What It Actually Says (The Part Where I Am Required To Be Academic Before I Am Allowed To Be Savage)

Here is the core of it, stated plainly before we start sharpening the knives.

Womanhood, as a social status, is generally considered settled. You are born with the relevant biology, you pass through puberty, and the question of whether you are sufficiently female is not, on a normal Tuesday, up for public adjudication. Your womanhood does not require an audience, it does not need to be demonstrated through a series of approved actions, and nobody is standing by with a clipboard waiting to mark you down.

Manhood does not work like that.

Manhood, according to Vandello and Bosson’s research, which includes five studies, rigorously conducted and robustly replicated, is a precarious social status. It is hard won and easily lost. It must be earned through publicly – to other men – verifiable actions and maintained through continued demonstration. It is not a biological fact. It is a performance, and the audience never entirely leaves.

This is the difference between a foundation and a tightrope. Because here is what follows: when a man’s manhood feels threatened, and almost anything can threaten it, a failed test, a woman outperforming him, being told to do something stereotypically feminine, being seen to be uncertain or soft or wrong, the psychological response is not mild discomfort. The research is unambiguous: threatening manhood activates physically aggressive thoughts. Not metaphorically, but measurably, in laboratory conditions, with cortisol levels to match.

Men RAGE when they are threatened, even if it’s just that Barbara is capable of using a spanner, or Sandra mentions she’s seen a bigger dick. Thing is, she wasn’t just talking about genitalia at the time, but this was missed, although neither were meant as a compliment, Derek. And they RAGE more depending on where they were born, raised, and educated. Situational and cultural factors that heighten the precariousness of manhood increase the likelihood of male aggression.

All the above is from the peer-reviewed literature. Hold onto it, because we are about to go on a tour.

Nigel Farage, Britain’s most persistent rash and frog-faced fuckwit, is a simpler specimen and therefore easier to dissect. He does not have policies in any meaningful sense, he has posturing. Every studied pint, every performative fag, every calculated bit of man-of-the-people blokeishness is a manhood performance staged for an audience of men who feel that their own status is slipping and who desperately need someone to perform it on their behalf. He is not representing them, he is performing for them. He is the tribute act they hired because they cannot perform it themselves and the anxiety of that is unbearable.

The political project is secondary. The primary product is the feeling of being on the winning side of a manhood competition. This is why facts are irrelevant to his supporters: you cannot fact-check a feeling.

Andrew and Tristan Tate, two human participation trophies for the patriarchy, have achieved something genuinely remarkable: they have monetised masculine anxiety so efficiently that they have become wealthy enough to be genuinely above consequences, at least for a while. The product they are selling is not self-improvement. The product is the feeling of manhood. Buy the course, join the tribe, get the validation, feel like a real man for approximately forty-five minutes until the anxiety returns and you need to buy the next course.

The reason it works on young men is not that those young men are stupid. Most of them are not. The reason it works is that the culture has dug a hole in them and told them that manhood must be earned, that it is always at risk, that women and feminists and immigrants and diversity are actively undermining it, and then handed them a shovel and charged them three hundred quid for the privilege. The Tates did not create male anxiety, they just figured out the business model.

The forensic psychologist who assessed half the men convicted in the Pelicot trial, fifty-one of them, a roster of ordinary-looking, neighbourhood-dwelling, school-run-doing shitstains who would like you to know they didn’t realise she wasn’t consenting, told CNN that within these communities there exists a sense of brotherhood. Men creating bonds that meet their narcissistic needs. The rape is not only the act, it is the proof, witnessed and validated by other men. The most extreme, most irreducible expression of the manhood performance: total dominance over a woman who cannot resist, with an audience of men watching and paying to confirm that yes, this counts, you have proved it, you are a real man now.

FUCK.

French lawmaker Sandrine Josso, herself a survivor of drug-facilitated assault, called these places schools of violence. An online rape academy, where every subject is taught. She is not wrong. And if you want to understand the curriculum, precarious manhood theory wrote the syllabus. The lesson is dominance, the exam is witnessed, and the woman’s personhood is the obstacle to be chemically removed.

In England and Wales, more than half of recorded sexual assaults involved a partner or ex-partner. The proportion of victims assaulted while unconscious or asleep has risen to 23% over the last decade. One in four raped, in their own beds, by men they trusted. Men who filmed it and uploaded it and sold tickets.

The shame, as Gisèle Pelicot said at her husband’s trial, must change sides. She was braver saying that than most people will ever be asked to be. The least the rest of us can do is keep saying it after the algorithm has moved on.

The Manosphere and the Men Who Are Definitely Not Scared

The manosphere, that sprawling digital archipelago of incel forums, red pill subreddits, men’s rights activists, pickup artist communities, religious cults, and assorted purveyors of masculine grievance, is not, despite appearances, about men who hate women. It is about men who are terrified of women.

Specifically, it is about men whose manhood feels under continuous assault and who have been handed a ready-made explanation for why: women. Women who will not comply. Women who will not validate. Women who are present in spaces that used to belong exclusively to men. Women who have opinions about things and express them out loud without apologising first.

The online misogyny is not incidental to this. The harassment campaigns, the coordinated targeting of women who speak publicly, the death threats sent to female journalists and academics and game developers and anyone else with the temerity to exist in public while female; this is precarious manhood in its rawest, most undisguised form. The aggression is the proof of manhood. The target is whoever is most conveniently available and least likely to punch back.

Here is the particularly cheerful part: cross-cultural research involving more than 33,000 participants across 62 nations found that precarious manhood beliefs are highest in countries with the greatest gender inequality. The more unequal the society, the more anxious men are about their status. The more anxious men are about their status, the more they enforce the inequality that created the anxiety in the first place.

It is, in the scientific literature, described as a cycle. I would describe it as a fucking disaster.

Why This Matters Right Now

We are living through what happens when precarious manhood goes mainstream, gets a media strategy, and discovers that electoral politics is just the world’s largest dominance competition.

The rollback of women’s rights, the attacks on reproductive autonomy, the assault on gender equality across every sphere where women have spent decades clawing back ground, the appointment of men who have publicly stated that women should have fewer rights, less autonomy, and less presence in public life, and the enthusiastic applause from men who feel their manhood has been under siege and are relieved, finally, viscerally relieved, that someone in power is doing something about it. This is not ideology and it is not policy. This is collective anxiety management on a geopolitical scale, and women are the proposed solution.

We are not the solution, and neither are we the problem. We are simply people who exist, which turns out to be threatening enough.

Precarious manhood theory explains everything. The men it describes are going to absolutely hate that. Which is, of course, the most perfect demonstration of the theory you could possibly ask for.

Cue the insecure comments to do just that…