
Speaker 5 (48:03):
Like I'm fascinated by these Kavanaugh hearings, like I watched
little clips of it before. I just have to tune
out and talk away from Mary talk about fuckery. I mean,
I don't know what that dude did or what he
didn't do, but I think what's happening is more than that.
Speaker 3 (48:17):
Again, there's no one way that these spaces approach big
cultural moments like this. Everyone in the media had something
to say about the Kavanaugh hearings, and it remains a
cultural touch point to the extent that a secretly Republican
spinning instructor in Maine jump scared my entire class last
summer when she began to play a Kavanaugh testimony house
(48:40):
music remix. I'm serious, by the way, spinning is that sexy,
weirdly Christian stationary bike thing.
Speaker 4 (48:47):
Which I gladly do, in which I fully embrace working.
Speaker 11 (48:51):
Out, automatic, whacking out automatic, the Catholic all girls' schools
automatic still is.
Speaker 3 (49:02):
I will never understand in any case. The manosphere mocked, harassed,
and doxed Christine Blasi Ford, lamenting that this moment was
yet another example of what feminists were trying to take
from them, which is interesting because Brett Kavanagh was sworn
in and has gone on to vote in such horrific
legislations such as overturning Roe v. Wade, voting yes on
(49:24):
Grant's pass, a recent Supreme Court decision that makes being
unhoused and arrestable offense, and of course the presidential immunity
that I'm sure will not at all benefit his homie
Donald Trump in his upcoming eternity term. And this testimony
came less than a year after the Me Too movement began,
so consider how quickly the public tone changed. The questions
(49:48):
that Christine Blasi Ford endured from an all male Republican
committee pretty closely reflected that of Anita Hill's experience all
the way back in nineteen ninety one, after Hill had
leveraged Alleghani of assault and harassment against Supreme Court Justice
Clarence Thomas. And I'm resisting getting into how mad these
decisions make me, but the point is the institution one here. Yes,
(50:13):
it was challenged and Ford received a lot of support,
but Kavanaugh was sworn in and went on to enforce
all the far right policies that antagonize anyone less marginalized
than himself as intended. But the minisphere continues to cite
this hearing as a public humiliation. That is a problem.
So why are they doing that. I'm not saying anything
(50:35):
new here, but I firmly believe it's because being called
out for their abuse of women is embarrassing for men.
The aggressor is afraid of being made to feel small,
and the person who is an object to them is
afraid of being killed.
Speaker 2 (50:49):
And the more marginalized.
Speaker 3 (50:50):
They are, this risk increases. But by this time the
Overton window for the American public.
Speaker 2 (50:57):
Had clearly shifted right.
Speaker 3 (51:00):
American men pulled before and after the Ford testimony generally
said that women were more likely to scapegoat and harm
the lives of the careers of men than they had
been before. You didn't need to be an active part
of the manisphere to be profoundly affected by it. And
there's more to the manisphere historically that we could get into.
(51:21):
We could talk about the right leaning or far right
communities that have significant overlap with the manisphere. Flat earthers QAnon.
I could keep going, but we'd be here for six hours,
and I promised this series would be the basics. So
let's get back to Joe Rogan. In twenty twenty, Broken
Show was popular enough to pull the biggest podcast deal
(51:44):
in history, a two hundred million dollar exclusivity deal with
Spotify that quite literally changed the medium forever. Thanks for
fucking nothing, but he was just that big at the time.
He averaged around eleven million listeners in episode across platform
while welcoming guests like Ben Shapiro and Dan Crenshaw and
(52:05):
Tony Hawk. That's nice, but it's no coincidence that Rogan
never had to pivot to video the way that many
podcasts are struggling to now. Rogan was pulling more from
the traditional radio setups that had launched early Manisphere figures
like Rush Limbaugh and seamlessly made it work for a
new technological landscape. Another great example of this is Charlemagne
(52:26):
the Gods blockbuster radio show The Breakfast Club, which began
as a radio show around the same time that Rogan
premiered in twenty ten and then became a nationally syndicated
show in twenty thirteen and expanded to the Internet with
a lot of success, and yes, Charlemagne platforms a lot
of the same misogynist and particularly homophobic and transphobic messaging
(52:48):
that's characteristic across the manisphere.
Speaker 2 (52:51):
What about interns here she said that you make music
for gays, I do. I'm not. The Internet looked at me.
Speaker 6 (53:00):
With that nothing, So no, I'm saying now, I mean
it's not specifically for that audience.
Speaker 2 (53:06):
You just make music, right.
Speaker 3 (53:08):
I guess that was Azalia Banks. We don't have time
and there were plenty of imitators pulling from the Rogan
Charlemagne playbook, including Theo Vaughn, another stand up who hosted
a string of podcasts over the course of a decade
before he started his own I'm Just a Guy Asking
Questions video podcast to tremendous success. And so by the
(53:30):
time Donald Trump is doing this speed run of I'm
Just Asking question manisphere podcasters in twenty twenty four, UFC
founder Dana White gives a specific list of people to
think in this space during Trump's acceptance event.
Speaker 14 (53:50):
I want to thank some people real quick. I want
to thank the Note Boys, Aiden Ross, Theo Vaughn, Bustle
with the Boys, and last but not least the mighty
and powerful Joe Rogan.
Speaker 3 (54:04):
And this is fascinating because, based on what I have
learned and talked to other people about, these shows don't
represent the Manisphere as it's existed in the last ten years,
but rather expands the definition of the Manisphere to include
male dominated, misogyny fueled media spaces that have explicitly endorsed
(54:24):
or share the values of Donald Trump. Trump is now
inextricable from this space, and that would be an inconceivable
way to describe the Manisphere a decade ago, but I
think that that's probably how we'll hear it referred to
moving forward. And all of these men have experienced gaming
the algorithm online. The Nilk Boys began as highly successful prankvloggers,
(54:47):
much like fellow Trump supporters Jake and Logan. Paul Aiden
Ross is a twenty something edge lord gaming streamer who
got booted off Twitch for saying slurs, hosted white supremacist
Nick Quentez on his streams, and is a close personal
friend of Andrew Tate himself. Trump's appearances ranged from the
guys asking questions like Rogan and Theovaughn, to the full
(55:09):
blown extremists like Aiden Ross, and while it's fully possible
that a handful of these guys might be deplatforms someday,
if there's anything that this space has demonstrated to me
is that when one manisphere influencers fall, three pop out
of nowhere to take this fallen figure's place. And when
people talk about building their own Joe Rogan or whatever
(55:30):
the fuck, that's not possible for so many reasons, the
primary of which is that the left just does not
have the money that the far right does. Taylor Lorenz
made this point explicit in an election post mortem in
User mag writing, the conservative media landscape in the United
States is exceptionally well funded, meticulously constructed, and highly coordinated.
(55:54):
Wealthy donors, packs and corporations with a vested interest in
preserving or expanding conservative policies strategically invest in right wing
media channels and up and coming content creators. This creates
a well oiled pipeline for conservative influencers. Young TikTokers, YouTubers,
live streamers, or podcasters are discovered, developed, and pushed to
(56:14):
larger platforms, often with the financial backing of conservative billionaires
or organizations on the right who have long recognized the
content creator industry as a valuable means of shaping public
opinion and policy. Look, I didn't say it was encouraging news.
YouTube remains the most popular place for this, but as
streaming platforms continue to become more successful, so did the
(56:35):
extremists that populate them. Look no further than the top
ten streamers on Twitch the night of the election, with
only one left leaning creator, a snpiker, obviously getting meaningful
numbers while the rest were right wing streams. And if
you get deep platform from Twitch, no problem. There's a
right wing alternative in the form of Kick, where Aidan
(56:56):
Ross had to switch to after his third twitchban. So
I know that this was a lot of information, But
how I see this space moving forward? This new manisphere
is going to exist with a gradient. At its most extreme,
it's full on take the women's right to vote and
get them back in the home style male supremacy, And
(57:17):
at its most mild, it's taking those.
Speaker 2 (57:19):
Same people and saying, I don't know, let's hear what
he has to say.
Speaker 3 (57:23):
Misogyny will remain the bait because a dismissal of women
has always been generally socially acceptable, and so many creators,
along with the algorithms who push them will essentially test
the waters of someone's ideology by introducing misogyny. Oh you
watched a full video about how the me too movement
(57:43):
went too far? Maybe you'll watch this video, Maybe you'll
join this community.
Speaker 2 (57:48):
And it's not said enough. Most won't, but some will.
Speaker 3 (57:53):
And the more this content is pushed, the more likely
it is that young men will give it a try.
So is there any fucking hope of navigating out of this?
On Thursday I will talk to two experts who have
spent years asking that same question. My conversations with ft
Signifier and Robert Evans. Up next on Into the MANI Sphere.
(58:21):
Sixteenth Minute is a production of Whole Zone Media and Iheartwordopps.
Speaker 2 (58:25):
It is written, posted, and produced by me Jamie Lostus.
Speaker 3 (58:29):
Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans. The
amazing Ian Johnson is our supervising producer and our editor.
Speaker 2 (58:37):
Our theme song is by Sad thirteen. Voice acting is
from Grant, Crater and Pet.
Speaker 3 (58:42):
Shout outs to our dog producer Anderson, my Kats Flee
and Casper and my pet Rothbert, who will outlive us all.
Speaker 2 (58:49):
Bye
Al Zone Media Story.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
Times.
Speaker 3 (00:56):
Welcome to sixteenth Minute, the podcast where most weeks we
take a look at the Internet's main characters and see
how their moment affected them and what that says about
us and the Internet.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
But not this week, Queen's not this week. This week
we are entering parts who too of our into.
Speaker 3 (01:15):
The taking a look at how this space has both
continued to grow in influence and in our inability to
talk about it. Last week, in part one, we took
a look at the history of Manisphere spaces all the
way back to the nineteen seventies, and a little bit
about how it's been covered in the month following the
election and spoilers not particularly well. I personally feel that
(01:39):
the people best covering the Manisphere have already been doing
it for years, But first I just.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
Wanted to do a little housekeeping at the top.
Speaker 3 (01:48):
Thank you so much to everyone who has reached out
to me after last week's episode.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
It means a lot.
Speaker 3 (01:54):
As much as I hate hearing how many of my
listeners have had assault experiences similar to mine, and that
they were also encouraged to not think of.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
It as assault at the time.
Speaker 3 (02:03):
If you have experienced something similar, be gentle with yourself
and thank you for listening, But I really do appreciate
your listening.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
I firmly believe that we need.
Speaker 3 (02:15):
Each other to be able to survive times like this,
because the systems are obviously still not acknowledging it. I
heard accounts that came nearly a full decade after my own,
which is honestly frightening. Domestic violence exists at rates that
should qualify it as domestic terrorism, but that's just not
(02:36):
how we've been taught to see this kind of violence.
And more than anything, as I was preparing for this
second part, as I was taking a look at the
different areas of the Manisphere over time, it became very
clear to me that for the most extreme areas, misogyny
is usually step one sort of the bait, because it's
(02:57):
so normalized and we hear it so often that most
people may not flinch if they hear something casually misogynist,
and some might even feel validated by it. And if
they're into that and decide to watch some Manisphere shows
will slowly turn up the ante. How about some transphobia
with that? How about some racially charged comments about this
(03:19):
type of woman? And not every listener is going to
be receptive to it. Not all men, but let's be honest,
many are, and the nature of these shows can sort
of function as a frog sitting in a pot full
of lukewarm water not realizing that it's coming to a boil.
And again I will place some content warnings here. There's
(03:41):
a lot of information in this episode and some of
it is pretty heavy. So if it's not a good
time for you for this kind of thing today, I
really enjoyed Wicked Part one, check it out.
Speaker 2 (03:55):
I also really quickly just wanted to.
Speaker 3 (03:56):
Issue one correction from last week's episode where I failed
to be clear enough.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
I characterized custody.
Speaker 3 (04:02):
Statistics that Men's Right activist site as their reason for
pushing back against mothers and women's rights and characterizing them
as vindictive, when I should have said that this is
the idea that motivates them, not that it's actually based
on historically true data.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
In reality, while mothers are.
Speaker 3 (04:22):
More likely to be granted custody, that's in large part
because fathers request custody far less frequently than mothers do.
So I apologize for making that sound as if it
was a fact.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
It is very much a straw man argument.
Speaker 3 (04:36):
And that is certainly an important distinction in spaces like
the manisphere, where so much is straw man arguments. So
this week I want to break down the manisphere, starting
from when many consider for it to have crossed into
the mainstream and from where it started to affect me. Specifically,
gamer Gate, a twenty fourteen harassment campaign where men's forums
(04:59):
previously thought to be niche targeted women working or commenting
on the gaming industry, particularly those who had explicitly criticized
games for misogyny anywhere from explicitly critiquing the industry to
simply speaking out against an intimate partner who had literally
posted revenge porn of them.
Speaker 4 (05:18):
Violent depictions of women being beaten, raped, and run over
by cars. It's not the movies, it's video games. And
now the women calling for change in this multi billion
dollar virtual industry are facing a very real backlash, including
death threats.
Speaker 3 (05:33):
And as we discussed, the second event of twenty fourteen
that brought the manisphere into the mainstream was the Isla
Vista massacre perpetrated by Elliott Roger, who went on to
become and still is a figurehead of the in cell movement,
who is considered a martyr to the cause of fighting
back against matriarchy. However, his misogynist manifesto, which was deeply
(05:59):
connected and hosted to in cell forums, was only mentioned
in passing in many mainstream media outlets, the same outlets
who are three hundred and fifty percent more likely to
bring up mental health as the central issue of these
killings as they would for a Muslim shooter. Here's a
Barbara Walters broadcast from the time.
Speaker 5 (06:17):
I'll tell you the story of Bogra, chilling details you've
never heard until now about a loaner obsessed with finding
a girlfriend.
Speaker 2 (06:25):
In the next ten years.
Speaker 3 (06:26):
It became lethally clear that this loaner angle hugely underplayed
where Roger was getting positive reinforcement for this violence. Make
no mistake, Roger was pushing this parting message to the
in cell boards. Not only did it reference blackpill ideology,
the death cult mentality that indicated that women would never
(06:47):
like him and made him a martyr. The in cells
were inspired by this. And just so you know, I
will not be including quotes from any of these guys manifestos.
There our spaces where that's not unproductive, but this is
my show and no manifestos here.
Speaker 2 (07:05):
And finally to the guy last.
Speaker 3 (07:06):
Week in my comments who was like, interesting, you didn't
talk to many men. Yeah, if it was my goal
to platform men, I would own a house.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
So come with me if you dare to.
Speaker 3 (07:17):
The spring of twenty fourteen, during the fallout of the
Ala Vista murders, which claimed six lives, mainstream media was
still trying to figure out how to cover the story,
while the in cell communities that Roger spent so much
time in were celebrating.
Speaker 6 (07:33):
The in cell rebellion has already begun. We will overthrow
all the Chads and Stacy's all hail the Supreme Gentleman,
Elliott Roger.
Speaker 3 (07:45):
However, there is an ongoing argument amongst analysts of in
cell and manosphere spaces as to whether these forums can
be singled out as the sole cause of Roger's violence,
arguing that much of his own misogyny was already reinforced
by the culture that existed outside the Internet. Again, it's
this systemic versus is it these boards? Specifically, Michael Kimmel,
(08:07):
whose thesis on the Manisphere I cited in last week's episode,
argued this in twenty fourteen.
Speaker 6 (08:13):
It would be facile to argue the manosphere urged Roger
to do this. I think those places are a kind
of solace. They provide a kind of locker room, a
place where guys can gripe about all the bad things
that are being done to them by women.
Speaker 3 (08:29):
I don't fully agree with this, and I think it
fails to acknowledge a certain amount of gray area. On
one hand, I think Kimmel is right to emphasize that
manisphere message boards are places where men can take the
societally encouraged disrespective women and validate each other's prejudices. But
to suggest that these places don't amplify the violence of
(08:50):
those actions is not true in my opinion. And this
is what we're going to bump up against over and over.
More than one thing is going to be true in
some of these cases, and as it pertains to this show,
more than one thing being true tends to be bad
for social media engagement. But still, Kimmel is I think
(09:11):
right to say that Roger didn't have to do a
one point eighty ideologically to arrive at in cell logic,
the way that Western media conditions men to see themselves
in terms of virility, in appearance and in entitlement had
already gotten him pretty far along, and while we can't
know what motivated Roger definitively, there is no doubt that
(09:32):
he turned to these spaces as a way of validating
his low opinion of both women and himself, frequently posting
front facing YouTube videos of him jeering at couples in
the street and monologuing pretty point for point in cell
rhetoric using black pell logic that he will never be
the object of anyone's affection and might as well die
instead of, you know, not, being openly hostile to every
(09:55):
woman he ever came in contact with. In the days
leading up to the Elavista shootings, Roger also took his
own life. He began to refer to this premeditated plan
as the day of retribution and a method of punishing
the women that he felt rejected by, and Roger's influence
is clearly held in these spaces to this day, with
(10:16):
a number of subsequent killings citing his manifesto or shouting
him out by name. Look no further than the Umpqua
Community College shootings the next year, the christ Church mosque
shooter in twenty nineteen, or the twenty eighteen Toronto van
attack that claimed fifteen lives. The killer in Toronto said specifically.
Speaker 6 (10:37):
I was thinking that I would inspire future masses to
join me in my uprising as well, and.
Speaker 3 (10:42):
For more in this case specifically and its relationship to
the Manisphere, I would recommend the CBC podcast Boys Like
Me from a few years back. But in addition to
claiming to be in contact with Elliott Rodger, shortly before
his death, the Toronto shooter told authorities that he had
been radicalized on in cell forums shortly after the Ilavista
(11:03):
killings and referred to his attack as another day of retribution.
And of course, most people in the Manisphere aren't extremist killers,
but that doesn't mean that they are not encouraged to
cheer on those who are. That was a fixture of
spaces like four chan, eight chan, and earlier Reddit. Robert
(11:23):
Evans tracked this explicitly in the case of the christ
Church mosque shootings, which claimed fifty one lives, where fellow
manispheer adjacent racists watched the murder on a live streamed video.
Speaker 2 (11:35):
And that's not the only killing of that kind.
Speaker 3 (11:39):
Because, as it probably goes without saying, very few Manisphere
denizens are just misogynists. These communities very often intersect with racism, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia,
and on and on. These communities are locked into a
view of women that is entrenched in all this jargon,
but it boils down to this binary chestnut. Women are
(12:02):
defined by their ability to provide sex and children for men,
and should be subservient as well as men must make
themselves high value, and what determines high value is entirely
decided by capitalism.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
It requires monetary and.
Speaker 3 (12:17):
Career success in addition to appearance, and can rely just
as much on men's self hatred as it does on
their hatred of anyone who isn't a man. But that
doesn't mean that people locked into the manisphere aren't from
a diverse array of backgrounds. I was actually pretty surprised
at how diverse.
Speaker 2 (12:37):
This space is.
Speaker 3 (12:38):
Around the same time the mid twenty tens, the black
manisphere began to grow led by influencers like Kevin Samuels,
who started a YouTube channel in twenty thirteen.
Speaker 2 (12:48):
It is viewing shit like this, How are you even
willing to put a possible time frame only so we
need a time for anything, nobody.
Speaker 7 (12:56):
We need a cooperative woman. We need a woman that
understands what men want and understand that, yes, this is
going to be a part of it. And I've asked
you the question how many times? So what do you
let me tell you? If you're not willing to answer
the question. It's not a trick to it. You're a
grown woman.
Speaker 2 (13:13):
Yeah, that makes sense.
Speaker 3 (13:15):
I mean, I'm I'm learning, still learning about different personalities.
Speaker 7 (13:20):
It's not different personalities. It's a lot of you ladies
tend to want men to do all the work.
Speaker 3 (13:25):
Samuels took on a similar but a little bit harsher
persona to Jordan Peterson, presenting himself as a fatherly professional
who is just helping men and women understand the world
and improve their confidence, while slowly but surely escalating into
full male supremacist logic, then encourage men to be cruel
and dismissive to the women around them. The difference is
(13:48):
that Samuel's a black man himself focused on talking to
black men in particular, and while he passed in twenty
twenty two rather suddenly, his channel continues to post until
this day, and his influence.
Speaker 2 (14:01):
Is certainly still felt.
Speaker 3 (14:03):
Doctor Umar Johnson is another big black manisphere public figure
who at this point is basically given up on distancing
himself from his overt homophobia and misogyny, saying back in
twenty fourteen that planned parenthood quote was using homosexuality as
a population control strategy in the black community. And as
this misogyny is being pushed toward black viewers specifically, it
(14:25):
tends to be extremely vitriolic toward Black women in particular,
and unfortunately, the most harsh version of this is also
the most popular feature of the black manisphere right now,
the ultra popular podcast Fresh and Fit, whose hosts are
particularly cruel to Black women on their show, because remember,
no matter who's talking about manuspheer shit, they are operating
(14:49):
on a fundamentally white supremacist logic.
Speaker 2 (14:52):
First time, don'ating just say Maron is a real one.
Speaker 6 (14:54):
Don't change for nobody.
Speaker 2 (14:55):
Yeah, fuck out here, bro, we don't change. I don't
even know who she is, so don't care. That's King girl,
Like you don't know who Queen Vaughn is. No, I
know who King Vaughan is, but I mean.
Speaker 8 (15:08):
I don't.
Speaker 5 (15:11):
Oh the fact you said it's King Vaugh's girl instead
of it was heard yea, and.
Speaker 3 (15:17):
Let it be known That is the least convincing reading
of I Don't Care that I've heard in my entire life.
Similar spaces existed for Asian men interested in Manisphere content.
I mean, don't worry, fellas. Everyone can hate women in
the Manisphere.
Speaker 2 (15:34):
And boy do they.
Speaker 3 (15:36):
These influencers delight in broadcasting themselves, making women uncomfortable, and
sharing the content as if they're owning them.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
And you might.
Speaker 3 (15:44):
Remember this if you were on YouTube around this time.
There was a notorious style of video that had titles
like this.
Speaker 9 (15:52):
Jordan Peterson repeatedly owns Australian feminist Ben Shapiro Dismantle's third
wave feminism. Kevin Samuels knows ladies hate when the roles
are reversed.
Speaker 6 (16:04):
Patriarchy, which is a system of male dominance of society.
Speaker 10 (16:07):
Yeah, but that's not my sense of the patriarchy.
Speaker 2 (16:10):
What's yours?
Speaker 10 (16:10):
Well, in what senses are society male dominated?
Speaker 6 (16:15):
The fact that the vast majority of wealth is owned
by men, a vast majority of capital.
Speaker 2 (16:19):
And is owned by men. Women do more unpaid labor.
Speaker 10 (16:22):
Very tiny proportion of men, and a huge proportion of
people who are seriously disaffected or men. Most people in
prison are men. Most people who are on the street
are men. Most victims of violent crime are men. Most
people commit suicide or men. Most people who die in
wars are men. People who do worse in school are men.
(16:43):
It's like, where's the dominance here?
Speaker 3 (16:45):
Precisely, and these kinds of videos would have millions of views.
And Peterson there is virtually giving a list of classic
men's rights talking points, that is, listing out statistics about
how patriarchy negatively affects men and presenting it as an
argument against feminism for some reason, and while it's perhaps
(17:05):
the most obvious point on the fucking planet, no conversation
about the strengthening and empowerment of the manisphere would be
complete without the twenty sixteen election of Donald Trump. There
is ample proof that manisphere groups embraced Trump and loved
his proclivity for saying the quiet part loud. Laura Bates, author.
Speaker 2 (17:26):
Of Men Who Hate Women.
Speaker 3 (17:28):
Praised back the history of these groups and found that,
with the exception of men's rights activists hyper fixating on
custody courts, these Manisphere groups were not particularly political pre Trump,
but when he enters the sphere, they actually organized on
his behalf and the groups steadily become more politicized, and
(17:49):
that's not a mistake. Former Trump chief strategist and current
disgusting goblin Steve Bannon admitted to courting in cells, specifically
during the twenty sixteen election cycle.
Speaker 6 (18:00):
He said this, it was very much in the margins
and in the fringes of society to bring and recruit
people who would otherwise not necessarily engage in conventional politics,
but would engage with particular kinds of ideas that Cambridge
Analytica promoted online that can make an impact. If you
(18:22):
get an extra one percent, an extra two percent in
that swing state, and you win that swing state, that
might mean you win the presidency.
Speaker 3 (18:32):
And of course Trump continued to deliver on both rhetorical
misogyny that was reflected in his policy and extended to
a hatred of immigrants and trans people, who he has
repeatedly targeted in the years since. So to be clear,
I'm not saying that the manisphere elected Trump. They're not
(18:52):
quite that prominent. But Bannon and Trump were successful in
getting men who were otherwise ambivalent towards electoral politic to
become engaged because of him. The misogynist rhetoric, the whole.
Speaker 11 (19:06):
Hey, when you're a start, they let you do it.
Speaker 12 (19:08):
You can do anything whatever you want.
Speaker 5 (19:10):
Grab him by the.
Speaker 7 (19:12):
I can do any of that.
Speaker 3 (19:13):
God, I can't believe that's the second time I've had
to play the grab him by the pussy clip on
this show.
Speaker 2 (19:19):
Unfair.
Speaker 3 (19:21):
What's also worth mentioning here, and why I think there's
such a high barrier to entry for people to understand
these communities, is that there is a full and infuriating
multiverse of vocabulary, of specific memes, and of deflective ironic
humor that can make these Manisphere boards pretty hard to understand.
(19:43):
When it comes to irony pilled humor that was already
tied into comedy that was popular in the early to
mid two thousands, the same time that comedy was becoming
increasingly influenced by the Internet and in general pretty heavily
reliant on shock. This was the era of able list,
Helen Keller jokes, of dead baby jokes, casual or overt racism,
(20:05):
and stuff that mainstream culture thankfully sort of moved on
from after the peak of jud Appatau romance movies, But
the Manisphere never really moves on from this edge. Lord
humor and you'll find time and time again that very often,
after saying something completely horrific about a marginalized group, a
member of the manisphere will say, what I was joking,
(20:27):
you took me out of context A likely story. A
great example of this is famous misogynist pickup artist influencer
Julian Blanc was under fire back in twenty fourteen for
advocating that rape should be legal if one commits that
rape on their own property. Hilarious, right, and his response
(20:47):
to the understandable backlash to this was going on to
CNN and claiming that people misunderstood his hilarious joke.
Speaker 7 (20:54):
You intended every part of this.
Speaker 2 (20:56):
True intentions were never bad.
Speaker 13 (20:58):
I agree, it was a horrible at humor, and unfortunately
a lot of it also got just put out of context.
Speaker 3 (21:03):
And you probably will not be surprised to hear that.
Shortly after this, he returned to preaching the same stuff
for years after the controversy, and all but admitted in
a blog post that this apology was insincere. As for vocabulary,
terms that began in the Manisphere that have since gone
mainstream include obviously red and black pilling, and mis injury
(21:26):
or a hatred of men, which started in MRA forums.
There's femoids gross, and there's red pill wives, which is
a particularly disturbing subgroup that consists of women who are
frequently characterized as just wanting to remain in the home,
which would be fine if true, but what red pill
wives actually depend on is thriving on their own self
(21:49):
hatred and projecting this same misogyny at other women using
red pill logic. There's Alfa and Beta and Sigma men.
The list goes on, and then there's the memes. Much
of the reporting around in cells and eventually QAnon was
how frequently memes spread racist and misogynist jokes that set
(22:09):
the tone for the community while also making it a
safe space to say the most fucked up thing possible.
In the mid to late twenty tens, this meant stuff
like the tremendously successful co opting of Pepe the Frog,
a creation of comic artist Matt Fury who had nothing
politically in common with the people turning his cartoon into
(22:31):
a horrific sign of the alt right. I would recommend
checking out the documentary Feels good Man for more of that.
But memes let these communities say the quiet part loud
while maintaining the illusion of it's just a joke. You guys, though,
why a Pepe the frog in a KKK rope is
funny remains. I mean, it's just hate speech, right maybe.
(23:07):
Fast forward to twenty seventeen. Trump is inaugurated and both
the Muslim band protests and the Women's March take place
early this year. By this time, I had moved to
California to live with my rapists, who thankfully never picked
me up at the airport, and so I proceeded to
become a successful comedian. At the time, though, I was
(23:28):
working part time and doing freelance writing, much of which
centered around the Me Too movement, which began in late
twenty seventeen after a year where besogyny was more in
mainstream discourse than ever. And in case you don't remember,
there were a few moments early in the Me Too
moment that made huge waves in Western culture while also
(23:49):
indicating this movement's shortcomings from the jump now. The hashtag
itself was created by Tarana Burke, a black survivor of
sexual assault, on my Space all the way back in
two thousand and six, but the hashtag didn't really take
off in the mainstream until late twenty seventeen, the big
story was Harvey Weinstein, as prominent actresses were finally comfortable
(24:13):
enough to come forward and say that he had raped
or assaulted them, thankfully leading to his likelihood of dying
in prison. What I think the major accomplishment of this
movement was was making it socially permissible to talk about
experiences of assault, harassment, or gender discrimination of any kind.
And given that the women's March Think Pussy had remember
(24:36):
that had taken place in early twenty seventeen, Me too
at the time felt like an opportunity to at least
keep the conversation moving, and I was all about me
too in its early days. It was during this time
that I remember first hearing a swath of feminists rightfully
argue for rehabilitation and deradicalization of the men who were
(24:57):
perpetuating these abuses where I work in comedy, but at
the time still being pretty fresh out of this abusive
relationship and working a day job at fucking Playboy magazine,
I don't want to talk about it. My response was
just like rehabilitation, fuck, you, just get these men out
of here, make them leave. Because this was the first
(25:19):
moment in my adult life that that seemed even remotely possible.
So in a freelance column for Pace Magazine in December
twenty seventeen, I wrote that the piece was literally called
make them Leave. I began with the example of trying
to bargain with male comedy bookers to stop giving known
abusers time on their shows, and expanded my frustrations into
(25:41):
these talks of rehabilitation in a moment where I felt
like our frustration was only beginning to be addressed. Here's
a passage from that I was driving from one gig
to another with a friend. This passed fall when she
mentioned needing to quote rehabilitate our communities unquote as it
pertained to men assaulting female comedians. Voluntary wave of anger
(26:01):
it sent through my body. Rehabilitate, make them leave. That's
the least we can do. It's not my responsibility to
explain to someone why they can't touch me, berate me,
or rape me. Make them leave. I didn't say anything
for the rest of the night. I also don't think
she was wrong to bring the idea of rehabilitation into
the conversation. It's a complicated issue that I think we
(26:23):
will have to grapple with in the coming years, with
predators who are finally being held accountable. Today, right now,
I think we should make them fucking leave. It's weird
to read this now because I don't even disagree.
Speaker 2 (26:37):
With what I'm saying here.
Speaker 3 (26:38):
I'm twenty four and in a lot of pain, and
also kind of naively optimistic that writing this is going
to liberate me in all of the women around me,
and I do believe that white women specifically owe it
to others to do some of this deradicalization and rehabilitation work.
But in the moment, I was so angry that, weeks
(27:00):
after women being able to speak freely about this, the conversation.
Speaker 2 (27:04):
Went back to what do we do about the men?
I don't care.
Speaker 3 (27:10):
At the time, I was so angry and so convinced
that getting these abusive men out of my sight would
mean that either they would have to learn or disappear.
And some of them learned, but many of them didn't,
and none of them disappeared, And of course, the far
reaches of the manisphere fucking hated the me too movement.
(27:34):
Here are some comments from forums around the time.
Speaker 6 (27:37):
The main reason is that real victims don't get heard
because hundreds of women tell us that someone accidentally touched
their ass once on the bus ten years ago. It
belittles women who have actually been subjected to rape or
gross sexual harassment. I also wonder why women repeatedly end
up alone in parks take black taxis set. Why did
(28:01):
you ride an elevator alone with a strange man? Would
a better option have been to wait for the next elevator.
Speaker 3 (28:08):
And this is way mild in comparison to some other
stuff I saw in retrospect. I think Me Too was
actually an excellent recruiting opportunity for the manispheer because for
a moment, it was socially permissible for women to speak out,
and the manisphere could pitch this as a moment that
proved their point.
Speaker 2 (28:27):
Look at these women. They want you to lose your job.
Speaker 3 (28:30):
You can't say anything anymore, you can't do anything anymore.
They're trying to ruin our lives.
Speaker 2 (28:37):
Now, I want to say.
Speaker 3 (28:38):
Me Too is a rightfully criticized movement because, as with
virtually every other American feminist movement before it, its interests
disproportionately prioritize the wealthy, CIS and white. This is a
pretty popular point of view at this point, and while
the Weinstein story initially felt like the beginning of something
(28:59):
that could cut across class and race boundaries, that's not
really what happened. So, like every feminist movement that came
before it, me Too during twenty seventeen into twenty eighteen
failed to get meaningful results anywhere other than with the
financially privileged and mostly white. At the time, it was
such a cathartic moment for speaking out about misogyny being
(29:22):
publicly acceptable for the first time in a generation. It
improved some media representation and allowed people to feel safe
sharing their experiences, but the lack of an endgame led
the movement to get tangled and sort of fizzle out
in this whiff of pink pussy hat performativity. A few
abusers being ejected from Hollywood is great, but to treat
(29:43):
that as sufficient while women in the working class's struggles
remained unchanged and largely unacknowledged.
Speaker 2 (29:50):
Means that enough wasn't done.
Speaker 3 (29:52):
Not to mention that when it came to intersectionality with
trans women, this era was bad. So, while it was
deeply in perfect, me Too's prominence in the media gave
certain manisphere influencers the opportunity to double and triple down
from soft misogynists who serve as an entry point for many.
The previous generation had rash Limbaugh, we had Ben Shapiro
(30:15):
and yeah, we got there.
Speaker 2 (30:18):
Guys like Joe Rogan.
Speaker 11 (30:19):
Is there a photo of this flat Earth?
Speaker 2 (30:22):
No?
Speaker 6 (30:23):
Like I just said again, there's no photo of the
flat Earth from space. There's no photo of the round.
Speaker 11 (30:31):
Earth for a space that's not your true And.
Speaker 3 (30:34):
It's around this time that Rogan becomes extremely popular. He'd
been around for a long time, and the podcast had
been around in some form since all the way back
in two thousand and nine. But before that he'd been
a stand up an actor, a UFC announcer. Yes, that
is how he met Dana White, and my personal favorite,
(30:55):
a guy who makes people eat bugs on TV.
Speaker 2 (30:58):
Fair Fact that has known.
Speaker 9 (31:00):
For dreaming up some of the mouse outrageous and insane
stunts you could possibly imagine.
Speaker 4 (31:05):
Over the past three season, contests have been confronted with
over one hundred and sixty five stunts.
Speaker 5 (31:10):
Tonight, we're gonna count down the fifteen most outrageous moments
on fear Fact.
Speaker 2 (31:16):
Buckle up, because it's not.
Speaker 3 (31:18):
Gonna be pretty, and from the beginning, mister Joe presented
himself as not an outright bigot, but usually a guy
who would talk to anybody. I talked about this a
little bit in my interview with Becca Lewis last week,
but I would classify Rogan as an I'm just asking
questions guy who would have people on the show that
were likely to get the show a lot of attention.
(31:40):
He does push back on guests he doesn't agree with
from time to time, but the question I wish more
off his fans ask themselves is if Rogan knows who
these people are in advance and probably the points they'll argue,
why air something he disagrees with so thoroughly You're not dumb.
Speaker 2 (31:58):
You know why.
Speaker 3 (31:59):
It wasn't and still isn't a fully political show, which
I think is actually part of its appeal. It's always
been very masculine. Their own website admits that ninety percent
of guests are men, and the show's early recurring guests
were male stand ups of Rogan's generation, guys who aren't
afraid to drop us lur or a light misogyny every
few sentences. But he also hosts athletes, musicians. It was
(32:23):
a general interest show that kind of became a lifestyle
marker for its longtime listeners, but occasionally, and often successfully,
Rogan would platform just a full blown supremacist, male supremacist,
white supremacist and heavy hitters at that Stefan Molinu, Candace Owens,
Gavin McInnis, Milo Uanapolis, Jordan Peterson, Alex fucking Jones, dude,
(32:49):
more than once.
Speaker 11 (32:51):
Now you find the system, you automatically know what to do.
Like when you talk about something the president word for
Worden repeats me Trump as what freaks them out. Word
for word. The whole speech is like whole things and
I'm not on a power trip. That's what they flipped
out about at the CIA and everywhere else. And they're like, well,
Jones is connected to Trump, and I think Trump's like
an idiot savon what does.
Speaker 2 (33:10):
That have to do with this speech? And to get
ahead of it.
Speaker 3 (33:13):
Yes, Rogan has also had his fair share of leftists
on you're Bernie Sanders, you're Edward Snowden's and a lot
of people like to cite the fact that Rogan supported
Sanders in twenty twenty, but the fact remains. Rogan has
said on many occasions that he books these guests himself,
and so the repeated visits of white supremacists on the
(33:34):
show is not an accident. It's been happening for over
ten years. I could trace it back to twenty thirteen.
And while he still hasn't been a proper guest on
the show, someone who comes up a lot on the
Joe Rogan Experience is one Andrew Tait. And we'll come
back to Rogan and the podcast inspired by him in
(33:55):
a little bit, but we're going to take a detour
to Andrew Tait, a male suprema currently under house arrest
in Romania. So if you had the pleasure of not
being aware of this guy until this moment, you might
be like, what's happening in Romania? And the answer is
worse than you could possibly imagine. No conversation about contemporary
(34:15):
Manisphere influencers would be complete without discussing Andrew Tait. Next
to Jordan Peterson and the Fresh and Fit podcast. This
is the name that's come up in most of my
interviews about significant Manisphere influencers among young people.
Speaker 2 (34:30):
Specifically, I talked.
Speaker 3 (34:31):
To a middle school teacher who is beside themselves about
how frequently they'd find their students engaging with his content.
The content is like this.
Speaker 13 (34:41):
Life for a man is harder than life for a woman.
We need to have a lot of shit to be
an important man. To be a woman, you need makeup.
If you're truly beautiful, you don't need anything else. I've
been on boats in Dubai with nineteen year old Muldovan girls.
The guy who got that boat needed one hundred million dollars.
That bitch makeup.
Speaker 7 (34:59):
Never say you go in to bed.
Speaker 8 (35:00):
Going to bed is emasculine.
Speaker 2 (35:02):
Cowards need sleep.
Speaker 3 (35:04):
Well, I'm texting you, you beautiful girl, but I'm tired.
Speaker 12 (35:07):
I'm going to.
Speaker 2 (35:07):
Bed, you know.
Speaker 11 (35:08):
I like to say, at fucking court pass one in.
Speaker 13 (35:10):
The morning, I'm going to work, work at this time.
Speaker 2 (35:14):
Money never sleeps, baby.
Speaker 12 (35:15):
Then I go to bed, and.
Speaker 13 (35:16):
The most beautiful girls in the world are not walking
around shopping centers in England or fucking Nebraska or Idaho
or wherever you dorks do your day game.
Speaker 11 (35:24):
So I people go.
Speaker 2 (35:25):
I picked up a nine at the mall. There's no
nines in that mall, you fucking moro.
Speaker 13 (35:30):
I could sit outside that mall for a month and
analyze every single chicken walks in there. And I'll see
a single nine and you're telling me every weekend you
go find the only nine in the mall.
Speaker 14 (35:40):
Do you fuck she's a five and you're desperate.
Speaker 2 (35:44):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (35:46):
Tate, as you can hear, is pretty high on the
extremist scale, joining the cadre of Manosphere influencers who explicitly
advocate for assault and rolling back women's rights. Beginning as
a kickboxer and Big Brother contestant, and Tates' popularity steeply
increased throughout the twenty tens through overtly misogynist ventures like
(36:06):
Hustler's University and The Pillthinking driven the real world and
to get back to Romania. This past summer, he was
arrested there for charges of rape, human trafficking, and forming
an organized crime group to traffic women, and the investigation
has since been expanded to include charges of trafficking miners
(36:27):
and money laundering. He is literally under house arrest for
rape right now, and his content is still very popular
among children, and the Tates of the world definitely need
the Joe Rogans of the world to survive, because, yes,
seeing this unhinged man could be appealing to a kid
on its own, but to see that same unhinged man
(36:50):
being validated as worth talking about with a prominent, well
recognized figure is a legitimizing move. And again to draw
a line, and that's what the I'm just asking questions
corner of the manisphere really offers. It's easier for them
to remain mainstream while not getting arrested, but they are
(37:11):
open to these ideas. Okay, we're in twenty eighteen. At
this time, other already existent corners of the manispheer continued
to pull in new recruits, and as I'll discuss, the
manisphere expanded in every subcommunity in cells, men's rights activists,
pick up artists, men going their own way, and even
(37:32):
subgroups among these categories. And what I find particularly dangerous
is that both these creators and social media algorithms became
very good at finding young people who fit the bill
as being susceptible to this content, Young people who are
insecure in their bodies or lacking in real life spaces
(37:53):
and support systems to turn their head another way. And remember,
this is an issue that's just as much driven by
social issues as it is by algorithms. Algorithms are powerful tools,
but the ideology is the real weapon here. Economic disparity
fuels the manisphere. Like I mentioned earlier, most Manisphere participants
are encouraged to see themselves in relation to their quote
(38:16):
unquote value and success. And in an increasingly difficult economy
where men are trained to project and blame this economic
insecurity on women, well you can see how it can
get bad pretty quickly. And so for young men who
felt socially awkward or sometimes were neurodivergent, these spaces could
become tremendously appealing.
Speaker 2 (38:38):
And that's not even to mention how young.
Speaker 3 (38:41):
People are targeted at In the era of the iPad kid,
we see algorithms and influencers target kids as young as
ten years old, according to Manisphere influencer Andrew England in
a leaked Best Social Media Practices document in the early
twenty twenties.
Speaker 2 (38:58):
And this is extreamist group that is targeting children. So
why can't we call this what it is? Extreme?
Speaker 3 (39:06):
Misogynist groups were very slow to be classified overtly as
hate groups, and their crimes were almost never called out
for what the killers like Elliott Roger were explicitly telling
us that they were. The Southern Poverty Law Center was
the first to add male supremacy onto their registry of
Hate Groups, and that wasn't until twenty eighteen. And while
(39:28):
this was a step forward, it's a bit concerning that
it took that long, given that the SPLC had been
well aware of these spaces since twenty twelve, but resisted
classifying them as hate groups for half a decade. According
to SPLC's Arthur Goldwag in twenty.
Speaker 6 (39:44):
Twelve, it should be mentioned that the SPLC did not
label MRAs as members of a hate movement, nor did
our article claim that the grievances they air on their websites,
false rape accusations, ruinous divorce settlements and the like are
all without merit, but we did call out specific examples
(40:05):
of misogyny and the threat overt or implicit of violence.
Speaker 3 (40:10):
And while these institutions lagged to acknowledge what the Manisphere
had become, others took it upon themselves to try and
slow its spread. Following the twenty sixteen election and the
(40:35):
Me Too movement, there was a series of online creators
and thinkers who were beginning to see the Manisphere for
what it was, increasing in both toxicity and size, and
a space that needed to be deradicalized. If there was
any chance of decreasing its influence. There were many people
doing this work at the time, but I'm going to
hone in on the YouTuber who I've heard most commonly
(40:57):
cited by young men who were deradicalized around this time
and in the years since. Contra points a very talented
creator who is no stranger to being a main character herself.
I watched these videos at the time they were released, too,
and they're extremely good.
Speaker 2 (41:15):
Natalie, when the channel's ou.
Speaker 3 (41:17):
Tour and researcher, brought the perspective of a transwoman to
the conversation and acknowledged that when she was living and
being socially conditioned as a man, that she found the
in cell and other irony pill p hate forums appealing
because of the validation it gave her of her discomfort
in her own body and an answer for why she
was so frustrated. Of course, this answer was not true.
(41:41):
Once Natalie began to explore her gender, identify as non binary,
and eventually came out as a transwoman, she was world
happier than she was living as a man who hated women.
Using this experience, in addition to incredible research, talent delivery,
and oh my God aesthetics. Natalie was able to bring
personal experience in an impressive amount of thoughtfulness regarding these groups,
(42:06):
and critically, she knew how to speak their language. To
give you an idea of how these videos were structured,
here's a clip from in Cells, a twenty eighteen video
that has six million views at the time of this writing.
Speaker 12 (42:19):
The word in cell refers to a more specific community
of mostly heterosexual men centered around forums like incell, dot
me and r slash brain Cells. This group has recently
gotten a lot of bad press because for the last
few years they've been churning out mass murderers faster than
Marvel can make Avengers movies. But most in cells aren't
violent killers. They're just men who've formed an identity around
(42:41):
not getting laid. In this video, I don't want to
mock in cells, or lecture them, or even sympathize with them.
I just want to understand who they are and why
they're like this.
Speaker 3 (42:50):
Natalie Winn's strategy was extremely successful at the time because,
unlike so many media outlets that were ignoring or miscovering
the issue, she understood that to reach disaffected in cells
it was ultimately an algorithmic game. So in order to
get her videos seen, she was using the same hashtags,
the same aesthetics, the same language that extremist in cell
(43:13):
videos were, and she had a lot of success in
covertly infiltrating the YouTube algorithms of the insel curious and
effectively showing them some empathy and encouraging them to know
themselves better versus you know, signing a Sea Org style
infinity contract to hate women forever. And this turned into
a series of videos that got the ContraPoints channel a
(43:34):
lot of attention, but became too large of a burden
for one person, and so eventually she moved on to
other topics. And besides, her algorithmic strategy only worked as
long as.
Speaker 2 (43:44):
That was the way that the algorithm was.
Speaker 3 (43:47):
As we've talked about countless times on this show, the
YouTube algorithm was all but unmonitored in the mid to
late twenty tens and was very difficult to do well consistently.
Within Natalie successful algorithm infiltration and validates a consistent truth
in the manisphere. YouTube is an integral part of it.
After all, YouTube is now more popular than standard television
(44:11):
among young men, and as of the early twenty twenties
was the most used site in the world. I don't
think the fact that Rogan began his podcast on YouTube
all the way back in two thousand and nine is
any coincidence. Maybe a lucky mistake, but what his ideology
became makes it clear that the YouTube algorithm that favors
(44:31):
his guest with extreme or weird views has worked consistently.
Speaker 2 (44:35):
And make no mistake, YouTube's.
Speaker 3 (44:37):
Algorithm was also a part of why Manisphere spaces were
so successful at bringing new people in at higher rates
in the mid to late twenty tens, and I want
to be careful here and not blame this growth of
the Manisphere on the algorithm wholesale. In our interview last week,
Beccaluis emphasized that this spirit of misogyny was already very
(45:00):
much normalized. But what algorithms can do by serving users
the same shit over and over and over is make
a user's worst instinct seem like a far more mainstream
opinion than it actually is. If your algorithm is flooded
with Manisphere content and you don't fully understand how that
algorithm works, it's easy to envision a world where a
(45:23):
kid can think, oh, everyone must feel this way. Studies
now indicate that changes to the YouTube algorithm made in
twenty nineteen have pretty effectively slowed the unhinged radicalization phase
we heard talked about so much during the twenty sixteen
election cycle and beyond. But it won't surprise you to
hear that this happened, let's say, about half a decade
(45:45):
too late.
Speaker 2 (45:46):
It's great that.
Speaker 3 (45:47):
The algorithm is no longer directly targeting people to be radicalized,
but once someone is radicalized, as ContraPoints discusses in her videos,
it takes a lot of time and effort to undo that.
And it's no surprise that in those years of algorithmic
infinite growth from the highest up at YouTube, the value
of their platform skyrocketed, going from a valuation of one
(46:11):
point seven billion in twenty twelve two fifteen billion in
twenty nineteen, and its value has only continued to rise
from there. Fixing and tweaking the algorithm is good, but
let's not give them a shred of credits. YouTube waited
until bad pr via lawsuits and public pressure made it
(46:34):
advantageous to change their algorithm, certainly not when they first
became aware of it. And remember, as Andrew England said
people in the Manisphere were targeting young men specifically, and
men ages eighteen to forty nine want more YouTube than
they do anything else. I regret to inform you that
we are still in twenty eighteen because another inflection point
(46:55):
in the US for the Manisphere was the Brett Kavanaugh hearings.
I and probably you remember these vividly. I was sitting
next to producer of this show, Sophie Lichterman, at work
during these hearings, as a woman named Christine blasi Ford
came forward to accuse Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.
Speaker 8 (47:15):
I believed he was going to rape me. I tried
to yell for help. When I did, Brett put his
hand over my mouth to stop me from yelling. This
is what terrified me the most and has had the
most lasting impact on my life. It was hard for
me to breathe, and I thought that Brett was accidentally
(47:37):
going to kill me.
Speaker 3 (47:38):
Unlike many aspects of the Me Too movement, most manashre
forum spaces met this moment with unbelievable cruelty, but others,
the just asking questions guys took a slightly softer approach.
Sure it's possible that Brett Kavanaugh is a rapist, but
what if there's some ulterior motive as to why Ford
(47:59):
came forward. Here's Rogan around this time.
Speaker 5 (48:03):
Like I'm fascinated by these Kavanaugh hearings, like I watched
little clips of it before. I just have to tune
out and talk away from Mary talk about fuckery. I mean,
I don't know what that dude did or what he
didn't do, but I think what's happening is more than that.
Speaker 3 (48:17):
Again, there's no one way that these spaces approach big
cultural moments like this. Everyone in the media had something
to say about the Kavanaugh hearings, and it remains a
cultural touch point to the extent that a secretly Republican
spinning instructor in Maine jump scared my entire class last
summer when she began to play a Kavanaugh testimony house
(48:40):
music remix. I'm serious, by the way, spinning is that sexy,
weirdly Christian stationary bike thing.
Speaker 4 (48:47):
Which I gladly do, in which I fully embrace working.
Speaker 11 (48:51):
Out, automatic, whacking out automatic, the Catholic all girls' schools
automatic still is.
Speaker 3 (49:02):
I will never understand in any case. The manosphere mocked, harassed,
and doxed Christine Blasi Ford, lamenting that this moment was
yet another example of what feminists were trying to take
from them, which is interesting because Brett Kavanagh was sworn
in and has gone on to vote in such horrific
legislations such as overturning Roe v. Wade, voting yes on
(49:24):
Grant's pass, a recent Supreme Court decision that makes being
unhoused and arrestable offense, and of course the presidential immunity
that I'm sure will not at all benefit his homie
Donald Trump in his upcoming eternity term. And this testimony
came less than a year after the Me Too movement began,
so consider how quickly the public tone changed. The questions
(49:48):
that Christine Blasi Ford endured from an all male Republican
committee pretty closely reflected that of Anita Hill's experience all
the way back in nineteen ninety one, after Hill had
leveraged Alleghani of assault and harassment against Supreme Court Justice
Clarence Thomas. And I'm resisting getting into how mad these
decisions make me, but the point is the institution one here. Yes,
(50:13):
it was challenged and Ford received a lot of support,
but Kavanaugh was sworn in and went on to enforce
all the far right policies that antagonize anyone less marginalized
than himself as intended. But the minisphere continues to cite
this hearing as a public humiliation. That is a problem.
So why are they doing that. I'm not saying anything
(50:35):
new here, but I firmly believe it's because being called
out for their abuse of women is embarrassing for men.
The aggressor is afraid of being made to feel small,
and the person who is an object to them is
afraid of being killed.
Speaker 2 (50:49):
And the more marginalized.
Speaker 3 (50:50):
They are, this risk increases. But by this time the
Overton window for the American public.
Speaker 2 (50:57):
Had clearly shifted right.
Speaker 3 (51:00):
American men pulled before and after the Ford testimony generally
said that women were more likely to scapegoat and harm
the lives of the careers of men than they had
been before. You didn't need to be an active part
of the manisphere to be profoundly affected by it. And
there's more to the manisphere historically that we could get into.
(51:21):
We could talk about the right leaning or far right
communities that have significant overlap with the manisphere. Flat earthers QAnon.
I could keep going, but we'd be here for six hours,
and I promised this series would be the basics. So
let's get back to Joe Rogan. In twenty twenty, Broken
Show was popular enough to pull the biggest podcast deal
(51:44):
in history, a two hundred million dollar exclusivity deal with
Spotify that quite literally changed the medium forever. Thanks for
fucking nothing, but he was just that big at the time.
He averaged around eleven million listeners in episode across platform
while welcoming guests like Ben Shapiro and Dan Crenshaw and
(52:05):
Tony Hawk. That's nice, but it's no coincidence that Rogan
never had to pivot to video the way that many
podcasts are struggling to now. Rogan was pulling more from
the traditional radio setups that had launched early Manisphere figures
like Rush Limbaugh and seamlessly made it work for a
new technological landscape. Another great example of this is Charlemagne
(52:26):
the Gods blockbuster radio show The Breakfast Club, which began
as a radio show around the same time that Rogan
premiered in twenty ten and then became a nationally syndicated
show in twenty thirteen and expanded to the Internet with
a lot of success, and yes, Charlemagne platforms a lot
of the same misogynist and particularly homophobic and transphobic messaging
(52:48):
that's characteristic across the manisphere.
Speaker 2 (52:51):
What about interns here she said that you make music
for gays, I do. I'm not. The Internet looked at me.
Speaker 6 (53:00):
With that nothing, So no, I'm saying now, I mean
it's not specifically for that audience.
Speaker 2 (53:06):
You just make music, right.
Speaker 3 (53:08):
I guess that was Azalia Banks. We don't have time
and there were plenty of imitators pulling from the Rogan
Charlemagne playbook, including Theo Vaughn, another stand up who hosted
a string of podcasts over the course of a decade
before he started his own I'm Just a Guy Asking
Questions video podcast to tremendous success. And so by the
(53:30):
time Donald Trump is doing this speed run of I'm
Just Asking question manisphere podcasters in twenty twenty four, UFC
founder Dana White gives a specific list of people to
think in this space during Trump's acceptance event.
Speaker 14 (53:50):
I want to thank some people real quick. I want
to thank the Note Boys, Aiden Ross, Theo Vaughn, Bustle
with the Boys, and last but not least the mighty
and powerful Joe Rogan.
Speaker 3 (54:04):
And this is fascinating because, based on what I have
learned and talked to other people about, these shows don't
represent the Manisphere as it's existed in the last ten years,
but rather expands the definition of the Manisphere to include
male dominated, misogyny fueled media spaces that have explicitly endorsed
(54:24):
or share the values of Donald Trump. Trump is now
inextricable from this space, and that would be an inconceivable
way to describe the Manisphere a decade ago, but I
think that that's probably how we'll hear it referred to
moving forward. And all of these men have experienced gaming
the algorithm online. The Nilk Boys began as highly successful prankvloggers,
(54:47):
much like fellow Trump supporters Jake and Logan. Paul Aiden
Ross is a twenty something edge lord gaming streamer who
got booted off Twitch for saying slurs, hosted white supremacist
Nick Quentez on his streams, and is a close personal
friend of Andrew Tate himself. Trump's appearances ranged from the
guys asking questions like Rogan and Theovaughn, to the full
(55:09):
blown extremists like Aiden Ross, and while it's fully possible
that a handful of these guys might be deplatforms someday,
if there's anything that this space has demonstrated to me
is that when one manisphere influencers fall, three pop out
of nowhere to take this fallen figure's place. And when
people talk about building their own Joe Rogan or whatever
(55:30):
the fuck, that's not possible for so many reasons, the
primary of which is that the left just does not
have the money that the far right does. Taylor Lorenz
made this point explicit in an election post mortem in
User mag writing, the conservative media landscape in the United
States is exceptionally well funded, meticulously constructed, and highly coordinated.
(55:54):
Wealthy donors, packs and corporations with a vested interest in
preserving or expanding conservative policies strategically invest in right wing
media channels and up and coming content creators. This creates
a well oiled pipeline for conservative influencers. Young TikTokers, YouTubers,
live streamers, or podcasters are discovered, developed, and pushed to
(56:14):
larger platforms, often with the financial backing of conservative billionaires
or organizations on the right who have long recognized the
content creator industry as a valuable means of shaping public
opinion and policy. Look, I didn't say it was encouraging news.
YouTube remains the most popular place for this, but as
streaming platforms continue to become more successful, so did the
(56:35):
extremists that populate them. Look no further than the top
ten streamers on Twitch the night of the election, with
only one left leaning creator, a snpiker, obviously getting meaningful
numbers while the rest were right wing streams. And if
you get deep platform from Twitch, no problem. There's a
right wing alternative in the form of Kick, where Aidan
(56:56):
Ross had to switch to after his third twitchban. So
I know that this was a lot of information, But
how I see this space moving forward? This new manisphere
is going to exist with a gradient. At its most extreme,
it's full on take the women's right to vote and
get them back in the home style male supremacy, And
(57:17):
at its most mild, it's taking those.
Speaker 2 (57:19):
Same people and saying, I don't know, let's hear what
he has to say.
Speaker 3 (57:23):
Misogyny will remain the bait because a dismissal of women
has always been generally socially acceptable, and so many creators,
along with the algorithms who push them will essentially test
the waters of someone's ideology by introducing misogyny. Oh you
watched a full video about how the me too movement
(57:43):
went too far? Maybe you'll watch this video, Maybe you'll
join this community.
Speaker 2 (57:48):
And it's not said enough. Most won't, but some will.
Speaker 3 (57:53):
And the more this content is pushed, the more likely
it is that young men will give it a try.
So is there any fucking hope of navigating out of this?
On Thursday I will talk to two experts who have
spent years asking that same question. My conversations with ft
Signifier and Robert Evans. Up next on Into the MANI Sphere.
(58:21):
Sixteenth Minute is a production of Whole Zone Media and Iheartwordopps.
Speaker 2 (58:25):
It is written, posted, and produced by me Jamie Lostus.
Speaker 3 (58:29):
Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans. The
amazing Ian Johnson is our supervising producer and our editor.
Speaker 2 (58:37):
Our theme song is by Sad thirteen. Voice acting is
from Grant, Crater and Pet.
Speaker 3 (58:42):
Shout outs to our dog producer Anderson, my Kats Flee
and Casper and my pet Rothbert, who will outlive us all.
Speaker 2 (58:49):
Bye
Host
Jamie Loftus
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