In the early days of the Manosphere, there were two driving concepts: female hypergamy and female solipsism. In the days of Chataeu Heartiste and R. Roger Devlin, these two concepts were said to be the main driving factors behind female behavior. At Dalrock’s blog, hypergamy was mentioned thousands of times and solipsism was mentioned hundreds of times (but mostly in the first few years).
While we’ve discussed hypergamy regularly on this blog, we’ve almost never discussed solipsism. Here is the most expansive discussion of the subject I’ve had to date:
I get accused of effeminate solipsism seemingly all the time. How can someone who focuses so heavily on ideas—to the point where they get complaints about rejecting anecdotes and not being personal enough—be self-centered?
As you read, I suggest paying attention to the ironic relevance of being judged guilty of “effeminate solipsism” in each of the sections below.
Well, in the comment section the Professor posted an old comment from the middle of 2023 that jogged some memories:
Oh my God. Seriously. No wonder the manosphere is dead.
This further jogged my memory of another comment made a few months later:
Most of the men who found their way to what became the manosphere (which is now more or less dead) are men who
1) always had problems with socialization because they’re somewhere on the spectrum;
or
2) attract women but not the ones they want because they’re just not all that attractive to begin with.
Over the years my view has been (and still is) that the Dalrockian Manosphere is irrelevant, not that it was (or is) dead. After all, even in his heyday, Dalrock was an insignificant social force and his was arguably the most popular and influential blog in the purely Christian Manosphere. The secular Manosphere is somewhat more generally known.
As we will see, what “killed” the Manosphere was not a lack of empathy, but the solipsism of its participants.
Anecdotes
I’ll start here because it’s fairly obvious, and yet probably the most overlooked. The Manosphere is largely not data-driven. No matter what the data actually shows, the Manosphere participants will cite their own anecdotal experiences and let those personal experiences rule their impression of interpersonal relationships. They know nothing but their own experiences.
This is solipsism.
On this blog, we don’t care about personal anecdotes. I almost never mention personal information about myself, let alone use it in any of my arguments. Anecdotes are garbage. I talk about this often (most recently, here, in Free Northerner’s essay and earlier in this article on Hypergamy). Citing personal anecdotes often borders on the logically fallacious anyway, so is best avoided.
Using personal anecdotes is self-centered. It is solipsism.
Keoni Galt said that his wife married down to marry him….in his article on hypergamy. His article here is very interesting in light of everything we’ve discussed. He seems to believe that anecodotes are egocentric selfishness called “female solipsism” (including when men do it!). It would be hilarious to apply this standard to today’s interactions.
Hilarious, huh.
The Manosphere’s belief in “female hypergamy” is largely based on the collective personal anecdotes collected by men in the Manosphere. This makes the “female solipsism” criticism deeply ironic, for it is “manosphere solipsism” that has led to the collective belief in so-called “female hypergamy,” despite the huge amount of anecdotal (but not personal) and non-anecdotal evidence against the thesis, including the research on assortative mating and other related topics.
Social Cliques
Like many social media sites, the Manosphere is made up of social cliques. Groups of like-minded (and like-personality and like-gendered) men, who informally and formally enforce exclusivity, though censorship, social ostracization, and other less obvious assortative processes.
This tends to create tight communities that share a lot of “social capital.” One person, who we will gently and mysteriously dub “The Doctor of Feelings” once wrote:
Social capital, in a severely stunted environment like the manosphere must be very tightly defined and agreed upon because most of the rest of it is hidden behind the fact that very few of us have real relationships to each other. There are a tiny number of us who have actually met face to face and consider each other something like brothers.
The fact that several key writers in this space are anonymous severely cripples the “trust” part of the…
…that is required for it to have any meaning at all.
Why does the manosphere exist? What is the good or service it is trying to produce as a collective and who will be the beneficiaries of it?
The closest thing I can come up with is “marriages that don’t suck.” Maybe “[Christian] marriages that don’t suck.” Or maybe still “a path to [Christian] marriages that don’t suck.”
In order for all of us, from these wildly differing faith traditions to work toward that [those] goals, the rest has to be pretty stripped away, which makes it very difficult when each of those traditions teaches its adherents that their way is the only way to stay out of hell. After all, nothing else really matters but how you spend eternity.
The job of the Manosphere is to establish tightly defined social cliques that enforce collective agreement. Without this, they (supposedly) divide and fall apart. Within this frame, the purpose of the Manosphere is to find a path for Christian marriages “to not suck.” It is centered on men and what they want.
It should go without saying that the Manosphere is very hyper-focused on what men want for themselves. This quite often presents as solipsism. It is profoundly hypocritical to say that solipsism is an inherent trait of all females when you are a member of a deeply solipsistic movement.
I suppose the most awkward part is that exclusionary social cliques are female-coded.
Passing Judgment
One of the primary ways that the Manosphere ostracizes others is by passing judgment on anyone who dares to disagree. Here the good Doctor demonstrates how to develop social cliques in this manner:
Sam Harris on his worst day sounds more rational on the issue of faith than [Redacted] does. The kind of Christian I can’t stand more than anything else are the ones who engage in dronning on and confronting others on theological purity and then pretend they aren’t.
Bloggers like [Redacted] and [Redacted] like to pretend they are “iron sharpening iron” or that they are just making Spock like arguments in the soulless vacuum of some class they took on logic and that these people they insult and gaslight (including me) are not real humans with real lives and real experiences and real wives and actually put something on the line every time they post here.
(NOTE: all names have been removed, for pretty obvious reasons)
As with all ad hominem, passing judgment avoids having to deal with the ideas others present or even bother to substantiate the accusations. It’s about attacking people and not their ideas. All this is done while appearing to take the moral high ground. After all, the person who calls another person a liar can object that they are not lying because “Of course a liar would respond back with a lying accusation of lying.”
The point, however, is that the person who sits in judgment is elevating their own self-authority above all others. This is, of course, just another instance of solipsism. And while logic, reason, and argument are masculine traits, empty judgments are stereotypical feminine traits.
Emotional Manipulation
Perhaps the most insidious form of solipsism in the Manosphere is the emotional manipulation. Emotional manipulation is something that few would contest is firmly in the feminine domain, nor would they contest that it is an example of solipsism. Now, again, we’ll let the Doctor demonstrate how this works:
It is impossible to be empathic and human toward a person without directly addressing their suffering.
I can hook you up with some good autism therapists if you like.
This simple comment is almost a masterstroke (that is yet to come!) that combines passing judgment, emotional manipulation, and even incorporates a reference to therapy (which the Manosphere rightly views as female-coded and hostile towards men). It’s also a contradiction: insulting someone for not showing empathy and treating someone as a human by marginalizing them as cognitively impaired, as if you can show the importance of empathy and humanity be so viciously denying it to another.
But that was not the masterstroke. This was:
Of all the paragraphs of my comment to zero in on you missed the one that would make you come across as an empathic Christian brother and human being
A huge chunk of my ability to provide for my family was sacrificed on the altar of truth that we have burning here.
What the hell is wrong with you?
I’ve had to abandon the nation of my birth. The only place I’ve ever called home for the entire 52 years of my life to scrape after money in another country. A form of financial exile so I can feed my children. I only hope my cancelers don’t find where I’ve run to. And I still post here to help the men make sense of this.
After voluntarily picking a fight in the first place (e.g. the insults in the “passing judgment” section), follow it up with another insult and then make the biggest manipulative emotional appeal one could possibly make in the Manosphere. Reveal to the group—the one you just got done saying needs to stand tightly together—that you were cancelled from your job and had to flee the country (!!?!?) for posting content in the Manosphere—including what is being said right then and there—manipulating everyone’s emotions (with an apparent humblebrag?!) in order to win an argument online against someone you don’t like.
It’s hard to come up with a stronger example of solipsism.
It reminds me of all the divorce sob stories coming from divorced women that the Manosphere leaps on, saying “Solipsism! Solipsism!”
Authoritarianism
In the comments below, Lastmod pointed out that something was missing from this analysis, so I’ve inserted this section to the original article:
Early on, stone carved “rules” were made that were Unchangeable, immoveable. Truth. And DARE you question any of them, out came the smears “blue pilled thinking” and “cuckservative” and “hopeless beta” among others.
Notice how this incorporates the formation of social cliques, passing judgment, and emotional manipulation (through slurs). Many of the rules themselves were rooted in anecdotal thinking.
Here is the definition of a Sigma:
Most of the quotes above come from a website called Sigma Frame. At least one of the people who was attacked and ganged up upon for their lack of cohesion to the group’s social expectations is a Sigma. The irony of a Sigma being rejected on a website called Sigma Frame for refusing to operate within the social norms of the site is….overflowing. It’s especially ironic because the operator of the site had handed out a pair of temporary bans “for making arguments in bad faith / intellectual dishonesty / trolling.”
The fact of the matter is that the Manosphere suffers from an authoritarian tendancy. You can see this in how the alpha male is honored while the beta male is showered with disgust and disdain and the true, self-sufficient sigma male is blackballed (after all, what need of he for a Manosphere?). In this, the Manosphere mirrors the culture that it critiques.
This tendency also corresponds to a bureaucratic obsession with creating rules.
I have taken a lot of flak for “attacking” the Manosphere. But I’m not attacking the Manosphere, I’m criticizing it for giving general advice without respect to the individual man’s and woman’s situation, as if everyone were blank slates. The many—hundreds and perhaps thousands—of “universal” principles—axioms, commandments, rules, regulations, laws, maxims, protocols, methods, procedures, codifications, addendums, organizational charts—are not universal. They need to be viewed, not as truths that apply to everyone, but as things that may apply to some people in some situations from time to time.
Authoritarianism is solipsism centered on the leaders and the mobs that support them. The rules form a kind of control system, both in terms of controlling behavioral modification and in terms of establishing personal authority.
Many of the rules are rooted in the anecdotal experiences of the people who are creating (and enforcing) them. The rules themselves become things that must be protected at all costs and challenging them is considered a personal affront to the proponents.
The Manosphere is strongly susceptible to solipsistic cults of personality. Some are even called Saints unironically.
Essentially the advice the Manosphere gives is, at its core, about the advice givers more than it is about the people receiving the advice. This is why the advice is so absolute and rule based, as if everyone is a blank slate. It is relatively rare to see advice that takes the form of “try this, it may work for some people and not others.” It is much more common to see “All X Are Like That” than “Some X Are Like That.”
The Manosphere
These things…
- anecdotes
- social cliques
- passing judgment
- emotional manipulation
- authoritarianism
…are all examples of the easily documented solipsism that can be seen regularly in the Manosphere. Now, lest I be falsely accused of gossip…
…I’ll limit this discussion to just the substantiated examples already shared above. And, lest anyone then accuse me of making stuff up or overgeneralizing, I’m more than willing to further substantiate any particular claims made here. They are easily established claims and I will defend the veracity of my claims, if need be, against false accusers. So, just ask me in the comments and I’ll write a follow-up post. For now, I’ll stick to the established, documented examples given above as specific evidentiary support for the general claims.
The Manosphere would never recognize any of these things as solipsism in itself. Of course, if any of their female enemies tried these things, they’d label that as solipsism, and they do so regularly. But not themselves. Definitely not themselves, as evidenced by the fact that these things are common.
Now, you might think this is anti-Manosphere propaganda. But unlike the Manosphere’s view of women, solipsism (like hypergamy) is not, in fact, some great inherent trait that infects everyone and is destined to ruin everyone it infects, be it women or men. Humans have agency and they can and do choose.
But I do think that if the Manosphere continues to vilify females for what it is guilty of doing itself, it will continue to be irrelevant. It might even die for real. But regardless, it’s certainly not going to be effective if it continues to emulate the core behaviors of the people it hates the most. No matter how strong your arguments are, if you are guilty of your own criticisms, you’ll get nowhere.
Postscript
Word of advice, if you want people to develop empathy towards you and other men, don’t mock them for being personable and sharing a little bit of information about themselves:
I still post here to help the men make sense of this. What are you concerned about? What your legacy [means].
Otherwise, they’ll be “autistic” and “Spock-like” by avoiding emotional connections in order to protect themselves. It’s kind of how like men are avoiding making emotional connections to women because they know they’ll get burnt. I wouldn’t call this “autistic,” I’d call it rational.
It was just a bunch of men…..some intelligent. Some not. Some well read, some had some good insights.
What started as a place to just get some general information about women (and their evil nature…..but all these “good” men seemed to pursue and WANT this evilness in their lives….)
Turned into a place of chest thumping, people who just declared themselves “leaders” of the movement (Paul Elam for example, or Big John on the MGTOW side of things…….Rollo for the Game / PUA types)
Early on, stone carved “rules” were made that were Unchangeable, immoveable. Truth. And DARE you question any of them, out came the smears “blue pilled thinking” and “cuckservative” and “hopeless beta” among others.
And of course it turned into a place where some men just seemed to “exist” and women would throw themselves at them because of their oozing masculininy combined with their natural stoic, Red Pill stances. Women just “couldnt help themselves” around them…..and you, Mr Fustrated Average Man could get this too! You just had to put the “work” in, get a STEM degree, have a good income / provision, and know your life’s mission and purpose! Very simple! Women would be all over you….high quality ones that just wanted to be housewives and have your babies! Oh, and all of these women of course are *hot* and respond to masculine leadership.
The reality is that people do bad things intentionally and many times unintentionally. Its called sin. The self appointed leaders on the Christian side decided they were on some hot roll and at the front of the line of what “Gods Word” said and meant.
They forgot The Cross was something ALL MEN had to submit to (which goes against Red Pill, because a Real Man doesnt submit to anyone! What are you a beta?)
Men in general had a golden opportunity when this nonsense started, before it became “codified” and of course, we blew it. Literally.
It could have been better. Not a “utopia” but it could have become a place where men saw each other as men. The more astute and intellectual ones had a responsibility to the lesser to help uplift and build. It became a penis measuring contest of the few who knew everything, and everyone else just had to “suffer / burn / in heaven we will be all equal”
Leadership is a responsibility. A big one. A huge one. If you are a leader (self appointed or not) that man has a lot on his shoulders and is expected to lead. Men for the most part like the title and use it to get status again…….with women and to lord it over other men on how important they are.
I deal with in the secular world at work. So many “amazing leaders” and yet, no work getting done. “Its those underlings! Its those Betas and losers that are ruining everything! Those Incels!”
Hence why the USA is in the state its in. Leadershiop means to the ‘sphere how many women think you are hot, and how many you could get right now if-i-wasnt-married nonsense……..or it turns into high school on what a hot shot you were in 1987.
The whole scene made it only about sex, getting women to “obey” you or drop the panties.
Its a shame, a lot more could have happened.
What we got in the end BECAUSE of this is indifference by many younger men. Aloof stances. And for men my age and up……..not a hatred or anger at women per say but the ability to just not really care……about anything.
Oh, I forgot about the rules and bureaucracy. I updated this post to add a new section about that. You talk about that all the time, and I can’t believe I missed it.
I deal with in the secular world at work. So many “amazing leaders” and yet, no work getting done. “Its those underlings! Its those Betas and losers that are ruining everything! Those Incels!”
Hence why the USA is in the state its in. Leadershiop means to the ‘sphere how many women think you are hot, and how many you could get right now if-i-wasnt-married nonsense……..or it turns into high school on what a hot shot you were in 1987.
The whole scene made it only about sex, getting women to “obey” you or drop the panties.
Its a shame, a lot more could have happened.
What we got in the end BECAUSE of this is indifference by many younger men. Aloof stances.
I deal with in the secular world at work. So many “amazing leaders” and yet, no work getting done. “Its those underlings! Its those Betas and losers that are ruining everything! Those Incels!”
When the ”manosphere” says Derek or i ”attacked”(crit*qued-same thing ) them, they forget WE see the same things in today’s ”good” society/culture/women & women’s fathers dropping the ball by NOT stepping up and creating today’s matriarchy=matrix?.
“When the ”manosphere” says Derek or i ”attacked”(crit*qued-same thing ) them, they forget WE see the same things in today’s ”good” society/culture/women & women’s fathers dropping the ball by NOT stepping up and creating today’s matriarchy=matrix?.”
It’s about ideological purity, not the cause itself. We don’t slavishly agree, so we are enemies, despite being united on a great many things.
The Manosphere is strongly susceptible to solipsistic cults of personality. Some are even called Saints unironically.
This is why i thought it was so foolish when they started calling Dalrock, St. Dalrock.
Everyone in the manosphere knows the only one even remotely connected with the sphere to be called a st./saint by others before that was notorious shooter Elli@t R@dgers/ER.
& Elli@t R@dgers/ER barely had anything to do with the manosphere(as he just hated anyone remotely suggesting game/dating-related advice to him).
Authoritarianism is solipsism centered on the leaders and the mobs that support them. The rules form a kind of control system, both in terms of controlling behavioral modification and in terms of establishing personal authority.
Many of the rules are rooted in the anecdotal experiences of the people who are creating (and enforcing) them. The rules themselves become things that must be protected at all costs and challenging them is considered a personal affront to the proponents.
The Manosphere is strongly susceptible to solipsistic cults of personality. Some are even called Saints unironically.
Essentially the advice the Manosphere gives is, at its core, about the advice givers more than it is about the people receiving the advice. This is why the advice is so absolute and rule based, as if everyone is a blank slate. It is relatively rare to see advice that takes the form of “try this, it may work for some people and not others.”
This is very similar to the advice society/culture/women gives on MEN on being ”providers”(as showcased in the following video).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKAYASZrw0E
“I Said ‘I Don’t Owe Him S*x, He Should Just Pr*(it’s a dirty word if you’re trying to get ”good” society/culture/women & women’s fathers pay their own bills)vide’—Now He’s Moved on & I Can’t Pay My Bills”
{HT Kentucky Headhunter @Spawnys}
P.S.Bottom line? Why can’t ”good” society/culture/women & women’s fathers pay their own bills?