At the risk of jumping in on the "what does The Left have to offer young men" thing, probably the most critical thing I learned that led to me being happier now than basically any other time in my life was that nobody is going to think better of me if I don't do things.
Now, there's a chance that people may hate the things I do. But no one--whether they hate me, love me, or just don't give a shit about me--is ever thinking, "Say what you want about Ring, but I respect him for never doing something he wanted to and reminding me that he doesn't exist solely to tickle my fancy."
Let me back up: from about 18-21 years old I spent a lot of time on 4chan, which was really bad. I'm fortunate that I never got into any chud shit; I was operating under the tragically misguided idea that there was something poignant about the moments of sincere human vulnerability in the anonymous communication there that made it worthwhile. We were all invisible, so it was safe to express our real feelings. The missing piece in my understanding of the dynamic was that
the only fucking danger of being mocked, belittled, harassed, and torn apart for our vulnerability and sincerity came from each other.
If you were Online before 2010ish, you may remember when wanting attention for any reason was the worst goddamn thing you could do on the internet, especially if you were a woman or perceived as one. If you weren't there for the "there are no girls on the internet" era, the logic went something like this: girls who are at all worthwhile as people will never tell anyone that they're a girl online, because they just want to be treated like normal people. Therefore, revealing that you're a woman online is inherently attention-seeking behavior and a manipulative attempt to wheedle special treatment and favors out of fawning men.
Being treated like a normal person usually meant just being generically harassed and put down for having any kind of self esteem or personality. It was like that across the board. If you do anything to stand out, to differentiate yourself, to express yourself--well, aren't you special? Fuck you.
It was like that in fandom, where the gravest sin you could commit was creating an original character with standout traits or creating fanworks that were too self-indulgent. Webcomics had entire blogs dedicated to hyperbolic venting about how every part of them said something damning about the creator's need for attention. If I wanted to summarize Encyclopedia Dramatica, most articles about individuals boiled down to, "This person would not be doing things I found embarrassing if they didn't have a pathological need for attention, and they should be punished for that."
Most of this vitriol was aimed at stuff you didn't have to pay to look at and people who were just doing shit for fun. The sheer audacity of being publicly seen as a doer of things, putting yourself in front of people without molding yourself entirely to please them--preferably by making sure they didn't have to acknowledge your existence--infuriating!
It's not like this ever went away, and looking back on it, no shit it leads to fascist thought traps. The entire premise of GamerGate was that women were invading gaming and using it as a vector to seek attention. Nearly every reactionary complaint about marginalized people or what they think of as the left boils down to the furious conviction that not only do we want unearned attention, but we somehow want it maliciously--to suck up all the attention in the world, to leave everyone else in shadow, and we're so bent on this that we've constructed vast conspiracies to blot out the sun.
I'm not sure when the spell broke and I stopped being frozen by the certainty that everything I did or tried to do was being judged as a pathetic attention grab. It's possible that meds and time straightened out my brain chemistry enough. But it's only recently that I recognize my subconscious thought process: If people like a thing I do, they won't be angry that I made them pay attention to it. If they don't like it, at best they'll wish I hadn't bothered. If I do nothing, I'll at least be inoffensive.
Naturally, this is bullshit. If someone sits around getting incandescently furious or having pained secondhand embarrassment reactions to everything that doesn't set their world on fire, that's actually kind of sick. Acting like some sort of tantrum-throwing boy king who pouts and flails and demands the jesters' heads when they fail to delight him is fucking pathetic. Unironically sorting everything into bins marked "based" and "cringe" exists at the exact same level of maturity and self-awareness as a child thinking everyone is judging them because their mom dropped them off at the mall.
This isn't anything new; sometimes I feel like at least 70% of human conflict has its root in some of us being so pants-shittingly terrified of their own reflections that they'll try to force everyone to live by any fucked up set of torture rules that pops into their heads rather than face their own desires. They would prefer to invent a version of the world where everyone is condemning them according to torture rules and to spend their time screaming at and hitting each other for failing to torture themselves enough if the alternative is being their authentic selves.
When we tell them they don't have to follow the torture rules, they just insist we're the ones forcing them to live by them.
The left has nothing to offer guys who are into fuckheads like Andrew Tate because he's not promising them they'll get laid or have self-confidence or whatever. Like every other right-wing self-help asshole, he's promising to give them the weapons they need to torture and murder their authentic selves. When we say they can get what they long for without mortification of the flesh and soul, they see that as a threat! We're trying to empower the attention-seeking, self-loving, sun-eating inner parasite they want so badly to kill.
If you read all of this, I owe you "Find the Meat" enrichment.
