222A. UK Poll Confirms Widespread Misandry

This supports my recent observations that prompted me to write Supremacy People. But the researchers were stunned by who was most at risk and why. Here I think I can fill in the gap.

I’ve been seeing a massive spike in misandrist language on LinkedIn, and in response I wrote Supremacy People to explain what Supremacist movements and language look like and how they operate. All Supremacists share the same language and behavior patterns, perhaps because they keep copying each other generation after generation.

A recent UK poll was able to not only confirm my observations, but to quantify them. This is very helpful. Perhaps just as helpful is that they were able to identify which segments of society were radicalizing faster. The involved researchers were unable to explain the patterns they were observing, they had never seen anything like this.

But I have.

Exactly 250 Years Ago

Before I can properly explain, let me drop the data and then explain my assumptions.

The media, and especially social media, have been blasting a narrative that men hate women and that there is an epidemic of misogyny. That “The Manosphere”, including all men’s rights groups and influencers, are creating a toxic environment for women and making them less safe. After this poll dropped, these sources doubled down and began demanding collective punishment against men for various incidents of violence against women.

Now we could argue all day as to why media has this agenda. I’m willing to be optimistic (it happens) and just repeat that the human brain is wired to prioritize threat, so in an attention economy unregulated algorithms are going to do their best to threaten vulnerable groups. By vulnerable I don’t mean physically vulnerable, I mean psychologically vulnerable.

Many misandrists are arguing that they are physically vulnerable. All of us are both physically and psychologically vulnerable, but making the distinction between the two is absolutely critical here to unpacking what is going on. I’m blaming media and those that use/consume it for the huge spike in misandry. Media isn’t physically attacking us, it is psychologically attacking us.

This is important because men and women are wired a bit differently biologically, and will respond to threat differently. Of course they both experience stress and release catecholamines when exposed to threat. But biologically if a tiger attacks the tribe, a woman is most likely to sound an alarm (communication) and call for help (call to action) from the warriors (men). Men are likely to respond to physical threats by putting themselves between the tiger and the more vulnerable people in the tribe (woman and children). That’s assuming everyone had healthy levels of oxytocin, which was the case in the tribal environments that we are biologically adapted to.

Oxytocin boosts protective instincts in-tribe. It boosts aggression towards those seen as out of tribe. If a man is subjected to enough threat (including psychological threat), they may see the source as “out of tribe”. This is where things get dangerous.

Based on the high percent of men that like women and the low rate of misogyny, I think it is fair to say that men are doing a remarkable job of resisting social media hate speech directed against them. I’m going to describe this resistance as…

Resilience

Often described as the ability to endure despite adversity. In the Olympic track family which took me in when I became homeless at age 17, resilience is the trait respected above all others. It is the one common thread that binds all but the most privileged Olympians. Even Olympic Yachtsmen require some of this, but not to the same degree as track athletes.

It was my resilience in the face of adversity that caused my fellow Olympians to provide me with emotional support and guidance. As an Olympic trainer, the running joke was that the last people to complain would be the lady runners. The first would be the men’s basket ball players. Hold that thought, because I’m about to argue that while women can achieve higher levels of resilience than men, women have a wider range of resilience than men.

Resilience Today

Today modern life makes all of us a bit soft compared to our ancestors. Threats that would have culled the weak in earlier times are mitigated by modern technology. So while we can measure rates of mental illness (27%W, 19%M) and suicide (4 times higher in men), these are complex signs that can hide a lot of what is going on.

The poll researchers found this odd pattern in who was succumbing to misandry:

This is a great question because as I write about tirelessly in game design, people need to feel needed. When women don’t feel needed, they communicate and engage in calls to action. When men don’t feel needed, they often delete themselves. Often without communicating at all.

“Bame” here means Black, Asian, and Ethnic Minority. The people you would expect to have a harder life.

C2DE is what you might describe as “working class” people. ABC1 is the highly educated segment of society. It probably comes as no surprise that the more white you are, and the more educated you are, the less racist the world looks to you. White women are advantaged in education compared to men and minorities, and the higher they rise in education the less likely they are going to encounter minorities being mistreated. Or even any minorities at all.

Researchers also noticed this about white ABC1’s:

• Most likely to be misandrist

• Most left leaning politically

• Least likely to want children

• Women as a group were FAR less likely (not a little bit, almost entirely) to want children than men were (this shocked me)

• Younger women are paid more than men, and more likely to have jobs than men

• Women, and especially ABC1s, were more pessimistic about everything, but especially about the economy and opportunity, despite being better off

Resiliency in 1776

These results confused the modern researchers, but 250 years ago the most educated man on Earth recorded resiliency, at least for women. As my followers know, I think Adam Smith was a bastard. But he was a meticulously good record keeping bastard.

Adam Smith identified the most down trodden women in the local empire as the Scottish Highlanders, and described the aristocratic women as “fine” or “fashionable”:

“A half-starved Highland woman frequently bears more than twenty children, while a pampered fine lady is often incapable of bearing any, and is generally exhausted by two or three. Barrenness, so frequent among women of fashion, is very rare among those of inferior station. Luxury in the fair sex, while it inflames perhaps the passion for enjoyment, seems always to weaken, and frequently to destroy altogether, the powers of generation.”

This is how they talked in 1776. If you want to call this patriarchy, I won’t argue. But clearly times have changed in 250 years.

So here I would argue that Smith was describing what I would today call Resiliency. He was impressed that you could nearly starve a Highlander woman to death and she would still be infinitely more “generative” than aristocratic women.

If you compare this to modern times, the closest thing we have to “half starved” in the West, other than homeless people, would be the under educated working class racial minorities. The people who complain the least, are more likely to have children, and are least prone to misandry.

Our white privileged lady abc1’s match Smith’s description of “fine” ladies with uncanny precision. Here I am making the argument (of course you may not agree) that the more oppressed/disadvantaged you are as a class, the more resilient you are going to be. The opposite is also true, with the most privileged in society being the least resilient. This hasn’t changed in 250 years.

Of course these are statistics, averages. If you are in a privileged group but don’t personally feel privileged, it is entirely possible you are an outlier. Based on the survey responses, almost everyone in the white abc1 category felt this way.

Psychological Resilience

There are myriad studies linking physical and psychological resilience. Also, resilience is much more environmental than genetic, and can be improved through training (such as athletics). Some conditions like Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (which I did laboratory research on) significantly reduce resilience and may be very difficult to mitigate.

I would suggest that your ability to resist psychological manipulation is directly linked to your psychological resilience. The purpose of social media, from the lens of the developer, is to psychologically manipulate its consumers.

Also this from recently leaked internal research from TikTok:

TikTok’s research also indicates that addiction occurs after 35 minutes of exposure.

From AI:

While this wasn’t asked in the UK research poll, I would anticipate a link between hours of social media exposure per day (especially on TikTok, but Instagram is similarly designed) and reduced resiliency and increased misandry.

An algorithm determined to promote misandrist content, to a user that enjoys that content, is going to win. It is only a matter of time before it breaks your mind. Even Morpheus would fall if he was exposed to enough “man bad” content.

The Threat

Imagine you have millions of women consuming misandrist content every day. It’s not a stretch, that’s our reality. They may not have been misandrist a few months ago, or even a week ago, but the algorithm is VERY powerful and doesn’t require a lot of time to reprogram a vulnerable individual. All but the most resilient using social media a few hours a day are vulnerable.

I consider myself, like all Olympic runners, to be extraordinarily resilient. But I’m terrified of what modern social media could do to me so I only use LinkedIn. Now that LI is becoming TikTokified, I feel damaged every time I use it and it even affects my dreams. So I likely will have to abandon or strictly ration my use of it.

Now imagine how a young person, and especially a child, would be affected by exposure. We already know it increases the risk of suicide in young women by 300%. That number likely will go up with exposure. Given that women are much more likely to fail at suicide, compared to men, that could be a lot of attempts. Attempts lead to permanent injuries, with brain damage being common in overdose attempts. I’ve had this happen to multiple close friends in different parts of the country where I didn’t know they were in crisis.

What if the misandry rate continues to climb? That’s almost certain. We could hit 50% in just months at this rate. The Algorithms are reprogramming our women to hate men. Then the women turn on the men and attempt to reprogram the men to hate themselves.

So far the men have been remarkably resilient, holding at 7% misogyny rate. But it’s only a matter of time. As their defences break down, that percent will climb. And not only quantitatively, but qualitatively. Here I mean, it’s one thing to have hate, but another to act on it. Men are action oriented. If they feel strongly enough about something, they don’t complain about it. The resolve it. They know no one cares if they complain.

Then the misandrists will say “Look! We were right all along. Men are monsters!!” Statistically, they will be right. In the near future men may become monsters. Men, like women, need a reason to live. You take that away and anything could happen.

Here is the warning that I’d like all the women reading this to consider. In this scenario you can be Right, or you can be Safe. But using misandry as your tool, you can only pick one. Which is it going to be?

If you unplug and stop the hate (I realize this won’t be easy), then it is possible to go back to a world where you could have both. The statistics show that men overwhelmingly want this. For how much longer? Probably not much longer at this rate.