Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘The anxieties [Andrew] Tate addresses are real, which is part of the reason his sales pitch is so effective. ‘The system is deliberately designed to oppress and keep people working jobs which barely pay their rent and everyone is semi-depressed,’ he tells Tahsin and Shea. ‘But it doesn’t matter because the elites get to do whatever they want. So, the rules are for poor people. And when you understand how to break the rules, then you can find a very easy way to become rich.’ It’s not just rules that are for simps, but manners, decorum and kindness too. Some of his power, like Trump’s, comes from his acknowledgment that traditional paths to economic and social stability are increasingly blocked off, and in ways that undermine traditional markers of masculine success. ‘We live in a world where you cannot play fair any more,’ he says.

In a recent interview in Jacobin, the anthropologist Kristen Ghodsee described the theories of the manosphere and its female counterpart, the tradwife, as ‘individual escape fantasies’ – a dream that there is some way out of material and social reality, and that the key to comfort, protection and meaning in life is deciphering the messages sent by your endocrine system. ‘It’s sad,’ Ghodsee said, ‘because there’s almost a nascent anti-capitalist impulse here being hijacked toward reactionary ends.’ The clips of young mothers with facial fillers wearing eyelet dresses and stirring with wooden spoons, the thick-necked men discussing their paleo diets and their crypto positions – even the videos of the morning dew on a banana yellow sports car – bely a desperation. If the keys to the good life have been discovered, why this incessant gabbing at the camera?

As in the early days of men’s liberation, the manosphere could have gone in another direction and rejected the idea of a gendered fate. It’s often pointed out (if not by the red-pilled) that the Wachowskis directed The Matrix as closeted trans women. Elon Musk wants to put a computer chip in your brain and to colonise Mars, yet sees no value in using technology to alter secondary sex characteristics, and is estranged from his trans daughter. That the futurists who want to break the bounds of mortality are the ones most committed to the immutability of gender says something about how useful the concept is to them. Their insistence on masculine hegemony is an insistence on order and hierarchy.’ (from the London Review of Books)