Traditionalists and Feminists in Agreement?

I think it worthwhile to repeat that I have been, and remain, skeptical of the claims made for the current cohort of males just reaching adulthood turning right, and in particular the idea that the much talked-about "manosphere" and its message has great appeal to them. In fact I think it worthwhile to repeat that the belief that this is so is a matter of politicians and the media endeavoring to keep attention on the culture war, with the Democratic Party's (pseudo)intellectuals in particular continuing to repeat the line (the lie) that they were defeated by the right-wing sympathies of "deplorables" rather than their refusal to break with the neoliberal-neoconservative policy positions that not just their traditional electorate hates, but which even the Republican's own voters despise. It is also the case that the functionaries of the "liberal" media like the manosphere's brutal attitude toward young men, that brutality is what they want those young men to want, and so they persuade themselves and the public that they do want it, in spite of at best questionable evidence.

Still, I do not go so far as to deny that the "manosphere message" should thus be ignored, and indeed there is an aspect of its message that I have been thinking about as of late, namely the way the manosphere's personnel insist that men live up to traditional expectations, often without being insistent on women doing so, as even figures the aforementioned media condemns as toxic tell men "Don't blame women for your frustrations." Nevertheless, traditionalism for one gender is simply impracticable without traditionalism for the other, men unable to marry and start households the way they are expected to do unless women are prepared to do so with them, and just like women men are unlikely to do so unless it seems to them to be worth doing (all as, however much many do not want to deal with the fact, it is undeniable that under the current dispensation men are expected to give more and get less than before, within a marriage and family life as well as in an economy where the returns to effort have been falling for a long time).

I have tended to think of this as a matter of these right-wingers being hesitant to take on feminism in a head-on way, all as men have less protection against such admonitions or pressures. (Putting it bluntly, they would like to tell women to get back into the kitchen, but know it would be counter-productive to do so--the more in as bourgeois feminists, at least, have been such consistent and helpful allies to the right--and so they focus on browbeating young men who can expect no succor from the feminists, all as they have no movement which will push back against the way the kulturkampfers bully them.) Yet it also seems possible that they simply do not worry so much about women's break with traditionalism as others may think. So far as they are concerned, however much we hear of the social construction of gender it is genetics that calls the shots, and in the end women will act as they have traditionally done, embracing marriage, family, domesticity, and doing so on the most traditional lines, not least in their favoring the high-status male who is a promising provider and protector. That indeed, much of what feminists say on this score is a hypocrisy it is better to ignore than to call out. (Thus feminists treat as illegitimate the idea of men thinking of women as prizes--but women still expect to be courted and "won." Thus they consider it an outrage to say that women care how much money a man has, but no one denies that the rich, high-status man has opportunities with women that a poor, low-status man doesn't, as seen in how for all the feminists' denunciations rich old men continue to marry attractive younger women, as women despise and moralize at the low-status man, insisting that he is that because of his personal flaws, that he is lazy, irresponsible, immature, and that is why they have contempt for him, not his lack of money, which is the proof that he is contemptible. And women wouldn't really have things any other way, benefiting too much from things as they actually are.) And so their propaganda tells their audience "Hold up your end of the bargain," implicitly because the game has not changed, relations between men and women, in spite of much sound and fury over the matter, and perhaps even actual perturbations (they will admit that #MeToo didn't make things easier for men), the same as they ever were and always will be, and any "crisis of masculinity" only a matter of men having believed the hype about a change.