Spoiler warning right now. This entire essay is spoilers. If you haven’t seen it, bookmark this and come back after.

The movie starts four years into Peter Parker being Spider-Man full time and nobody remembers who he is. He’s used that as an excuse to disappear into the job completely with no friends or relationships. Just Spiderman stuff, every day, alone. When the movie hits its climax and he’s finally asked point blank whether he’s Peter Parker or Spider-Man, his answer is both. The all-in, no-distractions version of him gets rightfully treated as the wound he’s been carrying since the last movie.

Because the true villain of the film isn’t Jean Grey, Scorpion, or even the Department of Damage Control, it’s stoicism. Or rather “broicism.” I didn’t create that term, but it’s perfect as it’s used to describe what happens when Stoicism gets hollowed out and sold to sixteen-year-old boys between supplement ads.

In case you don’t believe me, the film hands you a mirror early on to make sure you don’t miss it. Frank Castle is living that isolation taken all the way to its end point. The Punisher is alone, armed, and cut off from everyone who ever loved him. And when Peter tries to compare their lives at one point, like they’re the same kind of tough guy, Frank completely shuts that down.

The guy whose icon is on a thousand pick up truck windows next to blue lives matter stickers because people have the media literacy of as a turnip is the one warning the hero away from becoming him.

The most misunderstood thing about the Punisher is that he hates what he’s become. Nobody should aspire to be the Punisher. He’s a tragedy formed out of the tragedy of losing his family, and this movie hits that beat beautifully, and quietly.

Peter’s own body is staging the exact same argument. His powers start mutating past his control, and instead of dealing with what’s underneath it, his instinct is to build a device to suppress it. A chip that can shut off whatever part of himself is inconvenient. Bruce Banner even not-so-subtly asks him who gets to stay, and which parts get switched off?

Then there’s the actual crisis at the center of the film. A grieving, dangerous stranger is tearing the city apart. Every instinct the genre has trained you to reach for (read as: overwhelming violence) fails. What finally reaches Jean is Peter letting her into his own mind to see a memory of the woman who raised him. Jean is defeated by Aunt May telling a scared kid that the people who love him do it for exactly who he is.

In the biggest domestic box office opening weekend ever recorded, the thing that makes Peter capable of ending the crisis is the exact thing broicism tells boys made them soft.

Then there’s MJ.

Peter tells her the truth about loving her and she tells him she doesn’t feel it back (because she genuinely doesn’t remember him, as a result of his own actions)...and he accepts it. He doesn’t even try to guilt her into reconsidering. He swings her home and keeps being decent to her anyway.

Earlier in the film, he’s tricked into a kiss he thought was real. When he realizes she has no memory of it, he brings it up to her anyway (knowing she’d never find out otherwise) because her consent matters even in a scenario where he was the one being deceived.

Some of the reactions to MJ and Peter on Threads was…not great.

But that reaction is the thesis of this movie, stated out loud, by the people it’s about, who can’t understand the point behind basic human decency if there isn’t a sexual payoff for it!

I think the brilliant part of how it was implemented is that the film never argues with them. None of the things I’m talking about were announced in a random speech about toxic masculinity. The film just keeps handing its hero the manosphere’s advice (handle it alone, suppress the inconvenient parts, physical power is all matters, don’t take no for an answer) and watches him decline every single time.

And he still saves the day.

Note:

My one nitpick is that I fully expected them to handle Peter getting shot by Frank the way the comics handled him getting beaten to death by Morlun back in 2005. Body taken away, then gone, nothing left behind but shed skin, and Peter climbing back out of a cocoon healed and changed. That would have been a much stronger button (for me) on the whole evolution. On him finally becoming who he needs to be. I thought the scene with the Punisher helping him sneak out was great, but I was POSITIVE that was how they were going to fix it.

At least they got the important part right.

That is genuinely the cleanest expression I’ve seen lately of something that runs through almost every manosphere conversation about masculinity. He would rather look like a man who could change the tire than have the tire changed.

The thing being optimized for is the appearance of competence (instead of actual competence). In the podcast, we discuss something similar in the appearance of being a good lover. And once you start noticing the pattern, you start seeing it everywhere. The guy who refuses feedback in the bedroom is doing the same thing as the guy on the side of the road. He’s choosing the story he gets to tell himself over the outcome the woman next to him is actually experiencing.

You can hear the logic underneath it if you listen. The flat tire guy isn’t really mad at the stranger who offered help. He’s mad at his girlfriend for accepting. In his mind, her saying yes meant she had, in that moment, looked at him clearly and decided she’d rather be home than be his audience. She broke the contract he decided existed wherein she is expected to believe as he pretends he’s the man he’s performing as, and in exchange…he gets to keep performing.

I think this is what people miss when they roll their eyes at “fragile masculinity” as a phrase. The fragility is structural. If your whole identity as a man is built on being the one who handles things, who knows things, who provides things, then any moment where someone else can do it better is an existential threat. Not an inconvenience.

And it’s expensive for both of them. She’s the one who has to spend the next several years managing his ego around every plumber, every IT guy, or, god forbid, every friend’s husband who happens to know how to do something he doesn’t. She becomes the guardian of his self-image.

The thing that gets me about the bedroom version of this is how transparent the trade is. You can ask your partner what feels good and probably get better at making her feel good or you can refuse to ask and stay convinced you’re already great at it. One of those options has an outcome attached and the other one is just a feeling you get to keep.

Most of the men I see selling this version of masculinity online are selling the second one. Instead of selling an actual skill or self-improvement, they’re selling permission to skip the part where you’d have to find out you weren’t as good as you thought.

Spoiler: It’s a bad deal. The girlfriend in the car already knows it and the wife already knows it. But the guys buying it are the last ones to figure it out…if ever.

The guy on your For You Page with the ring light and the fake podcast setup with the confident cadence who cites Jordan Petersen and speaks about “high value” behavior isn’t telling you anything that wasn’t being whispered in locker rooms in 1997. Wait three days to call her back. Don’t seem too available. Let her wonder. Take her somewhere cheap first because you don’t know if she’s worth more yet. They’re the same pick-up artist garbage from my teenage years and the only thing that’s actually changed is the production quality and the reach.

The difference between now and twenty years ago was that the shittiest guy you knew growing up was the one telling you that women respond to disinterest, that paying for dinner made you a simp, and who had a whole theory about why you should never text first, but that guy could only get to you so often. You’d run into him at soccer practice, maybe in the kitchen at a party, and then you’d go back to your real life and talk to actual human beings who had actual relationships and at least some of that nonsense would get diluted by reality. The problem is that the algorithm has eliminated that dilution. Now that guy is in your pocket twelve hours a day, and he brought forty thousand friends who all agree with him. And the platforms make it worse by rewarding the most extreme version of whatever he’s saying because outrageand inadequacy get clicks.

What gets me is how much work goes into making this stuff sound reasonable. The ones with actual audiences don’t lead with the worst of it. They lead with something that lands, something that feels like finally someone gets it. Yeah, dating is hard. Yeah, rejection hurts. Yeah, it’s confusing out there. And you’re nodding along, and you feel seen, and then somewhere in the forty-second video you’ve watched this week he mentions that coffee dates are for women you’re not sure about yet, and it just kind of...slides in. Because by that point you’ve already decided he’s smart. You’ve already given him the benefit of the doubt. The framework has been installed, and now you’re just filling in the content.

And the advice itself is always structured the same way. It positions manipulation as strategy, dishonesty as discipline, and genuine human warmth as weakness. Don’t show too much interest or else you’ll look needy and don’t pay for things because you want to because that’s being a simp and, god forbid, don’t form friendships with women you date…because that’s the friend zone, which apparently is a fate worse than death. As if spending an evening with someone and walking away with a good friend instead of a hookup is some kind of catastrophic loss rather than, I don’t know, a perfectly nice Tuesday.

What they’re really teaching is how to interact with women you don’t actually want to be with. All the language of dating…just none of the actual vulnerability of it. And they’ve convinced an entire generation of men that this is just being smart. That the guys who actually like the people they go out with, who pay for dinner because it’s a genuinely nice thing to do for someone you enjoy spending time with, and who text when they feel like texting are the naive ones.

Meanwhile the “smart” ones (according to them) are out here announcing publicly that coffee dates are “only for women they don’t find attractive,” seemingly unaware that they have just told every woman they will ever ask out exactly what a coffee date means to them. Permanently. Forever. That clip exists now. It will continue to exist.

The actual secret that none of these guys will sell you a course about is that most of the best relationships most people have ever been in started from exactly the kind of genuine, unstrategic, I-just-actually-like-this-person energy they’ve been trained to perform as weakness. Not as a tactic to lure her in, but because it’s the only thing that actually works long-term. You cannot manipulate your way into a relationship where someone genuinely knows and chooses you. You can only manipulate your way into a relationship where someone knows the character you performed and chose that, but eventually they will meet the real you…and you’ll still probably find someone to say it was her fault.

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For any of you not on Threads, a woman named Courtney started posting real-time updates from her friend on a bachelor cruise, and what unfolded was a cascade of entirely preventable disasters. Nobody booked lodging before the trip. The groom hadn’t checked his email, so his excursion payment had failed and he wasn’t registered. They missed the free shuttle. They walked to a restaurant near closing and got turned away for being too large a party. Someone double-tipped at the bar because they paid cash without reading that gratuity was already included, then got angry about it. An Excel itinerary existed…nobody looked at it.

It’s funny. Like genuinely funny. And the comment sections treated it that way, which is fine, but I think the thing that made it go so viral isn’t just that these guys were chaotic. It’s that the chaos felt familiar. People recognized it as a familiar pattern that they see play out in their day to day lives.

The mental load conversation has been happening for a while now, and it tends to get reduced to dishes and laundry, the physical tasks that are visibly undone. But what the Bro Cruise illustrates is the layer underneath all of that. The cognitive work of anticipating what needs to happen before anything needs to happen and knowing that “we’ll figure it out when we get there” is nothing more than an optimistic statement about the future that someone else will have to manage when it falls apart.

I want to be careful here because I don’t think these guys are necessarily bad people, but I also think that’s kind of the point. I think they’re a pretty honest portrait of what men look like when nobody has ever required them to hold this kind of information. When you’ve spent most of your life in relationships or households where someone else was tracking the details, you don’t develop the reflex. You simply show up and things have been handled, and you might even feel like you helped because you were present for the part where things got handled.

There’s a moment in a lot of marriages where one person realizes they are the Excel spreadsheet. I broke down the research on mental load and unfair labor division in a video just a couple weeks ago, but, in short, they are the one holding the departure time and the reservation confirmation and the awareness that the groom hasn’t checked his email and the reason so many women recognize the Bro Cruise isn’t necessarily because their husbands are idiots, but because they’ve seen what their household looks like when they stop being the one who checks.

The cruise ends. Everyone goes home. The chaos becomes a story they’ll tell for years. But in the actual architecture of a life, it’s important to remember that somebody is always doing the work. And at some point, it’s a choice you make as a partner to remain inept at the most basic life competencies.

In the early 2000s, someone decided that a man who used moisturizer and owned more than two pairs of shoes needed a category. Not because anything about him was actually new or remarkable, but because the culture needed somewhere to put him. So they coined “metrosexual” (a portmanteau of metropolitan and heterosexual), which tells you everything you need to know about what was actually being negotiated. The heterosexual part was a disclaimer to reassure everyone that this well-groomed man was still, in the ways that mattered, “one of us.”

Think about what the word is actually describing though. An “urban-dwelling man who invests time and money in his grooming and appearance.” That’s it. That’s the whole definition. A man who washes his face and buys clothes that fit. And we needed a new word for him. We needed a cultural category, magazine profiles, think pieces, because the baseline expectation for men was so low that clearing it even slightly required explanation.

I remember being called a metrosexual in my twenties simply for shaping my beard. Not for anything elaborate. For maintaining the hair on my face in a way that suggested I had thought about it for longer than thirty seconds. The comment was always delivered warmly, the way you’d compliment a golden retriever for learning a new trick. “Look at you. Who are you trying to impress?” And the honest answer of “myself” seemed to confuse people more than anything else I could have said.

That’s the part worth sitting with. The assumption underneath the question is that men only perform grooming for an audience (specifically a female one). The idea that a man might want to take care of himself because he finds value in it, because he has some relationship with his own body that isn’t mediated by whether a woman is watching, doesn’t really compute within that framework. Masculinity, as it’s traditionally constructed, doesn’t leave a lot of room for men to have preferences about themselves that aren’t about competition or attraction. You lift weights to be stronger than other men or more appealing to women. You dress well to close deals or get dates. Self-care as an end in itself is, at minimum…suspicious.

So when a man shows up and just takes care of himself, the culture can question his sexuality (the implied logic of the metrosexual label in the first place because why else would a man care about this?), or it can treat him as an eccentric exception, a curiosity worth profiling rather than a template worth following. Either way, the underlying standard doesn’t move. The bar stays on the floor, and the man who steps over it gets a nickname and the “real men” are allowed to keep walking around with an unwashed ass.

The word “metrosexual” has mostly faded at this point, which people take as a sign of progress. I’d argue it’s more ambiguous than that. The category dissolved partly because some of what it described got absorbed into mainstream masculinity (skincare for men is now a multi-billion dollar industry, which the same culture that invented metrosexuals is happy to monetize). But the policing is now about being “too soft,” about men who are “in their feminine,” and about the steady suspicion that any man paying too much attention to how he presents himself has something to answer for.

The metrosexual panic was never really about grooming. It was about what grooming implies.

If you have a self image worth caring for independent of what anyone else thinks about it, something must be “wrong” with you. That’s a genuinely threatening idea to a version of masculinity that needs men to be either useful or attractive but not just present in their own skin for their own reasons. A man who takes care of himself because he wants to is harder to sell things to and harder to keep insecure.

We gave him a funny name and moved on…but the bar never moved.

So people keep saying the “left doesn’t provide a space for young boys.” It’s repeated at parties, on podcasts, talk shows repeat it, and people just nod along and say, “you have a great point,” but every time I hear it, I want to ask them to actually explain what they mean.

What is the left doing to discourage men from joining? What policies is the left implementing that stigmatizes young men? What specific thing are progressives doing that’s making young men feel unwelcome?

Because what you’ll get is silence. Or worse, you get comments that unintentionally explain the whole problem better than I could. A guy wrote on Threads that he’s been a progressive his whole life but keeps getting told he’s the problem just for being straight and white. And I believe that he genuinely experienced it that way. But I’m in those same spaces and I don’t hear it. So what’s the difference between what he’s hearing and what I’m hearing? I think he’s hearing “you’re not automatically the center of this conversation” and his brain is translating it as an attack. But I’ve never met someone who needs to be told they are the exception to something who is actually the exception they think they are. He might even see this essay as an attack.

Because there’s nothing there. There’s no policy. No agenda. There’s just...women. Women exist on the left. Women have power on the left. Women are making decisions without asking permission from men first. Misogyny is still rampant, but it’s less socially acceptable to say it out loud in left-leaning spaces, and this has somehow translated to “the left doesn’t care about men.” And nobody ever provides evidence other than vibes and an unwillingness to interrogate what is actually being said.

I’m not trying to cast a wide net and say everyone who repeats this is evil or sitting around plotting. Most people aren’t. Most men don’t spend any time reflecting on their own internalized misogyny, regardless of political party and sometimes it’s even worse on the left because we self-identify as “good,” so hurt feelings must be justified and can’t be a reflection of anything negative. Most people hear this from someone they respect and just accept it as true. It gets repeated so often, by so many people who seem to know what they’re talking about, that it starts to feel like fact. And pretty soon you’re saying it too without ever actually stopping to ask yourself what it means.

That’s how this stuff spreads. Through repetition and respectability and smart people saying things and other smart people just...nodding along. And even better, you get applause for it. You say “the left needs to do better for young men” and people nod. People agree. You sound thoughtful. You sound like you care. You sound like you’re speaking outside of politics.

But notice what never comes next. There’s never a “how do we do that.” It’s just a “we need to do that.” There’s never a solution just beyond the sound bite. It just acts to show that you care in a way that feels nice and simple and gets you good boy points for being the progressive who’s willing to criticize his own side.

Because the actual answer is uncomfortable. The actual answer is “men need to unpack their internalized misogyny” and to “stop being jealous of the right for politicizing it and start doing the real work in your own spaces.” And that doesn’t get applause. That makes you the guy being called out and requires you to actually change something about yourself instead of just voting correctly and feeling good about it. Because there are progressive men who will read this and immediately think I’m attacking them.

So it’s easier to just leave it vague, get the applause, and move on. We talk about performative allyship all the time, but this is the version nobody wants to name. The performance of caring about men while making sure you never have to actually challenge the misogyny in your own community…of being the good guy without doing the work.

Everyone keeps calling for the left to create an online ecosystem like the right has, but the left already has one. The left already has content creators and spaces for young men to learn and grow. The difference is what it’s selling. The right’s ecosystem offers a transaction of adopt this worldview and you get guaranteed access to women’s compliance, women’s bodies, women’s deference. That’s the product. That’s what moves the needle.

The left’s ecosystem? It offers actual relationships based on mutual respect. It offers critical thinking and nuance. And yeah, that doesn’t go viral. That doesn’t give you the dopamine hit of feeling like you’ve cracked some secret code about women. And it gets called cringy.

And the reason it gets called cringy isn’t just because the right makes fun of it. It’s because misogynist men on the left are making fun of it too. Because they don’t want nuance. They want the same guarantee the right is selling, just with liberal branding. They want a leftist version of the manosphere that still promises them that if they follow the rules, women will comply.

So when people say “the left doesn’t have content for boys,” what they’re actually saying is “the left won’t promise me that women will be smaller so I can be bigger.” And the left refuses to make that promise. And they call that a failure instead of a success.

When you actually push people on this, when you force them to name the thing they’re upset about, you get “thought leaders” like Scott Galloway. Well-meaning people ask, “Where are the leftist voices talking about masculinity the way he does?”

And that question reveals the actual problem. Because Galloway isn’t some thoughtful counterpoint to the manosphere. He’s a pipeline to it. Strip away the politics, strip away the academic language, and his message is identical. In just the last several months, Scott has gone on major media outlets and called Title IX “affirmative action for women,” told young straight men to go to gay clubs to pick up on women, said that men are useless during the first six months of a child’s life, pushed hypergamy as a fact multiple times, and downplayed women’s fears of violence in dating as irrational compared to men’s “real” fears — again, multiple times.

And we’re expecting teenage boys to see the nuance between Galloway and Andrew Tate? We’re expecting kids to be sophisticated enough to understand that one is progressive misogyny and one is red pill misogyny, as if the difference matters to a 15-year-old who just wants to feel like he understands women. He doesn’t see the difference. He sees a progression. He sees consistency. And when he gets older or angrier or just scrolls a little further, the jump from Galloway to the manosphere guys doesn’t feel like a betrayal. It feels like the logical next step.

That’s the danger. That’s why Galloway is so much more dangerous than some red pill podcaster who’s at least honest about what he believes.

But that’s what people who repeat the talking point of “the left hates men” actually want. Not evolution. Regression. If the only way to bring men to the left is by sacrificing women, then we’ve lost the plot entirely.

The spaces exist. Young men just have to decide if they actually want to be in them. And if you disagree, tell me in the comments what space you think is missing, without arguing that the answer is just a little progressive-flavored misogyny.

Frequently Asked Questions From The Comments I Haven’t Read Yet But I’m Certain Will Follow

Q: So men can’t have concerns now?

Men can absolutely have concerns. I listed some real ones at the end. I am also a man with concerns. The concern that women exist near you and have opinions is not one I can help you with

Q: You just proved my point. I raised a concern and you diagnosed me with internalized misogyny instead of engaging with it.

I engaged with it for about a thousand words. Maybe more, I didn’t count. The diagnosis came after the engagement, not instead of it. If your concern is “women have power here and I don’t like it,” then yes, that’s what internalized misogyny looks like. That’s not me dismissing you. That’s me taking you seriously enough to tell you the truth.

Q: You can’t even say the word hypergamy without being called a misogynist. This is exactly the thought-policing that drives men away.

That’s because the only people pretending hypergamy is uncontested human fact are misogynists. You can say the word. But you can’t present it to teenage boys who are trying to understand why women won’t date them, and then act surprised when those boys end up somewhere dark. Hypergamy isn’t a neutral observation. It’s a framework that tells men women are transactional by nature and then sells them the transaction.

Q: This essay isn’t for men. It’s for progressive women to share so they feel validated.

Notice that this objection doesn’t engage with anything I actually argued. It’s a way of dismissing the argument by questioning the motive behind it. If something I said was wrong, say what it was. “You wrote this to get applause” is itself exactly the move I described in the third paragraph. Tell me specifically what I said that you disagree with. It’s still there to read.

Q: What about the stuff that’s actually measurable? Male suicide rates. Boys falling behind in school. Men struggling to find connection. Your answer to all of that is just “unpack your misogyny”?

Those are real and they matter and anyone who waves them away isn’t paying attention. But the manosphere doesn’t fix any of them. It diagnoses them as women’s fault and then sells you a strategy for extracting compliance from women, and when that doesn’t work (and it never works) you end up lonelier and angrier than you started. The left’s answer to male loneliness isn’t “unpack your misogyny.” It’s “build actual relationships with people who see you as a full human being.” That’s harder to sell than a secret code, but it’s also the only thing that actually works. If you want to talk about what the left should be doing differently to reach men who are genuinely struggling, I’m here for that conversation. That’s a real conversation. It’s just not the conversation most people are having when they say “the left doesn’t make space for men.”

This one is about control dressed up as love and how it gets sold as a product.

“I’m his prize, not his possession.”

That caption is doing a lot of work it can’t actually do. A prize is a possession…that’s what a prize is. Neither word makes you a partner. Neither word makes you a person. They’re just two different ways of being an object.

Now, I want to be careful here, because I don’t actually think she lives this. Her pinned video is her in a sports bra and most of her content is her wearing workout gear. So whatever he’s protecting her from, it isn’t the internet. Anyone who’s been married as long as I have knows that real relationships don’t look like staged clips, but what I want to discuss further is what the video is selling.

The framework is not new. He covers you up because he loves you and his discomfort with your outfit is actually devotion. If that feels like control, that’s your mistake and means that you don’t understand love yet.

Once you accept that, you’ve handed him the interpretive keys to the whole relationship. Every boundary he draws becomes evidence of how much he values you. And the really elegant/vile part of that system is that your discomfort with it becomes proof that you’re the problem.

What makes the influencer version worth paying close attention to is the gap between what’s being sold and what’s being lived. She is a working content creator, earning money, posting videos of herself online to an audience of strangers, exercising every freedom she’s implicitly telling her audience to hand over. That’s not a contradiction she stumbled into. That is the product that she and her husband have realized will make them the most money.

Something Regan said during our recording is really important (and I’m going to paraphrase), but the ideology that tells women to cover up and stay small is the same ideology that stokes the kind of male entitlement and aggression that these men then offer to protect you from. They create the conditions and sell you the shelter…but the shelter conveniently has no door handle on the inside

The main point is if that ideology disappeared tomorrow, what exactly are they protecting you from?

The women this content reaches most effectively are often the women with the least structural protection. Not the creator with the brand deals. The woman who goes home to an actual version of this and finds out what it looks like when the camera’s off.

The isolation from friends and family. The financial dependence. The disappearance of a self that used to have opinions about things other than what he prefers. But it happens so slow that none of the requests (read as: demands) seem unreasonable in a vacuum…he just wants to keep you safe.

None of that makes it into the reel though.

Just the shirt.

Author’s Note: This past week, I was hit with a deluge of angry comm…

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The reason we all dislike him is because he is not an alternative to the manosphere, but simply three manospheres in a liberal trenchcoat. As an argumentation professor, the rhetorical strategy he continually uses is to sandwich his misogynistic takes between arguments that sound like he “gets it.” 75% of the things he says are things I agree with, so the 25% that sound horrible must not be so bad, right?

I want to give you three examples of exactly how he does this from his appearance on Liz Plank’s podcast “Boy Problems.” And to be clear, I like Liz. I think she does great work, this is not a critique of her and she actually called him out on this early in the show. But he does it for the entirety of their interview and on nearly every other guest appearance I’ve seen him make.

So Liz asks Scott about why men are so afraid to approach women, and Scott starts talking about how women express fears about dating men. And here’s where Scott does his first sandwich.

He starts by acknowledging that 2,500 women a year are murdered by men, and he says “that is unacceptable” and “until zero, it needs focus.” Great! Sounds like he gets it, right? He’s acknowledging the problem. He’s saying it needs to be addressed. We’re on the same page here.

But then, he immediately says “Having said that, 40,000 men will kill themselves this year. So the guy you’re on a date with is 16 times more likely to go home and hurt himself than hurt you.”

First off, women aren’t just afraid of being murdered on dates. They’re afraid of being assaulted, of being raped, of being drugged, of being stalked, of being harassed, of having their boundaries violated in dozens of different ways that don’t end in death but absolutely wreck their lives. So reducing women’s legitimate safety concerns to just “murder stats” is already minimizing the actual scope of the problem.

One in six women will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime. One in six, Scott. One in three women experience sexual violence involving physical contact during their lifetime. Every 68 seconds, an American is sexually assaulted. And 90% of adult rape victims are female. There are 5.3 million incidents of intimate partner violence among U.S. women aged 18 and older PER YEAR. Only including the murder rate in that discussion was a specific choice meant to minimize the fear of women.

Because when the women I know say they’re worried about going on a date with a stranger, they’re not not only worried about murder statistics. They’re doing a risk assessment based on lived experience (theirs and every other woman they know). It reminds me of a chilling comment I received during the “Man or Bear” discourse a few years ago: “I choose the bear because the worst thing the bear can do is murder me.”

But here’s the bigger issue that is straight out of the manosphere playbook. Scott bringing up male suicide rates in response to women’s safety concerns isn’t advocacy for men’s mental health. It’s a deflection.

Male suicide IS a real problem that we should absolutely address. I’ve made dozens of videos about toxic masculinity harming men and keeping them from seeking help. About how patriarchal systems hurt everyone. About how we desperately need better mental health support for men who are taught from childhood that expressing emotion is weakness.

But you know what doesn’t help address male suicide? Using those deaths as a rhetorical weapon to silence women’s safety concerns.

This is like if someone said “we need to address homelessness” and you responded with “well actually more people die from car accidents.” Both are problems! Both deserve attention! But bringing up one to dismiss the other isn’t advocacy.

If you want to talk about male suicide? Let’s actually talk about it. Let’s talk about how the same toxic masculinity that tells men they can’t express emotions, can’t be vulnerable, can’t ask for help, or, the thing that Scott has pushed in multiple other interviews, if they aren’t the toughest guy in a room then they are a failure, that’s the same ideology keeping them from getting mental health support.

The same systems that tell women “your safety concerns are unfounded” are telling men “seeking therapy is weak.” These aren’t competing problems, Scott. They’re the same problem. They’re both symptoms of a society that devalues emotional wellbeing and treats women’s concerns as trivial.

So this “men are 16 times more likely to hurt themselves than hurt you” stat is not just minimizing women’s fears, it’s revealing that you’d rather use men’s pain as a rhetorical shield than actually address what’s causing it.

Because real advocacy for male suicide rates is talking about how to get men into therapy, how to break down the stigma around mental health, how to create support systems for men that don’t rely solely on romantic partners to be their entire emotional support system. But instead, you’re using those statistics to tell women they’re being irrational about their safety.

When you use male suicide as a counter to women’s safety concerns, you’re not just dismissing women’s fears. You’re also preventing us from actually addressing male mental health. Because now, any time someone tries to talk about suicide prevention, it’s contaminated. It’s associated with this dismissive, bad-faith argument. You’ve weaponized men’s pain, which means you’ve made it harder to actually help them.

You want to know how many young men have heard these statistics used this way and then felt like they couldn’t seek help because doing so would somehow be betraying other men? Like their struggles have been turned into ammunition in a culture war they never signed up for?

When you use men’s suffering as a rhetorical shield against women’s concerns, you don’t help men. You just ensure that their pain becomes a talking point instead of something we actually address. You make their mental health struggles into a weapon, which means you make it harder for them to see those struggles as something deserving of care and attention rather than something to be deployed strategically in online arguments.

That’s not advocacy, that’s exploitation.

Okay, so that’s deflection. That’s move number one in the playbook. Let me show you how he does move number two in the sandwich technique because this is where Scott really shows his rhetorical skills (and I am not saying that as a compliment).

So earlier in the interview, Liz pushes back on Scott and says, essentially, “men built the system we’re in, men are in charge, so why aren’t men fixing the system that’s hurting them?”

And Scott responds by talking about his own privilege. He says he was born a white heterosexual male in sixties California and jokes about it being “the smartest decision I’ve ever made.” He talks about how all the prosperity from 1965 to 2005 was funneled to white heterosexual men. He admits that when he was raising money for startups in the nineties, it never even occurred to him to ask why there were no women or Black people raising money.

Self-aware king! He’s acknowledging his privilege. This is great, right? He gets it!

But then, and watch this transition because it’s BEAUTIFUL in how sneaky it is, he asks, “Should a 19-year-old male who has an education system biased against them pay the penalty for MY privilege?”

And suddenly we’ve pivoted from “I had advantages” to “but young men today are the REAL victims.”

He goes on this whole tangent about how boys are suspended twice as much as girls, how school promotes behaviors that are “easier for girls” like sitting still and being organized, how 70-80% of primary school teachers are women who “naturally champion people like themselves,” how boys are “18 months less mature” and their prefrontal cortex doesn’t catch up until they’re 25.

Now, this is a much more nuanced discussion that deserves it’s own essay, but I do want to address a few things before moving forward. When you gender basic life competencies, you don’t help boys who struggle. You just give them an excuse to never develop them. You tell them that their failure is inevitable, biological, not their fault. And sure, that might feel good in the moment, but you know what happens to men who never learn organizational skills, who never learn to sit with discomfort, who never learn to regulate their attention? They struggle in college, in careers, in relationships, and in life. They seek out easy answer to complex questions that are the centerpiece of why these manosphere dating coaches are so appealing to young men. It’s the underlying belief that says that men have a biological imperative to punch things and to fuck things. That emotional intelligence is a woman’s trait.

Second, when teaching was a male-dominated profession, somehow nobody was worried about whether male teachers could effectively teach girls. And I know this because I am a tenured college professor and over 70% of professors in STEM are men, yet we aren’t ever having those discussions regarding why there aren’t more women pursuing careers in STEM. But now that it’s female-dominated, suddenly we’re supposed to believe that women teachers are the problem? But now this idea that having mostly women teachers disadvantages boys is essentially saying that women are incapable of teaching or supporting boys effectively. Like, I’m not putting words in his mouth, he said that they “naturally champion people like themselves.” Because why think critically about this when we can just blame women. Moreover, maybe if we treated our pre-k through 12 teachers with the dignity and respect they deserve, more men would return to the field, but I digress.

But here’s where it gets REALLY interesting because you can ignore everything I said in the previous two paragraphs and just listen to Scott defeat his own argument. After spending several minutes painting this picture of young men as these deeply disadvantaged victims of a system designed to hurt them, after telling us that boys are being discriminated against at every level of education, that they’re not going to college, that everything is stacked against them…he casually drops, “Women under the age of 30 are now making as much and sometimes more than men under the age of 30 in urban centers. They own more homes. Single women own more homes than men. Once a woman has kids, she goes to 77 cents on the dollar.”

Wait. Hold on. Scott. SCOTT.

Did you just...did you just accidentally prove that your entire argument is wrong?

You spent all this time telling us that boys are being suspended, they’re not going to college, the education system is rigged against them, their teachers don’t support them, but then you admit that DESPITE women supposedly having every advantage, DESPITE women going to college more, DESPITE women apparently having this system that’s designed to work perfectly for them...men and women still end up in basically the same place economically until a woman dares to have children.

Do you see what you just did there? You just proved that even with all these educational “disadvantages,” men still end up with equal pay by age 30. Which means those disadvantages aren’t actually disadvantaging them in the job market. Two decades of disadvantages for men in our educational system results in...equality? But only for 4 or 5 years because if a woman chooses to have a child (which 86% of women eventually do) something that men face absolutely zero career consequences for…immediately tanks a woman’s earning potential by 23%.

This is the sandwich, everyone. This is exactly what I’m talking about. He starts with “I had privilege” ( the agreeable top bun). Then he fills the middle with “but men today are victims of reverse discrimination” - the problematic meat. And then he quietly admits “oh by the way women still face massive systemic discrimination” as the bottom bun, said so quickly and moved past so fast that he hopes you won’t notice it completely undermines his entire argument.

If the system is so rigged against men, Scott, why do they still end up making the same amount as women? Why are they still able to own homes? Why do they still have equal economic outcomes despite supposedly being discriminated against at every turn?

Make it make sense.

The answer, of course, is that the system ISN’T rigged against men. What’s happening is that women are ALSO succeeding now, and that feels like discrimination to people who are used to having less competition. As the saying goes, when you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.

He’s so close to getting it. He’s SO close to understanding that the real problem is that our society still punishes women for having children while rewarding men for the exact same choice. That we still don’t have adequate parental leave, affordable childcare, or workplace structures that support working parents.

But instead of saying “wow, we really need to fix how we treat parents in this country,” he uses it as a footnote to his argument about how hard men have it. It’s infuriating. And I find it extra infuriating because I KNOW he is smart enough to see what he is doing. This isn’t an accident.

You’re seeing the pattern now, right? Acknowledge something true, bury something harmful in the middle, move on quickly before you can process what just happened. But it gets worse. Because at least those first two examples were about systemic issues where you could maybe convince yourself he’s just misguided. This next one? This one shows you exactly how little he thinks of marginalized people when there’s something in it for straight men.

And now we come to what might be the most Scott Galloway moment of this entire interview. After spending an hour talking about empathy and respecting women and being a better man, he gives what he calls a “pro tip.”

He tells straight men that if they want to “punch above their weight class” and meet women, they should get a gay friend and go to a gay bar. Because, according to Scott, at that gay bar will be “a bunch of the gay man’s cool friends who like to dance” and “just being there makes you an aspirational male.”

He literally says “I used to go to gay bars all the time with my friends in New York and the odds, anyway, it was incredible.”

Do you hear yourself?

You’re literally telling straight men to treat gay spaces, which exist specifically because LGBTQIA+ people needed SAFE SPACES away from straight people who harassed, discriminated against, and committed violence against them, as hunting grounds for women.

You’re telling them to use gay men as accessories, as props, to make themselves look “aspirational” to straight women.

This has been called out by the queer community for YEARS. For DECADES. Gay bars aren’t your dating service. They’re not there so you can look cool and progressive to straight women.

Gay bars exist because for centuries, LGBTQIA+ people couldn’t safely be themselves in straight spaces. They couldn’t hold hands with their partners. They couldn’t dance with people they were attracted to. They couldn’t exist authentically without risk of violence, arrest, or social destruction.

The Stonewall Riots, the event that kicked off the modern LGBTQIA+ rights movement, happened at a gay bar because police were raiding it. Because even in their own spaces, queer people weren’t safe. And Stonewall wasn’t unique. Throughout the 1950s and 60s, police regularly raided gay bars, arrested patrons for “crimes” like wearing clothing that didn’t match their assigned gender at birth, publicized the names of those arrested in newspapers to destroy their lives and careers. The raids were violent. People were beaten. People were killed.

And we like to pretend that things are different and that we are so much more evolved now, but we literally just celebrated in shock last week that the Supreme Court didn’t overturn gay marriage, so let’s not pretend like we are living in a utopia here.

Gay bars exist not as entertainment districts for straight people. Not as strategic dating locations. As refuge. As community. As one of the few places where LGBTQIA+ people could be themselves without fear.

There is a monumental difference between what you said that you did in organically having gay friends as a young man and going to bars with them AS AN ACTUAL FRIEND and you giving the pro-tip of “hey straight dudes, seek out gay friends solely so you can invade those spaces leverage their identity to pick up women.” That’s not allyship, that’s exploitation.

I’ve been to gay bars with my gay friends. We had a great time. But I went because THEY invited ME to THEIR space. I went to be a supportive friend, to celebrate with them, to be part of their community in the way they welcomed me and I recognized my position.

I didn’t go because I saw it as a strategic move to meet women. I didn’t go to instrumentalize their identity and their community for my romantic benefit.

The fact that Scott presents this as dating advice presents queer people simply as tools to make yourself more interesting to potential romantic partners. Which is wild considering that earlier in this same interview, he talked about how he became friends with Kara Swisher and suddenly lesbians started feeling comfortable approaching him. And he frames it as this beautiful thing about acceptance and community.

Only to follow it up with, “Hey straight dudes, you can exploit this for dates.”

Do you see the difference? It’s not subtle.

He starts every conversation by saying the right things. He acknowledges his privilege. He says women’s safety matters. He talks about empathy and kindness and being better men.

But then, in the middle of all that progressive language, he tells men that women’s fears are overblown, that young men are the real victims of discrimination, and that they should use queer spaces as pickup strategies.

The top bun. The meat. The bottom bun.

In many ways, this is even MORE dangerous than the Andrew Tate’s of the world. Tate is obvious. He’s a caricature. He’s so cartoonishly toxic that even people who might be susceptible to manosphere messaging can often spot him for what he is. He’s the poison that announces itself, that makes you gag on the first sip. Even conservatives like Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson have said that his takes are shitty and problematic.

But Scott? He’s got credentials from the Stern School of Business. He’s got TED talks. He’s got op-eds in the New York Times. He sounds REASONABLE. He sounds EDUCATED. He sounds like someone who’s really thought about these issues and come to BALANCED conclusions. It’s Jordan Peterson’s schtick repackaged.

He’s the poison in a wine glass at a faculty dinner. The kind you sip slowly, that tastes sophisticated, that makes you feel smart for drinking it. And by the time you realize something’s wrong, you’ve already internalized his arguments. You’ve already started using them yourself. You’ve already become the guy at the party explaining to women why they’re overreacting about their safety concerns, why boys are the real victims of the education system, why it’s totally fine to use your gay friend as a prop.

And the worst part? You think you’re being PROGRESSIVE while you do it. Because Scott said all the right things first. He acknowledged privilege exists. He said women’s safety matters. He’s best friends with Kara Swisher. So clearly you’re not being sexist or homophobic or anti-feminist. You’re just being REASONABLE. You’re just being BALANCED. You’re just acknowledging that men have struggles too.

Except you’re not. You’re just repeating manosphere talking points with better vocabulary.

This is how the discourse gets poisoned. Not by the Andrew Tates who announce themselves. But by the Scott Galloways who sound so reasonable that you don’t realize you’re being radicalized until you’re already there. Until you’re already the guy in the comments section explaining why, actually, women should be grateful that men only murder them 2,500 times per year.

The manosphere doesn’t need to convince you that women are the enemy. It just needs to convince you that men are the victims. And once you believe that, once you’ve internalized that frame, everything else follows. Every women’s safety concern becomes an attack on men. Every advancement in equality becomes discrimination against you. Every space that wasn’t built specifically for you becomes evidence of your oppression.

And Scott Galloway is out here handing out that framework, wrapped in academic language and progressive posturing, to thousands and thousands of men who think they’re too smart, too educated, too liberal to fall for manosphere bullshit.

But guys, and I’m talking to the men who nodded along to Scott’s arguments, who found yourselves agreeing, who maybe even used these talking points yourself…you’re not too smart for this. Nobody is too smart for sophisticated propaganda. That’s why it’s sophisticated.

The question isn’t whether you’re smart enough to see through it. The question is whether you’re willing to admit you were wrong. Whether you’re willing to actually LISTEN when women tell you about their experiences instead of immediately jumping to “but what about men?” Whether you’re willing to be a genuine ally instead of someone who uses marginalized identities as accessories.

Because here’s the thing about being a better man (and I mean ACTUALLY better, not Scott Galloway’s version where you acknowledge privilege and then immediately explain why you’re the real victim), it requires sitting with discomfort. It requires accepting that you have advantages you didn’t earn and disadvantages that aren’t anyone’s fault. It requires listening more than you speak. It requires prioritizing other people’s safety over your own comfort.

It requires not falling for the sandwich.

And Scott? I know you’re probably never going to read this, but I hope you do. I hope you sit with it. I hope you think about whether the harm you’re causing–and you are causing harm–is worth the book sales and the speaking fees and the reputation as the “reasonable” voice on men’s issues.

Because right now, you’re not helping men. You’re just giving them more sophisticated ways to avoid growth. More academic-sounding excuses to dismiss women’s concerns. More respectable-seeming permission to exploit marginalized communities.

You’re not the alternative to the manosphere, Scott.

You’re just the manosphere for men with graduate degrees.

To everyone else reading this, when someone starts a sentence with “I’m not saying women don’t have problems, BUT...” pay attention to what comes after the but. Because that’s what they actually believe.

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THE MUMMY: WARDEN'S BURDEN

Genre: Action-Adventure/Supernatural Thriller

Tone: Indiana Jones meets The Mummy with modern tech thriller elements

Target Rating: PG-13

LOGLINE

When a young librarian uses cutting-edge algorithms to solve his grandfather's ancient puzzle box, he accidentally frees his legendary great-grandparents from mystical limbo, but also unleashes an evolved Imhotep who exploits modern technology to raise undead armies across the globe.

MAIN CHARACTERS

DANIEL O'CONNELL (28) - Rick's great-grandson, a brilliant but bookish digital archivist at Stanford's Special Collections who specializes in using modern AI to decode ancient texts. More comfortable with algorithms than adventure, he's always felt overshadowed by his family's legendary reputation.

MAYA TORRES (29) - Sharp, ambitious corporate lawyer for Synaptic Technologies, the company behind ThothAI. She's been investigating internal anomalies in their AI system and handling the legal fallout from user complaints. Confident, skeptical, and completely unimpressed by conspiracy theories—until she can't ignore the evidence anymore.

ELENA VASQUEZ (22) - Conservation intern specializing in pre-Columbian artifacts. Her knowledge of non-Egyptian mysticism proves valuable when the threat expands beyond ancient Egypt.

RICK O'CONNELL (60s) - The weathered adventurer, now bearing the scars of decades in mystical imprisonment. Still quick with witted (and with a gun), but struggling to understand a world transformed by technology.

EVELYN “EVIE” O'CONNELL (60s) - The brilliant Egyptologist, educated nearly a century earlier, but brilliant as ever. She's fascinated by how modern technology can unlock ancient secrets, but horrified by its potential for evil.

HOLLY O’CONNELL (late 40s/early 50s) - Daniel's mother and Rick's granddaughter. A tactical operative with the modern iteration of ancient protective orders who has spent decades hunting supernatural threats while trying to keep Daniel safe from the family legacy. Confident, combat-ready, and secretly responsible for cats taking over the internet.

IMHOTEP (Immortal) - The ancient high priest, now evolved and cunning. He's learned to merge his mystical powers with digital networks, seeing technology as the perfect vessel for his undead consciousness.

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