Ian Ironwood - The Manosphere: A New Hope For Masculinity

The Manosphere:

A New Hope For Masculinity

By Ian Ironwood

Copyright 2012 , 2013 Ian Ironwood

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For my Father, my Brothers, and my Sons,

The most important Men in my life.

One gives me Wisdom.

One gives me Comradarie.

One gives me Courage.

All give me Strength.

Table Of Contents:

Manosphere:

Authors Forward:

What is the Manosphere?

What little is written about the Manosphere thats not actually in the Manosphere has usually been written by its opponents. A cursory glance might give the casual observer the impression that its just a bunch of cranky old angry conservative men who want to go back to the 1950s. Terms like misogynistic and anti-woman and hatemongers and worse have been leveled at the bloggers who make up the Manosphere.

In some cases the harsh terms seem justified. In others they are decidedly not. Indeed, more often than not the critics are so enraged by the challenge to some of their basic precepts that they cannot get over their own sense of outrage enough to see the validity of the content, and its importance. The Manosphere often sees that kind of reactionary response to its discussions the men there are used to it. All too often it is the standard response from women to men when they try to reasonably discuss matters of importance and subjects of interest to their gender.

Instead of participating in a frank discussion about gender relations, appreciating that there are, in fact, two sexes involved, many feminists and misguided sympathizers assume that ANY criticism of feminism from men is automatically worthy of condemnation and derision, and make a point of informing the men in question how misguided and ignorant they are, and how they probably dont like gays or black people, either. And live in their mothers basement. And never got touched by a girl.

That impression would be highly misleading. The Manosphere is more than that. Far more. If you get distracted by the rhetoric, youre missing the important stuff... and that important stuff is mushrooming in importance.

For those who are unfamiliar with this corner of the internet, the Manosphere is the nascent and evolving collection of blogs discussing topics of masculine interests and mens issues. Every day, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of men, visit these sites in search of wisdom and understanding about what it means to be a male in the 21 st century, particularly in the face of a culture irrevocably changed by feminism. Trying to draw a tighter circle around the phenomenon is difficult but I think Ive hit upon a good metaphor to describe it.

The Manosphere is like a comet.

I dont mean that in the usual metaphorical sense, wherein it would be compared to a rarely seen, spectacular (and undeniably phallic) event portending great changes and the end of empires. No, I mean it in the literal sense, informed by science. The Manosphere is like a comet in that it is essentially a dirty snowball .

In case you fell asleep before that particular show came on the Discovery Channel , the head of a comet, broken down to its constituent components, is a dirty snowball: a mixture of rock, dust, and ice attached to a common center of local mass on a common trajectory across the solar system.

Comets spend most of their life dutifully plodding through the outer reaches of our local stellar neighborhood, lurking in the Oort Cloud far beyond our notice. But the Suns gravity relentlessly lures the dirty snowballs back into the light on a periodic basis. As the comet gets nearer the sun, the solar radiation fans out the dust and ice from the dirty snowball into a brilliant tail.

But its still just a dirty snowball, when you get up close. And the Manosphere is like that.

The memes and the ideas behind it have been there all along, in the silence of the cultural Oort Cloud. The invisible, indefinable gravitational center of the Manosphere is no less than Masculinity, itself. There has been an unease about masculinity a recognition of crisis by the friends and foes of men, particularly in the face of a changing femininity that has been around for decades, now. The signs and symptoms of this unease were as clear as portents and omens, murky and misunderstood. Only when that irregular mass got exposed to the strong energy of the internet did it start to show itself... and now the tail of that metaphorical comet is starting to be seen in the sky by those who know to look.

Okay, enough with the tortured metaphors. Ill be returning to this one so often youll get sick of it.

When trying to pin down just what constitutes the Manosphere, suddenly things get complicated. Like many other social or intellectual movements, just where it begins and ends depends entirely on your perspective. But after long investigation and consideration, I believe the best and most useful definition of the Manosphere is this : a collection of internet blogs, cultural discussion groups, interpersonal interactions and digital clubhouses whose focus revolves around issues and interests common to men and masculinity .

That covers a lot of territory. But so does a comets tail.

The Manosphere is often split by its critics into two broad areas, the Mens Rights Advocates ( MRAs ) groups advocating for masculine issues like fair child custody, divorce, alimony and visitation laws for fathers, equitable sentencing between the genders for similar crimes, combating falsely made allegations of rape and the Pick-Up Artists ( PUAs ) groups and individuals advocating the best ways of removing the panties and inhibitions of women for the purposes of sexual seduction.

But while both of those points-of-mass are vital and important to the Manosphere, they do not define it. Mens issues and interests go beyond that, and often into some intriguing (anthropologically speaking) areas including politics, religion, economics, psychology, philosophy, sociology, and beyond. Both the PUA communities and the MRA communities are legitimate and valued voices within the greater Manosphere, particularly since their interests often overlap. Particularly on the subject of sex.

Sex, you see, is a near-universal masculine interest and male issue. (We had a meeting. It was unanimous.)

Since most men have sex with women (but not all there are plenty of gay men lurking in the Manosphere, despite the soft homophobia that abounds, because theyre dudes too and struggle with most of the same things straight dudes do) a lot of the talk about sex concerns women. Since feminism is such a powerful force in the lives of many Western women a primary focus of the Manospheres discussions about feminism revolve around the affect it has had on men and masculinity.

(Spoiler alert: the discussions are rarel y known for their congratulatory positivity.)

Not all the Manosphere is anti-feminist, and few parts are legitimately anti- woman. Accusations of misogyny, while overblown, have legitimate basis... but then again, some of the voices in the Manosphere belong to men who have been savagely treated by women. And the blatant misandry on feminist sites like Jezebel is at least as appalling from a social perspective. Yet mens issues are not even acknowledged as rising to the level of social concern, for most feminists. In the context of Gender Feminism, as it has evolved, it is impossible for straight men to be victims. The Oppressors cannot be the Oppressed... and even if they are, the suffering of women trumps the suffering of men.