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“the alt-right is recruiting depressed people” has two awkward implications: either it cures their depression, in which case yikes, or it doesn’t, in which case oops

I have opinions but it’d mostly just be my fight club post again

But okay let’s go again: to be a man in lefty “intersectional” internet spaces is to be confronted with a constant background of hate. Some men are cynical enough to espouse it to reap the social rewards without turning it on themselves. Others can’t. They internalize the discourse and grow to hate themselves (made worse because they imagine that the intersectional-lefty men who don’t hate themselves actually live up to the contradictory demands that the discourse lays on them instead of realizing that they are hypocrites).

This dynamic is depression-inducing.

Now, it’s possible to find a better corner of the internet, or leave social media altogether. It’s also possible to mature out of it, find some measured middle ground where you’re still basically a progressive, take the hate in stride etc. But depressed people are not necessarily the best at making good decisions for themselves.

Any path out of it necessarily involves not submitting to other people’s resentment, but it’s not easy to do that with the drumbeat of “you are terrible” in lefty spaces. Meanwhile, the alt-right offers a readymade path out of that sad-sack life–even if into another sort of shitty life, but at least one where you don’t make yourself into a doormat. It probably does improve their depression.

(This is the primary psychological truth of “cuck”: that self-hating lefty men are complicit in their own submission, that there is a measure of masochism in it, and that it is kind of pathetic–and many, maybe most, of the people who use the term are secretly (or not so secretly) talking about themselves in the past.)

I don’t know if it’s hypocrisy, exactly, but one of the things I accidentally discovered recently is that in lefty woke internet spaces nobody actually expects men to internalize the messages they’re being given.

And if you have been working hard to internalize them, something almost physically snaps inside when you discover that fact.

So, a friend of mine posted a message on Facebook last year around summer, which said something like “With summer coming on this is a good time to remind everyone: it is never okay to sexualize someone because of what they are wearing.”

Within a couple of weeks of that, in a different conversation, in a different context, “I think when you go up to a person in a bar, you just see a cute person and go up and talk to them because it would be fun”

When I repeated those two thoughts to people who aren’t really part of these social justice-y, woke internet spaces, they went, “Wow, no wonder you feel so conflicted about your sexuality, when you’re getting such conflicting advice from your peers.”

When I repeated those thoughts to people who were familiar with woke culture, every single one of them said, “Uh, yeah, that first one wasn’t meant to be taken literally.” Sometimes, for people who were skeptical or disillusioned with wokeness, it was said in a kind of sad, “I hate to break it to you” kind of way, like, “Yeah, I get that ‘never sexualize women’ sounds like it’s meant to be advice about your thoughts and behavior, but it’s actually not.”

With people who are still into that culture, it was said with a kind of undertone of disbelief. Like, how neurotic must I be to think that “it is never okay to sexualize someone” actually means what it says? Like, they are openly perplexed that I spend most of my time talking to attractive women terrified that I am sexualizing or fetishising them. 

Like, they literally can’t understand how constantly hearing “It is never okay to sexualize a person” would somehow lead to the worry that you might accidentally sexualize someone. It doesn’t scan to them. “It’s never okay to sexualize someone” just isn’t a moral admonition, it’s just not supposed to be something you ever say to yourself in your day to day interactions.

And when I discovered that, I could almost hear a little popping noise in my brain, and I became really, really intensely angry at this whole woke project.

I wonder, how much of lesbian sheep syndrome is caused by this? Because, every social space where it’s ok to be a wlw is also swimming with “it’s immoral to look at a woman lustfully” “it’s immoral to sexualize women.” Which is a bit of a problem, when it’s also the only space that says, “it’s ok for women to desire other women.”

I have to wonder though: if their rhetoric isn’t meant to be instructions on how to behave, what the heck is it meant to be?

This is my first time hearing that it’s not supposed to be literal

I assume it’s purely performative, or intended to create status claims about kinds of people? It would make a lot of sense.

I knew someone who would say stuff like “[person] deserves to be broke and homeless and starving”, and if you said “wait, that’s horrible, no one should starve”, she got confused because who the fuck said anything about it being okay for anyone to starve? She didn’t even perceive the possibility of understanding those claims that way.

this has been a real stumbling block for me, i’m pretty good at parsing stuff thats REALLY overblown as hyperbole but i know people who will say that no, they really DO mean that there’s never been a [member of majority group] that wasn’t secretly a closet violent bigot and deserved to die violently for it

as someone who just wants as many people to be happy and cared for as possible, and as someone who’s autistic, it makes it really hard to figure out when i should be taking people at face value and fighting them about wanting to violently slaughter millions of people, and when to just let them vent, even if the words theyre using unsettle me

You see enough posts “casual reminder women sexualizing women is ok” that it definitely must be contributing to the hopeless lesbian shit. Like if I habe a crush on a girl (unfortunately ALL my recent crushes!) I get stuck in a self hate cycle because “how DARE you, you must be fetisizing them, you are a predator. ” sorts of stuff.

Like no amount of “you are an exception” posts is going to keep people who already think they are evil because of x from internalizing it as more evidence the intrusive thought is real. And the people who the post is aimed at WILL assume they are an exception due to their higher self confidence so what the fuck are you accomplishing?

I think it’s a lot like an externalized version of saying things like “I want to die” or “I want to fucking kill him” when you do not actually want either of those things; it doesn’t necessarily indicate an unusual amount of cognitive dissonance or hypocrisyl. Someone who is being sexually harassed by someone who blames their clothing might well come home and snap out “there’s no excuse to sexualize someone based on what they’re wearing” in the heat of anger without really thinking of the implications.

That’s normal. We all assign context to the stuff we say and do that other people don’t have.

But I also think it’s destructive to other people to vent like that in public spaces where other people don’t really know you, any random stranger can see it out of context, and many people are saying similar enough things they do mean that it comes off as ambiguously sincere.

I do think it’s possible to process these messages as ‘venting or mistaken’ and move on with your life without much internal trauma over it, because I’ve gotten to a place where I can. I don’t think that depressed, traumatized people who aren’t socially confident are in a good place to do that. Admitting you do this also will make some people who want to use the cultural environment for control angry. (So will anything else you do in public).

However, I think all of this is fairly irrelevant to the alt right/internet presence of nazism, which afaik recruits mostly via overwhelming presence in internet spaces designed around male bonding letting them radicalize people via taking over their social circles. I am willing to be persuaded otherwise, but by like, evidence, not theorizing without proof or specific referants.