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Clavicular, the twenty-year-old looksmaxxing influencer…you know where I’m going with this. whose entire public persona is built around ranking human beings by sexual value, has been charged in Massachusetts with rape and drugging someone for sexual intercourse, allegations he denies. Andrew and Tristan Tate, probably the most successful evangelists for the idea that masculinity consists of domination and access to women, were arrested in Miami while fighting extradition to Britain over charges that include rape and facilitating trafficking for sexual exploitation, which they also deny. Despite the fact that absolutely everyone saw some version of this coming from approximately six hundred miles away, I’m going to exercise a degree of restraint that none of these men have ever successfully monetized and stop making jokes about it here.
I don’t bring these cases up because criminal charges prove my argument about the manosphere, and working backward from an allegation into a complete theory of somebody’s ideology would be stupid. What interests me is the political culture surrounding these men and the answer its most successful figures keep offering young men who feel humiliated. Women become the prize at the end of successful masculinity, while men get sorted according to their apparent ability to obtain that prize, leaving the miserable man with the instruction that he needs to become better at winning the same contest that taught him (correctly) to understand himself as a loser.
Cornell has had me thinking about men again, which is never how I want to spend an evening.
A former Cornell student has “”””alleged””” (I’m going to remind everyone that allegedly in this instance just means that if the courts deny Jane doe justice they will go after everyone who has spoken up on behalf of this brave woman.) that seven members of Chi Phi drugged and gang raped her in the fraternity house in 2024. The accused men have denied wrongdoing, the criminal investigation has been reopened, and Cornell has said its internal process resulted in expulsions and suspensions. the allegations have dragged the same question back into public view that universities have supposedly been answering for more than a decade: how do men who have sat through consent trainings, watched MeToo happen in real time, and grown up inside a culture that now publicly condemns sexual coercion still end up inside social worlds where something like this can even be alleged?
A certain kind of man took exactly one lesson from MeToo, and it wasn't the one we thought we were teaching, because he learned to fall in line. He learned the rules of exposure: which things he can't say around women, which jokes will get him fired, which kinds of touching will get him reported, which messages should never go out from an account attached to his government name. He learned that women now have enough collective legitimacy to make some of his behavior dangerous to him, and he adjusted. What he didn't learn, because nobody made him, was why he and his friends were like that in the first place.
That second thing is what nobody touched. A man can get genuinely good at respecting a woman's boundaries and go on running his friendships by the exact hierarchy that produced his entitlement. He can know that commenting on a coworker's body is unacceptable and still spend a whole evening telling his friend nobody wants him because he's fat. He can know a woman has every right to turn him down and still laugh when another man admits he's a virgin. He can talk fluently about consent and belong to a male friendship where humiliation, unwanted sexual jokes, shoving past each other's limits, and constant little tests of adequacy all pass for affection. Then everyone acts surprised when some lonely boy grows up certain that getting laid is what decides whether he's worth respecting, even though his friends gave him the fucking syllabus.
The mistake is assuming that learning the boundary changes the value system that brought him to the boundary. It can change his behavior without changing what sex means to him or how he measures himself through it. A man can understand perfectly well that nobody owes him sex while continuing to experience sexual success as proof that he has succeeded at being a man. He can respect a rejection in practice and walk away feeling that something has been revealed about his standing. We taught him what he's allowed to do after hearing no without asking why hearing yes had been made so important to him.
Male socialization has always run its own little police department. Boys learn early that other boys are watching them for weakness, femininity, failure with girls, and whatever else their particular group has decided can knock somebody down a few places. Nobody has to explain the rules because the rules arrive as laughter. You cry at the wrong moment or admit no girl wants you, and the other boys show you exactly where you sit.
The policing becomes most effective once it feels like common sense. A boy doesn't have to consciously think that he's performing masculinity for other boys every time he changes his behavior around them. He learns what produces laughter and what earns approval, then adjusts before the reaction arrives. Eventually he can inspect himself through the imagined eyes of other men without anyone asking him to do it. He wonders whether he's tall enough, whether he's getting enough attention from women, whether admitting that he has never had sex will change how his friends look at him. The crowd moves inside his head.
The most important audience in a straight man's life is often other men, which means a lot of what gets called heterosexual masculinity is performed for a male crowd. The desire can genuinely be directed toward women while the meaning assigned to successfully obtaining that desire is organized through men. He wants her, and he also knows what having her will say about him.
Men spend their lives presenting evidence of manhood to each other, and women are some of the most valuable evidence they can hand over. A girlfriend proves something about you, while sexual experience can raise your standing and dating a woman other men desire can become proof that you won a competition whose judges were other men all along. She gets to remain a whole person inside her own life while doubling, inside his, as a credential.
This is part of why misogyny survives so comfortably inside a man who has learned the formal language of respecting women. A woman doesn't have to be consciously hated to be used against other men as proof of his worth. He can care about his girlfriend deeply while still enjoying the status her desirability gives him. The contradiction becomes easier to maintain because nobody involved has to consciously decide that women are being used this way.
You can see the pattern most clearly when a man dates a woman his friends consider unattractive and suddenly discovers that they think his private desire is their business. Their mockery makes very little sense if heterosexuality is only about individual men desiring individual women. It makes perfect sense once the girlfriend also occupies a place inside the male status system, because his choice can lower him in their eyes. Her desirability has been assigned a social price, and he's expected to know what association with that price says about him.
This is old, older than the internet by a couple of centuries. Hegel watched two self-consciousnesses meet in the Phenomenology of Spirit and found that neither one could be sure of itself until the other recognized it, and that the encounter could become a struggle over whose recognition counts and who gets reduced to an object. Men run a small daily version of that struggle on each other, and women have been made to mediate a considerable part of it. The woman gets pulled away from being the person whose recognition might matter on its own terms and becomes part of the proof through which the man seeks it from somebody else.
Gayle Rubin gave this its material shape in 1975 through the traffic in women, where kinship is organized so that women pass between men as the gift that seals the bond, leaving the woman as the thing exchanged rather than a party to the exchange. The incel keeps the apparatus and throws out the kinship. It's what I've called sexual social currency, and a currency is always priced unevenly, which means some of us have spent our whole lives being quoted the lowest rate.
The structure can therefore hurt men without becoming any less misogynist. Men can suffer terribly under a hierarchy built through women because being the beneficiary of a social order doesn't guarantee that every individual man succeeds inside it. Some men have to lose for the ranking to mean anything. Patriarchy can offer men a standard of masculine value and then humiliate the men who fail to reach it, which gives those men a genuine grievance while leaving them spectacularly confused about who created the terms of their humiliation.
Once you see that, the incel stops being mysterious. He has his Chads and his Stacys, his "foids," his looksmaxxing charts and facial measurements and ever more deranged theories about why one man's jawline grants him unlimited access to women while another man's wrist circumference sentences him to celibacy. The vocabulary is insane, and the common sense under it is completely ordinary. Incels didn't invent the idea that a man who can't attract women is pathetic or that getting them raises his standing. Ranking women by their looks and laughing at the guy whose girlfriend flunks inspection isn't their invention either. They took those ordinary lessons seriously enough to ask what they would mean if they were literally true.
Once the ranking gets treated as objective, measurement follows almost automatically. If sexual success demonstrates masculine worth, there has to be an explanation for why one man succeeds while another doesn't. His height becomes a data point, and his face becomes something strangers can supposedly examine and place inside an objective sexual order. The informal cruelty of adolescence gets converted into charts because a chart at least promises that humiliation follows rules.
If getting women tells you something real about a man's worth, the man women reject has to be worth less. Once looks become part of the explanation for who receives attention, they can swell into an entire caste theory, and women begin to look like the people administering it because their choices appear to determine which men get chosen. A boy who spent adolescence hearing virgins treated as failures already knows what position he's supposed to occupy before he ever learns the word blackpill. The blackpill takes that ordinary sorting and hardens it into fate.
Then the man blames women, and this is the part that makes me insane, because women didn't build the fucking thing. Men teach boys that getting pussy is what decides whether they're pathetic, and then a share of those boys reach adulthood furious at women for holding the pussy that would have certified them as real men. His friends laughed when he couldn't get a girlfriend, his father asked if there was a girl yet, and the culture surrounding him treated romance as part of successful masculine development. By adulthood, experience has become competence while inexperience is something he learns to bury. Then everyone turns toward the woman and asks why on earth this man thinks her attention decides his worth when she didn't write the exam and just got turned into the answer key.
The woman becomes the obvious target because she occupies the point where the verdict appears to happen. He asks her out and she says no, so the rejection has a face. The years of masculine discipline that taught him how to interpret the rejection don't. There was never one afternoon when male socialization sat him down and explained that his worth depended on sexual success. The lesson accumulated through jokes, comparisons, questions from adults, conversations with friends, and humiliations that boys are expected to survive without admitting they hurt.
That's the seed of incel ideology, and it's already planted inside ordinary male socialization before any forum gets near it. The manosphere hands the resentment a vocabulary and a mythology, while the injury underneath is much older. Because a man is raised to run his standing through women, a rejection can land like something far bigger than one woman saying no to one date. A no from her can feel like the other men's verdict finally coming in, which keeps the humiliation homosocial even when the rage comes out aimed at women.
That's what makes the situation after MeToo so strange. MeToo established, with real force, that women have boundaries men are obligated to respect. Her no ends the encounter, her clothes aren't consent, her sexual history gives you no claim on her, and her being drunk doesn't make her available. Your disappointment doesn't become her job to fix, and every word of that should remain.
Consequences matter. I'm not interested in pretending a rule becomes worthless because everybody subject to it hasn't undergone some beautiful internal moral transformation. Plenty of civilization consists of people learning that they can't do whatever they want because somebody will stop them, and I would rather have the boundary enforced than wait around for universal enlightenment while women absorb the cost.
The limitation appears when compliance gets mistaken for transformation. A man can learn exactly where the new line sits while preserving the worldview that repeatedly brought men to that line. He can understand coercion is forbidden while continuing to believe sexual acquisition measures masculine success. He can remove the joke from mixed company and keep making it around men, allowing the male space to preserve the older value system with better operational security.
The problem is that most of the culture stopped right there. We taught men that a woman can say no, and we left standing the contest among men that makes her yes feel like proof he counts. A boy can grow into a man who sincerely believes women owe him nothing while still believing a man who gets nothing from women is a loser. Those beliefs can coexist peacefully until he becomes the loser, because only then does he discover what it feels like to accept a woman's autonomy while measuring himself by the results of her choices.
That produces a form of resentment that doesn't require him to reject consent. He may sincerely believe a woman has every right to turn him down and still experience the aggregate result of women's choices as a judgment about himself. The feminist principle and the masculine ranking system can survive together because they answer different questions. One tells him what women are allowed to choose, while the other tells him what their choices supposedly reveal about him.
I'm horrified by the obsession, same as everyone, but I want to back the argument up one step and ask why the fuck we're measuring men this way at all.
The manosphere has a pile of answers, because reactionary politics gets inventive fast when it's trying to save a hierarchy that stopped paying out the reward somebody was promised. Andrew Tate tells them to dominate hard enough to win, while red-pill culture teaches them to study women like a hostile species whose code can be cracked. Looksmaxxing moves the problem into the body and promises that enough surgery and gym time will finally change where he lands. The blackpill looks at the same hierarchy and declares the outcome settled before the game begins.
The factions can despise each other while sharing the premise that matters. The red-piller thinks the losing man can improve himself enough to climb, while the blackpiller thinks biology has already assigned everybody a permanent position. Neither explanation has to question why access to women has been granted this much authority over a man's understanding of himself. They can spend years fighting over whether the game is rigged without asking why they're still allowing the scoreboard to tell them who they are.
So I won't treat the incel as some alien thing the internet grew in a dish. An ordinary man can joke that women only want tall guys with money and then go to work because nobody expects him to build the joke into a complete theory of civilization. The incel goes home, measures his face, opens a spreadsheet, and turns the joke into historical materialism for men who think Marx forgot to account for cheekbones. The internet gave the thing organization and a political language, while the raw material came from a masculine common sense that predates anybody's canthal tilt calculator.
This is where reading for the invariant matters. Invariance isn't a hunt for identical language across history because language changes constantly, and treating every period as interchangeable would destroy the method before it told us anything useful. The point is to follow a social relation through those changes and ask what continues performing the same function after the institutions, vocabulary, and technology surrounding it have shifted.
The word can move from "loser" to "incel," and the locker room can become a Discord server without preserving every feature of the world that came before it. What survives is the demand that manhood be confirmed by other men and the repeated use of women as the proof through which that confirmation travels. The forum gives it new language, while algorithms can intensify it by bringing isolated men into contact with one another. Neither development explains why the grievance was immediately recognizable to so many of them because the grievance already had somewhere to land.
The invariant therefore isn't incel ideology itself. Inceldom is historically specific, shaped by internet culture and a particular political moment. The invariant is the social relation that makes incel ideology intelligible when it arrives: men ranking men through access to women and teaching one another that sexual success carries information about masculine worth. Once that distinction is clear, you can explain historical continuity without pretending nothing has changed.
The fraternity house and the Discord server don't perform identical functions, yet both can become places where men interpret themselves through other men and women's sexuality becomes part of the evidence. The continuity exists at the level of the relation rather than the surface form. Once you know what you're looking for, the apparent contradiction between the ordinary guy making virgin jokes and the incel building a caste theory starts looking considerably less mysterious.
Fraternities make all of this easy to see because a fraternity takes an informal male ranking and gives it a house and four years to work on you. An allegation isn't a conviction, and none of this requires pretending every fraternity produces sexual violence. What a fraternity concentrates is the male crowd itself, since the men around you can become your friends, your social life, and the people whose approval decides where you sit.
That concentration matters because masculinity becomes easier to police when belonging is at stake. The judgment of a stranger can be dismissed in a way the judgment of the people structuring your daily life can't. Reputation circulates inside the group, stories become communal property, and behavior toward women can acquire meaning far beyond the encounter itself. Something that happens between two people can therefore become the stuff through which a much larger group negotiates rank.
None of that establishes what happened in any particular allegation, and it shouldn't be used as a shortcut around evidence. It explains why the social structure deserves attention alongside individual conduct. If an institution wants to understand how sexual misconduct becomes possible, asking whether each man knew the consent policy gives you one part of the mechanism. You also have to understand what his immediate social world rewards and what happens to the man who refuses whatever performance his peers expect.
Universities answer sexual violence with rules aimed at individuals because rules are what an institution knows how to run. They define consent, write disciplinary procedures, require training, and punish conduct when they determine a policy was broken. Consequences like that really do change behavior. What the rules can't do on their own is follow the student back into the daily life that's also teaching him.
A university gets forty-five minutes to tell him where consent begins, while the men whose approval runs his days get four years to teach him what they reward. The training can establish a necessary boundary around his conduct after years in which the social meaning of sex has already been partially written for him. By eighteen, he may have spent most of adolescence learning that sexual inexperience is embarrassing and being wanted by women proves something about him. Consent education arrives downstream from that education.
A man can therefore learn affirmative consent while his friends keep teaching him that conquest earns their respect. He can know never to pressure a woman and remain comfortable in a friendship where men pressure one another to prove their manhood through women. Fear of becoming the next MeToo story doesn't prevent him from calling his lonely friend a pathetic virgin because learning how to behave toward women never required him to reconsider what men do to each other.
This is why I keep coming back to male friendship. Feminism has spent an enormous amount of time examining what men do to women while popular culture continues treating what men do to one another as background noise. Men can humiliate one another and police each other's sexuality while calling it bonding, and some of it genuinely happens inside loving friendships. That makes the discipline stronger because the cruelty can come from somebody whose approval matters enormously to you.
A lot of male intimacy is built under conditions where directly admitting vulnerability risks lowering your position, so affection gets routed through teasing and competition. The problem isn't that every joke between male friends secretly constitutes abuse, because that would be stupid. The problem appears when humiliation becomes one of the ordinary tools through which the group teaches its members what kind of man they're allowed to be. A boy learns very quickly which insecurities can safely be exposed when the people closest to him know exactly where to press.
That gives the manosphere an opening feminism should take more seriously. Telling a man that women don't owe him sex is true, and he may already know it. Telling him his loneliness doesn't entitle him to misogyny is equally true. Neither statement explains why loneliness became evidence of masculine failure in the first place. If feminism leaves that question sitting on the table, somebody else eventually answers it.
By the time the lonely friend finds a Discord server, the forum doesn't need to manufacture an injury. His ordinary life already handed him one. The misogynist explanation works because it names enough of his experience accurately to earn his trust before lying about the cause. He really may have been mocked, and his appearance may have affected how people treated him. He may occupy the bottom of an order he never consciously chose. The lie enters when women's freedom gets blamed for a ranking system that taught him to grade himself through women's choices.
The incel keeps nearly every patriarchal premise that hurt him and turns on women because the premises stopped paying him. I have no patience for the idea that these men are short on masculinity because they're drowning in it. They believe the whole thing more completely than almost anyone. Male bodies can be ranked, conquest proves value, weakness earns contempt, and women become trophies men hold up to one another. Their misery comes, in large part, from accepting those terms all the way down and discovering that the same terms have handed them a losing position. The blackpill is patriarchal meritocracy reading its own rejection letter.
Even the word "foid" tells you what happened. A woman stops being allowed to be a person the moment her own desire gets blamed for the whole male pecking order. She hardens into a biological category that can carry collective guilt, so her choice to sleep with one man and turn down another becomes evidence about the nature of all women. The word has to erase her as an individual because an actual woman wanting one person and rejecting another would wreck the theory.
Individual desire is intolerable to the ideology because it doesn't promise a fair distribution. People want who they want for reasons that can be shallow, complicated, contradictory, or barely legible even to themselves. The incel needs women's desire to operate like an institution because only then can his personal rejection become political evidence. Once every woman becomes a representative of women, her private choice can be prosecuted as collective discrimination.
Men build the gate, stand women in front of it, and then hate women for guarding it.
MeToo cut into the place where male entitlement ran straight into women's bodies, and I'm glad it did, but feminism can't leave the rest of the machine running. Boys have to stop learning that another boy's virginity makes him pathetic, and men have to stop using women to settle who outranks whom among themselves. Male friendship can't keep running on humiliation while everyone acts shocked that humiliated men become obsessed with where they stand. Fathers also have to stop treating a son's success with women as a sign that he developed correctly.
Taking that seriously means being able to discuss male suffering without turning women into the treatment for it. Some men really are lonely, and some really are treated cruelly because they're considered ugly, awkward, poor, disabled, feminine, or sexually inexperienced. Their suffering doesn't create a debt women must repay with access to their bodies. It gives us a reason to care about the social order that convinced those men sexual access was the payment they were missing.
I want a feminism that can look straight at the incel and see an enemy of women who was also built by a male order that trained him long before the manosphere ever came recruiting. Explaining how he was produced doesn't excuse what he does with what he was given. It tells us where to intervene before a misogynist forum becomes the first place willing to explain his own life to him.
That intervention has to reach further back than teaching boys what they're forbidden to do to women. It has to reach the boy who laughs when his friend gets rejected because he knows the laughter might turn toward him otherwise.
None of this replaces consent education, consequences, or women's right to say no without being drafted into somebody else's rehabilitation project. Those interventions establish necessary boundaries. The larger task is understanding why the same social order keeps producing men who experience women's choices as judgments on their own humanity.
The internet found boys who were already terrified of being ugly, weak, unfuckable, and laughable to other boys, gave their fear a theory, and told them women had caused it. That accusation is the lie, though almost everything you'd need to make the lie feel true had already been taught to them by the men whose good opinion they spent their lives trying to earn.
WORKS CITED
G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). For the account of recognition: a self-consciousness becomes certain of itself only when another self-consciousness recognizes it, and the encounter can collapse into a struggle over who is recognized and who is reduced to an object. Used here for the male recognition economy, where a man's masculinity becomes real only when other men confirm it and women can be turned into the evidence through which that confirmation is sought.
Gayle Rubin, "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex" (1975). For the argument that kinship circulates women between men as objects through which relationships among men are constituted. Used here for the material form of that recognition economy and for understanding how women can become the medium through which male relationships and status are organized.
Tara Knight, "Your Tboy BF Is Using You" and the sexual social currency analysis (Bundle of Styx). For the argument that sexual attention can operate as a form of social currency whose value is distributed unevenly across bodies. Used here to explain why sexual attention carries different social values and why rejection acquires meaning beyond the immediate encounter.