Everybody's bloggin'. Everybody in the manosphere, that is. There are hundreds of them. There are PUA blogs. There are anti-PUA blogs. There are MGTOW blogs. There are MRA blogs. There are female anti-feminist blogs. There are manosphere blogs about other manosphere blogs. And there are manosphere blogs devoted to giving other manosphere bloggers advice, like The Private Man.
What do they all have in common? Well, as Zosimus the Heathen pointed out in his last comment: everything. Remember the theme song of the old Patty Duke show? "They look alike, they talk alike, they even dress and walk alike." (Thanks a lot, Zosimus, now I'm going to be hearing that in my head all day!)
One of the memes of the manosphere is the "hive mind" of women, but Jezebel and Feministe ain't got nothing on these guys. They stay united by constantly commenting or repeating each other's comments. They band together at the virtual feet of their gurus, few of whom tolerate dissent within the ranks. Roosh is notorious for blocking the IPOs of commenters who fail to demonstrate the appropriate degree of fealty, while Paul Elam prefers to publicly eviscerate potential rivals to his throne. These tiny beleaguered sects cannot withstand much tension or challenge to authority before they splinter and fragment. And thus are born ever more blogs. Yet they're all pretty much singing the same tune, which goes something like this.
A preoccupation of many manosphere bloggers is figuring out how to spin straw into gold support their "masculine lifestyles" with blogging. (Cuz what's more manly than spending your days in your tighty-whities in front of a computer, kvetching endlessly about women?) In fact, Matt Forney is right now promoting on his blog his new self-published e-book about how to make money blogging and self-publishing e-books (even though he hasn't made any money yet and his stats aren't much higher than mine LOL).
Manosphere bloggers unite in their admiration of Roosh's ability to travel the world on the money he makes with his "Bang" guides. I'll admit I am myself rather curious how much income his blogging and self-publishing generate. Obviously, it's extremely variable. I've read blogs with high traffic can generate as much as $1000/month. Suffice to say he's no Stephen King, and, as his videos demonstrate, he lives frugally: in simple sublets overseas, in his father's basement stateside, schlepping his own panini-maker wherever he goes, and proudly refusing to buy drinks for the ladies (it's a matter of principle, doncha know).
Roosh
@rooshv
"And trust me it's not dope to be 25 and move back to your parents' basement" http://ow.ly/kuye4 Tell me about it
Manosphere blogging as a career choice is problematic on so many levels. One's potential readership is limited right out of the gate. (Of course, the manosphereans maintain this is just a matter of converting a critical mass of American youth.) As Delicious Tacos points out, he hasn't bothered to commercialize his blog because the potential profit doesn't justify the effort. And don't only manosphere readers buy manosphere e-books? And most of what is in their e-books is on their blogs anyway. Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?
Which reminds me of my mom's comment many years ago, when the shale oil boom collapsed, that the entire economy of Grand Junction, Colorado was being kept afloat by neighbors buying each other's stuff at garage sales.
Manosphere Blogging 101 – 21 Pieces Of Advice
There are many new, self-identified Manosphere bloggers cropping up ( some links below). I’m enthused by this. For all the new guys, I have some advice. I never thought that I’d be in the position to offer Manosphere blogging advice but after being at this for almost two years and with almost a million page views, I’ve learned a thing or two:1. Blogging requires patience and perseverance. Blogging for a couple of months and being disappointed is normal. A few hundred (if you’re fortunate) page views a day is to be expected until readers realize the seriousness of the blog. There are few, if any, home runs with blogging. Writers should only expect singles and doubles as page view counts grow.
2. Writing is work. For those not accustomed to writing often, it’s a serious chore. Not only must a man live his life, he has to be introspective and be willing to write about it. It’s not easy. You have been warned. Writing is work.
3. Manosphere writers, for now, are but humble pamphleteers (link below) and not real movers and shakers when it comes to shifting public opinion. The good news is that pamphleteers have an historic precedent of shifting public opinion. It just takes time and a critical mass of readership.
4. Commenters are the life blood of good blogs. A good blogger acknowledges and supports good comments. It doesn’t have to be often but it’s important that it’s done.
5. Haters gonna hate. Got hate comments? Nuke ‘em and ban ‘em. It’s your blog. It’s your real estate. If haters want to shit on your blog, moderate heavily and use the banhammer relentlessly. Don’t engage trolls… ever.
6. Spammers gonna spam. It’s vital that you check your spam inbox for legitimate comments because sometimes good comments get spammed out. Don’t let the spam folder get too full.
7. In the beginning, post often. These means three posts a week, at a minimum. When your blog gets some traction, you can cut back a bit, but not too much.
8. Brevity is the soul of wit. Posts needn’t be long. Rollo and Ian (links below) are the huge exception as their posts are usually quite long. You can’t be the exception to the rule until you’re well established. Three hundred words or so (well-written and concise) will do.
9. Comment on other blogs with meaningful comments that add to the original point(s). Dropping a brief comment just to generate traffic to your blog won’t do you any favors in the long run. Read the post. If you don’t have anything to offer, don’t comment.
10. Link to other blogs via your blogroll or your comments on your post. The other Manosphere bloggers will appreciate the links and be more willing to the link back to you.
11. Try to meet Manosphere bloggers and readers in real life. The Internet is not real life. Shaking a fellow man’s hand is real life. For example, I’ve got a live event coming up in March, 2013 (link below).
12. Find your niche. This will take time and your commenters will steer you in the right (write?) direction. As the Manosphere stands now, there are almost too many young men writing. For you young guys, consider focusing on a geographical or lifestyle niche on which to focus your concentration. Or, go personal as Danny (link below) has done.
13. Don’t give up. Patience and perseverance, remember?
14. Be willing to be a contributing author to group Manosphere blogs (links below). This will build your credibility and drive traffic to your blog. If you find yourself only able to post irregularly on your own blog, be willing to give that up and only be a contributing author to group blogs.
15. Be patient. Keep at it.
16. Post on forums with a link to your blog in your signature. There are loads of male-oriented forums that are not relationship of socially-focused oriented. Find the “other” category in gun, motorsports, sports, and male-oriented forums where men often go. Build a reputation there. Be taken seriously… then send them to your blog or other Manosphere blogs.
17. You want to monetize your blog? That’s a whole new level requiring far more time and effort. Don’t be half-assed about it. Go big or go home.
18. Respect your blogging elders. Rollo, Roissy, and Roosh are the starting points (links below) but there are many other Manosphere bloggers worth your attention and input. Check out my blogroll for a starting point. I don’t have them all.
19. Read the Red Pill women’s blogs (some links below). These dames are smart and worthy of serious consideration. They are also signs that life isn’t too bleak for the Red Pill man.
20. Don’t post hateful comments on blue pill blogs and forums. Once branded a hater, you lose credibility and that helps to lose credibility for the general Manosphere.
21. Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs) are part of the Manosphere. So is the Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW) crowd. That statement will get me some hate and I say tough shit.
Good luck, gentlemen. We’re doing something big here. Spread this advice.
I'm honoured to discover that my last comment helped provide the inspiration for your latest post (though understandably sorry that it appears to have triggered memories of what sounds like a positively ghastly piece of music)! Yes, the homogeneity of the manosphere is indeed rather striking, although I suppose, to be fair, it's a trap that a lot of other "rebellious" subcultures and movements end up falling into as well (outlaw motorcycle gangs being another notable example that springs to mind). They're certainly also not alone in their tendency to undergo endless schisms - I can't help but notice parallels there with groups of religious fundamentalists (from the countless Protestant sects the Reformation spawned to the jihadist groups causing so much trouble in the Middle East today) that likewise seem to be constantly fragmenting (and whose members all seem to end up hating one another even more passionately than they do the vastly larger numbers of unbelievers that you assume would be the main targets for their wrath). Still, for every manospherean group that's fracturing in this manner, there seems to be another that's attempting to forge an alliance with the most unlikely of people. One of the most bizarre such alliances I've noticed lately has been one that PUAs have been trying to form with religious fundamentalists - seeing guys who want to screw around without consequence trying to find common ground with modern day Puritans who want to outlaw contraception, abortion and everything else that makes consequence-free sex possible makes so little sense that I'm assuming the only reason they're doing it is out of some misguided notion of "my enemy's enemy is my friend" (then again, this wouldn't be the first time these dimwits have engaged in behaviour that ultimately goes against their own self-interest - witness the way they devote so much of their lives to getting sex, only to reward the women who give it to them by calling them "sluts"). One of the nastiest groups of this type I've seen them extending the hand of friendship towards has been a mob called the Orthosphere, a group of ultra-ultra-orthodox Catholic nutjobs who seem to think that Western society started going down the toilet when the Middle Ages ended, and who, if they ever got into power, would no doubt make PUAs among the first victims of their modern-day Inquisition.
ReplyDeleteGetting back to the subject of manospherean bloggers' uncanny similarity to one another, I'm wondering if part of the reason for this is the fact that once a blogger starts getting seriously caught up in this sordid subculture, he (or occasionally she) finds him/herself being influenced by the most vocal (and unhinged) members of that subculture. Some manosphere blogs I used to follow (before going cold turkey on them for the sake of my continued sanity) actually seemed to start out being reasonably moderate, only to become more and more extreme as time went on (or maybe I was just a lot more naive when I first stumbled upon them). A classic example is a blog called Married Men Sex Life, which seemed almost progressive when it started, the author rejecting the more misogynistic or otherwise douchy beliefs of the more prominent MRA and PUA bloggers. Over time, though, said author seemed to push more and more the message of Traditional Gender Roles Are Awesome! before giving the whole site a complete makeover, so that when I last dared pay it a visit, the first thing I saw was a huge graphic of a hand holding the RED PILL. Needless to say, I ran away screaming and never went back.
Yes, the parallels with religious cults and sects are very interesting to me as well. Equally fascinating is the uneasy alliance, or at least sympathy, between gamers like Roosh and the taliban / fundy mindset. United in their common misogyny? If you can recommend any reading that explores the psychology of this, please share.
ReplyDeleteThe way institutionalized misogyny works against men's interests perplexes. For example, female infanticide (through neglect) or gender selective abortion has resulted in Asian and middle eastern countries with disproportionately high numbers of single men. That doesn't seem to benefit heterosexual men at all. (Oddly, it doesn't raise the status of the surviving girls either.)
Maybe that's what fascinates me about the manosphere realm: it all seems so perverse. I cannot wrap my head around it.
A lot of bloggers are chasing stats and comments, so it's not surprising they try to give their readers what the readers seem to want. I expect in most cases they're not conscious of it themselves.
If I could recommend any books on the subject of gamers and fundamentalists, and the odd parallels between them, I would, but unfortunately I haven't encountered any; all the stuff I've mentioned above has really just come from my own personal observation (it probably doesn't help that the whole "Game" phenomenon is still relatively new, and has therefore probably yet to come to the attention of serious scholars). I'd imagine a lot of it would boil down to authoritarian worldviews and whatnot - I've heard stories of people with this sort of rigid, black-and-white thinking finding it surprisingly easy to jettison one particular authoritarian philosophy (for whatever reason), and adopt that philosophy's (equally doctrinaire) polar opposite.
ReplyDeleteReligious groups arguably provided my own introduction to the manosphere; I seem to recall first encountering a lot of common MRA talking points on websites run by conservative Christian organizations (many of which seemed to push the decidedly contradictory message of "Patriarchy hurts men too, so let's all go back to it!" Um, what?). Another site that proved pivotal was one called Oz Conservative, an extremely conservative Australian website (and another site I've been staying away from of late) whose creator, Mark Richardson, seems to have a bug up his butt about something called "autonomy" (ie the evil idea, much favoured by feminists and other degenerate liberal types, that people shouldn't be limited in their life choices by things they have no control over eg sex, race, ethnicity etc), and whose every post seems to degenerate into a rant against this. While not a manospherean per se (indeed, he often rails against the MRM, seeing its members as a rather degenerate and unmanly lot), his blogroll contains links to blogs that are far more sympathetic to that movement (indeed, it was thanks to his site that I first stumbled upon Roissy). He's also sympathetic to that Orthosphere mob I mentioned above.
I remember first becoming interested in fundamentalist groups myself during my final year of school (far too long ago now), and researching a couple in my own part of the world: namely a mob called the Festival of Light, who are/were rather notorious in Australia (and maybe the UK as well), and a similar group with the rather pretentious title of Women Who Want to be Women (who subsequently gave themselves the somewhat more innocuous-sounding name of the Endeavour Forum). So, yeah, a lot of the ravings of today's religious anti-feminist crowd have a very familiar ring for me.
I agree with you that institutionalized misogyny ultimately does men few favours. Another obvious way in which it does this is by making everything even remotely feminine (and therefore "inferior") so taboo for boys and men that these individuals are then forced into an extremely narrow role. Indeed, it's a source of constant amusement/bemusement to me to see MRA types demanding that men be released from the restrictions of their traditional role, but not in any way that might, God forbid, "feminize" them. Um yeah. Not sure how that's supposed to work (maybe it's why "true" masculinity for so many of them seems to revolve around being a basement-dwelling bum).
Finally, re your last point, I think that chasing stats and comments was what our mate Matt ended up doing when he was blogging as Ferdinand Bardamu. I recall him actually writing, as the latter individual, a half-decent piece on why White Nationalism was a stupid and doomed movement, only to later renounce it when he evidently decided that the white power movement was a great untapped source of potential support (so, yes, his complaints about his comment threads subsequently becoming overrun by neo-Nazi knuckle-draggers were a bit rich!). I sort of miss his old blog - it was like this great one-stop-shop for all the different brands of right-wing lunacy on the market today. Good stuff!