How To Be A Man
19th April 2024
ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.
One of the unremarked things that has happened over the past ten years is the collapse of the so-called man-o-sphere. There may be people still working that land, but all the big names have moved on or disappeared. The pickup artist have all disappeared from the internet entirely. That whole scene just seems to have folded up and gone the way of the dinosaur without anyone noticing.
One reason is the demographic aged out of the material. A guy like Heartiste, for example, could do the pickup artist stuff when he was early middle-age, but once you hit fifty you become a skeevy weirdo, not a Don Juan. The same holds for the other subcultures in that space. Once you reach middle-age, it all starts to sound a bit weird and pointless, even to the people making money off it.
There is another aspect to it. That whole scene was a reaction to the feminization of the culture starting with second wave feminism. The next generation of males have no frame of reference in which to have a reaction. The typical Zoomer has been raised in the longhouse, to use the cool kid’s term. He has no way of knowing that all of this is both weird and unnatural.
That is the point of the show. The male role is not a slippery concept that changes from one generation to the next. It has been revolutionized and pulverized over the last few decades, but that is what makes this age anomalous. The male role in society is timeless, at least in the Western world. There are certain immutable characteristic to being a man that will reassert themselves in the coming years.