Cognitive Dissonance - Episode 918: The Men Who Want Women to Be Quiet

Episode Date: May 28, 2026

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/06/conservative-masculinism-misogyny/686939/?utm_source=reddit&utm_campaign=the-atlantic&utm_medium=social&utm_content=edit-promo

This episode of Cognitive Dissidence is brought to you by our patrons. You fucking rock. Be advised that this show is not for children, the faint of heart, or the easily offended. The explicit tag is there for a reason. Reporting live from Glorhol Studios in Chicago and beyond. This is Cognitive Dissence. Every episode we blasts anyone who gets in our way. We bring critical thinking, skepticism, and irreverence to any topic that makes the news.

makes it big or makes us mad. It's skeptical. It's political. And there is no welcome at. Today is Thursday. It's long form day, Cecil. It's like a holiday over here, cognitive distance.

Long form day. We've got a very, I was going to say good, but good's not the right adjective. Good is the wrong word. I don't know. We got accurate, well-written, fascinating, distressing.

article from the Atlantic. The men who want women to be quiet. A virulent form of misogyny has become the single most important force holding together the American right by Helen Lewis. This feels fucking important. Yeah.

I will say like the increase in open, open misogyny as a part of the current political theater as a force, like as a social force, as a social media force, is, like, it's ramping up in a way that, like,

is, is, it should define our era. Like, this is the, like, I can't think of anything else that's happening right now that is as fucking upsetting as this, because this affects, like, everybody. Yeah. Like, everybody loses in this equation, right? Yeah. Yeah. The men, The men don't win. The men who are even on the other side don't win. The one thing that I do take away from this, it's my hope. I know that there are some people who are pick me anti-feminists, right? There obviously are going to be a group of people and, you know, a lot of women, not a lot, but some women who will be very anti-feminist go along with this sort of patriarchal idea, this top-down, male-down system of thought and when. in which to govern and way in which to run a household,

etc, etc. But I am emboldened that we outnumber them. That's my hope, right? Is that there's enough people on the left that are, you know, that are male that also think that the patriarchy sucks and that, you know, women should have fucking equal rights in things. And there's enough of them as well as regular just want to have rights. women out there that it's we're all they're already women already outnumber men so if it's just a

if they get a boost too you should be able to outnumber them the problem is is you can't outpower them and we can't out motivate the way that these people motivate and what this article does i think the most the most important thing it does is it sort of turns on its head the idea that what got us here was a backlash racism from Obama. So what it says is that's a subset of what is essentially a war on women and a war that has been brewing for a long time where they have tricked a lot of impressionable young males into thinking that when someone else wins, you lose.

When someone else has something that should be yours. And they've done a good job of doing that. And the other things that are oppression also stem from this sort of masculine overdrive that was sort of kicked into place. Because if you look at the way in which Obama was elected twice, but then look at the reason why Hillary wasn't, I think that might explain to you why it was. There might be a case to be made about what they're talking about here.

Yeah, it's interesting because for everybody demographically, politically, sociologically is looking to try to understand how this very unlikely coalition of people has been stitched together to create the new right, whatever the new right is. Because it has the strangest of bedfellows. It's got people from Nick Fulentes, who's in this article, you know, all the way to Mitch McConnell, all the way, who's a very traditionalist, you know, all the way to, you know, Doug Wilson, this fucking evangelical pastor will talk about. So, heggsets guy, yeah. There's all, and you would think, and then, you know, this coalition of like suburban women and like, you know, Hispanic vote having shifted dramatically. And, you know, there's all these.

demographic pieces. And when you try to think about those pieces in some way and you say, what the fuck? How does this work? This coalition doesn't really make any sense. And then if the through line is, well, wait, what if misogyny were the through line? And then you look at it there. And then you start paying attention. And then you say, yeah, that's the through line.

That is a massive uniting force that binds. all of these disparate people to get all these disparate demographics together. The rise of misogyny has become so out loud and so, like, there's a seeking to not just socially renormalize loud and proud misogyny, but to also re-institutionalize that same misogyny. And it's gaining traction. And that is fucking wild, wild to me. I remember it's been a while since I was on social media.

But I remember when I was on social media. And because some of my interests tend toward the stereotypically male, a lot of my, and I don't interact with reels and stuff. A lot of the reels that were suggested to me were very, like, the algorithm thinks I'm just a dude of a type, right? And so it fed me dude of a type stuff. And I cannot tell you how much of that content was some guy interviewing women on the street and asking them humiliating questions about their sex lives. Men talking about, like, and saying like wildly misogynous things about, you know, women and property and ownership and, you know, what men are for and what women are for. and like terrible dating coach advice for in cells and in cell adjacent people. Like that, the rise of this, the out loudness of it, the volume of it, the like profligacy

of it is just kind of crazy. And now to see that also becoming institutionalized, Doug Wilson, powerful character, wants to repeal the 19th Amendment. Yeah. You know, the project. 2025, openly misogynist, openly working toward removing things from women and from families that benefit women. Look at like J.D. Vance and his unbelievably regressive views about what women are for and like what women are supposed to do and the role of women in civic life and family

life. And which women you should listen to and which one you shouldn't, right? He says like these are cat ladies. These are people who are childless cat ladies and those people can be written off as Looney and the other people who have families and who are part of a family structure. Those are the women we should be paying attention to. Those are the women that we should listen to. Yeah, those are the right women. And then there's the wrong women who aren't doing those traditional things. And I say traditional in the sense that they think it's tradition, not like a tradition that we embrace, but it's, I say traditional because that's the words they use, not because I think it's traditional. Yeah, and I think that that bears a moment of exploration, too, because there is always

this hearkening back on the right, especially now with this like push toward what they would call traditional masculineism and traditional feminism, right? And they want, they want this masculine energy, feminine energy, masculine role, feminine role. And so that would, if you were a smart person and they're not, and you were a thinking person, and they're not, they're just grifters, they're all just grifters. But you would then say, okay, well, like, we should define these things. We should look back and define what this tradition is and where there's like, what are like long-held cultural values. The reality is that there is no such thing as any of that. There was never a long-standing period of, they want to present it as if there

was a long-standing period in American and world history where women stayed home and men went to work. and that is not true. For most of time, like when we were an agrarian society, women worked and not just in the home. They worked the fields. They worked in tending the animals in agrarian societies.

They still do all over the world. They just also do a lot of the work in the home. It's not instead of. It's always been and also in addition to. Once we became an industrialized nation and the Industrial Revolution took place, women worked in laundries. They worked in factories.

They worked. They didn't stay home. They did all the housework and they were working in laundries and factories and many other places of employment. This like golden age that they're trying to identify is one, false, but two, was a tiny fraction of time. They're looking at a fraction of time that was less than a generation long. It's really a post-World War II. 1950s to the maybe middle 60s, early 70s. That's it.

You can't call that. And that was really only available to a small economic class of people. So that was never broadly American or broadly what women did and what men did. They're looking at a tiny, tiny sliver that was only available for a tiny sliver of people and saying, that's how it's always supposed to be. that's what men are designed for and women are designed for. That ignores the history of all of time and people. But what it does is it gives them an opportunity to push women out of the workforce to say that stuff was always ours.

Right? All that stuff was ours and you're taking it from us. I want to read a part of this article because this harkens back to the beginning of the conversation we had about black versus white. The MAGA movement is often framed as a reaction to the first black person. president to a growing Latino population, but the multicultural aspect of the manosphere and the Trump 2024 inroads with young minority men point in a different direction. People ask me what the new right is furious about, author Laura Field, whose book Furious Minds describes the intellectual underpinnings of Trumpism told me. And I think a good shorthand for that is they're

furious about their own loss of status in society over the last few years and the elites who made that happen. And I think the pithiest short version of that is that it's the women. It's the women who took their status. And what I think the most important piece of this to remember is that while a black man may not have white privilege, they do. have male privilege, right? And I think, like, that's the thing that people don't get is that if you might not have a certain type of privilege, you can, you can, if you have the other type, lean harder on that other privilege to help you get ahead.

And I think what happened was is that they played into the privilege that the men had over the women. And so they played into that hand to make them. forget about all the other places that they don't have that privilege. They gave them one instead of trying to make it equal for all. Yeah. They've done a really effective narrative job, I think, of convincing people that having less privilege is the same thing as being oppressed. Yeah. They've convinced a whole generation of people. And I want to acknowledge something too. think that when there is a massive social shift, and there has been, when there is a massive social

shift, it naturally does cause some amount of identity chaos at a demographic level. And I think that that is true, and I think that it is also necessary and good, right, because you're not going to have progress. But I think that sort of identity chaos, the right has figured out that this is a great opportunity to capitalize on the insecurities that that identity chaos causes. And they've done a really effective narrative job of doing that. So what I mean by that is that if you're a young person or you're a man born right now, maybe you grew up on a diet of media that has given you some ideas about like how,

what types of activities to perform in order to be valued in your masculinity. And now society is like, well, actually, we don't care that much about that. And so then there might be some legitimate identity chaos around like, how do I create value for myself and for others socially, sexually, financially, financially, familially, et cetera, when the stories about my identity and my masculinity are, they don't conform anymore to the world I'm living in. That's a complicated conversation. It's much easier to say, well, it's because the uppity women's took it from you. right we don't want to have those difficult conversations with people where we

say you know like as demographic shifts and as people all of these things were you know institutionally unfair and all of these things were institutionally wrongs and as we write those wrongs we're going to have to retell ourselves stories about where our value comes from and we're in the middle of that retelling

and there may be some discomfort throughout that retelling well I don't want to to feel discomfort, fuck that, you know? So, like, and the thing is like that the political project of misogyny has always been sexual and financial. Those are the two driving factors. And what motivates human beings more than sexual and financial motivations? I can think of nothing. So the political project of misogyny has always been, how do we make sure that we remove women from the workforce and ensure that we have the greatest possible sexual access to women. And all of these Doug Wilson types, if you strip all of the rhetoric out of it, that's what they're

building. They're building a space that directly strips women of their financial rights and allows men sexual access while women have less financial viability and independence. Here's a piece of that article that echoes that. It says, Wilson believes that women should not ordinarily hold political office and should never serve in combat roles in the military. Husbands should have dominion over misbehaving wives' weight. What the fuck? Have dominion over their weight.

Spending habits, choice of television programs. His uncompromising vision for America was once considered marginal and conservative and now since the elevation of Hegsseth, no one can credibly say that Doug Wilson is a fringe anymore. And because he's Hegss preacher, he basically has the exact same. This is Hegsses Jeremiah Wright, except for this guy's terrifying and dangerous and awful.

And this is a guy who wants to have some say over his wife's weight. Look, I'm not going to fat shame the guy, but he looks like he's 270. He doesn't look like he's a thin guy. guy. Like, what are you talking about, man? Like, are, I, this is what makes me crazy about these people is they, they expect other people to be held at standards they don't hold themselves to. It's like, what the fuck, dude? Like, like, you don't look like a catch yourself. You look like, you look, you look, you don't

look like somebody who should be dictating to anyone how they have to look because you look like that. Like, I'm like, come on. It's ridiculous. But the thing is, is, that's not what it's about. What it's about is that the man has power over the woman, that the man has his voice and his needs all met. And the woman has to just listen to what the guy has to say. And that's the kind of world that this guy wants to spit out. And it's not just him. They list in this article about a dozen influencer-type people, podcasters, other types of people that are involved in this sort of manosphere ideal. and it's frightening because what they're giving men

and what they're feeding into is the fact that men have lost something. That DEI itself is any kind of equity at all is them losing. And so they keep on hammering this home to these men and these men are now on their side even though many of the policies would affect them negatively.

They're still on their side because it's the one thing that they can cling to to say, I at least am part of the in crowd for this reason. And it's because I happen to have the, I happen to identify as male. Yeah, well, and like they identify, like, when you talk about like the, you know, dozen or so names that they drop,

a lot of those people, it would be very easy to dismiss that as trolling. But I was thinking about that when I was reading this story. And I think that there is something that I've learned. And that is that just because something is trolling doesn't also mean that it is untrue or not also a sincerely held belief. Trolling can also be something, controlling can be something that is purposely framed and phrased to upset somebody. And also, I believe it entirely. Sure.

Yeah. Right? We do this thing where we say, oh, they're just trolling. and then we dismiss it as if it's not something they will later act on, or that they are trying to push forward, or that it is not part of a political ideal or a social ideal. Deeply held belief. Yeah.

Right. And we got to stop doing that. We all need to get together and say, there's no such words as just trolling as a way to dismiss something and be like, well, that's somehow less important or less impactful or won't be actualized because the evidence doesn't. not support that at all. So stop doing that. Stop doing that. I think that's a great point. There's a piece of this I want to read. It's a very short line from this. This is what Doug Wilson,

this is how the writer characterizes Doug Wilson's ideology. He wants feminists like me to get angry with the most outlandish proposals making ourselves look like scolds or chicken littles in the process. And what that tells me is that they want to be provocative because they relish in the fact that you're hurt by it, right? They,

you couldn't possibly think that is just trolling if you're enjoying the effects of the misogyny. If you're enjoying the, you know, inflicting emotional damage on people, by belittling them and making their plight feel little

and making them feel like they're hysterical about this sort of thing while you're actively trying to take rights away. And then you revel in that, you're a shitty, awful misogynist and any part of this, because she even says in this article multiple times about multiple different people

that their in-person demeanor is very different. different than their online persona. So she makes a point to say that I met with this person and they seemed very nice. And I talked to Doug and he laughed and he kidded around and he wasn't mean outright. And one, it's because they can get away with it online. That's number one. And we've always known that, that you can get away with saying things that you could never

say in person. And most people wouldn't, right? Sure, some fucking psychopaths do, but for the most part, most of the people who have these sort of shrill, awful online personas when they are finally confronted in real life don't have those types of protections around themselves. So they immediately revert to being a lot more meek than they actually are online. It's just a natural way in which human beings interact in person versus interacting online. So that's the first piece. But I think like these people also recognize that this is the way that they can get out of it. They can get out of it by being as outlandish as possible because that's the real them.

That's the real piece. The piece your meeting is the veneer they put on when they don't have those miles and miles of insulated wire between the two of you. That's the, the veneer is the human interaction. And we've taken that away and they don't need it anymore. So they can come online and say the most hideous, heinous shit. Now, Andrew Tate is going to say shitty stuff in front of people and shitty stuff because he's too stupid to even know what a veneer is. He thinks it's for your teeth. So he's too dumb to know that stuff, right?

But there are, I want to say this because there's a couple people in this article that we covered on the No Rogan experience. One of them is this Andrew Wilson guy. And if you watch Andrew Wilson's debates online when he's talking to people and that he's, you know, these young women that he gets on his show to belittle, he's a fucking piece of shit. And when he's having conversations with people and debates,

he's a fucking piece of shit. But when he was on Rogan show, he sold himself as a very, very milder version because Joe's audience isn't the same audience. So he's got to. sell a Andrew Wilson light to Joe's audience

because if he can do that he can then garner them and pull them in. Now, some of them are going to watch and be like, this guy's a fucking asshole. He's totally different now.

Some will. Some will see that and this will be hitting a scratching an itch they didn't know they had and they're going to stick around. Because if you, chances are if you're watching Joe,

there's probably a little bit of you that's a little misogynistic if you know what I mean. Yeah. A little bit. I think that's exactly true. These guys have figured out code switching. This is what's happening. Like, they're code switching. And there's been this great apology to try to figure out who means what, as if that's an important distinction. And that's not an important distinction. What's said is what

is said. Everything behind that does not matter. It does not matter. Stop trying to pretend it matters. Nick Fuentes is not just trolling. Nick Fuentes, he is probably playing some version of a character and blah, blah, blah, but none of that is actually important. Why would we pretend that any of that conversation were important? Like, what's important are the things that are being said because they are becoming actualized, right? They are moving out of this sort of like niche space, and they are growing and growing and growing. and growing, and now they're starting to reach into and become part of the out loud and everything institutional elements of our country.

Yeah. So stop giving cover to this apologist nonsense where we decide that if somebody's online, that's less true than in person or this version of them doesn't really mean it. They're just trying to get lals or what, like all that is just, you are, what you're, what you're doing is carrying water for misogynists in order to give them cover. to expand their project of misogyny. That's all that that does. It accomplishes literally nothing else.

We're responsible for the things that we say. In person, on the phone, through text, online. Doesn't matter. None of that matters. There's not like a secret like he didn't mean it because he was behind it. No, none of that. An avatar is none of it. Stop.

When you pull a fire alarm, it doesn't matter when you did it as a joke or not, right? Right. It doesn't matter. The fire department's still going to show up. And the same thing goes for when you try to hurt somebody. Whether I try to hurt you and I'm kidding and you didn't know or whether I'm actively trying to hurt you, both things. The thing is is that what happens is at the end of that equation, you're hurt. Right. So if I'm trying to hurt you and I do it as a joke or I do it in a real malicious way, in both instances to you, it doesn't matter. to you, you are still hurt. So regardless of how I got there, the product is the same. So I don't want to hear about, just like you, I'm not interested in

whether or not somebody was kidding or not, because it doesn't matter. I don't care. It's the same thing when, like, I used to care whether or not Alex Jones believed what he said for some reason. And the only reason to do that is to sort of give him an out.

And I'm not going to do that, right? In some way, if he believed it, then I thought maybe he's not as responsible. No, he's absolutely responsible for the things he does. He's an adult, just like the rest of us. So whether or not he believes the things he said about Sandy Hook doesn't matter. It doesn't matter because is he more evil if he does it one way or the other? I don't care anymore. I don't care. You're hurting people. Stop fucking hurting people. The end. So whether or not you you sat behind a desk in a dark room with a bunch of other people and you thought this out

ahead of time, or you're just a fucking idiot. Either way, it's hurting people. And so I think we need to throw all that out. I'm 100% with you. In this article, they refer, and this is why I think this is also so important. In this article, they refer to a conversation being had where they're like, oh, like, what about like reversing Roe v. Wade? And they're, you know, I don't remember who they were even talking to. This doesn't matter. And they laughed it off. Like, I don't, nobody has to really worry about that. We're just, you know, fucking sound. off, that's never going to happen. It happened. Yep.

The thing is, like, the drift and the normalization of this kind of misogyny has moved its way out of these sort of small use, small cells, you know, because this is terroristic. Like, let's also call this what it is. This is every single time it's hate speech. Sure. This is hate speech. So this hate speech has moved its way from its. little cells in pockets.

And it has become normalized. Look at what Pete Hegesa says about, like, the military and like the masculinization of the military and strength and what that means and where that comes from it. How power is exerted and who gets to exert it. All of that is misogynist as fuck. All of that messaging is misogynist as fuck. Trump, the most openly misogynist president we have had in, I don't even, I fucking shrug emoji.

years. I don't even know. How many generations is probably the real question. This kind of open, I'm not saying misogyny has not always been a thing. It's been a thing. I fucking get it. I am not. But there's a renormalization of the worst parts that institutionally we decided we didn't want anymore. Right? We built protections in. Things like Title IX, you know, like I'm talking about institutional, legal, systemic protections, they're being rolled back. Yeah. This is regressive as retrogressive. This is regressive as fuck.

And the stated goal, the out loud goal of these guys is like, hey, we really want women to be financially dependent on men. Because as soon as they can make women financially dependent on men again, then women's choices to leave, reduced to very little. We reduced to essentially nothing. What I think a lot of dudes don't like is that up until, even as late as the 1990s, women couldn't get a business loan without a man signing off on it. So like up until fairly recently, in order for women to be financially secure and safe, a man, she had to attach herself very often to a man to provide. That has been structurally what we required by the way that we built our banking laws, our lending.

laws or home ownership laws, etc. Now that's not a thing anymore. Now women can get, go to go to college and get jobs and have bank accounts and open businesses and all of this stuff. And so now women are like, yeah, what do you actually provide

here, dude? Because it's I don't need you for this stuff. And I think men are like, well, look, it was better when you needed me to survive because I didn't have to do as much. Yeah, yeah. I didn't have to be good or nice or decent or offer value to you as a person and a partner. I'd have to do any of that stuff

because you were fucking desperate to survive and I was a life raft. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I think, you know, when you said hate speech, I think that there is a piece of this that really speaks to that. Now, again, I think we've thrown out the idea

that you're just trolling. So I'm going to read something that Nick Fuentes said and we're just going to say that this is a true thing that he thinks, right? don't think that this is just trolling. I don't think this is just kidding around. I think this is something that Nick Fuentes actually thinks. He says, our number one political enemy is women, because women can strain everything, every conversation, every man, everything. Fentes said on a live stream earlier this year, he added, just like Hitler imprisoned, gypsies, Jews, communists,

and all his political rivals, we should do the same thing with women. He suggested that they be sent to breeding gulags. The good ones will be liberated, the bad ones will toil, in the minds forever. So this is a guy who, I mean, how do you look at that and not say that's hate speech against women, right? How do you look at that and say that that's

not somebody who is not expousing that part of our, 50% of our population needs to be treated as if they are enslaved to the other 50%. That's what he's saying out loud.

Yeah, you know, 100% that's what he saying. And think about how much that echoes what Doug Wilson said when he said that men are in charge of when women misbehave. Yeah. What the fuck? What do you mean misbehave? But if you listen to Doug, Doug says, I don't believe, you know, I don't think, I want to read it here. He says, Wilson told me he considers this sort of rhetoric, unforgivably gauche. The Bible says that a godly woman is a husband's crown, he said. I've never seen a king talk about his crown that way. Listen to how they have to turn women into objects, by the way.

That's so fucking ridiculous. Fuentes talks about the way Fuentes talks about women. It's absurd. I wanted to ask whether, because he refers to women as small-breasted bitties, and so she says, I wanted to ask whether small-breasted bitties came from the gospel of Mark or Luke. But Wilson was on a role. He thought Fentz was so extreme that he might even be an undercover federal agent sent to discredit the movement.

Quote, he is, as far as I'm concerned, on the other team, end quote. No, bro. He's yours. He's fucking yours. And he's echoing what you think. He's just saying it to Gen Z crowd. Yeah, man. And like, 100%.

They're in agreement, right? What upsets Doug Wilson about Nick Fuentes is Doug thinks he can package it sweeter. Unforgivably gauche doesn't mean he's wrong. It just means it kind of makes him cringe. That's all it means. He's basically like, hey, fucking, of course we're going to do the Gulag thing, but you're not supposed to tell him until we can. Stay on the Ola Gai.

Yeah, man. For that's it. Like, what the shit is this? Like, the thing is like, you can't dismiss Nick Fuentes. anymore, there's like a groiper that is running politically, like filling town halls and running for political office. Now, we covered him like that several weeks ago. We covered that guy. Filled town halls full of people. That guy had no political chance. But that doesn't mean the next one worked. Was his name fish market or something like that? Yeah, he had a weird fucking name. It's like a weird last name like

fish house or something was his name. He did. He did. Yeah, it was like salmon head or something. Yeah. Yeah. But like these guys, sure, this one didn't, this one didn't stand a political chance, but will the next one, we've seen the rapid accelerationism of these kinds of niche. Remember when Q was so funny, Cecil? It wasn't a force. Q was nothing. And then all of a sudden, now there's Congress people, Congress people who are out loud, open Q&on supporters or Q&N believers.

Like this stuff is that fast. It's that fast. Within a couple of years, you can go from, okay, but he's a fucking weirdo with no chance to, holy shit, that dude's in the halls of Congress. That stuff can happen overnight. There's a smuggling of this that Wilson is doing to the older people. And there's a smuggling of this, I think,

that some of these people do when they get on different shows. they smuggle these ideas as less than ideas. But I think you're 100% right. I think that they're like, they're the same fucking thing. Like you're saying the same stuff. You're just saying it a little different. And Doug Wilson wants to take all the rights from women away.

He doesn't want you to vote. Here's what he wants. He wants there to be a household vote. That's how he wants it to be. So there would just be one vote per household, I guess, is how it would be. And then the man would be. the one who decided. And his

argument for this is we were happier before. And that's always their argument. That's the thing they always go back to. We were happier before. And it's like there's a possibility some people were happier, but that chances is that they were like a hundred percent male. In this article,

they even talk for a second about SSRIs. There's a part of this where they talk about SSRIs. And they say like a bunch of women were on SSRIs back in the day. It says, it says here, it says, I asked Wilson about his allies, nostalgic distortion of history. Just a simple question, he responded. If you went back to the 1850s and said, out of all these

women who had to get husbands permission to travel, to visit a sick cousin or whatever, how many take 10,000 of those women, how many of them were on antidepressants, and how many of them today would be antidepressants. And it's so funny that they have to frame this as a life where women have no choices about what's better for them, right? They don't get the choice. It's men deciding how they get to choose what's better for them. It's this man who's saying, what's better off for women at this point. It's not whether or not women get to choose what's better. It's whether we get to choose what's better for women. Even the way he frames it is making it so they shouldn't have autonomy to make the decision

that they should be able to make. And when I read that, I was like, well, yeah, if you go back to 1850 and ask how many people are, there were no antidepressants in 1850. Yeah, that's just not a thing. What an insane thing to say. In order for him to make his analogy argument, he has to literally ask a question that is so stupid it cannot be answered. Yeah.

Like, it's not even like rhetorically interesting. Yeah. You know? But like the point of that question is to assume it's to embed an assumption in sympathetic listeners that the past was better for everybody. This is the same exact argument, the same exact. It is exactly the same as the benevolent slave master argument. Yeah, 100%.

There is no difference. Not a no meaningful difference. What I say is no difference at all. This is a benevolent slave master argument. And there are people right now who are incredibly sympathetic to enslaving 50-some percent of our population. And then trying to tell them it's fucking good for them. And then what makes me crazy is how many like fucking shitty fucking shitty fucking pick-me-useless fucking traitors are helping these dudes smuggle this shit through. I can't understand it from any perspective, but when I hear the fucking Phyllis Schaffleys that did this stuff in the past, and when I hear like the influencers now that are grifting off of this to make a fucking buck to sell this, I'm like, you fucking traitor. You fucking sell out traitor. How goddamn dare you. I hate it. I hate it so much, Ziesl.

We've read a lot of pieces about this very phenomenal. that have sort of put all this into perspective. Like each one is like a different facet, right? Like we've read a lot of pieces about this very specific idea, but each one adds a new, it sort of opens up a new perspective on it, right? And this is a different article, obviously, than the other ones we read, but it does put into perspective different of focus. It's a different focus.

With all the things that we've read and all the things that we've gone through, the thing that I struggle the most with is I am flustered on how to fix this. I am really flustered because I think like what you're tapping into in our last show that we just did, we talked a little bit about the difference between the way in which the Democrats approach stuff

versus how Republicans approach stuff. It was in this Democratic forensic report about the last election, you know, forensic hard air quotes on that. But one of the things is that they said, and I think they said it rightly, is that Democrats try to win arguments and Republicans try to win elections. You're trying to sell rationalism to people who are angry. I'm paraphrasing, but you'll get at what I mean, right? Exactly true. Yeah, right. So, and I think that's 100% true. I think that oftentimes we get stuck on being right. We get stuck on the argument and we get caught up in that rather than get caught up in the feeling. I don't know how to affect. this group of men who are so angry and the whole time, there's a great image. And I'm interrupting myself here,

but there's a great image that sort of would illustrate this. There's a, I think it's Rupert Murdoch is stating at a table. And he's got two people sitting next to, like in front of him. So he's in the back of the table and there's two guys. There's a black guy and then there's a guy in a worker helmet. The black guy, Rupert Murdoch has a.

gigantic pile of cookies in front of him. Like it's fucking almost as tall as his head. And then the worker has a single cookie. And the black guy in the photo doesn't have any cookies. And Rupert Murdoch turns to the worker and he says, hey mate, that guy wants your cookie. Right? And I think like that's what they've been able to do is they've been able to trick

all of these men into thinking it's the women who are against them while they pick their pocket, while they get all the things they want out of government, by sicking them on the other side, they've been able to produce this with a wide range of people. Because think about the MAGA movement. Think about the different economic classes

that are involved in the MAGA movement. And then I don't think, for instance, that all of them are misogynist, right? But I think that one of the glues that holds a piece of that piece together is the massage. and they can trick even the most destitute guy into trying to sort of force women to do other stuff because then it gives them the tiniest bit of privilege.

So I don't know how to, I don't know how to counteract it. Yeah, I think about this topic too much. I think about this topic a lot. It's a topic that interests me tremendously. And what I think Cecil is that we collectively, the me's, the use, other people that would be quote unquote influencers. We need to begin and be a part of a new social project to define a kind of masculinity that people can see as effective and successful and that drives for them sexual success, financial success,

and personal success. Because that is what the other team is sort of offering, right? They're probably, now they're not delivering it. No, no. But they'll sell you a hookup university subscription all day. Right. So they are saying if you accept and demand and enforce this kind of retrograde nonsense, then you will have sexual success, financial success, and personal success.

And so there's a lot of people who are like, well, hey, I'm struggling in one of those three areas. And this is a way for me to sort of find a villain, point at my energies at that villain, and the sort of demand that I am an old school masculine kind of guy, and I'm going to change the world to fit around me. But what I really want is to be sexually, financially, and personally successful. I think that we need to embark upon a new kind of positive masculinity. I don't think that we have socially done a good job of that.

And I think that that's much to our detriment. I don't have those answers. I think about them a lot. I don't have those answers on exactly what it should look like. but I know that if the promise is sexual, financial, and personal success, and it's actually working, people will sign up for it. I think they'd rather do that than hit themselves in the fucking face with a hammer. You know, like looks maxing is just another grift to try to say, here's how to be sexually successful. Yeah.

Right. It's part of that misogynist, like super patriarchal right-wing manosphere grift, right? So people are desperate to be successful in these realms of their lives that they see as important. And I think the problem is that we have not begun to coalesce around what a new kind of positive masculinity looks like. I think one of the reasons why is because there's been so much objectifying of women on that side that they can't relate to women anymore. I think there's so much objectifying that they think they're an object, something. that needs to be one over instead of just being a partner. Do you know what I mean? Like there's a feeling like like I've never had that because I've always just been like oh the person who I love is a

person. They're not a object. They're not a thing. They're not a you know, something I need. They're not a thing I'm trying to manipulate. There's a thing I just love. And so I just spend my time trying to make sure that they love me because I want to feel their love. So I, do the things that make it so that we love each other, right? If those things, if I do things that upset my wife, I will then now change my behavior because I don't want her to be upset. And if I do things that please her, I want to continue to do those things because that makes me feel good that she's feeling good. That's what a reciprocal relationship should feel like. And so I've never had that moment where I've been like, like, this is a thing I'm trying to win over. It's always just been,

a relationship I've been trying to foster. And I think the thing is that what they've done is they've successfully convinced men, especially these really radicalized men, that women are like femoid or whatever they call them. You know what I mean? Like they take away human names from women

and turn them into like fucking robot type things. And they just don't. So they've got to turn the clock back into, hey, we're all just people. all just trying to get by, let's try to have relationships rather than have a winning, losing relationship. Yeah. Well, I think a couple of things about that, man. A hundred percent, I agree with that. I, like, to yes and that, what I tell my boys is like, I'll never teach you how to talk to girls. I just thought, I'm just going to teach you how to talk to people.

Talk to people. It's not different. But like, like, what the right tries to do is they try to other eyes, categorize, and define. And by doing that, women are seen as a goal-orient, right? And that is, so what I tell the kids, and they're, you know, 19, 20, I've got a kid turning 12 here in a minute, a boy. So, like, what I've always told them is, like, women want to be spoken to, like, people because they're people. And if you want to, you know, date somebody, if you want to have a relationship with somebody, if you want to be successful in this sort of dating and romantic sphere, like first start with the radical assumption that they're people and treat them exactly like you would anyone else. It will actually be so refreshing. You'll be surprised. It's so funny that that

that has to be said out loud. It's so amusing. But at the same time, it's great advice, right? It's really good advice. But it's like crazy that we've got to the point where that has to be said out loud. Yeah, man, it's fucking wild. I also do honestly believe that like it's really hard. I think the dating apps and hookup culture that has been created by these massive corporations. Yeah. Yeah. What they've, what they have done is they have intentionally built systems to other eyes and dehumanize to gamify.

Yeah, that's what I was going to say. Yeah. This idea of human connection. Because what did you just describe? You described like, well, geez, you know, I always want to be in a relationship and to feel loved, I know that I also have to give love, right? And so like, I've never thought of it. But when the systems that people enter into as young people teach them a gamified system to start with

where you can win and lose where there's numbers and metrics, like, they're not entering into it with this idea of how do I receive love? How do I build a relationship? How do I have an enjoyable connection with another human being? Even if it's a short-term connection. And I've talked to the boys about that too. Like even a short-term connection has the exact same rules. Like what people want is to be felt, heard, and seen. And if you work on that first, like, is it going to be successful every time?

Is everybody going to click with and for you? Of course not. But like, if you do that, you never go wrong. Yeah. There's never a downside to that. Like, but we are also swimming upstream against massive corporations who want to to sign up for products that dehumanize each other. That's really tough. I think the dating app thing, you know, you've got to gamify yourself in order to even get eyeballs on yourself, right? You've got to

turn yourself into something. You've got to find those qualities that make you somebody who's a catch. So in order to do that, you've got to do the things that make you into that person. And that may be selling a version of you that's not real. Right. That's that's selling of it. And you want to try to make sure that you can market, now you're marketing yourself, right? I'm marketing myself to somebody else instead of just being who you are. I think we had it easy, Tom. We had it easy too. And we could just, you know, you could just roll up and be like, you go to, you know, where I used to meet girls was the bowling alley or the river walk or whatever, you know, the mall. And you just say, hey, you look cute. You want to go out sometime. And they say, sure, and you trade a number. And then you chat.

And you get to know them. And then you make a decision on whether or not you're going to go out with them. but you met them in person. They had an opportunity to see you. And you also had to do that work in order to go up and talk to them and do that uncomfortable moment and not feel like a, you know, I don't know, like not overwork yourself

and all those types of things. So you had to sort of go up and do that work. And that's a different type of thing now. Yeah, man. Because now I'm competing with every single guy out there on this dating app. And I've got to have the more buff picture or whatever it is that's going to shoot me up

to the next level, whatever that next level is. It's totally gamified. You're absolutely right. I think that's a real problem that I don't know how to fix, but that's a real problem for sure. Well, what I am happy about is I've read a number of studies and articles that people are opting out of that system, that the apps are, they are driving people to be unhappy and people are realizing it and they are becoming less and less of a thing.

And I think that's great. I think we have to reject that shit. We also, because like, that also enforces the idea, which is terrible for us, that we are a brand. Yeah, yeah. And we are not a brand. And the selection of somebody to be a partner in your life or to even be somebody to spend an enjoyable evening with in your life is not a gamified, swipy, algorithmic choice. Yeah, right, right. We've got to stop thinking like that.

We have, we have, we literally have no choice if we're going to survive this moment. Yeah. All right. That's going to wrap it up for our show this week. Remember we mentioned last time there won't be a patron show this month, but we'll do an extra funny one next month we promise. Or at least we'll just do a one next month. I can't promise it's going to be funny.

Our timeline is not super funny. We're going to do our best, but it's not going to answer. It is a thing. But we will be back next Monday with a full show. And we're going to leave you like we always do with the skeptics creed. Credulity is not a virtue. It's fortune cookie cutter, mommy issue, hypno-Babillon, bullshit. Couched in Scientician, double bubble, toil and trouble,

pseudo-quazi alternative, acupunctuating, pressurized, stereogram, pyramidal, free energy healing, water, downward spiral, brain dead pan, sales pitch, late night infoducatainment. Leo Pisces, cancer cures, detox, reflex, foot massage, Death and towers, Tarot cars, psychic healing, crystal balls, Bigfoot, Yeti, aliens, churches, mosques, and synagogues,

temples, dragons, giant worms, Atlantis, dolphins, truthers, birthers, witches, wizards, vaccine nuts, shaman healers, evangelists, conspiracy, double-speak stigmata, nonsense. Expose your sides. Thrust your hands,

bloody, evidential, conclusive. inclusive. Doubt even this. Thanks for tuning in. If you enjoyed the show, consider supporting us on Patreon at patreon.com forward slash dissonance pod. Help us spread the word by sharing our content.

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