Happy holidays, Deeists. I have some thoughts on the Gender War today. Please excuse the clickbait title, I needed to get your attention. The Social Media Gender War. There’s an obvious piece to write about how hyper-polarization shapes our sexuality. I guarantee that someone is churning it out right now. Hell, I published that piece a year ago. The conventional narrative goes like this: Right-wing men pursue left-wing women, drawn to what they perceive as emotional volatility (that is, the “BPD gf”), which, in both popular imagination and reality, promises sexual adventure.¹ Meanwhile, left-wing women gravitate toward right-wing men for their “unrestrained masculinity” that progressive spaces have carefully contained. Rather than being simply a open-and-close case of transgressing taboos (though for the left, there’s certainly a very real “bad boy” element at play), it hinges on assumptions about who’s better in bed. As right maps onto male and left maps onto female, the sexual tension presumably rises. Or so the think pieces would have you believe. The reality becomes even more complex when we consider how social media surfaces and rewards extremes, turning the dominant sides of the gender war into fun-house mirror versions of themselves. The “Gender Wars,” at least on X (though, I’ve observed, not so much on TikTok, Instagram and Bluesky) have devolved into an endless escalation of mutual antipathy. It’s up for debate to what extent social media discourse impacts lived communities, as opposed to “take sellers” and their respective fandoms. Some right-wing communities really are becoming more misogynistic, and it’s worth watching, as Helen Roy points out, because these things have a nasty habit of breaking containment. I also suspect that certain right-wing communities are upping the ante on misogyny for two strategic and seemingly contradictory reasons: first, as a gatekeeping measure as their spaces become more accessible to bigger audiences, and second, because building a coalition is easier on anti-women lines than racial ones. A lot of nuance gets overlooked in analyses of the Gender War, though. Josh Citarella, friend of the newsletter, provides an interesting example in a recent conversation about the economics of the Manosphere. What are these masculinity influencers selling and who, specifically, is their target audience? Economic precarity shapes male identity, too, and there's often a literal commercial transaction at the heart of these movements. Similarly, we miss quite a bit in the female response. Take the 4B movement, for instance: while “Western women are adopting 4B now!” makes for attention-grabbing headlines, it's not true. 4B is grounded in South Korea and emerged in a specifically Korean context. The brief viral moment of 4B-related TikToks and the associated “hot takes” is an excellent demonstration of how our understanding of gender relations often stems from elaborate fictions built around a handful of viral posts – narratives that ultimately serve to bolster the careers of professional opinion-havers. The female response to the Manosphere is complicated, and how we treated the whole 4B thing just shows how much we flatten it. Many women internalize the messages of the Manosphere. I know I did, and to great emotional and psychological distress. Years ago, radfem reader accused me of being a “fed” (traitor) for platforming writers like Delicious Tacos. Her radical feminism stemmed, in part, from exposure to men’s unfiltered blog posts about their darker and darkest sexual thoughts. These conversations didn’t just make dating unappealing—it made it morally untenable for her, a form of self-harm and humiliation. From her perspective, the evidence was clear: men overwhelmingly consume pornography without remorse, harbor preferences for teenage girls, and view women as inherently inferior. She saw all the discourse around “feminine features” as sophisticated window dressing for deep-seated misogyny. She also found the writing about Zoomer women to be insulting: this isn’t about hating men. It’s about a proportional response to peering into the inner worlds of men who she believed hated her in the most literal sense. Give me money — it helps me argue to my family this isn’t a hobby, it’s real work: Chuddy Chasers. For years, stories have circulated about leftists tasting the “forbidden fruit” of far-right dick. The truthfulness and frequency of these encounters remains unclear—does it happen? has it ever happened?—but they’ve become a persistent piece of online folklore. Like all good fairytales, the stories follow a predictable pattern: a leftist begins investigating far-right communities, becomes sexually involved with someone there, and everything implodes spectacularly in a dox, hit piece, or tell-all book which conveniently omits the sexual element. The conventional wisdom explains these liaisons through what we talked about above: the supposed masculinity of the right and femininity of the left, the cynical transaction of sex-for-information, or even just the natural attraction between extremes. Sometimes, it’s explained away as the natural result of being Terminally Online: what these characters really share is their commitment to online subcultures. But there’s another reading I’d like to explore. One that might be wrong, so please excuse this, corrections welcome. Leftists (insiders) are “topping” rightists (outsiders). The insiders aren’t drawn to right-wing power but to its absence—to the vulnerability beneath the posturing. Meanwhile, the rightists are drawn not to leftist weakness, but to the barely concealed malice that institutional power enables. The attraction isn’t to strength but to the potential for harm: both giving and receiving it. When a leftist gets involved with a rightist, it reifies the leftist’s power; when the rightist involves himself with the leftist, he knowingly puts himself at risk. For the leftist, it isn’t about submission to a would-be ubermensch, but in dominating someone who poses as strong while lacking real social power. It reminds me of another online phenomenon: women who become attracted to incels. It often begins as narcissism masked as a savior complex—they alone can see the person’s true worth. Or worse, they offer the poisoned validation of being “one of the good ones,” “not like the other.” And in turn, they get to feel like the “only one” who ultimately understands the outsider. But they don’t want to save them, not really. They want to have power over them. Far from victims though, the outsiders are willing participants in their own eventual humiliation. The outsider divulges secrets, compromises their principles, even betrays their communities... for a taste of sex, a taste of playing the rebel for the establishment, for the unique joy of being an exhibitionist watched by a voyeur, and also, maybe perplexingly, for their position as a loser to be validated by their dangerous lover. For the insiders who masterfully conduct these encounters, they draw satisfaction not just from the eventual exposure, but from the prolonged exercise of power over someone who can see the trap closing and walks into it anyway. Granted, the tables can always turn. The outsider can wield his own power over insider... 1 The rightists may be onto something, though I’d be remiss if I didn’t also say that any young woman cultivating an audience of mostly men is no less “crazy” (or willing to suck dick like her life depended on it) than the doe-eyed art hoe on the left you’re chasing. Invite your friends and earn rewardsIf you enjoy default.blog, share it with your friends and earn rewards when they subscribe.
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Keep a civil tongue.