Transcripts / Men
Introduction
Hi boys! It's me again, just your average girl. Look I may be a biological female, but I do hope that just for this video we're able to converse as men. I want you to think back to 2016, which I know in internet years is like halfway between now and the decline of Rome. Do you like history, boys? How did Rome fall again? Was it “the gays”? Tell me all about it. Back in 2016 the big internet culture war was between feminists on one side and men's rights activists on the other. Whatever happened to that? These days it's as dead a meme as… I don't know, Harambe.
I did want to do the fedora though. Every YouTuber who's ever covered the men's rights movement has done the fedora, and I wanted to put my own little twist on it. My wardrobe notes for this video say "MRA femme fatale", and "fedora but make it fashion." School shooter realness. I feel like I'm also serving a little… red-pilled Carmen Sandiego? 🕵️♀️
In this video I wanna ask in all seriousness, what are we going to do about men? Because no offense, but as a group… you guys kind of seem like you're not doing okay. Could a group of people who are purchasing uncucked alpha yogurt possibly be subsisting in a state of psychological balance? Fellas, are regular bowel movements gay? I guess yeah, kind of. You don't see a whole lot of psyllium husk in heterosexual medicine cabinets. I'm losing my target audience here.
Listen my dudes, let's just say I'm kinda worried about you guys. And I'm not saying I'm any better. To be clear, I'm not okay either. There's like 15 jars of urine in my refrigerator right now. Yeah, that's right. Women pee too okay? Get over it. I'm so sorry if this offends your male notions of feminine delicacy, but I for one will not be shamed by your patriarchal bullshit.
You boys, you're very rational, aren't you? Ugh, I suppose I was too. I admit that these days rationality, it's something I struggle with, both as a biological female and as a Pisces moon. But when I decided I wanted to make a video for men, ContraPoints: For Him. I started brushing up on my reasoning skills because I wanna be so fucking rational for you.
So to prepare for this video I read Newton's "Principia Mathematica", Wittgenstein's "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus", and of course the philosophical classic "The Rational Male" by Rollo Caliente. So my mind is well-lubricated and I'm ready for what I have no doubt will be a penetrating intellectual interchange. Look, I wanna play by your rules, okay? So there will be no emotions in this video. I will present my arguments in strict logical form, relying only on facts, reason, evidence, and deductive proof.
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Actually, you know what? Fuck that. Let's listen to house music and do sex drugs!
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I'm pandering to the male gaze! 😉
Oh, and the male straights. God I love attention! Hey gorg. Hey gorg. Hey gooooorg.
Okay I'm ready. Let's crack open a cold one boys. My hands are too pretty to open the can. I need a man to do it for me. Heeeeellllllllpp. Fuck it. 🍾
Okay, that's superfuckinggreat. Hey gorg. Hey gorg. If there are any women still watching this video, I'm really sorry about all this. Unless you're into that sort of thing, in which case how very dare. I'm a good Presbyterian. And by Presbyterian, I do mean pansexual heyhowareyou.
Look, the video's about men so I'm trying to be attractive to men. Am I doing this right? Is this what men like? Trap straps! It is a risky look for a girl like me. When you do a lingerie look you know you're gonna wind up somewhere on the Frank-N-Furter/Violet Chachki/Dita von Teese spectrum, oh but you don't know where exactly. And that is a dangerous game ladies. I have to say though, I actually am feeling pretty fucking empowered right now. But umm… that could be because of the drugs. Look, gentlemen, let's be rational. No more fooling around okay?
Part one– oh wait. Rational.
I
Axiom One: America's Next Top Victim
I think there is some truth to the idea that we live in a victimhood culture. And I'm not just talking about campus SJWs with their microaggressions. No bitch, this goes all the way to the top.
We have white people whining about “reverse racism”. We have the literal 1% complaining about "anti-rich prejudice". That must be super fucking hard for you. We have the heterosexual agenda organizing straight pride parades. You know, flaunting their sexuality in the faces of children who are trying to raise a family and protesting in the street like a bunch of ****. And so of course because there was women's rights, there has to be men's rights too.
I've been hearing about men's rights for my whole adult life, and I've always been very skeptical. Because in my experience online men's rights activism in practice always looks like this. Women try to do a good thing to solve a real problem, and then a man shows up to say “well what about men? Men also get harassed. Why aren't you talking about men?" And is this man actually involved in activism to stop harassment against men? Of course he's fucking not. He doesn't give a shit. He's a troll. His contribution to the conversation begins and ends with "what about men?" What about them, honey?
For this video I decided to actually do some research for once. And the first thing I did was read the foundational text of the modern men's rights movement, which is "The Myth of Male Power" by Warren Farrell. Actually I listened to the audiobook, cause let's be honest reading is hard. But as I was listening, I admit I thought it made more sense than I was expecting it to.
Basically, Farrell says that second-wave feminists rightly fought against the traditional gender role that confined women to domestic servitude. But, he argues that the feminist idea that men have all the power in society is actually an illusion, because the traditional gender role for men is just as oppressive. He introduces the idea of male disposability, basically the idea that society values female lives more than male lives, which are seen as expendable in the service of protecting and providing for women and children. And he points to statistics showing that men make up the majority of military casualties, workplace fatalities, murder victims, suicides, and so on.
So we're supposed to conclude that even though at first it looks like men have more power than women, in fact the “queens” have a certain kind of privilege in being protected and provided for by the expendable male worker bees. And I guess that kind of makes sense, I feel like I can at least empathize with the point of view.
What I'm saying is, I took the red pill. And I rubbed it on my cliiiiiiit. 💊
But some initial objections come to mind. Like, haven't men been almost all of the kings, presidents, and CEOs for millennia? Didn't men make up all these rules in the first place? I don't know boys. Still seems kinda patriarchal to me. But maybe you'll say that it's only at the top of society that men have more power than women. Maybe the average man is also oppressed by this system that feminists call patriarchy. If that's what you're saying, I think I basically agree with that.
See, what you have to understand about me is I am such a fucking Libra. Whenever there's a conflict my gut reaction is to be like “well, maybe everybody's right. And maybe there's good points on both sides and we should all just listen to each other and rub each other's cliiiiiiits.”
But no, my Scorpio-rising persona will not allow that. Oh, there will be a champion, there will be blood. So, judges, how do we decide which gender is America's next top victim? I mean, it's not like you can just change genders and see how the other half lives. Or can you? 🤔
II
Proposition Two: Diary of an Ex-Man.
✍️“Dear Diary, with every false smile I conceal that on the inside I'm drowning in darkness!” Mom! Get out of my room. Ugh, You're ruining my life!
Look. I've never, ever talked about this on my channel before so this is like a super fucking vulnerable moment for me, but I was born a boy. Well, was I ever really a boy? It's hard to say.
✍️“Dear Diary, growing up I always knew that I was different from other kids, especially other boys. And it took me so long to pinpoint what it was, but there was this moment. I must have been what, seven, eight years old? And I was playing in my parents' room all by myself and I saw this pair of my mom's shoes lying on the floor, and I don't know what it was, it was like this magnetism that drew me to them. And I put my little feet in them, and walked in front of the mirror, and I didn't really have the words yet to describe how I felt but… basically in that moment I sensed that God had made a mistake, and I was destined to be… to be a crossdresser!” That is super fucking coconuts. 🥥
Anyway then in my 20’s my life completely fell apart and I became a woman heyhowareyou? I became one of… the dolls. My plastic surgeon is an artist. Look boys, the point I'm trying to make here is, I used to live your lifestyle. I know what people like you get up to, and I think it's disgusting! I gotta say though, since I transitioned my life has been super fucking great. Like, way better. Now of course a lot of that is not because women have it better than men, but, because hey gorg! I am literally transgendered! ⚧
So before I transitioned I was dying inside. You know I was in the wrong body. And now… it's like I finally have the body I was meant to die inside of! But it's not just that. I do think that, in some ways, since I started presenting as a woman people actually do treat me better. I mean they take my opinions less seriously sure, but, that's probably for the best. 🙃
Now before using my personal experience as any kind of evidence, I guess I should say a couple caveats. Caveat one is that most pre-transition trans women are “not like other boys”, and most of us were not living the business-class male experience by any means. You know, it's a lot of drunk melancholics, tormented sissies, secretive transvestites, poets, you know, that sort of thing.
Caveat two is that MY trans experience is not THE trans experience, and I do have a lot of other privileges that made things go super fucking well for me heyhowareyou? Don't you just love it when someone checks their privilege in a way that's actually just bragging?
You know it's super important for me to acknowledge that I've been so successful and I've come so far, in part because I'm white, and I'm skinny, and I'm young, and I'm blonde, and I'm rich, and I pass, and I'm educated, and I'm popular, and my plastic surgeon is an artist, and my boyfriend is really rich and hot, and I come from a pure Aryan bloodline. And part of what makes me so enlightened and so compassionate is that I'm able to recognize these privileges that I have that just might not be available to people who are less fortunate.
ᶠʳᵒᵐ ᵗʰᵉ ᵇᵒᵗᵗᵒᵐ ᵒᶠ ᵐʸ ᵐᵒᵗʰᵉʳᶠᵘᶜᵏⁱⁿᵍ ᵃⁿᵈ ᵐʸ ᶠᵃᵗʰᵉʳᶠᵘᶜᵏⁱⁿᵍ ʰᵉᵃʳᵗ ᵗʰᵃᵗ ᵐᵘˢᵗ ᵇᵉ ˢᵘᵖᵉʳ ᶠᵘᶜᵏⁱⁿᵍ ʰᵃʳᵈ ᶠᵒʳ ʸᵒᵘ ᴵ ᶜᵃⁿ'ᵗ ᵉᵛᵉⁿ ⁱᵐᵃᵍⁱⁿᵉ.
What I was saying is, there are ways that people treat me better now that I'm presenting as a woman. You know people smile at me more. I feel more taken care of. Men do things for me! Now a lot of women don't like men doing things for them. You know holding doors, helping with luggage, because they feel that it's infantalizing or condescending. But not me. I love it. Both because I love attention, and because I am a recumbent queen who's too much of a delicate flower to lift a finger. I do this thing on airplanes where when it's time for me to put my carry-on luggage in the overhead bin, I pretend that my bag is too heavy for me to lift, and then some man will usually get up and do it for me, even though I'm taller than most men. It makes me happy! (◠‿◠✿)
Another good thing about becoming a woman is I integrated more into female social groups, and I found that they provide a kind of communal support and overt affection that male social groups generally just don't. I find the female social style suits me better than the male one, which tends to be more atomized, more individualist, where affection is always concealed behind this semi-jokey front of competition. Like, think about the way boys talk to each other when they're playing video games.
A third improvement for me has to do with the way men and women are treated differently in public space. When you present female in public, you're more likely to be treated as a spectacle to be commented upon. People, usually men, will just blurt out their opinions about you. Sometimes complimentary, sometimes insulting, sometimes just fucking weird.
Whereas when you present male in public, you're more likely to be treated either as invisible or as dangerous. Now feminists have traditionally interpreted these differences as men asserting dominance over women in public space, and they've criticized catcalling as being objectifying, degrading, and misogynistic. And it certainly can be all of those things.
But there's different kinds of catcalling, and I have different feelings about them. If I'm walking with another woman, and a man says: "Ladies, you look beautiful tonight." I don't know, I like that. I think that's nice. It makes me feel seen, it makes me feel admired. It boosts my confidence. Whereas, if I'm walking alone and a drunk starts following me down the street singing: "Have you seen Polythene Pam? She's so good looking but she looks like a man!" That, I am less enthusiastic about. I mean not that that's ever happened. I'm completely fucking unclockable heyhowareyou...
♪ No one knows what it's like ♪ To be a sad tran ♪ 🌧
I definitely get where feminists are coming from because street harassment sucks. I'm a lot more afraid walking alone at night than I used to be, and there's a lot more places I just won't go by myself. But on the other hand, I do now enjoy being able to walk down the street at night without other people acting afraid of me.
I think a lot of feminists have failed to imagine the ways that being treated as invisible or dangerous can also kind of suck. In my video on “Incels” I talked about male invisibility on dating apps, and how getting no attention at all can actually be emotionally worse than getting a lot of shitty attention.
And when it comes to being treated as dangerous; when I was living as a man, sometimes if I was walking at night, a woman on the same block as me would change sides of the street. And I totally get why. Men do scary shit sometimes, and it's better to be safe. But it still stung a little bit to be treated as dangerous by default. I think it can actually be harmful, which becomes clearer if we add race into the equation. There's ways that white women's fear can actually be dangerous, in particular to Black men.
I had an experience with this recently when I was filming my video "The Apocalypse" and I'd rented a room in a hotel casino. Around midnight I was carrying some camera equipment up to my room, and I got into the elevator with a group of people from the casino floor. A couple floors up, everyone got out of the elevator except for me and a single Black man.
Well, I mean he was alone. But I don't know if he was single, that's not part of the story.
And as soon as the door closed, he started literally whistling “Row, Row, Row Your Boat”, the official melody of performative innocence. And I realized “oh shit, he's afraid that I'm afraid”. And I found that just excruciating. I was like, "oh God. How do other white women behave in elevators?" Do they like, clutch their purses? That's so fucking embarrassing.
Nothing like that had ever happened to me when I was living as a man. It's not a thing between Black men and white men. It's a thing between Black men and white women. And so that dynamic was there not just because I'm white and he's Black, but because I'm a woman and he's a man. And I thought of that incident again when I was listening to "The Myth of Male Power" and Farrell says:
"Men's greatest weakness is their facade of strength, and women's greatest strength is their facade of weakness."
I think there is some truth to the idea that women's perceived vulnerability can make them powerful, and men's perceived power can make them vulnerable. Now I hope you're taking all of this with a grain of salt, because these are just some little observations I've made based on a handful of anecdotes. And as rational males it's important that we consider the facts, the stats, and the figures.
Did you know that 46% of men are at least 2.8 times different than 73% of women? Look it up. I haven't. 📊
I guess my super fucking Libra opinion is that there's upsides and downsides to male and female experience. I don't actually think there's a single definite answer to the vague and useless question "which gender has it worse?" I consider myself a feminist because I support reproductive rights, and I oppose workplace misogyny, and I generally agree with a lot of the activism that happens under the heading of feminism.
But I also think a lot of men are just having a super fucking difficult time right now, and that must be super fucking hard for them heyhowareyou. And I don't think feminists have an obligation to care about male angst, but I care about you boys.
God I'm such a cool girl, I think the entire mid-Atlantic region is about to freeze over. No I'm just a super fucking empathetic Pisces moon, and I really try to understand other people's pain because… I just find it really, really funny. I'm also really, really sobering up here. The drugs have worn off, and I am suddenly feeling very naked. Like it's just now occurring to me that this is a highly inappropriate outfit for this occasion. So, I'm gonna go put on a robe and I'll meet you back for the next section.
III
Postulate Three: The Man Question.
Hi boys, et cetera, et cetera. Heyhowareyou?
For the last three years on this channel I have been your Virgil, leading you through gender hell. Pick-up artists, gender dysphoria, incels, radical feminists, non-binary genders, men's rights activists. It seems like everybody's having gender trouble. So what do we make of that?
Well gorg, a very, very rational male philosopher named Hegel once said that the unfolding of history is a basically rational process gorg. That means that at any time in history society is based on certain principles, like all men are created equal–as long as they're super fucking white and rich. And there's always contradictions within those principles, which creates tension and eventually leads to a rupture like a revolution, where society has to be reorganized according to new principles.
At least, I think he was saying something like that. It's pretty hard to make anything out through the fog of his unreadable, hyper-abstract, man-jabbering. God I can't stand that shit or any of the other music-hating volcels of the male philosophical tradition.
My point is, I think our society has reached a place where gender as we know it just isn't working anymore. Now no one seems to agree why it isn't working or how to fix it, but we do all agree that it's broken. We have mainstream feminists saying we need to continue advancing the rights of women. We have conservatives saying we need to restore the gender roles of the 1950’s. We have an increasing number of people not identifying as men or women. We have TERFs who think that the transgenders are the single greatest threat to civilization heyhowareyou? And we have men's rights activists saying we need a male equivalent to feminism to liberate men from their oppressive gender role.
Now I wanna focus on that last one, because in principle I agree. I've spent a lot of the last three years covering the manosphere– I know such a feminine topic, love that for me. And from all the time I've tortured myself wading through these communities of incels, pick-up artists, men's rights slacktivists, intellectual dark web fanboys, and alt-right racists I've noticed that they all have one thing in common. Which is that they all recruit from the same massive pool of sad young men.
We all know the archetype. He has trouble relating to women. He has no strong friendship group. He's not excited about any long-term goals, and he fills the void with video games and porn. And just to clarify, I'm not trying to take away your video games and porn. I'm not telling you what to do with your penis.
You can rub one out to this video for all I care. Just don't pull a Gamergate on me okay? I live in fear. 🙃
Look, I like to believe that until the red-pillers inject their poison, most of these boys are not bad people. I think this all originates in a genuine crisis of male identity. And I think it's happened in something like the way men's rights activists describe. The sacrificial role of men as warriors is no longer widely glorified or necessary. The traditional protector/provider role of men is being replaced by a more equal and undefined gender dynamic. And college professors and activists are telling men that most of our culture's aspirational representations of manhood are toxic and bad.
But without an attractive replacement vision of aspirational manhood, average young men can only imagine their future as... what? The beta. The cuck. The nu male. And in a post-LeftTube internet we're so used to laughing at this vocabulary. And to be fair it is very funny. But we forget– especially us grills, that for a lot of men these words actually do tap into a deep, existential angst. And a lot of leftists go "well how can men be so angsty, especially white men? They're so privileged".
But existential angst is often a disease of privilege. If you're actually being oppressed you have a struggle. You have something to fight for, and therefore a purpose. But for a lot of men, their lack of purpose puts them in search of a struggle. And that, along with the loneliness and the lack of a positive identity is what makes men vulnerable to recruitment by the manosphere groups and by the alt-right. And even worse, it seems to be a motivating factor for the small but growing number of young men who decide to pick up a gun and open fire in a shopping center.
There were two mass shootings during the weekend I was writing this video, resulting in 31 deaths. Both shooters were young white men, and one of them posted about the shooting on an alt-right image board. Now I don't pretend to fully understand the motives of mass shooters, but I don't think it's a coincidence that basically all of them are men.
One possible interpretation of the mass shooting epidemic is that these killers are trying to resurrect some horrible parody of ancient masculine glory, and therefore to be seen and recognized as men by unleashing Homeric violence in a fucking Walmart.
And of course there's also the racism of the alt-right killers, and the wounded sexual entitlement of the incel killers. But that racism and that sexual entitlement are learned, and men in the throes of a masculinity crisis are more receptive to learning it. So you can try to take down their forums, and ban their accounts, and deplatform their events, but as long as this male identity crisis goes on, I don't see any end to these problems.
IV
Theorem Four: What Do?
There's this media narrative that has emerged around me and around this channel. And by the way, the fact that there's any kind media narrative about this channel is super fucking coconuts. Because let's be real gorg, I just wanted to pour milk on my face and talk about the mouthfeel. 👄
But there's this media narrative that my role in the discourse is "de-radicalizing young alt-right men". And it's true that if you read the leftist YouTube fan subreddits, “I used to be alt-right” posts are so common they're considered cliché. And some of them cite me as an influence in changing their politics, which I love for them and I'm superfuckinghappy about it but it's also a lot of responsibility. They're… my boys.
And I worry about my boys. Because in reality it's not like they go from far-right extremists to complacent centrists. No, most of them go far left. A lot of them become communists or anarchists. So I watch them go from far to my right, to significantly to my left. It's not really de-radicalizing so much as re-radicalizing. And I think it's definitely an improvement, but I still worry it's not gonna be enough. I worry about my boys. Because I don't think that the left yet has a final solution to the man question– oh no, that was worded poorly.
You know there's kind of two options the left has for disillusioned men. The first is the Marxist promise of economic revolution. We say "well, actually yes you are oppressed. But you're oppressed because of your class, not your gender. So just join the revolution, It's gonna be super fucking crazy. We're gonna overthrow the bourgeoisie– meow meow. Smash, no voting, and then things will be better for you".
Now, I think that has a couple limitations. One, is that I look at the far left and I see a bunch of people who spend all their time accusing each other of abusing moderator privileges in closed Facebook groups. And I'm concerned that might not succeed at ending capitalism– meow meow.
Like, definitely vote for Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren or whoever. But if you're investing all of your hopes in a capital R “Revolution”, I worry that can become like waiting for Godot or waiting for the rapture. So we do need political change, but I feel like I'm failing my boys if I'm somehow giving them the idea that revolution is their only hope. Cause here's the other thing, even if we did succeed at ending capitalism there would still be gender. And my boys would still need some model of what it is to lead a good life as a man.
Now the other option the left has for disillusioned men is the feminist tranquilizer. We say "look, toxic masculinity is the reason you don't have room to express your feelings. And it's the reason you feel lonely and inadequate." So while feminism tells women "you hate your body and you're constantly doubting yourself because society did this to you and needs to change”, we kinda just tell men "you're lonely and suicidal because you're toxic. Stop it".
We tell them that they're broken without really telling them how to fix themselves. I think what we need is a new, positive ideal of manhood. Which I don't think is something that women cannot create for men, even if they wanted to. And honestly the best way for that to happen may actually be some kind of men's movement. But on the left the whole idea of a men's movement is basically taboo, because the men's movement we all know is basically just a backlash to feminism, and at worst it's just straight-up misogyny.
And look boys, I understand that being lectured about manspreading for most of 2015 was superfuckinghard for you and you're still mad about it. But posting endless outrage porn about false rape accusations and paternity fraud isn't actually gonna make life any better for you. Because yes, those things are horrible when they happen but they're not systemic issues that affect most men.
I think what would actually improve life for most men is a positive ideal of 21st century manhood, but that's not something I can give to you because in case you hadn't noticed, I'm literally a fucking woman. I can't mom you through this one boys, you're on your own. You have to help each other. So find each other in the comments section, meet up on Reddit, make friends, clean your room, leave the house, fuck each other. I don't know. It's worth a try. And failing that, you could always throw in the towel and become a woman. Worked for me! 😊