I've been studying sex and gender for two decades, first as an experimental social psychology student, then as a high school psychology teacher, and finally as a writer. During that time, I've studied pretty much every issue that arises when discussing males and females; masculinity and femininity. The one primary problem that always eluded me:
"How do we effectively solve problems related to sex and gender that result in mutually-beneficial solutions?"
In today's social media-dominated world, many groups try to solve these problems from one of two very general perspectives:
- "Feminism"
- "The Manosphere"
"Feminism" includes all the flavors of feminism from Amazon to Trans-national with the common thread being some degree of vilification of men and masculinity as oppressors of women.
"The Manosphere" includes all flavors of pro-male groups including Men Going Their Own Way, Men's Rights Activists, The Red Pill, pickup artists, etc. The common thread tends to be a reaction to feminism and feminist ideals that have basically fucked up our social institutions.
Neither group is effective at solving problems because they become echo chambers of bad ideas that have zero chance of success. There are all kinds of reasons for this, most of which can be explained with cognitive biases.
I've spent the last three years either passively observing many of these groups, actively trolling them, or genuinely engaging in conversations. Damn, did I learn a lot! Specifically, I learned almost all of the people involved in these various groups and communities have a strong emotional attachment to whatever outcome they desire. It's not unlike the irrational attachment we see to political candidates or sports teams. I've come to realize this emotional attachment absolutely kills any chance any of these groups have of solving the problems they routinely bitch and moan about mostly because they ignore reality. At the most basic level, they cannot pass the simple test I like to use to reveal the barriers that prevent ideas from becoming reality:
Ask the "If only..." question.
For example, "Men and women could achieve true gender equality if only..." where the answer will reveal what barriers are needed to overcome in order for the goal to be actualized. Sure, almost all of these groups WILL be able to answer the question, but their answer is not grounded in reality OR is completely unrealistic.
In very broad, general terms, most of the feminists seem to want to destroy masculinity as a gender role and most manosphere groups seem to want to subjugate women. Both ideas are moronic because they fail to understand basic human psychology. So they bitch and moan, whine and complain. They blame, shame, and play the victim card. It's like a really, really unpleasant form of intellectual masturbation. And they go through this endless cycle because they seem to genuinely believe there will always be tomorrow.
I ain't got time for that shit.
I have an urgency because there won't always be a tomorrow. I don't know if I will be here tomorrow, next week, next month, or next year. I don't want to talk about problems. I want to solve problems. So that's what I'm doing. Anyway, I digress.
The Problem
As it turns out, I've discovered the problem is a whole lot simpler than I expected. Most "gender discussion groups" from any perspective are set up and administered by people who are fundamentally broken in some way (that's not a bad thing per se, as most of us have some degree of "broken".) This causes them to gravitate towards one set of particular beliefs that benefits them personally. That's why they cling to one perspective that makes no logical sense, nor has resulted in any empirically-verified positive outcomes.
They're not doing what they do to make the world a better place; they're doing what they do to feel better about themselves. So they become emotionally-attached to the ideas and resist alternatives.
This was my experience in a group called "The New Masculine", which turned out to be a front for the stupid OneTaste cult. It was basically a bunch of low-value females emotionally manipulating a bunch of uber-beta males. The leaders of the group were clearly exploiting the men for affirmation (and apparently money) not because their ideas worked, but rather because they needed to power to overcome their personal shortcomings.
To further compound this problem, a lot of gender discussion groups enforce exclusively masculine or exclusively feminine communication styles. That's problematic because that's not how our world works. When we police language with censoring, we create an artificial environment that does not represent the real world. Any discussions we engage in within that environment are subsequently useless.
I hypothesize this is THE reason all of these groups have such shitty real-world outcomes... they're not based on the real world. Instead, they're based on intellectual musings of broken people.
The Solution
Turns out the apparent solution is quite simple - create and administer a group that allows men and women to communicate like most men and women communicate in real life. This is exactly what is happening in my Cotton Underwear Nougat Troupe group. All I did was collect folks who have realized their world view might be wrong and throw them together in a group and toss out ideas to discuss. In one month, I've already made tremendous strides towards developing my own hypotheses and, more importantly, workshop content to help solve many of our most pressing sociopolitical problems starting on the individual level.
The formula is pretty simple - keep out the extremists who do not have the ability to consider alternative points of view, then set a tone of civil discussion. BAM! Phenomenal discussions.
One other significant variable seems to be most if not all of the group's membership has the ability to communicate in either a masculine style or feminine style without losing their shit, which helps immensely with misunderstandings. Those who can't handle that usually don't last all that long without getting triggered and quitting the group.
What develops are surprisingly organic discussions that closely mimic real-life interactions, which is significant. One of the greatest problems with online communication is the lack of body language and tone of voice cues, which is a fundamental problem with every other gender group I've experienced.
This group, because of the quality of discussion, is a near-perfect conduit to actually solving all these gender-related issues.
I'll be posting more on this topic down the road as the group continues to develop.
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