This is section 2 of Down With The Cisness: Betrayal To Manhood is Loyalty to Humanity. See the intro here.

What we’ve seen in the West in the past decade especially, is a reactionary and fascist(ic) backlash against gender non-conforming as well as feminism. There’s been a coordinated and violent political movement to strip back the relative progress made in terms of women and the LGBTQ+ community’s rights, access to healthcare, public existence and aspirations. Moreover, there is a distinctly revanchist aspect to this, with a cruel, sadistic desire to discipline, abuse and make suffer anyone who doesn’t conform to strict patriarchal gender roles. That includes a sort of open and public spectacle wherein cis male supremacism is reaffirmed and the “deviants” get humiliated and dehumanized.

It’s not like this kind of violent patriarchal-masculinist reaction hasn’t happened in the past, nor that the prevailing status quo isn’t itself a regime of terror and torture. For example, things like muscular christianity in the 19th and early 20th century, the men’s rights movement (which started in the 1970’s in response to feminism) or the Promise Keepers in the 1990s were predecessors of this kind of male chauvinist reactionary movements. But this current wave of revanchist violence and attempts to step back progress in terms of gender-sexual equality, basically exploded during the 2010’s, notoriously (but not exclusively) in the context of Gamergate and the depressingly popular “anti-SJW/anti-woke” content mill online since then. This has also been one of the major boosts to the far right’s resurgence in the West (and beyond).

Similarly, trans people have become a major focal point of this global fascist drift, with a full-on genocidal onslaught against their existence since 2020 especially (e.g. USA and UK). This was explained brilliantly in a now-deleted set of posts by noorah666:

Here’s my nuclear take: I don’t think it’s a coincidence that fascism in the west has risen in a time when trans people are beginning to gain agency and social rights. Trans people are such a rebuke and shock to the presumed “normal” in his liberal society that fascism rises to re-assert ancient dominance  heirarchies. The minute a society accepts that a person can vary their gender, all sorts of “truths” start to crumble. Patriarchy says men are the pinnacle social position yet trans women gladly give that up for a seemingly more inferior one. Trans people existing destabilises the fundamental axioms of patriarchy as a system of organizing people. Fascism is a violent reaction to that fact. (…) It also sadly explains liberal weakness on trans issues because they agree with fascists about the fundamental axioms of patriarchy, they will always side with fascists when the time comes. I don’t think the world has ever evolved past the radical notion of the transgender person.

This reactionary backlash truly covers all the dimensions of patriarchy that I’ve mentioned so far in this text, because let’s also not forget QAnon, which is tied to the anti-trans crusade because of the right’s false pretense to be deeply concerned about children’s safety and the weaponization of the notion of “groomer”, as Lee Cicuta explained:

In reality, the right wing is pro-rape and pro-CSA to their core, and any serious look at their rhetoric and practices bears this out. Many of their biggest celebrities actively and publicly talk about the sexual desirability of young girls, and the lion’s share of the sexual assault that happens in their communities is enacted by people they know and approve of. This is because, in practice (and this aspect is not unique to reactionary communities) sexual assault is a tool of patriarchy, and works to reinforce existing power structures. If the right-wing took grooming and CSA seriously, they would be eating each other alive, they would trust youth when they came forward about predatory adults in their community, and they would be affirming youth autonomy. They do not, and will not, do any of these things, because actual sexual assault has never been something they have been concerned about. What actually concerns them, and what they are intending to express when they throw around terms like “groomer” and “predator,” is the maintenance of their property relation to youth.

The manner in which reactionaries are preoccupied with sexual assault or victimization of children is not about care for the person victimized, nor even that they see it as bad in all cases (as we can see, they do not). They see it has a defending their own property relation to that person. The right-wing in general feels an extreme entitlement to shaping the youth under their power as they see fit without the interference of outside influences that reveal to youth that there are other possibilities for them besides the singular narrative the adults in their life offer them. They may cloak their rhetoric in a faux concern for children’s wellbeing, but in practice it is fairly obvious to any attentive observer that what they want is to be the singular authority in children’s lives. Children, in their eyes (and the eyes of the State) are private property, and their ideology dictates that any and all private property can be controlled utterly by those who hold “ownership” over it. Sexual assault then, as long as it it happens among those “approved” to interact with their “property” (family members, pastors, friends, etc.), is generally acceptable to them even as they deny that it ever happens. Sexual assault is a rhetorical placeholder for them, it signifies their outrage at outside influence on vulnerable people they see as their property, and it has always been so.

In this seriously horrendous context, one of the central tropes of the masculinist/anti-feminist backlash – which is what prompted me to write this whole text/essay! – has been the so-called “male loneliness epidemic” and the (tellingly) closely-tied idea that it’s a big deal/problem that “young men can’t get laid anymore”.

Let me first quickly describe this horseshit. Basically, it’s a misogynist moral panic that frames rising social isolation among men—especially in Western societies—as a widespread and growing crisis. It has often been brought up via claims (with or without legimitate evidence/data) that young men have fewer friends, and tellingly, this often leads to worries that they’re not having as much as sex with women as before. In these discourses it’s often claimed “it’s hard to be a boy/man nowadays” and that we supposedly have to say/show to boys and young men that “it’s okay to be men”. Feminism, shifting gender roles and the declining of traditional masculinity sometimes is blamed for these alleged trends.

First of all, as Nicholas Sherwood wrote,

There is no male loneliness epidemic. It is simply a loneliness epidemic. By arbitrarily gendering a universal loneliness, our fragmented society becomes further fractured, and the discourse surrounding relationships becomes a breeding ground for misogyny.

Likely contributing to the idea of an exclusively male loneliness crisis, a survey from the Survey Center of American Life released in 2021 found that 15% of men reported having no close friends, whereas 10% of women reported the same. The statistic was cited in articles by  NPR, the Independent and Vox about male loneliness. However, that same year and two years prior, studies were released which found that not only do roughly the same number of men and women report being lonely, but they report equal levels of loneliness throughout their lives.

Likewise, the “young male virginity on the rise” meme/fake chart which resurfaces every now and then, was selectively edited based on an original chart made by the Washington Post in 2019. The charts from WaPo, based on data from the General Social Survey, did show that as of 2018 a) the young adults of both genders (only cis men and women were accounted for) were driving the rise in recent decades of the share of U.S. adults reporting having had no sex in the past year, and b) that the increase especially since the 2000’s was sharper among young men. But some online misogynists distorted this as if it indicated a rising “virginity”, and as usual with social media fake charts and info often get spread uncritically, sparking discourse based on literal lies.

More importantly though, it’s the underlying male chauvinist and misogynist logic at play that must be highlighted here. It should go without saying but “virginity” as such is a fundamentally reactionary and patriarchal concept, that should be given as much importance as the idea of “sin”. It’s about teaching young girls/women and boys/men that their destiny is heterosexual reproduction. And it’s a core part of rape culture: men are taught they’ll only be “real men” if they treat women as sexual objects, and women that they have to submit to men’s sexual desires and harassment (but not demonstrate any sexual agency themselves, otherwise they’re denigrated as “sluts”).

The moral panic about men’s sexual access to women’s bodies – i.e. against women having the choice to say no – is particularly egregious in a time of intense backlash and rollback against women’s autonomy. Besides, the premise is itself ridiculous. By default in this patriarchal society women’s bodies and sexuality are held to be at the disposal of men, i.e. regardless of the pretensions otherwise women are considered men’s sexual property.

It’s also ridiculous because it’s not fucking hard to have sex with women, in fact it’s still too easy because of the social pressure on girls to submit to/accept/feel like they have to seek and satisfy men’s sexual advances/harassment/etc. Women of all ages often “don’t get laid” for long periods of time (presuming they’d want to and aren’t aces, of course), for various reasons (including legitimate fears about men’s sexual/intimate conduct and violence). Not only do we not have an “incel problem” with these women/girls, there’s never been any of this kind of uproar about their condition, including again how much of it is tied to male sexual and domestic/interpersonal violence. If anything, we should be happy that more and more women are refusing to deal with and endure the abuse and harassment they get from men.

The topic of loneliness is very familiar to me, I have actually suffered from it. But there’s nothing about this that is specifically about sexuality – as if it was a survival need like eating or sleeping, which it isn’t – it’s just about building connections with people, which can lead to sex but obviously doesn’t have to.

Instead of building connections with people of any gender based on kindness and empathy, the moral panic about “male loneliness” or “men not getting laid”  puts all the worst patriarchal, homophobic/queerphobic/transphobic and misogynist tendencies that guys are taught by society on steroids and make guys bond based on them, as if they were the victims. In other words, it’s indistinguishable from what the fascistic manosphere talks about. It’s pretty much the polar opposite of what men and young men should do, which is disavow, betray, forever abandon Manhood to become actual human beings rather than pathetic imitations thereof who think that dominating women gives them purpose

There are basically two choices for men who are lonely, something I’ve been very familiar with: either continue down the misogynistic-patriarchal-incel road (and this ends very darkly) or start building actual emotional connections w/ ppl based on mutual care. Try the latter and see your whole world turned upside down! The worst that will happen is *gasp* a bro hugs you and you start feeling “damn this feels so good maybe what I needed all along was genuine emotional connection and caring” and at this stage being called a faggot would be an honourful thing regardless of who you actually have sex with (hey maybe that hug felt so good you *gasp* wanted some more bromance and *gasp gasp* gay sex).