Morality Monday is a bi-weekly column written by the Cornell Review’s staff writers. It aims to provide values-focused commentary on social and political trends.
What’s happening, and more importantly, whose fault is it?
Online gender politics right now are the most vicious they have ever been. On TikTok, casual misogyny and misandry have reached a feverish intensity. Time and time again, a contentious video becomes the prelude to a battlefield of a comments section. Soon enough, arguments get downright baroque. Whose fault is it that dating is so difficult? Why don’t men and women get along anymore? Who is responsible for the downfall of democratic, modern civilization? Scrolling through one such comments section, depending on one’s desired level of chalant-ness at the moment, either engenders simmering rage or a state of hopeless despair. Mindless scrolling has gone from a guilty pleasure to a major cause of social corrosion. So, what’s going on?
First, let’s examine the origins of our current moment. What we’re seeing right now is two shattered crumple zones after an unfortunate accident– two online communities that should never have met each other barrelling straight into one another like some sort of head-on collision. (How romantic!) On the male side (and implicitly, though not necessarily, the political right) is the manosphere.
Beginning in the shadowy days before everyone started spending all their time on their phones, this community began in the “blogosphere,” the collection of personal websites that people used to broadcast their thoughts into an echo chamber of disgruntled men. The manosphere was the subsection of these blogs devoted to men seeking to seduce women at scale, often known as “Pick Up Artists.” Many bloggers in this era, such as Daryush “RooshV” Valizadeh, a central figure in the space, discussed not only “pick up artistry” but also their extremely conservative politics. In more recent years, the concepts and terminology which originated in these communities have proliferated far beyond the blogs of their origin, becoming another element of male “Zoomer” (Member of Generation Z, born between 1997 and 2012) lingo. But, instead of reading these ideas in lengthy blog posts, “Zoomers” today encounter these concepts in many cases through easily digestible short videos, often on TikTok.
This kind of online sex compartmentalization was not exclusive to men, however. Women have created their own online culture that has seeped into the way they view men. An influential hub of this culture was the online, anonymous microblogging platform Tumblr, which gave rise to “Tumblr feminism.” The platform normalized stigmatized aspects of the teenage girl experience, providing a place to discuss insecurities and taboo topics like sexual harassment. However, the same features that made Tumblr appealing also fueled controversy. Unlike many other platforms at the time, Tumblr fostered anonymity, allowing members to articulate more unconventional or provocative positions in communities separate from their daily lives. (The same phenomenon can be witnessed even today on anonymous platforms across the political spectrum). Many criticized Tumblr’s small communities for veering toward outright contempt for men, spiraling from nuanced criticism of men’s behavior to open misandry. Posts describing men as inherently evil, selfish, and emotionally stunted circulated, and blanket disdain promoted, manifesting itself in slogans like “Kill All Men.” These ideas and symbols, much like those formed in the manosphere, have displayed real staying power within short-form content ecosystems.
TikTok, a real online cesspit if there ever was one, serves as a perfect breeding ground for the worst tendencies of both sexes to manifest themselves. But the issues men and women are complaining about are not purely a construction of internet rage cycles. The problem goes deeper.
The 20th-century Austrian priest-philosopher Ivan Illich can help us understand what is happening. Illich was not an easily categorizable thinker, associated often with the left far more than the right. He was associated with anti-institutional thought during the era when the New Left began its ascendency. At the same time, however, Illich was a staunch Catholic. His book Gender details the changes in human society regarding its titular subject, not through the lens of moral theology or politics but as an anthropological and economic phenomenon. According to Illich, all around the world, subsistence-level societies divided tasks, tools, and pretty much everything else into two categories, one assigned to each gender, until the Industrial Revolution and the rise of modern capitalism destroyed this cultural-economic paradigm starting near the end of the 1700s. Beginning at that change, labor was rendered genderless and the laborers much the same; the differences between the two types only relevant in terms of physical differences. Today, we live in a world where “vernacular gender,” as Illich calls it, is a distant memory in advanced countries, and has been replaced with a regime of “economic sex” in which previously gendered aspects of life have been rendered intrinsically neutral, even human bodies. A hallmark of this new social reality is the idea of a neutral, genderless human from which various deviations can be made.
Technological “advancements,” like the Internet’s doom-loop rage-bait content cycles, have only increased the alienation that men and women feel in our increasingly mechanized age. All of these things taken together build up to an unbearable weight. What’s the solution?
Well, let’s circle back to the online examples we discussed earlier. RooshV closed down his blog several years ago after converting to Russian Orthodoxy and has disavowed his earlier practices. Tumblr, too, has largely faded from its peak in the 2010s, and many Tumblr feminists have similarly repudiated their previous views. It seems that the best cure to online gender politics may be to just stop engaging with them and live a normal life.
And what of the inescapable real-world issues? The difficulties inherent to Zoomer life in the present era? These problems are bigger than any one person, or even any one sex (gender?), and will not be easily addressed. Men and women both are sealed in an industrial massified system in which it is nearly impossible to live a dignified life as a human person rather than an economic unit. And it’s even more difficult alone. The only way out is through, and the only way through is with each other. The impulse to assign guilt to the opposite sex for various social ills, real or imagined, may be cathartic for the most terminally online among us, but it’s not getting anything done.
Rather than engaging in fruitless conflict, Zoomers, male and female both, should realize that they should view the other men and women in their lives as potential cooperators in a broken system and co-conspirators against the conditions of their world. Rather than denigrating and blaming an entire half of the human race, our actually existing social bonds to the real people around us should shape how we view them and deal with them. We should be able to take into account the differences and difficulties between men and women without turning them into the front lines of a conflict. As the French say (and if they don’t, they need to get with the program), Vive la différence!
Benedict Segrest is a sophomore majoring in English and philosophy in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be reached at bjs322@cornell.edu.
Isabella Cho is a junior majoring in government in the College of Arts and Sciences.
