Last week, I briefly mentioned this eye-popping chart that shows 12th-grade boys have moved way to the Right over the last few years:
Nobody can tell you exactly why this has happened, but it doesn’t feel like you need Sherlock Holmes to figure it out. The first clue comes from this brief argument on Twitter:
The Left in America treats men like a disease that needs to be cured. We’re accused of promoting “rape culture,” told that being masculine is “toxic,” trashed at every opportunity, and then, as a final bizarre insult, told that there’s a “patriarchy” that we’re a part of that is somehow holding women down.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, modern America has to be one of the least patriarchal nations in recorded human history. In fact, if you were so inclined, you could probably make just as good of a case that America is a matriarchy than a patriarchy because our entire society caters to women in a way that it doesn’t cater to men. Men are openly demonized in our entertainment and discriminated against in divorce court in a way that women aren’t. Women now make up nearly 60% of college graduates. Women even live 6 years longer than men. Now, look at these numbers:
We could go on, but you get the idea. If you claim that we live in a “patriarchy,” you have to ignore an awful lot of inconvenient facts and statistics to do it.
Yet and still, the Left talks about men, particularly straight, white men, like we’re being handed everything on a silver platter because a relatively tiny percentage of men have been wildly successful. Yes, people like Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Joe Rogan, Clint Eastwood, Robert DeNiro, Warren Buffet, etc., etc., etc., are clustered at the top of the heap in our society, but do you know what they have in common with the average man?
In most respects, very little.
If you’re an 18-year-old guy, you’re probably looking at men like that and going, “Look how much they’ve accomplished. How will I ever measure up to that?” Meanwhile, we live in an extraordinarily competitive world. Whatever you want to do as a man, you are going to have to be several orders of magnitude better than people used to be at it 50 years ago to even get your foot in the door.
There are a lot of examples I could use to get this point across, but let’s talk about an entertaining one that is near and dear to the heart of many men: mixed martial arts.
The first UFC was held 30 years ago and while it was wildly entertaining, it was a very different event. Most of the guys fighting were practitioners of a single art and although they were all tough as nails, very few of them were athletically gifted. For example, this is one of the most famous early fights and neither of these guys would have had the skill level OR athleticism to make the roster in the modern UFC. Not even close:
Today, fighters that compete in the UFC need to have a fairly high level of proficiency in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, wrestling, boxing, kickboxing, and Muay Thai. Even if they’re not truly experts in a particular art, at a minimum, they need to be extremely good at defending against that art because they’re going to face it on a regular basis. Furthermore, if you’re not a stud athlete, you will probably never make the top 15 in any weight class in the UFC and you will certainly never become an elite contender because the top fighters these days tend to be true genetic freaks. Just to give you one example of the type of athleticism we’re talking about, here’s 6-foot, 3-inch, 265-pound (he cut 25 pounds to make that weight) Derrick Lewis securing victory in his fight last month with an explosive FLYING KNEE:
Many of the stars in the UFC today started training when they were children. For example, here’s legendary UFC champ Khabib Nurmagedov wrestling a bear when he was 9 years old:
Now, imagine being an 18-year-old man looking at the world, where that kind of thing is the standard of excellence you need to pursue to get to the top, not just in the UFC, but in pretty much ANYTHING – and ask yourself what could motivate you to put in that kind of effort? The answer has been the same since the beginning of time: women. God bless you, ladies, because if you didn’t exist, but men somehow did, we’d all still be fighting it out with clubs to get the nicest caves. Granted, some people might claim it’s not about women, it’s about “money or power,” but what are those really for most men at a base level? They’re a way for men to get access to the quality of women they want.
Of course, that’s a problem these days, too.
Sure, there are PLENTY of exceptions, but to a lot of young men, the dating world looks systemically broken. Why? Well, let’s start with this video that caught my attention recently from the “Godfather of the Red Pill,” Rollo Tomassi:
What he’s talking about in this video is that the old script so many Americans are trying to read off of on relationships no longer exists in a fundamental way for a lot of women. Because of birth control, abortion, and government welfare, women no longer live in terror of having a baby outside of marriage. Women are working now, so they no longer NEED men to support them or their kids, and taking care of a child solo may statistically often lead to bad outcomes, but it has also been normalized. In other words, a lot of women may WANT a man, but they don’t feel like they NEED a man. If you want to know one of the biggest reasons why the divorce rate in America is pushing up towards 50%, this is it.
Additionally, this is one of the reasons things like Only Fans, pornography, and “Sugar Babies” have become such big things. There are a lot of women at the peak of their beauty who would rather sell access to themselves to make money and sleep around with good-looking men than find a man to spend the rest of their life with. Even many of the women that aren’t selling themselves often have a similar mentality. Their twenties are about building a career, getting likes on social media, and sleeping with the best-looking guys they can find – and guess what? Online dating is perfectly suited to help them scratch that latter itch. If you’re one of those most desired men, you’re going to have a wealth of options, but most men aren’t and many of them feel almost locked out of the dating market.
Crude and obscene though it may be, this quote from Dan Bilzerian earlier this year would probably resonate with a lot of young men because it’s what they’re experiencing in the world now:
“You’re either getting all the p*ssy or no p*ssy. The world has changed.”
Anyone who has read my work probably knows I’m not a fan of Andrew Tate, but if this is how a lot of men see life and he’s claiming that he can teach them to be the ones getting “all the p*ssy” instead of “no p*ssy.” Can you see the appeal? Can you see why these men might appreciate someone like Jordan Peterson giving them advice on how to navigate the difficult world they see in front of them? If you’re an 18-year-old man, which message sounds more appealing, the conservative message which is essentially, “Masculinity is good, you have a lot to offer the world and we think you can succeed” or the liberal, “The world’s problems are being caused by cis-white men like you!”
If you want someone to support you, the bare minimum fee for entry is giving off a vibe that you like them, care about their problems, and want them to succeed. Conservatives want men to succeed while liberals treat them as members of some kind of patriarchal, oppressor class. Young men are just noticing the difference.
Not disagreeing with the larger issue, obviously, but Sydney Watson's one of the good guys (gals, if you prefer). She's been banging the drum about the emergent asymmetry in how men and women are treated nowadays (among many issues near and dear to my heart) for a very long time. Check out her YouTube vids or her various online presences--she's on Patreon and she has her own website--if you are dubious.
This is good news! I presume you saw Tucker Carlson's interview with Andrew Tate. Honestly, I didn't hear him say or promote anything that isn't positive advice for young men to hear. I can't even begin to express how glad I am that my son came of age before the constant berating and bashing of men, especially white men, came into being.